Chapter 3 #2
“I’ll be your designated... safety sherpa. Make sure you don’t, you know, Blow out a flip-flop, step on a pop top.”
Despite his silly words, he was serious. “What about your work?” she asked.
He kissed the top of her head as he straightened back up.
“Have laptop, will travel.” Mick was self-employed.
He did post-production sound editing—not exactly the kind of work he could do outside of his high-tech home studio.
Her skepticism was obviously all over her face because he added, “I can do the basics with my laptop and headphones. I’ll need to do a major tweak when I get back, sure, but that’s no big thing. ”
Emily wasn’t so sure about that. In fact, it seemed giant.
He sat down on the dining room chair closest to hers, reaching out his hand to intertwine their fingers. “Your own schedule’s pretty clear right now.”
It was. She’d just been complaining that she had absolutely zero paid bookings until the end of the month—which didn’t mean last minute opportunities wouldn’t magically appear, particularly when it came to the types of photography gigs she did.
“I don’t know,” she said. As a still-relatively-new photographer looking to establish herself in a competitive business, it was important to be available for those last-second gigs.
“When’d you last have a vacation?” Mick asked.
“Never?” she said, laughing a little, as she wiped her eyes. “I mean, not since I went to Alaska.” That was at least four, no, five years ago.
“Take the time, Em,” Mick said, his voice as steady as his warm brown eyes.
She wanted to, but... “I don’t want to go too far. If Carlotta needs me...”
“Palm Springs?” he suggested.
They’d yet to go together—this relationship was still so new—but he was well aware that the campy desert resort town had been her shiny, happy place, back when she was a kid.
She’d talked about it enough—going there with her mom, and then later, with Carlotta.
The bonus being that it was only a few short hours drive away, traffic gods permitting.
Mick smiled now as he saw the giant yet silent Oh yes please in Emily’s eyes. “Palm Springs,” he decided.
“Can you really just take off on a Friday—”
He cut her off. “Absolutely. Let’s just get in the car and go.”
“Right now?” She laughed.
“Yes, right now.” Again, he was serious. “Look, I’ll run home, grab some things...”
“God, I love you,” she said and as she leaned across the table to kiss him, she knew. This man not only made hard things bearable, he made her life richer in so many ways.
Palm Springs. Yeah. She’d love to go to Palm Springs, and while they were there, in the beautiful desert, maybe they’d find the time to take a quick road trip up to Vegas, the home of a multitude of wedding chapels. Who could know what might happen then?
And leaving today absolutely worked.
“Lunch first,” she told Mick, reclaiming her hand to more thoroughly wipe her eyes. “Then you go home and pack while I call Carlotta, let her know our plans.”
“I’ll take my sandwich with me,” Mick told her, already heading for the door, wrap in hand. “It’ll get us on the road sooner.”
“Wow, you really want to go ASAP,” she said, and he turned to look back at her.
“I really want to get you out of here,” he countered, then added, “Get you someplace safe.”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He laughed a little. “I’ll be back soon.” And he was gone.
Boston, Massachusetts
“It’s a little scary.” Robin’s voice was low, but it carried clearly from the hall into the primary bedroom, where Jules was burrowed listlessly beneath the covers of their bed.
“I just flew back from Atlanta, I’ve only been home about an hour myself, but I’ve got another job out in LA next week and, well, I’m gonna cancel, because.
.. Well. I’m not leaving him like this.”
At first Jules thought his husband was talking to Lulu, the next door neighbor’s miniature Schnauzer that they sometimes took care of as part of Robin’s ridiculous prep for their at-that-time-impending baby—as if an elderly dog was anything close to a newborn infant.
But Jules had gone along with it because Robin was Robin and why the hell not?
Lulu was a very sweet if anxious little dog, but he’d imprinted almost instantly onto Jules and was content to visit them on the condition that he glue himself to Jules’s side.
But sloppy kisses, adorable puppy eyes, and way less adorable dog farts beneath these already too-ripe sheets and blankets were one hundred percent not what Jules needed right now.
What he needed was a time machine.
“Please just let me sleep,” he said, but he didn’t have the energy to do more than whisper.
