The Guy Next Door

Chapter 26

26

ZANE

A fter our visit to animal rescue, Leif and I take Kyra to his parents’ place before heading out to meet with Dman.

Leif said he’s nervous about meeting with a stranger, which fair enough, but I know there’s more to it than that. I’m sure he’s worried for the same reason I am—that this guy won’t have the answers I’m so desperate for.

I tell myself I’ll be fine if that’s the case, but it’s a lie.

When we get to the coffeehouse, we enter through push doors. The place isn’t far from campus, and it’s fairly busy. For the most part, the patrons are kids in their late teens, early twenties. There’s a large, decorated tree, and snowflake ornaments and other seasonal paraphernalia are strung about the place as a pop Christmas song plays overhead. Dman said he’d come to us, so he must know what I look like—from my brother’s social media accounts, I’m guessing.

No one’s looking up or moving from their seats, so he’s probably not here yet. We order our drinks. I go for a black coffee, and Leif adorably orders a hot chocolate with whipped cream. Then we head to the other end, where the pickup counter is.

“A hot chocolate?” I say, quirking my brow.

“Don’t give me shit about that. It’s all Christmasy right now. I couldn’t help myself.”

“It’s adorable, so I wouldn’t dare give you shit.”

He scans the room, something he’s done a few times since we arrived. “What do you think he looks like?”

“My brother was quiet and distant. Played a lot of video games, so I’m thinking he’ll be a gamer with hair down to his shoulders because he’s too busy playing Call of Duty to get to a barber. Maybe a beard with crumbs in it.”

Leif laughs. “Okay, I was being serious.”

“We’ll know soon enough. Although, if he’s as introverted as my bro, he might be a no-show.”

It’s a thought I’ve tried to push to the back of my mind. If he doesn’t come, that might be the thing to break me.

When the barista sets our drinks down, we grab them before I hear, “Zane? Leif?”

I turn to see a six-foot-something man approaching. High cheekbones, a jawline that looks chiseled from stone, his biceps and chest filling out the thermal he wears. The fluorescent lights shine on his hair, which I would call dirty blond, but seems like a crime to say there’s anything dirty about this man who looks like a model.

His face twists up, and he glances between us. “It’s me. Dman.” As he says it, I realize I’m staring as he looks at me with bright, baby-blue eyes.

“ You’re Dman?” I ask.

“It’s Wes,” he says with a charming-ass wink before looking between Leif and me. “Aren’t you two a pair of cuties? Will you grab us a booth while I order? Think we need privacy for this.”

“Sure, totally,” Leif says.

As Wes heads to the register, I sneak a glance at Leif, whose lips are pressed together like he’s trying to suppress a smile.

“Yeah, the guy’s a real introvert,” he says. “Surprised he made it out, for sure.”

“Shut it,” I say through my teeth.

Leif and I grab a booth.

I was nervous before, but now my hands are shaking, and surely this caffeine won’t help in that department.

I try some of Leif’s hot chocolate and regret giving him hell about the whipped cream because that’s some good shit. When Wes slides into the seat across from us, I scoot closer to Leif. I’m sure it’s because I feel threatened by this hunk across from us.

“What?” Wes asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I think because of how we met, I was figuring you’d be this dorky internet geek. Not that there would have been anything wrong with that, but—”

“You weren’t expecting me to be this hot?” he asks, his smile distracting from the cocky remark.

“Um…maybe,” I confess.

“Fair enough. First off, I want to say I’m so sorry about everything that’s going on around Mike. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. And sorry I didn’t get back to you before. That wasn’t my usual Reddit account. Wasn’t something I wanted linked to my other shit, you know? And it kept getting inundated with requests from podcasters and TikTokers, so I stopped looking at it after a while. Wasn’t until I saw the press conference being tweeted about that I checked again. Even more requests, but then I see this one from a guy claiming to be Mike’s bro, and I was like, the hell?”

