Chapter 10
CAL
Three months into this thing with Hazel, and I've never been happier in my entire life. We've fallen into a rhythm that doesn’t feel like a new relationship, but like something we’ve been doing our entire lives.
People always told me that when you’d find the one you would just know, and I do.
Everything with her is fucking easy. Dinner most nights at her place or mine, Biscuit splitting his loyalty evenly between us, lazy mornings on her days off, the occasional lunch at the bakery that still, somehow, ends up mentioned in Spotted in Whispering Pines, though nobody seems bothered by it anymore.
If anything, half the group's taken to rooting for us outright, which still catches me off guard some days. It’s a nice surprise when we see candid pictures of ourselves.
You can really see the love when we’re caught in the moment.
I'm coming up on the end of an uneventful overnight shift, when dispatch crackles through.
I nearly choke on my coffee.
"Copy that, dispatch. Responding." I flip the lights on and pull out, already knowing, somehow, in my gut, exactly what I'm about to find. There's no way. There's absolutely no way she'd actually do this again.
I pull up outside Earl's a few minutes later, same dark storefront, same hand-painted sign in need of touching up, same quiet street holding its breath the way it did that first night almost a few months ago.
I get out, hand resting on my belt out of habit, and head around toward the back door, half expecting to find an actual burglar this time and feeling like an idiot for hoping otherwise.
The back door is cracked open. I push it the rest of the way, flashlight up, and there she is.
My Hazel, standing in the middle of Earl's stockroom in her pajama pants and an old T-shirt, a stick of butter in one hand and the most unrepentant grin on her face I have ever seen in my life.
"Whispering Pines Sheriff's Office," I say, fighting back a laugh. "Open the door. Oh wait, it's already open."
"Evening, Officer." She holds the butter up like she's presenting evidence. "Caught me red-handed."
"Babe, are you seriously breaking into Earl's grocery store? Again?"
"In my defense, Earl knows I'm doing this. Full permission. We've got a system." She's fighting back laughter now too, and it's only then I notice Tiffany crouched a few feet away, phone up, filming the whole thing with the kind of glee usually reserved for major holidays.
"Tiffany, are you seriously filming this."
"For posterity," Tiffany says, entirely unrepentant. "This is going straight in the group. History's repeating itself, Cal, somebody's gotta document it."
"Oh my God." I drag a hand down my face, though I can't stop the smile pulling at my mouth. "You two planned this."
"We absolutely planned this," Hazel confirms, setting the butter down on a nearby shelf and crossing her arms, still grinning at me. "Wanted to see if you'd actually cuff me again."
"I am not arresting you for the same crime twice, not when I’m going to get crucified for it."
"Shame,” she gives me a smart ass grin. “Kind of miss the handcuffs."
"Hazel,” I say by warning.
"What? Just saying." She shrugs, all faux-innocence, and takes a step closer, close enough that I catch the smell of vanilla that always seems to follow her, even at close to two in the morning in the middle of a grocery store stockroom.
"Figured this was fitting, though. Full circle moment.
This is where it all started, after all. "
"This is where you committed a felony, is what this is."
"Misdemeanor, technically. Earl looked it up." She grins, unbothered. "C'mon, Officer Sutton. Aren't you even a little sentimental about it?"
I look at her standing there in the same spot where I found her a few months ago, thinking about everything that's happened between then and now.
The apology dinner. The kiss on her doorstep.
The week she pulled away and the way my chest damn near caved in until I finally walked into her kitchen and told her the truth.
Charcuterie on the back porch with Biscuit snoring at our feet.
The post I finally worked up the nerve to write, and the way this whole town, the same one that spent years calling me Deputy Doody, ended up rallying behind us instead of tearing us apart.
I am, in fact, sentimental about every single bit of it.
Tiffany's still filming, phone steady, clearly not planning on missing a second of whatever's about to happen, and something in me decides, right here in this room, that there's no better place and no better moment than exactly this one.
"Hazel," I say, and something in my voice must shift, because her smile falters just slightly, replaced by something more curious.
"Yeah?"
I reach into my pocket, fingers closing around the small box I've been carrying around for the better part of two weeks now, waiting for the right moment, half convinced I was overthinking the whole thing.
Turns out the right moment was exactly this ridiculous, and I drop down onto one knee right there on Earl's grocery floor.
Hazel's hand flies to her mouth. "Cal. I didn’t do this for that. I just missed you and wanted to play a prank.”
"I know. You broke into this grocery store a few months ago, and it was without a doubt the most annoying, most complicated night of my career.
" I open the box, and even in the dim light of my flashlight propped against a shelf, the ring catches enough light to make her eyes go glassy.
"But it's also the night I got the chance to finally know you the way I always wanted to, back in high school, too scared to say a word.
You've changed my whole life these past few months, Hazel Monroe.
I don't want to spend one more day without you being mine, officially, for good. So, marry me?"
She's crying now, laughing through it, that same unrepentant grin still tugging at her mouth even with tears sliding down her cheeks. "You're proposing to me in a grocery store stockroom. During a fake burglary. I love you so much."
"I love you too, this seemed fitting."
"It's perfect," she says, and drops down to her knees in front of me, careless of the dusty floor, cupping my face in both hands. "Yes. Obviously, yes."
I slide the ring onto her finger, hands not quite steady, and she kisses me right there on the floor of the grocery store, laughing against my mouth, and somewhere behind us I hear Tiffany let out a whoop loud enough to wake up half of Main Street.
"This is going straight in the group," Tiffany announces, still filming, voice thick with her own tears now. "Oh my God, everybody is going to lose their minds."
She's not wrong. Within the hour, the video's already up, already climbing toward more shares and comments than I've ever seen on a single post in Spotted in Whispering Pines.
Deputy Doody proposing to Hazel Monroe in the very grocery store where their whole story started, complete with a butter-stick cameo, and by morning it feels like the entire town's commented, half of them crying, all of them thrilled.
But none of that matters half as much as Hazel sitting beside me on the tailgate of my truck a little after two in the morning, ring catching the streetlight, leaning her head against my shoulder while Earl himself comes out, laughing so hard he has to lean against the doorframe when we tell him what happened.
"Only you two," he wheezes, shaking his head. "Only you two would manage this."
"Guess we're just that kind of story," Hazel says, threading her fingers through mine, and I think, sitting there under a sky full of stars with the woman I've loved for longer than I ever let myself admit, that she's exactly right.
Thank you for reading Arrested by the Deputy!