“Wait, what?” I asked him, as he turned around and started walking back to the kiosk. Time to activate the Elle-defense-mechanism. “You mean the imaginary girl I’m going to set you up with, right?”

“Yeah, totally. Her,” he said, ignoring me briefly to turn our clubs in, before looking over at me. “This was fun and all, Elle, but it’s probably a bad idea. Thanks for inviting me out though,” he said, before turning on his heel to walk away.

“Are you kidding me?” I told his receding form. My KILLER was ditching me? I should’ve been glad, but instead I was pissed. I ran around to stand in front of him, blocking his path. “I haven’t even set you up yet—what’s going on?”

“Mostly? That I don’t want to go on a date with an imaginary person.”

I crossed my arms and made a face. “I’m not imaginary—but I’m also not dating anyone after only meeting them twice.”

Byron closed his eyes as though pained, shook his head, and confessed. “Fine. I actually don’t date. At all.”

“Me either,” I said. He opened his eyes to give me a disbelieving look. “If I did, would I be this awkward?” I went on. “I’m not good at this. Clearly.”

He sighed, and waved his hand between us like he was erasing a chalkboard. “Just let me take you home, Sunshine—I mean to the coffee shop, which is near your house or apartment, as the case may be.”

I followed him out to his car—the same Buick as the first night I’d met him—and got inside. It’d been a sunny afternoon outside, but inside the car felt gloomy.

“I’m not lying, you know,” I said. “I am a matchmaker.” I could see the word floating over my head, in the rearview mirror.

“I bet you are—it’s just that I’m probably better off alone.”

“Why?” I was only forty-percent hoping to get a KILLER confession—the other sixty-percent of me actually wanted to know.

“I’m a private person, and my life is weird,” he said and shrugged, then looked over. “Don’t take it personally or anything.”

“Oh, no, I totally won’t. I get ditched on mini-golf not-a-dates all the time.”

He snorted. “No, you don’t,” he said with a spreading grin I only saw in profile. “If you did, you’d be better at it.”

“You take that back right now,” I said and groaned as he laughed. I turned in my seat to face him, trying to make his KILLER reconcile with how I felt about this ending. The word was like a puzzle piece that I couldn’t make fit with my picture of him. “You know, Byron, whatever it is you think makes your life weird—I guarantee you my life is ten times weirder.”

“Impossible.”

“Totally true.”

“Okay—how so?” he asked, glancing over.

I slouched against the seatbelt and the door behind me. “I can’t tell you.”

His eyebrow cocked up, before he returned his attention to the road. “Touché, then, I guess.”

I spent the few short blocks leading up to Mr. Z’s fighting the impulse to look in his car’s glove-box for gun-knives or to stare at him, willing his word to change. Going out with him was kind of a big thing for me, and it would’ve been nice for him to get that—then again, when he said he didn’t date, I found myself believing him.

What if he wasn’t his word, and I just hadn’t figured it out somehow? What if in addition to being inexplicably hot, he was also strange, and truly lonely?

What if he was like me?

He put his turn signal on, to pull into the parking lot for Mr. Z’s not long after.

“Don’t—two more blocks,” I told him, pointing forward. “I live in Ames Apartments, the ones with the fountain out front, that way,” I said, with a wave.

Byron looked over at me, then turned his turn signal off. A few minutes later he was pulling into the roundabout around the fountain that drowned out the road noise if I left my window open late at night. He parked the car and I gave him a half-shrug. “Thanks for the ride.”

“You’re welcome,” he told me, as I opened my door.

And that was that.

The time I met and survived a murderer—maybe.

I took the staircase up to Whitney and I’s level, without looking back.

I didn’t know what to do with the strange disappointment I felt. I’d taken a chance and hadn’t exactly gotten rewarded for it. I hadn’t died…but oddly, somehow, that fact didn’t feel entirely satisfying.

I pulled out my stabby-cat keychain, which not once had I ever gotten to use for its intended purpose, and was flipping out my apartment key when I heard a, “Hey,” from behind me.

I jumped, and found Byron there, patting the air. “Sorry—I was trying not to startle you, honestly.”

“O—okay,” I stammered, with my back to the door, as my heart leapt into my throat. “Why are you here?”

He stood a little straighter, looking down at me. “To ask if we can try really going out. Not just for pretend, next time.”

I stared at him, my mouth an O of surprise, and found I wasn’t currently worried about being killed—no, now my heart was racing for a different reason.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, with a subtle nod.

“Yeah?” he double-checked, like he couldn’t quite believe it, then grinned, stepping back. “Awesome—I’ll text you.”

I bit my lip and gave him a tiny smile. “Okay.”