The door to the bedroom opened anyway—which it would’ve regardless of Robin’s hearing him or not.
He pulled the blanket over his head—not that Robin would heed that message, either. And sure enough the mattress sagged as Robin climbed in behind him—except, no, wait, that was definitely not Robin.
It was...
“Hey, Squidward.” Yup, it was one of Jules’s best friends, Sam Starrett—here in Massachusetts, what the hell...?—who was now spooning him, big arms wrapped around Jules’s chest, like that wasn’t at all freaking weird.
Nor was it Robin who was climbing under the covers facing Jules.
It was Sam’s wife Alyssa, Jules’s OG best friend from the shining, golden, halcyon days of the past, back when they were partners in his beloved FBI.
She snuggled in close to him, intertwining her legs with his.
She’d kicked off her shoes and her feet were cold.
She took his no-doubt-extremely-surprised face in her hands and kissed him on the very shocked nose.
“You did the right thing,” she told him, resting her head on Robin’s pillow. She was clearly in travel mode—her gorgeous brown skin devoid of make-up but smooth and clear, her expressive eyes filled with both love and empathy. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
Jules’s stomach twisted. It sure didn’t feel like the right thing. “I should’ve stayed. I should fight,” he whispered. “But, God, that loyalty oath... I just... I couldn’t. I can’t and... I feel like such a coward.”
From behind him, Big Spoon Sam hugged him even more tightly. “Yeah, well, you’re not, Jules.”
It was, perhaps, one of a single-digit number of times Sam had ever called Jules by his first name instead of Cassidy or some random and amusing-but-mostly-amusing-to-Sam nickname like Squidward.
It was made even more odd because as Sam spoke, the heat of his breath moved Jules’s unwashed hair against his ear, which was a brand new experience for them both.
“What are you doing here?” Jules asked. “Please tell me you didn’t come all this way...?”
“For you?” Alyssa said, and Sam unisoned her, “Absolutely.” He added, “SAN to BOS, nonstop, baby.”
Jules sighed as he closed his eyes. “Robin, you shouldn’t’ve.”
“Hey, well, I didn’t, babe.” The mattress jostled again as Robin climbed into their bed just behind Alyssa. He lifted his head to look at Jules over her array of dark curls. “Alyssa and Sam called me because Max called them.”
Max Bhagat.
Jules’s former boss at the FBI.
To whom Jules had CCed his emailed letter of resignation, written on his iPhone from this very bed, on the nausea-filled, heart-sinking, gut-wrenching morning he’d found out that yes.
Yes, this new administration was going to be awful not just for the entire country, but for the Bureau, and for FBI agents like him, personally, as well.
He’d been drastically demoted and assigned to some lower-level desk in some backwoods, deep-red-state office in which he couldn’t possibly thrive—or even expect Robin to go with him.
A place where the freaking Pride flag had actually been banned.
A place where they would live in constant fear and danger. ..?
The cruelty was the point.
And frankly, he was done with it.
Max had responded to the news of his resignation with a brief but sincere, “I understand completely, my friend,” and signed “With my utmost disbelief and deepest regrets.”
“My whole life is gone,” Jules said.
“Hey!” Robin lifted his head again, even as Sam growled in Jules’s ear. “Boy Wonder and I both forcefully disagree with that bullshit thinking.”
“Career,” Jules said. “I meant career. God, I thought the work I was doing mattered—or... maybe I was just fooling myself.”
As a gay man, Jules had been the first in the Bureau so many times, he’d lost count.
He knew he’d never head the entire, vast organization—being so publicly married to a movie star with a somewhat messy past had made attaining that position highly unlikely.
But he’d been a whisper away from stepping into Max’s high-level job when Max was next promoted.
But even that was likely not going to happen now.
Max Bhagat himself was unlikely to advance in this FBI under this administration.
Assuming there was even going to be an FBI after the dust settled.
“I just don’t know anymore,” Jules continued. “I was trying to change the world, but... the world refuses to be changed.”
“You changed my world,” Sam said gruffly.
His quiet words were so honest and heartfelt and sweetly sincere. And God, Jules’s stomach twisted. He’d lost so much, they’d all lost so much—in fact, the entire country was seriously fucked—and yet...
