The noon light pours through the thin curtains and onto Elijah’s sunglasses that are still perched crooked upon his nose from last night’s migraine. The sound of guests bustling through the hotel corridor on the other side of the wall brings him out of his groggy state and back into the world of the living. He needed to get out before the cleaning crew found him in this unbooked and supposedly uninhabited room and called security. This wasn’t the first time he’d stolen a room keycard to avoid the ugly fate of sleeping rough on the streets - it wasn’t even the fiftieth - he had become quite the connoisseur of sneaking into places he shouldn’t be since he’d been orphaned and left homeless, penniless, and starving at the age of twelve.

He doesn’t bother to check his reflection as he passes the mirror, knowing exactly what he would see; his long, ashy-brown hair that touches his shoulder blades and curls back up ever so slightly at the ends scattered with grey strands almost everywhere you look. Cutting it seemed wrong somehow, perhaps this was his one last act of defiance against his painfully conservative family who assumed the church would come to crucify them if they allowed their son’s hair to grow past his ears. Or perhaps he just liked the way it looked on him. The dark circles around his eyes from the rough nights and the sickly paleness of his skin were just more reasons to not look in the mirror. If he was going to go about his day, he was going to do it acting like he’s the sexiest man on the street, ready to stun eligible bachelors and break hearts, rather than this weak, run-down version of himself. Despite life not exactly turning out ideally, Elijah was ever the optimist, even when nobody could see. He would have his moments, sure, like last night when he had to hotwire a car, drive out into the middle of nowhere and dump a body, he was a little miffed, but only because he could have been in his free hotel room watching reruns of Kitchen Nightmares and raiding the mini-bar for crispy M&Ms.

Straightening his plaid, button-down shirt, he silently slips out of the door and joins the parade of people hurriedly dragging their suitcases and poorly-packed bags toward the only working lift in the building. With the stolen keycard clutched in his hand, he makes a quick left just before he gets to the rowdy hotel crowd and takes the many flights of stairs down to the lobby. Nobody suspects that he didn’t belong, why would they? Most of the staff in the lobby are underpaid and overtired, they’re not paying attention to him in the slightest. Not to mention, the fact that checking out merely requires you to deposit your keycard in an unmanned box and leave the building makes exiting unseen incredibly easy.

The sun is almost too hot to bear and Elijah briefly considers ripping his clothes off and waltzing through town in his underwear to combat the unavoidable heatstroke. Pushing the urge aside, though, he heads off in the direction of the nearest tea shop to spend the loose change he found last night in the purse of a young woman who had so clumsily left it in his peripheral vision. He counts out the coins. “£4.48, looks like someone’s getting a muffin with his tea today,” he laughs to himself gleefully. The English countryside had no shortage of independent tea shops and cafes to choose from, so Elijah rarely had to show his face in one twice, which helped when things got a little bit messy. He had never settled in one place for long enough to have anybody remember or recognise him, a fact that worked in his favour considering the complications he usually caused. He walks aimlessly along the cobblestone path until he stops in front of a cosy-looking mint green building with cute chalkboard menus holding the promise of tea and cakes. Perfect for today’s only goals of a mug of peppermint tea and a lemon drizzle muffin.

“Is that everything for you?” Asks the employee behind the till, wearing a pink pastel apron and a minimum-wage kind of smile.

“That’ll be it!” Elijah responds with such alert optimism that he swears he could see the employee physically take a step back and roll their eyes as they turned away to serve another person. Elijah was always aware that others tended to find him just a bit ‘too much’, but he always lacked the capacity to care. He was happy. It wasn’t his fault that no one else was. He was simply happy.

He could have easily spent the entire day in that little tea shop, eavesdropping on the various couplings and families that came in and out, being nosy at a web designer’s laptop when he left it unoccupied to go to the bathroom, picking at his lemon drizzle muffin as if it was his last meal and he had to somehow make it last lest he starve to death by dinnertime, but the women on the table behind him seemed to be hell-bent on disturbing his peace. There were three of them, Elijah could see their reflection in the glass in front of him so he didn’t have to ogle at the table to know that two of them were in a relationship.

