Things began to fall into place.

Harvey, Damien and I quickly established a daily routine—get up, go to our respective jobs, come home, order out some food, and pass out with some beer and video games, or maybe a nature documentary on Discovery channel. The domesticity of our lifestyle was a little unsettling, and something entirely new. My new surroundings must have had some sort of weird effect on me, warping my old sensibilities into something more refined.

It was the first time I’d lived in an apartment with actual furnishings. It was also the first time I lived with people who weren’t drug addicts, pathological liars, or psychopaths. It also happened to be the first time I wasn’t completely broke and out of money.

And it was actually sort of fucking nice.

Damien was a federal agent who worked on the field, so his schedule was, more often than not, very irregular. Some nights he’d be on a stakeout and wouldn’t return home until the next day. He did a lot of traveling out of state, and on those occasions he’d be gone for days on end. His absence gave me time to do what it is that I do best: Snooping.

I was an expert snooper. And good thing that Damien was somewhat of a slob with his paperwork—it only made the snooping easier. I canvassed Damien’s room several times, hoping for something, some sort of clue that would bring me closer to the truth.

Harvey, skeptical of my suspicions about Damien, watched with bemusement. “What do you expect to find, anyway? Damien’s just an ordinary fed, he tried to bust Lars for a drug-related felony. And then he failed, and then he decided he needed a roommate, so by coincidence, he found your housing ad on Craigslist.”

“That’s exactly it, Harvey!” I snapped. “Doesn’t that all sound fucking strange to you? Improbable, even? Why would a federal agent concern himself with such a petty crime?”

“Drug possession is pretty serious, man.” Harvey gravely replied. “It’s a felony, in fact.”

“Ugh, don’t be naïve, Harvey.” I sighed.

“Shit, I don’t get it. I just don’t get what there is to be suspicious about. And what the hell are you looking for?”

“Proof.” I sifted through a pile of Damien’s wireless bills, credit card transactions, bank statements. “I think he’s up to something. The whole thing with Lars was no coincidence. There’s something more to this. And I’m going to find out what it is.”

“You’d make a good conspiracy theorist,” Harvey observed, stretching out on Damien’s unmade bed. “You’re always fucking suspicious of everything.”

“Better paranoid than dead,” I muttered, studying Damien’s call records. “You’ll learn one day that—oh, shit. SHIT, Harvey, look at this!!”

I shoved Damien’s Verizon bill into Harvey’s face. “Incoming call from Lars’ cell phone. Dated two weeks ago. Now tell me, why would Lars be calling Damien?”

Harvey’s eyes were like dry ice. He glanced at the cell phone bill, and then back towards me. “Eugene. Look. I don’t know what’s going on, but we’ve got something good going on here. Damien’s got money. He’s taking on over half of the rent. We’re in a good situation right now. Let’s not fuck it up over some trivial matter, alright? He’s probably pulling some double agent shit with Lars. It’s none of our fucking business.”

A long silence followed as we both stared at the piece of paper in my hands, and the implications of the evidence it presented to us.

“Let’s just leave it alone,” Harvey finally broke the spell. “I think we’re prying into things that we’re not meant to understand at this point.”

“I need to know more,” I stubbornly continued sifting through Damien’s cell phone records. I threw Harvey a look over my shoulder. “You know anyone that could hack into the FBI database for me?”

Harvey blankly stared at me. “You’re kidding.”

“Um, no. I’m serious.”

“That is a felony,” Harvey said through gritted teeth. “At least, I’m sure of it—“

“Please.”

“Maybe if I let you do this, you’ll come to your senses. You’ll realize how batshit stupid you are. And then we’ll end up in prison, and we’ll be the jailhouse bitches.”

“Exactly. Yes. Definitely.”

That same weekend, Damien was to perform a stake-out in Jersey. Before he left, he brought home bags of groceries filled with essentials like beer, potato chips, cheesy puffs, tv dinners, canned soup, and basically everything else that he knew I would like. His crystalline chameleon blue-green eyes had obtained a little bit of a twinkle as of late. I don’t know what it was exactly, but he was being all nice and caring and motherly and shit, and it drove me off the wall. Though I had to admit, those eyes that I had once found creepy and shifty were growing on me. I mean, hell, I was even close to admitting that Damien’s eyes were pretty. They were a mismatch on his dark complexion, but at the same time, highly unusual and striking.

Despite all this, I was constantly on my guard and there was no way I’d let myself go soft and soppy on him.

I grudgingly relieved him of the groceries. “Thanks.”

“You’ve never thanked me before,” Damien replied. “Are you sick or something?”

”Shut up.” I began to put the goodies away. “What are you, my mom?”

