*
She’s parked outside Hoskins’s home, idling across the street in the gray shadows between the streetlamps. It’s a little shoebox house near downtown; it looks tiny on the outside but is huge inside, like it’s been enchanted with some weird magic. It’s different from the last time she saw it. Better. He’s been putting some effort into the property. Trimming back the branches on the evergreens and hanging drapes in the windows. Sweeping the snow off the walkway out front. She can remember when she’d first met him, right after Seever was arrested, when Hoskins was running on nothing but nervous energy and caffeine, when he didn’t have time for anything but his work. Things have changed a lot over seven years, and she’d heard about his suspension, it’d been covered in the paper although she wasn’t the one to write it, she’d turned down that assignment because it seemed too weird, too close to home. She knows he lost his position in Homicide, but she’s not sure if he still works for the PD. Or if he still lives here.
Almost six in the evening. There’s a car parked in front of the house, another in the driveway, but she’s not certain if either belongs to Hoskins. He might’ve changed cars in the last seven years. The lights are on in the back of the house, where she knows the kitchen is. He might be making coffee, or dinner, pushing ground beef around a frying pan, although the thought of him cooking a meal strikes her as funny. She never saw Hoskins use his kitchen; she once opened his fridge to find nothing inside, not even an old box of baking soda. Nothing but the frosty blue light. The fridge could’ve been brand-new, recently unboxed and plugged in, except for the outside, which was peeling back at the corners from wear and tear, and the white-powder coat was flaking away to the metal beneath. The empty fridge had made her laugh at first, and then it upset her, made her sad, although she didn’t know why. When she’d first started dating Dean, his fridge had been filled with food, and she’d found it comforting. Slices of cheese and wrapped butter in the door, plastic containers of leftovers stacked neatly on the shelves under the cold light. She used to open Dean’s fridge just to look, to run her eyes over all that food like a greedy kid in a candy store.
She’s made her decision—she’ll get out, go to the front door. Wing it from there. She has no idea what she’ll say, but she’s always been good on her toes. She’ll make it work.
What she actually does: nothing. Before she can turn off her car the front door opens and Hoskins comes out. He looks the same. A little older, but the same. Or maybe he’s changed a lot, and she doesn’t know the difference. She remembers the big freckle he had on the inside of his thigh and the streak of grays in his pubic hair, but she can’t seem to remember what color his eyes are. The other things she remembers about Hoskins: The smell of cologne on his bare chest. The big vein on the underside of his cock. The way his eyebrows would jump up his forehead when he laughed, as if he was surprised into amusement. The grunt he made when he came.
She isn’t excited to see him, like she thought she might be, or even nervous. Instead, she doesn’t feel much of anything. He walks across his front yard, pushing through the snow so he can get to his car that much faster, and a woman comes out behind him, waving her hands and saying something. She looks like she’s wearing scrubs—a nurse? The woman might be his girlfriend, or his wife. For the first time, there’s a twinge in her chest. It could be jealousy, but that doesn’t make sense, because it’s been seven years—isn’t that long enough for her not to feel a thing? It’s like one of her girlfriends used to say back in college: Once you fuck a man, he’s yours forever. Even if you wish he was dead.
She watches the woman go inside the house, Hoskins get into his car. He’s moving in the quick, jerky way she recognizes. It’s the way he moves when there’s something big going on, when the adrenaline is pumping furiously through his veins. She could come back again later, when he’s home again, but instead she decides to follow him, to see exactly what’s going on, where he’s headed in such a hurry. Get the scoop, like they supposedly say, although she’s never heard anyone actually use that phrase, not once in her whole life.
HOSKINS