His dearest friends had come all this way to support him. To make sure he knew that he wasn’t alone.
Alyssa always could read his mind, and she echoed a variation on that theme, as tears brimmed in her eyes.
“Imagine how awful this would be if we didn’t have Robin and Sam,” she whispered, and he actually laughed a little as he nodded because yes.
He and Alyssa both were so lucky to have found love in a world that could be so ugly, so harsh, and so brutally cold.
“It’s okay to cry,” Sam murmured from behind him, and Jules knew he was talking to Alyssa, too.
“I’m just... so numb,” Jules whispered. God, he wished he could cry. But he just felt so... disconnected. So lost.
“That’s okay—just feel whatever you’re feeling even if it’s numb, it’s okay,” Robin said, and both he and Sam moved in even closer, into a giant group hug with Jules and Alyssa in the middle. “Just breathe.”
Alyssa smelled really good—Jules not so much, he was certain, but she obviously didn’t care.
“Give yourself permission to grieve this,” she whispered—she who’d always been so much more private with her own grief than Jules had ever been, so that was saying something.
“But there’s no timeline, no right way or wrong way to do it.
You’ll get there when you get there. We’re all feeling a loss—you and Robin even more so, after these past shitty, shitty months. ”
“God, it’s been so bad,” Robin whispered, which was good because as the upbeat, still youthful, optimistic Boy Wonder as Sam called him, he’d been trying so hard to be hopeful, even in the face of all of the devastation—especially the loss of their long-awaited, desperately wanted baby and the devastating injuries to the surrogate who’d become their dear friend.
Oh God, there was so much to cry about.
But Jules just couldn’t do it. And God, he was just so tired...
“When a door closes, a window opens,” Sam murmured into his ear, and no, Jules was never going to get used to that.
“Believing that helped me, when I had to leave the teams. I’ve been where you are, Jules—” Another Jules from Sam.
Was this end times? “—at the end of a road, the end of a journey I wasn’t ready to be over.
But there was a crossroads ahead for me—just like there’s one hanging out there, for you.
There’s a future that doesn’t have to suck just because it’s different from the one you imagined last year or, shit, even last week.
This I know for abso-fucking-lutely sure. ”
And Jules had to laugh, just a little, despite the soul-crushing fatigue and disappointment, because.
.. “Does one of those crossroads lead directly to the Troubleshooters office in San Diego?” he asked.
“Is this where you recruit me to come work for you?” He was talking to Sam but he opened his eyes and included Alyssa in that you, since she was Sam’s boss at the personal security firm that they’d both helped create after Sam left his beloved SEAL Team Sixteen, all those years ago.
“It’s more of a with you,” she answered for Sam. “We need experienced team leaders. We’ve gotten a lot of new recruits from Team Sixteen these past few months—you’re not the only one who’s decided that enough’s enough.”
And yeah, that made sense. Lotta the enlisted SEALs—at least the ones that Jules knew well, like Izzy Zanella and Mark Jenkins and even Adam’s husband, Tony Vlachic—were older and married and probably more than ready to start a new phase of their lives.
They, too, were no doubt eager to skip the illegal orders and constitutional crisis bullshit, thanks so very much, American voters.
Alyssa kept going. “We need you.”
Robin lifted his head again to look at Jules over Alyssa. “San Diego’s not that far from Hollywood.”
“It’s not,” Sam agreed from behind Jules. “And yeah, you would have to bounce down to SAN with some frequency, at first at least, but we’re actually looking to open a branch in LA.”
“Oh, my God,” Robin said. “Really? That’s... I love you.”
“Ditto, Boy Wonder. Grab a shower and get dressed,” Sam drawled.
“Both you guys. We’re taking you to lunch to make you an offer you can’t refuse.
” He caught himself then, because he was Sam and he was always alert and thinking, “Well, probably best to order in, avoid the movie-star goatfuck factor, but it’s on us.
And by us, I mean Tommy Paoletti, who really, really loves you.
So shower’s optional but highly recommended, because holy fuck, Cassidy. ”
Jules had to smile. Cassidy. He was Cassidy again.
And maybe—just maybe—he’d get through this, like always, with a little help from his friends.