“I appreciate you got to it at all.”

He glances between us. “You guys are a lot cuter than the pics I’ve seen of you online.”

“You looked at Leif’s?”

“I checked out his profile when I got that reply on the subreddit, so I already knew what he looked like, but I pulled it back up when you said he’d be coming with you. And obviously, I’ve seen you on Mike’s Insta.”

So I was right.

“We didn’t have that same advantage,” Leif points out.

“Probably for the best. All my socials link to my OnlyFans, so you’d have gotten to know me way better than I would’ve gotten to know you.”

Wes just gets more and more interesting by the second.

“But if y’all want to see…” he goes on.

“We’re good,” I say.

Leif turns to me, not even attempting to disguise his smile as he rests his hand on my thigh. I’m waiting for him to call out my jealous streak, but he offers a gentle rub of his thumb, and damned if that doesn’t offer the reassurance I need.

“But enough about me,” Wes says. “We should get to the point of why you wanted to meet up.”

“You said you were friendly with my brother.”

His gaze wavers. “Eh, he’d come over and we’d smoke a joint or take an edible…and stuff.”

And stuff?

Holy fuck. Not that I’d never considered my brother might have been queer too, but is this how I’m going to find out?

“Wait. You and my bro were hooking up?”

“What the hell?” Wes asks. “That’s what you thought I meant when I said stuff ? No. We played Fortnite together. You know your bro’s straight, right? But trust me, if he’d let me, I would have let that guy do whatever the hell he wanted to me. But speaking of…you guys are sitting awfully close. I figured when you said you were bringing Leif that it was only because of the note on the subreddit, and maybe my instincts are totally off, but is there more here?”

“We’re boyfriends,” Leif says. It’s nice hearing him claim me like this in front of a stranger, especially one that, frankly, I’m intimidated by. This guy is way more in Leif’s league, and I’m enough of a creeper without sitting near fucking Adonis.

Wes’s eyes widen, a smile sweeping across his face. “Wait. Okay, there’s a story here. So I assume you didn’t know each other before any of this?”

“No,” I say. “We met…” As the details come to mind, I realize this is going to distract from what I actually want to get. “You know, maybe we can get to the stuff about my bro and then tell you about our fucked-up meet-cute.”

“He held me up at gunpoint,” Leif pipes up.

Wes winces. “That a joke?”

“It wasn’t funny at the time.”

Wes cringes, like he’s not sure what to think, before his smile returns. “You guys are weird. I like it. Are you exclusive, or are you open to—”

“Closed as closed can be,” I spit out, surprising myself. Some knee-jerk response to make it clear Leif is mine.

And only mine.

“Ooh, a challenge?” Wes says with a wink, making something flare deep within me, before he adds, “I’m teasing you, man. Sorry. I forget you guys don’t really know me, so it’s hard to get my sense of humor.”

“Trust me. I know the feeling.”

Leif chuckles, which makes me think of that first discussion, when he was still adjusting to my sarcasm.

“So you hung out with Mike some,” Leif says, “but you weren’t friends?”

“We were both taking what was supposed to be a basic graphic-design class, and the teacher was kicking our ass. Nothing brings people together like a crappy teacher. So we’d study a little. Then chill and drink, get high, play video games. He was easy to talk to. We both had weird stuff in our childhood. Oh shit. Maybe that’s not stuff I should be bringing up.” He glances between Leif and me again.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I’ve talked to Leif about how we grew up.”

“I was raised in a New Agey religious group,” Wes continues. “I figure most people would call it a cult. Didn’t get out until I was in my teens and went to live with my mom, so both Mike and I had daddy issues to bond over. Long story short, even though we didn’t get into the details much about our experiences, he felt like a kindred spirit.”

“And he told you about a note he received?” Leif asks.

