Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
He opened his arms, and I was careful that time, covering him gently, the aftershocks making me jolt as he held me tight.
“You’re being so gentle with me, when it should be the other way around,” he murmured.
“You always take care of me,” I reminded him. “This time it’s my turn.”
“I love you,” he said into my ear, licking some of the sweat off my skin. “So much. Let’s rest a second and do it again.”
I was ridiculously pleased with myself, and demanded a kiss.
He kissed me hard, letting me know that all I had claimed, he’d done the same. “You’re all mine, Josiah Redeker.”
There had never been any doubt.
TWELVE
Since it could always go either way with Ian—he could be right about things or really wrong, it truly just depended on the day—I decided to be cautiously optimistic with what he’d said about Custodial WITSEC. I was hopeful I would not be going home every night to cry because a child was lost to the system. But amazingly, he turned out to be a hundred percent right. The last time I worked with Miro, or technically, for Miro, it had been a mess. But now, with years under his belt, the department ran seamlessly. Miro Jones did in fact know exactly what was happening with all the kids under his supervision. And, even better, there were no new intakes in the two weeks that Bodhi and I had already served.
Since we weren’t actually needed, Ian moved us back to our regular desks, but because I couldn’t be on the street yet, we got to be the permanent guys in the office. Normally, as all of us were investigators, we rotated. But since I was a bird with a clipped wing and Bodhi was the keeper of said bird, he was stuck with me.
“No,” I whined when I was at my desk, which faced Bodhi’s.
“Make the best of it,” he suggested even as he took a phone call from an FBI agent who wanted us to send a member of our team to find a rodeo clown in Montana.
“No,” Bodhi said, and hung up.
I scoffed. “That call will go over your head to Ian.”
He did not seem concerned.
Two hours later, I heard Ian on his cell as he walked by my desk. “No, you have a field office in Bozeman. We hunt fugitives, not suspects. Let me know if you need me to overnight you a goddamn dictionary.”
“That doesn’t seem helpful,” I told him.
“Rodeo clown my ass.”
That was the end of that.
Bodhi was right. Once his place was on the market, it sold in three days for eighty grand more than he’d paid for it. He was thrilled with the twelve percent increase, especially since, unlike me, he’d done nothing to the townhouse. But it was a much-sought-after, thriving area, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that it went so fast.
As predicted, our friends helped move him into my place. And they did do it for pizza and beer, but there was the whining we had to live through.
“What even is this?” Eli asked, gesturing at Bodhi’s wrought-iron sculpture.
“It’s a heart,” I told him.
“What?”
“See how the rib cage is open and the heart is there?”
“That’s disgusting,” he passed judgment.
“Art is in the eye of the beholder,” Celso, his fiancé, explained to him.
Eli did a slow pan to him.
“It is.” Celso sounded defensive.
“I refuse to move this,” Eli informed me. “It should stay here for the new tenants.”
It ended up going in my backyard, where it became lawn sculpture.
“Vinyl is dead,” Sharpe assured Bodhi as he packed up his extensive record collection.
“That’s sacrilege what you just said,” Ryan assured him. “The imperfections on records are what makes them unique.”
“It’s a whole lot easier to plug in your iPod.”
Eli was horrified.
“Why don’t you have any plants?” Dorsey wanted to know. “Everyone should have some. They’re our little photosynthesizing buddies.”
Ian didn’t understand why Bodhi’s kitchen was so bare. No pots or pans, only assorted silverware, and perhaps three glasses.
“What the hell?”
“You know, living like you’re still in college is a bad look at your age,” Miro told him.
Bodhi gestured at me. “I’ve always had Jed’s stuff.”
“And now you have it again,” Celso said, grinning at him. “How fortuitous that you fell in love with a guy who has plates.”
Bodhi sighed deeply. “Not missing the sarcasm even a little.”
Celso cackled and walked away.
“Your fiancé is a dick,” Bodhi informed Eli.
“At least he doesn’t own questionable sculpture.”
“Yeah,” Ian chimed in. “What the fuck even is that?”
“You know,” White called out from the kitchen, “no one should have this much kids’ cereal. All this sugar will kill you.”
Bodhi flopped down on his couch, which was going home with Dorsey.
“Watch the sofa, man,” Dorsey yelled at him. “It’s not yours anymore.”
“Dude, why do you have so much toilet paper?” Sharpe wanted to know, leaning out of the bathroom.