“This has to be some kind of a joke.” The third woman. Older. Spiteful tone. Mother. “You’re not a dyke! You’ll meet a nice man one day, have a little patience.” She thinks she’s talking indiscreetly, but in reality at least half of the tea shop just heard her disgusting intolerance toward her daughter and her girlfriend. Disappointingly, yet predictably, that same half are also bound to do absolutely nothing about it, because if it isn’t their business, they don’t care, they never have.

“This is why I haven’t spoken to you in six months, mum. Why can’t you just be happy for me?” Why, indeed. That’s the big question, isn’t it? Why can’t people just be happy for people? Why is there this incessant need to contradict? To fight? To look someone you’re supposed to love unconditionally in the eye and say, ‘you’re living incorrectly’?

“How are you and this woman going to give me my grandchildren?”

“We could adopt, we could-”

“I will NOT raise a grandchild that is not mine, that’s absurd!” Her voice has risen to a shriek at this point and Elijah decides he’s heard enough. That feeling, that damn feeling was crawling back up through his chest just threatening to burst out of him. He felt like he was going to explode from the blood pounding in his ears and his brain screaming. Screaming at the woman, screaming at his family, screaming at the passerby on the street who gave him one of those “I know what you’re hiding” type looks. He was happy, he wanted to be happy, but people just kept getting in the way.

He reaches into the pocket of his jeans and feels the small, glass bottle he’s been carrying around for years. He didn’t always use it - sometimes it was broken glass in the alley, sometimes it was his bare hands, once it was a gun, but the bottle was always a safe option to go back to. He didn’t really know exactly what it contained, just that it was lethal. He had stolen it from his grandfather’s special “hunting” cabinet twelve years ago. Whether or not the things in there were actually used for hunting wildlife or something else remained to be discovered, but that hardly mattered any more. He would wait for the couple to leave and for the shrew to go to the bathroom and then spike her tea with the poison. Yeah, that sounds plausible. He sighs. That wouldn’t work, what if the couple didn’t leave first? What if the mother doesn’t leave her tea unattended? He had a conundrum and seemingly no solution. He sits for a while longer, hand still clasped around the bottle, woman still shouting abuse at her daughter despite the other diners complaining to the staff. But the staff doesn’t get paid enough to confront a volatile homophobe on an intolerant tirade, no one does. Elijah begins to accept that there’s no good window of opportunity when a sudden loud noise from the front door startles him out of his concentration.

The door swung open so violently that the little bell almost flew straight off its hook, “Everything from the cash register, in this bag, now!” There are three of them, no more than twenty years of age, trying to rob an innocent independent tea shop. You could shake a bag of coins and get three higher-class criminals than these boys, and most of the sample pool in question is pushing seventy. The leader of the group has a pistol that he’s waving around in a lame attempt to scare the customers under their tables, which is working for the most part, except Elijah hasn’t yet finished his peppermint tea and has absolutely no intention of being bullied to the floor. One of the boys rounds on him,

“Under your table, right now.” The boy’s fixing Elijah with a glare so ludicrous he almost laughs right in his face. Instead, he takes a sip of his tea.

“Nah.” The boy blinks, hesitates, and readjusts his stance. Clearly no one prepared the baby criminal for this particular response. He clears his throat and his glare becomes even more intense.

“On. The. Floor. Pretty boy!”

“You flatter me. It’s the hair, isn’t it? Don’t worry, it gets everyone, you’re not the first man to call me pretty because of it.” Elijah shoots him a dazzling smile, winks, and takes another sip of his tea which, of course, drives the boy into a complete fury. He reaches for Elijah’s hair and pulls on it so hard that he slides right off his chair and his head hits the floor. “Whew, take me to dinner first, Jesus Christ!” He laughs a little, dizzy, and mutters to himself, “Manners, manners, manners, so hard to find in criminals these days.”

The one accosting the employee for the money turns to flag down the others, “Come on boys, we’re almost done here.”

