Chapter 20 #2
She’d gone still beside me. I could feel the shift in her energy, the careful way she was holding the next question.
“What happens to him then?” Her voice was quiet. “When he retires, do they…” She stopped. Her hand tightened on the edge of the counter.
The look on her face told me exactly where her mind had gone.
“No.” I said it immediately, firmly. “Absolutely not. Retired K9s live out the rest of their lives as regular dogs. The harness comes off, and they’re done. They get a yard and a couch and someone who spoils them rotten. That’s it.”
Her shoulders dropped. She exhaled like she’d been bracing for something she couldn’t bear to hear.
“Okay. Good. Because I was about to lose it.”
“Jolly’s going to be fine. He’s going to have a great retirement. That’s the easy part.” I paused. Turned my water glass on the counter, a slow rotation. “The hard part is what comes after.”
“After retirement?”
“For me. If I want to keep doing K9 work, I need a new partner. A young dog. Training takes months, usually at a facility somewhere else. Then the contracts start again. Travel, deployments, the whole cycle. And a retired dog can’t come along for that.
He needs stability. A home. Someone who’s there every day. ”
I heard what I was saying. Heard the weight of it land in the quiet kitchen.
“Most handlers in my position either stop doing K9 work altogether, or they find the right home for the retired dog. Someone who’ll give him the life he’s earned.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
I didn’t look at the Lego fortress on the living room floor.
Didn’t look at the crayon drawing on the fridge.
Didn’t look at Kayla, because I knew what I’d find on her face, and I wasn’t ready for it.
The thought of handing Jolly to anyone, even someone who’d love him with everything they had, was the thing I’d been circling for months without letting myself land on it.
Kayla was quiet for a long time. I could feel her thinking, feel the restraint it cost her not to say the thing that was sitting between us like a third person in the room.
“He’s a good dog,” she said. Simply. Like that covered it.
“He’s the best dog.”
She reached across the counter and put her hand over mine. Her fingers were still cool from the salad bowl. Neither of us said anything else about it.
My phone buzzed on the counter. I glanced at the screen. Donovan. A text, not a call, which meant it wasn’t urgent. Probably an update on the Martinez situation or Jace with another data point or just Donovan checking in the way he did when he couldn’t sleep and figured I couldn’t either.
If it was important, he’d be calling in the next thirty seconds. When he didn’t, I turned the phone facedown.
The work would be there in the morning. It was always there. Patient and demanding and ready to swallow however many hours I was willing to feed it. For the past six years, those hours had been unlimited. The job got whatever it wanted because there was nothing competing for the space.
Tonight, something was competing.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“When does William come back?”
“Tomorrow morning. Trish said she’d have him home by nine.” She held my gaze. Waited.
From next door, faint through the walls, Jolly barked once. The single, sharp announcement he made when he heard a sound and wanted the record to show he’d been on duty. Then silence.
“He knows how to spend the night by himself,” I said.
“But he doesn’t necessarily like it.”
I smiled. “He’ll survive. Will be poking his head through that fence hole at dawn.”
I’d told her things tonight I hadn’t told anyone who wasn’t Donovan. About Montana. About why I’d enlisted. About the hollow efficiency of a life built for leaving.
I’d said more in the last hour than I typically said in a week, and none of it had been difficult, because she didn’t make it difficult. She asked and I answered, and the answers came without the resistance I was used to feeling.
I thought about what I’d told Vance at Brannigan’s a couple nights ago. That some guys eventually settled down. Took local contracts. Built something permanent. That Citadel didn’t chain anyone to the field.
I’d said it like I was describing someone else’s life.
A path other people took. Now, sitting in this kitchen with the drawings on the fridge and the herbs on the windowsill and a woman who’d approached every wall I had and walked through them like they weren’t there, I realized I hadn’t been describing someone else at all.
I just hadn’t caught up to it yet.
Kayla’s hand was still on mine. The kitchen was quiet. The light hummed faintly overhead. Somewhere next door, Jolly had gone back to sleep, satisfied that his single bark had been sufficient commentary on the situation.
I turned my hand over under hers and laced our fingers together.
“Come here.”
She slid off her stool and stepped into me. I was still sitting, which put her even with me for once, and she settled between my knees with her hands on my shoulders and looked into my face with an expression that made my chest go tight.
Not guarded, not careful. Just present, all the way through, nothing held in reserve.
I untied the belt of her robe. Slowly. Watching her face the whole time, watching the way her breath changed, the way her lips parted.
The robe fell open, and I pressed my mouth to the hollow of her throat, her fingers curled into my hair, and the sound she made was quiet and deep and went straight through me.
This was different from before. The hallway had been collision. Need overriding thought, two people who’d been circling each other for weeks finally running out of reasons to hold back.
This was deliberate.
I knew the shape of her now. Knew the places that made her breath catch, knew the sounds she made when I found them, knew the way her fingers tightened in my hair when I took my time.
I pulled her closer. She came willingly, her body pressing into mine, the thin fabric sliding under my hands. My mouth moved down from her throat to her collarbone, and she exhaled and tipped her head back, and I felt the trust in that gesture as clearly as I’d ever felt anything.
I stood, lifting her with me, and she wrapped around me the way she had in the hallway, legs around my waist, arms around my neck, her mouth finding mine. But the pace remained unhurried. Every touch a choice rather than a reflex.
I carried her toward the stairs. She broke the kiss long enough to look at me, and whatever she saw on my face stripped the last of the composure from hers. Something cracked open behind her eyes, raw and full and certain, and it hit me harder than anything that had happened all night.
“Ben.”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t finish whatever she’d been about to say. Just kissed me again, slower this time, her hand on my jaw, and I carried her up the stairs and into the room where the sheets were still tangled and the night still had hours left in it.