“It’s a thing. Oh, and no spitting in my mouth. That’s a hard limit.”
Adam was starting to think he and Noah watched entirely different porn. “Noted. But the others weren’t?”
Noah hit him in the shoulder, face flushing. “Shut up.”
“Hey, you’re the one setting the rules. I’m just clarifying.”
“Deal or no deal?” Noah asked.
Adam kissed him once more. “Deal.”
The restaurant was nothing fancy, but it was one of Noah’s favorite places. An old school diner with black and white checkered floors and where everything was red and chrome. He’d been frequenting Moe’s since the year after his father died. The wait staff used to give him free food after school because they knew it would likely be his only meal. In all the time he’d been going there, he’d never once set eyes on the man whose name glowed in the window in red neon. He suspected there was no Moe.
The scent of maple bacon and buttermilk pancakes hit Noah the moment they walked in the door, making his stomach growl comically loud. Noah was sure everyone could probably hear it over the clanking of forks on plates and the animated conversations of the patrons.
Adam was glued to Noah’s back, his hands on Noah’s hips and his chin resting on his head, like they’d been dating for a decade instead of having met less than forty-eight hours ago. Noah felt himself leaning into the reassuring heat of Adam’s torso but hated how comfortable he already was with him. Hated how much he liked the feel of his hands on his body.
He flushed as he thought about their kiss that had turned into orgasms just ninety minutes ago. Noah had had a dozen meaningless hookups in his time, each with the understanding that it had meant nothing; they were just scratching an itch. But kissing Adam in that warehouse had sparked something deep in Noah’s core, something that seemed to smolder within until Adam had pinned him to the mattress and kissed him like he was dying and Noah’s lips were the only thing that could save him.
Noah had never experienced that kind of combustible chemistry. Adam was a match and Noah was gasoline-soaked paper, and that was a volatile combination that could easily blow up in his face. Still, he would have let Adam do anything to him, had wanted to let Adam do dirty things to him.
But Adam—despite his weird intensity—had seemed so comfortable letting Noah set the pace. He seemed to be this strange mixture of brute force and childlike possessiveness, like Noah was his new favorite toy and he’d smash it before he’d let anybody else play with it. That shouldn’t have been hot…but it was. Noah had never been anybody’s favorite anything.
Before Noah could fall any further down the rabbit hole of existential crisis, Cindi ‘with an i’ swayed her ample figure towards them, loudly chomping her gum. Moe’s really leaned into their retro aesthetic.
Cindi had on a red polyester uniform the same color as the red vinyl booths. She wore horn rimmed glasses and her hair in a sky high rat’s nest. Noah knew she was in her sixties and had eight grandkids, but she honestly didn’t look a day over fifty. She had good genes.
She smiled warmly when she saw Noah, smacking a kiss on his cheek. “Hey, doll. Haven’t seen you here in forever. I was starting to think you’d abandoned us for that new age place with their wheat grass shots down the block.”
Noah grinned. “Like I could ever give up the cinnamon roll pancakes here.”
She flicked her gaze to Adam, smirking when she noted the way he clung to Noah. “Who’s your friend?”
Noah craned his head up and back to glance behind him. “Cindi, this is Adam. Adam, Cindi.”
“Hi,” Adam said, not releasing Noah’s waist.
“Hey there, yourself. You look really familiar,” she said. “Are you an actor?”
“No. Definitely not,” Adam said with a laugh.
That wasn’t entirely true but hardly anything Noah could voice out loud.
Cindi grabbed two menus and led them to a back booth. Adam slid in across from Noah, but his long legs quickly entangled with his beneath the table. “What can I get ya to drink, cuties?”
Coffees ordered, Adam snagged Noah’s hand. “You have freckles on your fingers, too,” he mused.
“You’re obsessed with freckles,” Noah teased.
Adam flicked pale blue eyes upwards, snagging Noah’s gaze. “No. Just yours.”
If he didn’t stop saying things like that, Noah was going to do something stupid like fall in love with a murderer.
Cindi returned with two mugs, and Noah watched as Adam dumped enough sugar into his coffee to stand a spoon in. “That can’t be healthy,” Noah said, smiling when Adam took a sip and sighed deeply.
Noah drank his black. Mostly because he usually couldn’t afford anything but powdered creamers, which gave him the creeps. All those lumps just floating around, waiting to be dissolved in boiling liquid. No, thank you.
Once they had their food—cinnamon roll pancakes for Noah and a Belgian waffle buried in syrup and powdered sugar for Adam—the real conversation began. The one they’d put on hold in the trailer until they could get some sustenance.
They could talk freely. The restaurant provided the perfect amount of white noise to keep their conversation private. Still, he kept his voice low, leaning in just a bit to talk in-between mouthfuls.
“Okay, what’s step one?” Adam asked.
Noah was tempted to play dumb just to put off the inevitable for a while. But this was why they were there. To solve a mystery. “I stole Gary’s backpack and made copies of all his keys. He gets to the club at seven each night and doesn’t leave until ten or eleven in the morning. I swapped shifts with another dishwasher so we have the whole night to look through all of his shit.”
“You want to break into his house and look for…” Adam prompted.
“If he’s got the same…tastes…in porn as my father, then there’s a chance, maybe, he kept souvenirs of his time with my dad and these other men. If I can find those tapes, I can possibly find them.”