Elijah just can’t help himself, he never could. He begins to giggle and the robbers slowly turn to look at him on the floor with pure anger and confusion in their eyes. “I’m sorry boys,” he gasps out between giggles, “I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to diminish your whole ‘tough guy’ act, I know this is a big moment for you, but I just think that if you want to pursue a life of crime, you should probably invest in a real gun and not that fake piece of shite.” The boy clutching the gun looks absolutely furious and perhaps even ready to fire it - if it were real, of course. “I’m just saying, if the goal is to be accepted into the big boy mafia - or whatever it is that criminals hope to do one day - you’re probably not going to want to walk into a top secret evil lair with a gun-shaped novelty lighter.” Elijah grins at them as their poorly-masked faces turn increasingly more red. One of them opens their mouth to speak when there’s another sound and all their heads whip around to the road. The sound of sirens starts faintly and then reaches a deafening crescendo as two police cars pull up outside the tea shop.

The chaos that ensues next is nothing short of, well, chaotic. One of the three robbers yells “SCATTER!”, and they go sprinting down the road at top speed, two police officers in pursuit, meanwhile, the other people in the shop are emerging from under their tables, some angry and yelling, some frightened, some in fits of nervous laughter, and almost all of them hustling toward the door to leave the residence as quickly as they can. None of them are successful though, due to the fact that two more policemen are now entering the shop, attempting to calm everyone down and regain the peace, much to no avail. One of them bellows for silence and the crowd reluctantly obeys.

“We know you’re all a bit rattled, and if you’d like to leave then by all means you may do so quietly. But if anybody saw a face or has any information on those people just now then I ask you to please stay and let me or my partner know. Thank you.” The officer sounds annoyed, a bored glare stuck to his facial features. Almost everybody decides to leave. Elijah contemplates leaving too, just for a second - he had no interest in providing a witness statement for a small-town tea shop robbery, especially with a bottle of poison in his pocket that he was just about to spike a woman’s tea with - but something stops him in his tracks. Behind the large, loud-mouthed, glowering man he had made the snap-judgement to dislike, he sees the other officer illuminated by the sun in the doorway, scratching the back of his hair nervously. It was clearly his first robbery, possibly even his first day altogether. He stood as if he were ready to sprint away at a moment's notice, and his eyes kept darting around the room, all too readily scanning for threats. Elijah couldn’t determine if it was nervousness or eagerness making the officer seem quite so jumpy, but whatever it was, he found it rather endearing.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

There were just three people left in the tea shop. Elijah, the employee behind the counter, and an older man who didn’t care in the slightest that a gun was just being waved around, he only wanted to finish his crumpet. “No, I don’t have any bloody information for you, leave me or lose it, copper!” Typically the police force probably would have called that a threat, but Elijah supposed the system wasn’t about to crumble under the angst of one eighty-year-old and his newspaper. The larger, louder officer leaves the man and turns to speak to his partner who’s still stood, fidgety, by the door.

“Maxwell, go help that man up off the floor and question him.” In all the commotion Elijah had forgotten to get back up onto his chair, and instead was sat cross-legged right where he had been thrown. “I’ll question the employee, and then we can leave. I’d like to get back to the precinct and onto a real case rather than this babysitting gig ASAP.”

The nervous officer - Maxwell, apparently - makes his way over to Elijah and gives him a genuine, if not shaky, smile. “Hi, sir, my name is Detective Maxwell, may I ask you a few questions?” He stutters a little, which Elijah finds absolutely adorable and makes him beam in response. He’s too busy playing I-Spy with the detective’s freckles to answer his question right away. After a few seconds Maxwell hesitates and then

crouches down to Elijah’s level, “Sir?”

“Is this your first case?” The sudden response seems to catch the detective off guard.

“Uh, yes. Yes it is, sir. If you could just answer some-”

“Sit down with me.” Maxwell hesitates, looks cautiously over his shoulder at his partner, and swallows. After what feels like centuries of deliberation - although it couldn’t have been more than about four seconds - he sits cross-legged across from Elijah. They make the most fleeting of eye contact before Maxwell clears his throat and pulls out a small notepad and pen.

