by Abby Knox
“Send me a picture of you in your wrestling costume.”
I wait for the three little dots.
The photo of Max in his wrestling costume that appears on my phone is everything I’d hoped for. The tight navy blue spandex is not a surprise. The bare, jacked biceps, and even the bulge at the front of his spandex shorts? Also not a surprise. What does catch me off-guard in this photo he sends me is how comfortable he looks in character. He looks happy, posing for the camera. I look up from the image on my phone, and I regard the real-life man who is interacting with all the child guests, as if he’s in his natural habitat. It’s not forced. It’s obvious on his face, he lives for this.
I was expecting something sexy, but what I got was the vision of someone who would make a great dad. And…I don’t know, maybe that’s the sexiest thing in the world.
As we head out to Max’s truck after the party wraps up, Max shouts, “Shane! You forgot your treat bag.”
“Thank you,” says my little boy, looking up at him in wide-eyed examination. “You’re a pretty good pirate.”
“Thanks.”
“You wanna come to my party next week?”
Max shifts uncomfortably and looks at me, his face a question mark. “Ah, well, man. Shoot. I would really love that, but I have a match on Saturday afternoon. In fact, I’m supposed to be getting ready for one today but I already had to cancel. I’m hoping I won’t have to cancel next week too.”
“What kind of match?” Shane asks.
“Well, I’m sort of a professional wrestler, I guess you could say.”
Shane’s eyes nearly pop out of his head and his little stoic face explodes wild animation. “Like The Rock?”
Max laughs, “You a wrestling fan?”
Shane nods. “Have you ever wrestled John Cena?”
Max shakes his head. “No, I’m what you would call small potatoes compared to that dude.”
“You’re not small. You’re bigger than my mom. Bigger than my dad, even.”
Max bites his lip and looks at me. “What time is the party?”
I smile. “Eleven a.m.”
He nods in thought. “Tell you what, Shane. My match is a little bit after that. How about I come by before the match and say hi. Would that be OK?”
Shane nods his head slowly. “Will you wear your costume?”
“Well, I won’t be in costume until I get to the ring…”
Shane’s forehead wrinkles in an expression that says he neither understands nor cares about the reasons why Max might not be in his wrestling costume.
He’s worn Max down already. “Sure. Yes. Of course I’ll be in my costume. I’ll be there.”
I have to cackle as I get us all buckled in and we drive away.
As Max steers us home, Shane asks if he can open the treat bag. I tell him sure and enjoy the sounds of him in the backseat happily digging through the little toys and candies. There’s a whistle. Great. I know Millie wouldn’t have done that to me. I suppose I have Dave to thank for that. I’m grateful when he casts the whistle aside for some chocolate. Sitting at a stoplight, my phone rings.
I look at it. Fuck.
“Who is it?” Max asks.
I check the time. Technically, yeah, it’s Ross’s time to talk to Shane. Paternal rights and all that. “Ross. Shane’s dad. Shit. I lost track of the time.” I send the call to voicemail, knowing he’ll be waiting to talk to me as soon as we arrive back home.
Sure enough when we get back to our building, Ross is there waiting for us. He’s not supposed to be here, but he’s freaking out because I’ve forgotten about the scheduled phone call.
Max orders us to stay put and exits the truck first, coming around to stand between Ross and me as I open the door.
“Where were you?” Ross asks.
I could tell him to fuck off. He doesn’t need to know where we were. But he does deserve to know his son was out having a good time.
“Birthday party at a friend’s house.”
“A boyfriend of yours?” he sneers, gesturing to Max. He makes it sound like I have half a dozen boyfriends. And so what if I did?
“Ross, don’t start. You want to talk to Shane, then let’s do this. We can go to the park together.”
There’s a nice park right down the block from our building, where we often do visits with Ross. This isn’t a scheduled visit—it was just supposed to be a chat over the phone—but I’m not going to quibble over it.
“Why can’t we just go up to your apartment? Shane would be more comfortable up there, with his toys and stuff.”
I know what he’s doing. He tries and tries to get me to give him more and more and pretty soon he’s going to be manipulating me into a situation I don’t want to be in.
Instead of saying no directly, I offer, “If you’re worried about Shane’s comfort, then you can go have a chat at the playground.”
Ross’s jaw tightens. I know this energy. He doesn’t like it when I don’t give in to his bullshit.
“Fine. Hey, Shane. How was the party?”
Shane smiles as he bounds excitedly out of the truck. “Good. We swam in the pool, and Mommy’s friend Max was the pirate, and the cake was really big and had lots of chocolate candy on it. And she got a new bike and a new game console.”
Ross’s eyes travel between me and Max. “Party at them rich friends of yours?”
I cross my arms across my chest defensively. “Yeah. This is Millie’s brother, Max. He’s a police detective.”
“You dating him or something?”
I cock my head. All the words I want to say to him right now, I can’t. I would love to tell him off but I’m not going to do that in front of Shane.
I desperately try to end this conversation before the subject of Shane’s party next week comes up. It’s not that I don’t want Shane to see his dad on his birthday. I just don’t want him at the party around my friends.
And I definitely don’t want him around Max.
But I’m too late.
“You gonna come to my party next Saturday? It’s a wrestling party.”
I goggle at our son. “Oh, it’s an entire theme now?”
He nods. “Yeah. Max is a real live wrestler like John Cena and he is going to be there. In costume!”
“This mommy’s boyfriend of the moment?”
I open my mouth to tell him to fuck off, but now Max—who has been politely quiet this whole time—has finally had enough. “I’ll thank you not to imply things about Valerie, the mother of your child.”
Ross doesn’t engage with Max. Whenever he really wants to piss me off, he does that thing where he talks to Shane instead of me.
