Olive Juice

“Lower your voice,” Phillip said.

“I’m not—”

“David. Please.”

And when had he ever been able to resist that? They’d found that out almost right away, that all Phillip had to do was say please. That’s all he had to do, and David was turned to putty, unable to do anything but what had been asked.

“I—” he choked out. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know,” Phillip said. “And I can see where you’re coming from. How that would look. David, do you trust me? Deep down. Do you really trust me?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation, because even after all that’d happened, even after all they’d been through, he trusted Phillip Greengrass with everything he had. The things he said in the past might have contradicted that, but this was his truth. It was one of the few he had left, and he hoarded it as if it were precious.

“Thank you,” Phillip said. He closed his eyes briefly. “I was going to call you. Or text you. I told myself to call, but maybe I chickened out a little. But I didn’t know if you’d ignore it, so I called Detective Harper first, because she was the only one you talked to with any regularity. So I waited until Tuesday and called her. She told me you’d spoken the day before. She told me what you spoke about. She said she was checking into it. That every little bit helped. Then I texted you.”

David believed him. Phillip had never lied to him, not about the big things. And this was a big thing. “Why?”

“Why?”

The words almost got stuck. “Why did you want to see me?”

“Because I miss you.”

And there it was. There it was. The four words that meant more than anything he’d heard in the last six years other than we’ll find her, I promise, and he didn’t even know if he deserved them. After everything he’d done, he didn’t think he could have them and all that they potentially implied. Sure, it might have been just as a friend misses another, or something so much more, but still. It was something. And those four words were out there, Phillip just throwing them at him like it was nothing.

He didn’t deserve this.

He hadn’t earned it.

But he wanted it more than anything else in the world. So he said, “I miss you too.”

“Do you?” Phillip asked.

“All the time.”

Now they were reveling in it, weren’t they?

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Phillip shrugged. “Okay.”

He moved on to the broccoli.

David tried the swordfish. He could barely choke it down.

He set down his fork.

“You need to eat more,” Phillip said. “You’re wasting away.”

“Yeah,” David said. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”

Phillip had a fragile smile on his face, like he was unsure if it was okay for it to be there. “Might be. I like the tie. Nice touch.”

“It’s—I don’t know why I wore it.”

“I taught you better than that,” Phillip said. “You never need an excuse to dress up. I think you look very handsome.”