“So, um, what’s your name?”

“Elijah Asher.”

“Thank you, Mr. Asher, and what-”

“Eli.” The detective’s head shoots up from his notepad at the sudden interruption, “Call me Eli, Detective, not Mr. Asher.” Elijah’s expression shifts for a split second, “Please.” Maxwell’s eyes seemed to be searching for something across Eli’s face. There was a shred, just a shred, of suspicion about this guy, a nagging feeling that Maxwell couldn’t seem to shift, but nothing strong enough to overpower the charming smile Eli was flashing at him, so he let it go.

“Okay, Eli, what can you tell me about the robbers?” Elijah dives into a full recount of the events of the afternoon down to the very last detail. His memory was pristine; he could remember the licence plate number of the very first car he stole, the very first sentences of the letters he sent to all three of his ex-lovers, and the exact cookie recipe his mother invented to win over the neighbours, so recounting a crime that had happened mere minutes ago was childsplay. Whilst Eli was talking, Detective Maxwell was hurriedly scribbling down every single word he uttered, relevant or not. Elijah periodically slipped in ludicrous metaphors and anecdotes just to see if the detective would write them down. He did.

Ten minutes and a handful of nonsensical metaphors later, Maxwell finally puts down his pen. Boots appear by his side and both boys look up at the intrusion of Detective Loud-Mouth.

“Having fun on the ground, are we? Get the hell up, Maxwell.” Maxwell wastes absolutely no time in doing as he’s told, clearly intimidated by his partner. He scratches the back of his hair again sheepishly and shrugs his shoulders - a nervous tic that Elijah doesn’t suppose will ever get any less cute - and clears his throat one last time.

“If you think of anything else please call the precinct and ask for either myself or Detective Torres here. Thank you for your cooperation Mr. Ash- uh, I mean, Eli.” Torres walks briskly out of the tea shop as Elijah and Detective Maxwell share one last warm smile. Elijah clutches the small scrap of paper with the precinct’s phone number written on it tightly.

“Bye, Detective.”

ꕥ

Arlo follows Detective Torres out of the tea shop and back into the police car. His first ever case as a junior detective and he humiliates himself by having floor time with a witness. Sure, it was just a minor robbery, but the look on Torres’ face told him exactly how bad of a decision that was. He scratches the back of his hair and tries to act nonchalant.

“So, got anything good from the employee, Mateo?” If looks could kill, Arlo would be six feet under.

“Did I say you could call me that?” Arlo shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m ‘Detective Torres’ to you, got it? We are not friends.”

“Got it.” Arlo responds quietly. This isn’t how he imagined his first partnership to be. He pictured precinct antics and camaraderie, not passive aggression and feeling like he was back in school. He had wanted to be a detective for as long as he could remember. He would often think about how lucky he was that his lifelong dream had never changed, that he passed the exam, that he got a place in his precinct, but he couldn’t help feeling just a tad ungrateful that he got the partner from hell. Torres probably felt the same.

The drive back to the precinct is long, tedious, and silent. Arlo passes the time by flicking through his countless pages of, admittedly mainly useless, notes. He flips back to the first page. Elijah Asher. He’s known people before to have preferred names, to insist on nicknames, but there was something about the way Eli reacted to being called ‘Mr. Asher’ that Arlo just couldn’t shake. The expression that shadowed his face in the moment was… disgust? Shame? It was only momentary but Arlo noticed, and it bothered him.

The precinct, as usual, was hectic and rowdy. Too many detectives and not enough space - nothing new there. Arlo and Detective Torres push their way through the police force and their respective piles of paperwork until they get to the Captain’s office. As it was Arlo’s first case, the Captain wanted updates on everything they did. He couldn’t figure out whether it felt more like surveillance or good old-fashioned babysitting. Torres knocks on the glass door.

