Chapter 11
ELEVEN
NOTHING
Knox didn’t seem in the best mood.
We were on our late-night surveillance shift, watching the homeless camp in hopes of witnessing, then thwarting an abduction.
He’d been quiet and gave off a mildly moody vibe all night.
We’d swapped timeslots with Raye and Cap, who had the worst one, so all the AAHS were taking turns trading with them to give them a break—that timeslot being the dead of night—but I didn’t think that was the cause for his mood.
I just didn’t know what was.
He was at the window of the abandoned warehouse where we were doing our stakeout, night-vision binos up to his eyes.
I was in a camp chair, nursing a cold cup of coffee, and freezing my native Phoenician, thin-blooded ass off.
“Is everything cool?” I called.
“Nothin’,” he answered, dropped the binos and turned to me. “Seems like everyone’s asleep.”
“I didn’t mean with the camp, I meant with you.”
He glanced back at the camp before he returned his attention to me and declared, “Eric and Jessie are together.”
“What?”
“Eric and Jessie are together,” he repeated. “They’re a couple. It’s done. He’s claimed. She’s claimed. The crew is moving on.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I said carefully. “I’m not sure why you’re telling me something I know.”
“We said we’d keep us to us so no one would be in our business. We’ve done that. Everyone was in Eric and Jessie’s business. Now their business is a done business, and so is ours. And it got to me you pitched a fit about doing this surveillance shift with me.”
Taken off guard that he was ready to out us so soon, I explained, “I just…we’re still in that zone, and I didn’t want to seem excited about having a shift with you, which might give people ideas and maybe even lead them to guessing we’re together.”
“Why does it matter now that they get ideas?” he fired back. “We’re a thing. It’s a done deal. We don’t have to hide it anymore.”
“Okay then, maybe we should talk about this, because personally, I’d like more time.”
“More time for what?”
“More time for you and me to be just you and me.”
“Right,” he muttered, returned to the window and lifted the binos to his eyes.
“I’ve got a big posse I love, Knox,” I told his back. “But I’m kind of a private person.”
He didn’t respond.
I kept at him.
“I work. My shift ends, I leave it all behind. I get my dog. I go to you. We have dinner. We watch TV. We have sex. We cuddle. We share. That’s my happy place.
Nothing gets in, unless we want it to get in by talking about it.
I love that. When they know about us, we’ll still have it, but we won’t have it the way we have it now.
Is it selfish for me to want you all to myself, just for a little while longer? ”
Slowly, he turned back to me. “That’s what it is?”
“What else would it be?”
For a second, I thought he was going to answer me.
And he did, I simply sensed it wasn’t the answer he’d been going to give me.
“That’s it? You just want more us time?”
“Well…yeah,” I said. “Again, what else would it be?”
He didn’t address that.
He asked, “How much time?”
I shrugged. “A week?”
“Just a week?”
What was going on here?
“Is something on your mind?” I queried.
“Just a week, Luna?” he pressed.
“Actually, I’d prefer we solve this case, then you, Jacques and I disappear to a cabin in some snowy mountains, trucking in a huge-ass amount of food, none of it good for us, and we snuggle by the fire, eat, read, fuck, and then come back and tell everyone we’re a thing, when by then, they’ll already know because we disappeared together.
But since Christmas is fast approaching, and I’m way behind on buying gifts, I can’t do that so…
yeah. Just a week, if that’s good with you. ”
Though, I’d already bought his gift, but I didn’t tell him that.
His whole affect changed, even his voice, which had been wary with an edge of accusatory, and now was soft and sweet when he said, “It’s good with me.”
I didn’t like this.
There was something missing.
And we had hours of this boring-as-all-get-out stakeout gig.
So I went after it.
“Am I missing something?”
“Nope,” he said, and returned to watching the camp, so I was again addressing his back.
“You wouldn’t lie to me, right?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, and I could see his white grin through the dark. “Not about anything important.”
The life of the woman whose man was a private investigator.
I relaxed and rolled my eyes.
“Ten more minutes, and you’re up,” he warned about our lookout exchange.
“Gotcha,” I replied, settling back into the familiar that was us.
Doing that not having any idea my man had just lied to me.
And he’d done it about something really freaking important.
* * *
I had a dog who had needs, so I popped by Oasis Square to let him roam the courtyard while I followed with one of my puppy poo bags.
