Hale hummed as he washed the vegetables. His song was almost drowned out by the running water, but Austin’s ear was trained to him, and he knew he wasn’t imagining the melody. He watched Hale out of the corner of his eye, sticking to his end of the counter as he set the steaming chamber of his rice cooker back into the device. There was something about Hale that was unusual—and it wasn’t just his penchant for inviting himself over for dinner. There was a quality to him that was rare, and Austin didn’t have a word for it. He figured that whatever it was, it was the same kind of sparkle that had caught Mary’s eye and turned her into his pet project during her senior year.

As Hale washed the vegetables, he moved his hips from side to side slowly. The pants he wore showed off his slender hips and clung to his tight ass, and Austin couldn’t help but notice how, when Hale moved like that, his ass swayed in tantalizing ways.

Tantalizing? Seriously? What the hell is wrong with me?

Austin pushed down the button on the rice cooker and covered the steaming chamber with its lid. When he was done, he stepped over to the fridge and distracted himself by pulling out the tofu. It was going to expire in a few days, and while Austin was glad he had a use for it tonight, he still wasn’t overly thrilled with the fact that he had company. Getting used to Hale was going to take some time.

“Do you remember the house party you threw in your senior year?” Hale asked. He didn’t turn away from the sink, but he spoke loudly enough that his voice was heard over the sound of running water.

“Yeah.”

“You and Michael went down into the basement. You were playing strip poker.” Hale snorted. “I was jealous as all hell, and nervous that I was being left alone, but it wasn’t such a bad night, was it?”

“No, it was fine. We didn’t get busted, everyone had a good time, and it cemented me as a cool kid in the Hidden Creek senior class, even though I was the new kid.”

“The new kid is always the coolest kid, even if he’s dorky,” Hale said. “Anything new here is cool. New store? You bet your ass it’s cool, even if it sells kitchenware, or orthopedic shoes, or dialysis treatments.”

Austin laughed, surprising himself. He set the tofu on the counter and ran his hand over his jaw. If Hale noticed that he was stunned, he didn’t make it known. He continued to speak.

“Over that summer, word spread through town that there was a new kid. Everyone was talking about it. Before you even met anyone, you were the talk of the town. But then to find out that the new kid was actually a cool kid? It kind of blew everyone’s minds.”

“So was my new-kid status the reason why Michael hung out with me?”

“Mmm.” Hale turned off the water and shook the excess off the kale in his hand. “Michael was friendly to everyone, pretty much. He was even friends with me, his awkward younger cousin, until he hit his senior year and I was a freshman, when it would have been social suicide for him to be seen with me.”

“That didn’t stop Mary Chilt,” Austin said. “She swept you under her wing and didn’t let you go.”

“It’s different for girls. There are different sets of rules.” Hale set the kale on the paper towel he’d been placing all the other washed veggies on. “Michael hung out with you because he wanted to, I know it. He isn’t the kind of guy who does things because they’re expected of him—he does things because they’re what he wants to do.”

Austin huffed another laugh. “You can say that again. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me in the least that he’s pulled a disappearing act. Michael is infamous for doing his own thing.”

“But this time is different.” Hale’s tone changed. The light-hearted conversation they’d been having before shifted gears toward the serious. “I know that you’re not completely convinced, but you’re going to have to believe me on this one. Besides, what do you have to lose?”

“Oh, I don’t know… my time, my patience, my sanity…”

“Ha ha.” Hale dried his hands on the cloth hanging over the handle of the stove. “Well, what about your chance at salvaging your friendship with Michael? What if something terrible did happen, like I warned about, and you were the one who ended up saving him? I’m pretty sure whatever bridges you burned in the Navy would be rebuilt after something like that.”

“Michael?” Austin snorted. “Michael is the reason why we’re not friends right now, not me. We went from hanging out at Rocket together on Thursday nights, drinking malts and talking about everything and anything, to barely being able to pass each other in the halls without glaring.”

“What changed?”

“He did.” Austin peeled back the plastic covering from the corner of the tofu and drained it. As he spoke, he kept preparing it for frying. “I was headed back to my bunk one time—this was before I met Eleanor—and I caught him in there stealing my shit. My good headphones had gone missing the week before, and I caught him in there trying to lift my iPod.”

“Are you serious?” Hale leaned against the counter, his eyes on Austin. Austin felt the intensity of his stare. “He was stealing from you?”

“Well, I put a stop to that real quick.” Austin shrugged. “I don’t have proof that he took my headphones, but I’m ninety percent sure it was him. He started acting strangely once we left home, but it was that incident that finally did in our friendship.”

“Did he ever steal from you before?” Hale asked. “Like, did you ever notice anything go missing while you were here in Hidden Creek?”

Austin paused. Hale was Michael’s cousin—shouldn’t he have defended him blindly? He found himself impressed that Hale was impartial enough toward the situation that he was able to distance himself from his blood loyalties. It wasn’t often family was willing to hear that one of their own was up to no good.

“No. At least, I never noticed anything. I suppose he could have been stealing from other people, though. He’d have a larger crowd to lift things from. It would have been less suspicious if he spread out his thefts. In the Navy, I was his only friend at first. I guess that’s why he thought he could get away with it—people knew that we were on good terms, so I guess no one thought twice about him hanging around my space when I wasn’t there.”

Austin grabbed one of his larger knives from the block on the counter and laid the tofu out on a cutting board. He started to cube it.

“Did you ever get your headphones back?” Hale asked.