Damien slyly leaned against the counter. “No, but if I continue living with you for the next seven years, we’ll be married by common law. That would make me your common law husband.”

“Gay marriage is finally legal, but there is no common law marriage in New York,” I replied sharply. “Therefore, we can’t be husbands. Ever.”

Damien responded by ruffling my hair. “You’re so feisty.”

“Augh, stop it!!”

He smiled a little and performed a bit of an arrogant upturning of his head, reverting to his usual character. “I should be back by Sunday. I trust that you’ll keep the apartment in order until then. And remember to feed the spiders.”

“Yeah, yeah. Harvey takes care of that shit.”

“Ah. Well, in that case, so long, Husband.” Damien turns with somewhat of a graceful flourish and heads towards the door, trench coat trailing behind.

“Later, Damien!” Harvey calls out from the living room.

“Feed the spiders!” Damien orders Harvey. “If they’re dead by Sunday, I’ll force feed their carcasses to you.” He closed the door behind him.

Harvey and I went to the window together and watched as Damien exited the apartment building, climbed into his black Lexus, and drove off into the grimy Morgan Avenue sunset. “Alright,” I said under my breath. “Let’s call the Hacker.”

Harvey rolled his eyes.

Our hacker was none other than Adrian Donahue. The guy was supposedly some sort of certified genius/nutcase, although his credentials were dubious. He made shitloads of money from his rock band, but also practiced a secret career in Paranormal Investigation. Rumors circulated about his dark past, some shit regarding bank robbery or something. It’d be safe to say that Adrian was well-known in the neighborhood, popular in fact, for hosting crazy house parties that even the police didn’t dare breach. But few people knew about Adrian’s alternate career—Paranormal Investigator.

Adrian arrived with his equipment. He was a tall, lanky guy with hazel-colored eyes and a snappy black suit. “You need to hack into the FBI?” he asked.

“I just want to snoop around,” I replied. “Nothing serious.”

“Right then. Let’s go for a drive. We’re going to find an unprotected wireless network and use it to hack into the system. For the FBI, this is safest way to go about hacking without being detected.”

So we piled into Adrian’s Nova, and drove around we found a strong wireless signal in the parking lot of a local C-Town. With a businesslike air he opened up his laptop and began making preparations.

“You ever done this before?” I asked, a little tense.

“It is quite easy to hack into the FBI,” Adrian crisply replied. “I’ve hacked into their criminal database many times before. Also, they are technological dinosaurs. We’re talking about a government entity that can barely keep up with the world around them. I’ll get you into the system within approximately four hours.”

“Four hours?!” I cried.

“Yes—it’ll take approximately four hours to breach the system,” Adrian booted up his laptop. “Easy enough, really. There are two programs, both widely available on the internet, that practically do all the bloody work for you. I’m going to use one program to extract usernames and encrypted passwords from the FBI database, and then another program to crack the passwords. We’re basically going to use the identity of a special agent to access classified information, or whatever it is you’re looking for.”

“Are you sure this is 100 safe?” Harvey asked. “Or are we gonna get raided by the Feds come Saturday morning?”

“I’m using a chain of proxies,” Adrian answered with confidence. “We’re virtually untraceable.”

Hours later, Adrian had access to the database. We pulled up Damien’s profile and the snooping commenced.

“Ah,” Adrian murmured. “This fellow’s a special agent. And he has quite a track record. Fluency in multiple languages…Arabic…French…Hindi…his specialization appears to be global terrorism. He has a four-year degree in psychology from Yale and a J.D. from Columbia.”

“What’s a J.D.?” Harvey asked.

“Juris Doctor,” Adrian scrolled further through Damien’s profile. “He’s able to practice law.”

“Oh my fucking god.” I grabbed Harvey’s arm. “Lars is a terrorist. That’s why Damien’s after him. The whole drug thing was a cover story!! He made it up!”

Harvey frowned. “Eugene, first of all, we don’t know anything. Second of all, how the fuck can Lars be a terrorist, he was born in Oklahoma, for fuck’s sake. He’s just a petty criminal. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“He has to be a terrorist!! Why else would Damien be interested in arresting him? And that’s why Damien came after me, initially! He probably thought I was involved! It’s all making sense now! And look! There’s NOTHING in Damien’s profile that suggests even a whit of involvement in drug-related federal enforcement.”

“Who’s Lars?” Adrian asked.

I gazed at the roof of the car, dumbstruck. Something of this magnitude had never happened to me before. This topped all of the injustices that had been dealt to me in the past. Out of all the egregious, stupid shit people have pulled on me, nothing topped this. Nothing.

Because my ex-boyfriend was a terrorist.