While doing that, since Linda was hanging out on one of the chairs outside her front door, I had a brief chat with her about Alexis and Jacob’s fast approaching wedding (all three of them were longtime residents, especially Linda, who’d been there since the place was built, and Jacob having been recruited by NI&S, so part of the family in two ways).
I did this before heading to Lucky Boy, because Knox might want my ass right there, but I was hungry.
I got him his regular: a BBQ burger, onion rings and a strawberry shake.
I liked their menu, and as such, I enjoyed experiencing the whole of it, so I didn’t have a regular. But this time I got a corn dog, fried mushrooms and a vanilla malt.
After this, I headed to his pad.
I’d barely shut down the car before I saw him standing in his open door.
His gaze was aimed at me, and his face had a look of thunder.
What the fuck?
Ugh.
I wasn’t going to find out until I walked into the eye of that storm.
With nothing for it, I grabbed the food, got out and headed his way, noting he disappeared into the house before I had my car door open.
I entered, closed the door behind me, and saw him standing behind his kitchen counter.
I approached, stopped opposite and put the food on the counter, all under his heavy glower.
“Before you get more pissed than the inexplicably pissed you are,” I began, “I had to let Jacques out, as you know, then Linda caught me and we had a short chat about Alexis and Jacob’s wedding, and I’m hungry, so I grabbed our food.”
He didn’t comment on any of that.
He stated, “You went to The Porch the other night.”
Uh-oh.
Why was he mentioning that?
“Yes,” I said slowly.
“You told me you did.”
“Yes,” I repeated, equally slowly.
“What you didn’t tell me is that you went to meet Brady.”
Yes, I deliberately left that part out, precisely for this reason.
This meant now I was going cautious when I asked, “Did he mention it to you?”
“No. Cheyenne dropped by and gave me the news.”
Oh my God.
Fucking Cheyenne!
So maybe she wasn’t stalking me.
Maybe she was surveilling me so she could mess with me, Knox, and Brady, and whoever got in her unhinged crosshairs for reasons unknown to those of us who were not unhinged.
“Listen, Brady told me you two had an unhappy discussion, and we need to talk about that—” I started.
“Are you fucking him?”
My head jerked, and I asked, “What?” even if I heard his question.
He leaned toward me and roared, “Are you fucking him?”
I stood stock still, because I’d seen him this pissed the night we broke up, it was not a fun memory, thus, I warned, “You need to take a breath, Knox.”
“You need to answer my question, Luna.”
“We’ll be talking about this, but I’ll not be doing that if you shout at me.”
“I did not fuck her. I could barely stand to kiss her, because she wasn’t you.”
My heart started beating really fast, and other things were happening to me too, all of them terrifying.
“That wasn’t on me,” I retorted.
“No?”
“No. Not no. Hell no.”
“You walked out on me. It wasn’t the other way around.”
“Before that happened, you gave me an impossible choice, proving you weren’t into it with me, but into it with the woman you wanted to force me to be, and you gave me about five minutes to decide, even if there was only one choice I could make. That choice was continue, as ever, to be me.”
“You did not go into that house, Luna. You didn’t see what we saw. You didn’t have to do what we did. You and your women just led us there, and we had to clean that shit up. It was our asses on the line. Same as what happened with those women you found.”
He was talking about the cleanup of our first two major missions, both of which the NI&S guys did, indeed, do.
“If that’s a problem for you, don’t do it.”
“It’s not a problem for me. I know what I can do, and I know my team is tight. What will be a problem is if the Angels get messed up in that kind of endgame, and you don’t even remotely have your shit tight.”
“That isn’t our gig, and you know it,” I clipped.
And it wasn’t our gig.
We weren’t amateur commandos.
We were amateur investigators, who, I did not remind him because he knew all too well, cracked several cases the cops did not, and a couple more the cops knew nothing about.
“You can’t predict how things are gonna go down when you’re dealing with these kinds of people,” Knox told me something I knew, thus why the Angels weren’t commandos.
I didn’t get into that either.
I made another point.
“Like you couldn’t predict your sister and her boyfriend drilling two holes in you?”
His face got hard. “You walked out my door, and when you did, that no longer became your business.”
Even if it was true, that stung like a bitch.
Which was probably why I let loose my next.
“And I walked out your door, so who I fuck isn’t your business.”
“So you’re fucking Brady? A co-worker of mine. A friend of mine,” he bit out.
“Do I have to repeat about what’s your business?”
He threw his one good arm wide and shouted, “What the fuck is happening here?”