“One day, after we ate some brownies and were playing Fortnite , he mentioned this weird-ass letter he got. He thought it might have been from me, but I don’t write weird-ass notes when I’m into someone. But when we were talking about all this, it was just a funny thing. I didn’t think much of it.

“Then he went missing like a month later, and that rattled around in my brain. And people were already talking on campus about how Jason Kilbourne had disappeared a year before that, so I thought there might be a connection. The cops didn’t seem all that interested in my vague recollection about a note. I told them what I remembered, but they didn’t, like, document it or ask me to write it down.”

“Why did you go to a Reddit forum to post about the note?” I ask. “You could have reached out to me.”

“That was before Leif’s note popped up, so at the time, I assumed if there had been anything to what I told the cops, they would’ve told you. And if it was nothing, I would have felt like an ass for planting this wild theory in your head when you must’ve been worried enough as it was.”

That makes sense.

“What about after you saw my note?” Leif asks.

“After the Reddit account got inundated with requests for interviews from around the country, I let it go. I didn’t know there was another note until I got a call from Detective Roth. She mentioned the possibility that the note in the response was a copycat trying to get some attention online.”

Meanwhile, she’d led me to believe she hadn’t followed up on his post, but now I figure she was trying to keep me out of it because of my bad behavior.

“I think it’s my fault she didn’t take you seriously,” I confess.

“Why would that be your fault?”

“I fucked up, and I think she probably followed up on what you said about the note initially because of me. But afterward, she might have thought I’d talked you into writing it.”

“That would be a strange thing for someone to do.”

“I did a strange thing,” I say. “But that’s a separate, long-ass story.”

“Whatever happened, after talking with that detective about my post, I tried to move on with my life and forget about it. Then I saw the news, and it got my head back in it. And when I checked my account, I was shocked to see a PM from someone claiming to be Mike’s brother. Now I wish I’d reached out to you, that I’d trusted my gut about there being some connection.”

His comment reflects my feelings around my gut instinct about Isaac Tolle. And how much time I’ve spent trying to talk myself out of something that feels like it’s burned into my fucking soul.

“So once you told Mike the note wasn’t from you, did he say anything about who else it might have been from?”

Wes shakes his head. “At first when he brought it up, I didn’t even think he was being serious. And then he just changed the subject.”

“Did he ever mention a teacher helping him with his essays?”

Wes’s gaze drifts, and he bites his bottom lip. “That’s not ringing any bells.”

“Isaac Tolle?”

His eyes widen, and a rush of adrenaline shoots through me.

There it is!

A flare of hope.

But as quickly as Wes’s expression came to life, it twists up. “Oh, wait. No. I’m thinking of Isaac Clarke from the Dead Space series. Sorry.”

Fuck.

An emotional sucker punch.

Nearly as quickly as my hope returned, it vanishes, and I’m left with a hollow feeling in my chest.

I sneak a glance at Leif. The way he’s looking at me, he knows how disappointed I am.

“He’s a teacher at the community college,” Leif explains. “Maybe Mike didn’t say the name, but did he mention anything about an English professor he met up with on campus? Or maybe at the Chelsby Hill Library?”

I can tell Leif’s grasping at straws.

Wes takes another moment, but this time, his expression doesn’t change. He shakes his head. “I take it you think this Tolle guy is involved, but what’s the library got to do with anything?”

“Just somewhere I’ve seen him, and it’s a library Mike frequented,” I explain, leaving it there.

“None of that rings any bells. A lot of teachers at that school. I barely know mine. And like I told you before, we didn’t hang out too much, and besides the crap we talked about for that graphic-design class, school wasn’t exactly at the top of our list of things to talk about.”

Maybe Mike never mentioned him, but they went to the same school, so Wes might recognize him. I pull up Isaac’s picture, the one I showed Leif. After I pass it to Wes, he studies it for a few moments before shrugging. “Maybe I’ve seen him around campus. He looks like an average, fortysomething white guy, you know?”

“Yeah.” I can’t disguise the disappointment in my tone.