“Come in.” Captain Huxley spins around in her chair and shoots them both a friendly yet authoritative smile. “How was your first excursion into the big bad world of crime, Detective Maxwell?” Arlo grins, recognising her teasing manner. For all the bad partners he was bound to have, he was grateful that he had such a pleasant Captain. He was well aware, of course, that she also had the capacity to fatally maim him if he so much as missed a comma in his write-ups, but it wasn’t in his plan to see that side of her any time soon. Arlo and Torres fill Captain Huxley in with all the details of the robbery and are swiftly dismissed.

Exiting the office, Torres looks at Arlo and scoffs, “It was only a pansy-ass tea shop robbery, you don’t have to look so bloody proud of yourself.” Arlo’s content smile is replaced with something a lot more sombre, and Torres stalks off somewhere, assumedly delighted that his babysitting road trip is finally over.

“Wanker.” Arlo breathes, when he’s sure that Torres is out of earshot.

He returns to his assigned desk and puts his head in his hands, taking a moment to recover from the bizarre day he’s having, when he feels his phone vibrate shortly in his pocket.

sup mofo

how's the big shot detective life?

arrest anyone yet???

Cara. He forgot to call.

Cara Maxwell, Arlo’s irritatingly successful twin sister, was truly a force to be reckoned with. For all the pouring over law books for days on end Arlo did, Cara was having the time of her life programming software to rival Microsoft by the time they were sixteen. If you think being the sibling of the genius kid was torture enough, try being the twin of one.

Arlo was proud of and loved his sister just like any other brother would, but he couldn’t say that moving so far away from her and the rest of his family was a mistake, per se. It worked. It got a little lonely at times, but it worked. Despite the differences they so obviously had, though, Cara adored Arlo, there was no doubt about that.

no arrests yet, but i did cosy up to a witness on the floor of a tea shop in front of torres like a fucking idiot

“Why were you on the floor, and with whom?” Cara didn’t even bother to say hello when Arlo picked up the phone.

He sighed, “There was this one guy who witnessed the robbery and he wouldn’t get off the floor so I just kind of… sat down with him.”

“Let me get this right. You sat on a dirty cafe floor with a stranger?”

“Mhmm.”

“You?”

“Yep.”

“Arlo Maxwell, the socially anxious germaphobe, sat on a dirty cafe floor with a stranger?”

“Was there a reason for this call apart from asking me the same question twenty times? Also, I’m not a child anymore!” Arlo rolled his eyes.

“You don’t outgrow ‘anxious germaphobe’, my guy. Was he cute?”

“Uh, sorry?”

“The guy on the floor, was he cute?”

“I- he-” Arlo was spluttering annoyedly at this point, “What does that matter?!”

“Calm down, it’s okay, I’m just teasing!” Cara was giggling and Arlo couldn’t help the small smile that began to spread on his face. “Seriously though, was everything okay? Torres didn’t run you ragged for it?”

Arlo put his head in his hands once more, “He wasn’t exactly happy with me, Cara.” He hears her sigh.

“I don’t see what the big deal even is. Is sitting on the floor, like, some kind of taboo in the police world?”

Arlo chuckles lightly, “Torres told me to help the guy up. Instead I just dropped to the floor without even bothering to try. It was just humiliating, I guess. Unprofessional. I want to impress him.”

“I get that. Sorry mate, I really hope it gets better for you soon.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Listen, I have to get back to work, but text me whenever, okay? Promise, Arlo?” Arlo squeezes his eyes shut. He hates promising to text, he never actually does.

“Yeah. Okay, Cara.” The siblings say their goodbyes and Arlo hangs up the phone, undecided on whether it’s made him feel better or worse.

He sits for a moment, trying to tune out the ruckus happening on every side of him, then suddenly he whips his phone back out. Opening the browser, he types in ‘Elijah Asher’ and waits for the page to load.

Photos, social media, LinkedIn pages, websites, everything that could possibly pop up, popped up. Turns out Elijah Asher isn’t the most uncommon name in the world, but nevertheless Arlo set to work sifting through the mountains of different people to find something, anything that linked back to this mystery man. He shouldn’t be so sceptical over somebody who was absolutely none of his business, but he was an itch. He was an itch that had yet to be scratched.

Fifteen minutes passed.

Thirty.

An hour.

Nothing.