“No.”

“I… I really don’t know what to make of that.”

“I honestly didn’t want to tell you.” The knife hit the cutting board at a rhythmic pace. “No one wants to hear that their loved one isn’t the golden boy they thought he was. I figured that it was our business, not anyone else’s, and as long as he didn’t keep it up, I told myself I’d let it be. If you hadn’t come in here asking about it, I wouldn’t have told you.”

“I’m not angry or anything. I’m… surprised, I guess. Michael really did change, didn’t he?” Hale sounded troubled, and Austin’s heart went out to him. It couldn’t have been an easy thing to hear. “But I think that gives us what we need to keep looking for him. We can start investigating petty crimes in the area. I don’t really follow up with local news unless it makes its way to me through the gossip mill, but I’ve been so busy covering for Michael since he decided to skip out on work that I haven’t had much of a chance to be social. I think our best bet is probably to start combing back through the local newspapers. We can head to city hall and pick some up—I know they’ve always got those displays in the lobby filled with old issues. As long as we act soon, I don’t think anyone is going to clean them up before we get there.”

“It sounds like—ah!” Austin hissed out in pain between his teeth. He dropped the knife and stepped back from the cutting board. The tremor in his hand had started again, and he hadn’t been expecting it. He’d missed the tofu entirely and cut far up on his fingers as his hand shook out of control.

“Austin! Are you okay?” Hale was beside him in the next second, a hand on his back. “God, you’re bleeding. Okay, um, okay, it’s fine. You’re shaking, so that probably means you’re going into shock, but I promise, the wound isn’t that serious. As long as we get it bandaged, it’s going to be okay. I don’t even think you need stitches…”

The way he spoke, so low and comforting, led Austin to believe that Hale thought he really was going into shock. With the way his hands were trembling, Austin could understand his confusion.

“We should get you seated,” Hale said. “Do you feel dizzy at all? Do you need to sit on the floor, or can I help you into a chair so you can be a little more comfortable?”

“I’m not actually in shock,” Austin said. He gave Hale a small smile to try to put his fears to rest. “I know it probably looks like it, but I promise, I’m not squeamish about blood. I wouldn’t have gone into the Navy if I was. I just… it’s a thing.”

Hale didn’t seem interested in letting him go, even after Austin had done his best to dissuade him. He led Austin to the bathroom and sat him on the closed toilet lid, then tore open Austin’s medicine cabinet and poked around until he found what he needed—gauze, hydrogen peroxide, and medical tape. Without being asked, Hale started to clean Austin’s injury and patch it up. He was surprisingly gentle.

“Did you hear what I told you in the kitchen?” Austin asked, somewhat in awe of Hale’s tenacity. “I promise, I’m not going to faint on you. I’m not even going to wobble. My head is clear.”

“But if your hands are shaking, you can’t hope to patch yourself up properly, can you?” Hale smiled. It was small, but it was heartfelt. He pressed the gauze against Austin’s wound, then started to wrap it with the tape. “Besides, it’s probably better you sit for a minute, anyway. What’s the shaking? Something to do with sugar?”

“No. Nothing I could collapse from.” Austin fought with himself, both wanting to reveal his secret, and wanting to keep it as far away from as many people as he could. The fewer people in Hidden Creek that knew the truth, the better. He didn’t want to be pitied for his physical state—he was still Austin, even if he’d never be completely himself again. “It’s… from an accident. It’s a stupid story. It’s not even from being in the Navy.”

“What happened?”

“I… I ended up buying a house, a year or two after I left here. When I was on leave, I’d fly back there. It was in another small town, a little bigger than this, which was far enough away that it was a bitch and a half to drive to from the nearest big airport. It did, however, have its own tiny airport. I’d booked a flight from the big airport to the smaller one on a plane that literally sat twelve passengers, and it got caught in a freak micro-storm and went down. I survived, but not everyone was so lucky. It left me with this tremor, and some… issues. Some other stuff went down, and my only option was to come back here, to Hidden Creek. So, I did.”

“Some other stuff?” Hale asked flatly, an eyebrow raised. He finished wrapping the cut and put the supplies he’d taken out away.

“I don’t really feel like talking about it,” Austin admitted. “That’s the gist of my story. What happened doesn’t change the fact that I have nerve damage and will probably always randomly twitch. It doesn’t always happen—it’s only sometimes. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to faint, or that my sugar is low, or anything like that.”

“Well, I’m glad that you’re not in immediate danger,” Hale said softly. “I’m not glad to hear that you’ve been through so much. I’m sorry. That can’t be easy.”

“It’s not. It stays between us, okay?”

Hale met his gaze. The look in his eyes was sincere and heartfelt, totally stripped of any sign of the charismatic troublemaker he’d grown into. “I promise. Your business isn’t anyone’s business but your own. I’m not going to get in the way of that.”

The way he said it was tender, and Hale’s heart skipped a beat and softened for his ex-friend’s little cousin like it never had before.

“Let’s go back and finish dinner, okay?” Hale touched Austin’s shoulder, sending tiny, tingling shivers down Austin’s back. “We can talk about our next steps once we’ve eaten. Sound good?”

“Sure.”

It sounded even better when Hale didn’t try to help him to his feet or otherwise dote on him. He had compassion for Austin’s situation, but he didn’t treat him like he was crippled—and to Austin, who’d suffered over-the-top sympathy at the hands of others, it was a breath of fresh air.

He followed Hale back to the kitchen, and they finished dinner together.