“You think this guy might have had something to do with his disappearance?”

I tell him what I found in my brother’s planner, and my subsequent interest in him. How I had suspicions when I joined him at Habitat for Humanity, and that led to my unhealthy obsession. I don’t get into the details of just how bad it got, but I make it clear that Roth didn’t find anything down that path.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he says, “that doesn’t sound like much.”

After everything we’ve discussed, I’m starting to lose hope that I’m going to get anything out of this exchange, but I try to hold on a little longer. “Any chance you noticed if Mike was acting strange or different before he went missing?”

He shakes his head. I’m really losing hope.

“Is there anything else you might have found noteworthy?”

“Nah, man. I wish I did, but that note was really the only thing that stood out to me.”

“What about Jason?” Leif asks. “Did you have any interactions with him?”

“You don’t miss a face like that, but we never had any classes together or talked. I saw him on Grindr, messaged him once, but he didn’t message back. I took some screenshots of his profile pics because he’s a hot motherfucker. I think I still have those… Haven’t even looked because I took them not too long before he went missing.”

And with those words, he’s deflated the last of my hope.

*

After we finish our chat, Wes says he plans to stick around a bit longer to see what he can find on Grindr. Leif heads to the restroom, and I take our drinks to the trash bin near the front of the coffeehouse, where a line has gathered along the lengthy stretch of counter between me and the entrance. The place was busy when we arrived, but now it’s packed.

My disappointment is starting to settle in, a hollowness in my gut.

Although I’m glad we chatted with Wes, I’d hoped for some clue that might illuminate something about Mike, something that would help me figure out what happened to him. But I don’t know much more than before we came here.

While Leif’s in the restroom, I figure I’ll check the news on my phone, and as I’m about to retrieve it from my back pocket, something draws my gaze. Through a gap in the line at the counter, I notice a man in a hoodie leaving the coffeehouse, and as he turns, I catch his profile.

I’m sure I recognize the nose and jawline.

Isaac Tolle?

But it’s only a flash of part of his face before one of the patrons in line moves slightly, obscuring my view.

By the time I reposition, he’s gone. Only the door swinging closed.

It was so fucking quick, I couldn’t get a good look. Was that him?

I’m all instinct as I head toward the entrance, frustrated with every person I have to say “Excuse me” to.

Isaac works around here; he could have just been swinging by, like the day I found him at the library. But wouldn’t that be a hell of a coincidence for him to be here the day I chat with Wes about Mike? He sure as fuck never came here when I was following him.

Outside, I search around, first for Isaac, then, when I don’t see him, for his Toyota Corolla. No sign of either.

I notice a guy in a hoodie getting into his car. He pulls off his hood before he gets in, and it’s definitely not Isaac.

Was this the guy I saw?

No, it was Isaac. It had to be.

I rush to either side of the building, checking the lot, but still no sign. At the pace he was moving, he wouldn’t have been able to get away fast enough to evade me. Although, he could have seen me too and bolted. But he had to have parked somewhere.

Unless he was here to spy on us.

The image of his face is burned into my fucking brain. It reminds me of when I was in my manic state, seeing his face in places where I knew he couldn’t have been.

This felt different, though. Real.

It felt real then too…didn’t it?

Fuck. I’m shaking, and I know it’s because I fear the worst.

“Zane?” I hear, and I turn to see Leif jogging toward me.

“There you are. I wondered where you went.” As he approaches, he stops in place, studying my face. “What’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing,” I say, still searching around.

Wouldn’t he be out here if I’d really seen him? Or is he hiding somewhere?

Or is that what I’d tell myself even if it was just in my head, to justify the delusion?

“You look so pale,” Leif says. “Let’s get in the car and get you warmed up.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

I try to act normal, but that’s fucking useless since my mind’s playing on loop that moment when I could’ve sworn I saw Isaac.

But what if I didn’t? What if I’m having another episode?