Let Me Go by Chelsea Cain Read Free Book Online

because she’d taken him under her wing right away, outfitting him with the appropriate jacket, pants, shirt, shoes, and bow tie. He’d taken a pass on the cummerbund.
    Archie lifted the hem of his pants and studied his socks—the only thing he was wearing, besides his underwear, that was his. They were black. He usually wore them to funerals.
    The last time he’d had a tuxedo on had been at his own wedding.
    He heard Henry and Claire in the hallway before they knocked. Specifically, he heard Claire’s laugh. It was girlish and merry, and always sounded wrong coming from her mouth. Archie had canceled the dinner out that the three of them had planned for his birthday. The fact that they had decided to stop by anyway did not surprise him.
    Archie opened the door reluctantly. Claire was dressed to the nines in a black long-sleeved dress that hugged her growing maternity bump, and Henry was as formal as he got, in black jeans, his black leather jacket, a gray T-shirt, and cowboy boots. Their faces were beaming—apparently in the midst of a shared joke. Archie felt a surprising swell of jealousy. He missed that level of intimacy with another person. Whatever he and Rachel had, it was not a relationship in the traditional sense.
    Claire looked Archie up and down. “Did you get a catering gig?” she asked with a grin.
    Archie glanced down at his tux. “I thought I looked like James Bond,” he said.
    Claire laughed again. Archie couldn’t remember ever having seen her in a dress before. With her very short dark hair, boyish frame, and penchant for jeans and T-shirts, Claire Masland was pretty and feisty and smart, but few would describe her as ladylike. Her pregnancy had brought out her latent femininity. She was in her second trimester, and Henry had told Archie that last week he’d found her crying over a bowl of cake batter. This from a woman who had once left a witness handcuffed to a park bench next to a flooding river. Estrogen. It was a powerful thing. Claire produced a small, sweetly wrapped gift and put it in Archie’s hand. “We wanted to drop off your present,” she said. Then she bit her lip and gazed past him, into his apartment. “I have to pee,” she added.
    Archie stepped aside. “You know where to go,” he said.
    She hustled past him toward the bathroom, her black high heels tapping against the fir floorboards.
    Henry walked in and closed the door behind him. “She’s been peeing every fifteen minutes,” Henry said. “I don’t know where it’s all coming from.”
    Archie flashed back to his ex-wife’s two pregnancies. “It’ll pass,” he said.
    Henry took the drink from Archie’s hand and sipped from it.
    â€œDo you want one?” Archie asked.
    â€œI don’t want to be any trouble,” Henry said. He lifted Archie’s glass to his mouth again and grinned. “I’ll just take yours.”
    Archie examined his now-empty hand. “I find that I am suddenly thirsty,” he said. He walked to the kitchen and got another glass and then set it on the bar that separated the kitchen from the rest of the main living space, and poured another drink. Henry leaned against the bar next to him. Archie saw him glance across the living room at the closed bathroom door. “You’re getting mixed up in this whole thing with Leo, aren’t you?” Henry asked in a low voice.
    Archie recorked the whiskey. “No comment.”
    Henry ran his hand over his face and then smoothed his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Who’s running it?” he asked.
    Archie took a drink and then set the glass on the bar. He looked at Henry with a helpless shrug.
    â€œJesus, Archie,” Henry said, his face reddening. “What if something happens to you? You don’t turn up, who am I supposed to call?”
    â€œI’ll be fine,” Archie said. “But I need you