“Shane, maybe you can remind your mom it’s not nice to bring one boyfriend after another around the house to meet you. They come and go and then they leave without saying goodbye to you and that can hurt your feelings.”
“Ross, fuck off, please,” I blurt out, having had enough.
Max takes a small step forward toward Ross; he towers over him by about five inches. “Maybe you should keep your opinions to yourself.”
Ross doesn’t like this. He stands up to full height and his eyes shoot lasers at me while he still speaks to Shane. It’s such a weird creepy feeling when he does this.
“Shane, what would you like for your birthday? You ready for a BB gun?”
Fuck him all the way into next week.
“Obviously he’s not old enough for a BB gun,” I say.
“Yes I am! Momma! I can have a BB gun. Dad can show me how.”
I scoff. “Your dad needs to check with me before bringing up these kinds of ideas.”
“Calm down, I can see in your body language you’re getting worked up. Max, is that your name? Be careful, it sounds like it might be that time of the month. She’s gonna send you to the store for hygiene products before you know it. That’ll really wreck the tough guy persona you’re trying really hard to keep up.”
My nostrils flare involuntarily. “OK. We’r
e done here. Come on, Shane.”
I take Shane’s hand, and with the other hand he waves goodbye to Ross.
“Bye, Dad!”
As we walk away, Ross calls after us, “Aren’t you going to tell me what time the party is?”
“Sure,” I call over my shoulder as we walk toward my door. “It’s at three p.m. on Saturday the 36th of Never, at the corner of Jump Off a Bridge and Shit Creek. Have a nice weekend.”
I close the door behind us and scoop up a tired Shane into my arms, who’s starting to crash from the sugar. When I get him upstairs, we wipe the chocolate off him, let him sit on the potty, and get him ready to go down for a nap.
I sing him a song, smoothing out his curls as he bends into a little ball under the blanket, clutching his stuffed sloth. “Mommy,” he asks.
“Yes, what it is, baby?”
“Where’s Shit Creek?”
“Mommy made it up because I was mad at your dad. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk like that around you. It’s silly grownup talk.”
“I don’t like it when Dad makes you mad. I like Max. I liked what your face did when you were listening to him talk like a pirate.”
My stomach tumbles.
After I quietly close the door and go into the kitchen to get a drink of water, I get a text notification.
I look at my screen and it’s from Max.
“Taken care of. He won’t be breaking the rules again.”
Pretty sure my face is doing that thing that Shane said he liked seeing on me.
“What did you say to him?” I ask when Max ascends the stairs into the loft.
“I told him that if he didn’t follow the custody rules, and if he showed up unannounced again, I was going to open a CPS investigation on him.”
I gape at him. “Can you do that?”
He lifts one shoulder and casually saunters toward me. His hands on my hips feel right. Safe and cozy. “I dunno. Maybe. But he ran away like a scared little bunny when I said that.”
I laugh. “Don’t insult bunnies in my presence, please.”
Max chuckles softly and covers my lips in his. The kiss warms me, inside and out.
“Thanks for agreeing to entertain at the party next weekend. You made Shane’s day. He likes you. I would never have asked you to do that.”
He gives me a crooked grin with his eyes trained on my mouth like he can’t wait to kiss me again. “I like him too.”
“He said my face looked happy when I was talking to you.”
I worry that I’ve said too much. I bite my lip and wait.
Max’s heated gaze travels from my mouth to my cheeks and my hair. He kisses one cheek and I feel myself glowing pink.
“I want to know how I can keep it that way. Can I keep seeing you when this case is over?” he asks.
Every reason I could have come up with to say no is now a pale ghost, floating in the past, no longer holding any sway over me.
“I can’t think of any reason why not.”
Max’s lips find mine in a slow, sensual kiss. His body is bent over so our mouths can reach each other. There’s no telling how long he can hold the position without hurting his back. As my arms rest on his chest, the longing for him to lay me down grows exponentially.
Except there’s only one problem with that.
“Mom,” comes the chipmunk voice from the other room. “Can I be done with my nap now?”
Chapter Fourteen
Max
Talking to me—me—makes her smile.
So the bed sharing and the kissing and the touching and the…whoa… So, it wasn’t just a one-night incident. On top of that, she likes my company during regular times.
I can float on that for the rest of my life.
Somehow the knowledge even helps me sleep better that night on the ridiculously tiny sofa. It’s great news for me and for the tiny sofa because if I’d been tossing and turning all night, the entire thing would be a pile of sticks this morning.
“Chill” is not how I would describe myself in this current situation, but if I don’t try to get some chill, I’m afraid of spooking her away.
After we drop off Shane at Millie’s house to play with Emily, Val accompanies me to the precinct.
My smile hasn’t faded since last night, and Murphy knows something even before registering that Val is with me.
“Somebody must’ve finally gotten laid,” Murph says, arching her eyebrow at me, and then blanching as soon as she lays eyes on Val, coming up behind me.
I decide to bail Murphy out of that comment by pretending it didn’t happen and asking if she’s got a chair to spare for Val.
“Oh! Yeah! I have to go anyway; you can use my desk chair. Hi, Val, how are you?” Murphy’s tomato-red face looks like it might start to sweat pretty soon.
“Where are you off to?” I ask, glancing at Val, who’s also pretending not to have heard Murph’s knee-jerk question about my sex life by fussing with her purse as she accepts Murphy’s offer of a seat at her desk.
“Warehouse on Sixth to look for case files. Marty wants us to see if there’s any other connections between this guy threatening the psychics and the Southside Stalker from way back when.”
We chat for a bit about the case, careful not to say too much around Val—I don’t want to scare her—and I tell Murph that I’ll check out everything I can from this end and see if there are any loose ends in more recent cases.
I sip my coffee as I sift through the deluge of emails that await me this morning. A few leads on a few cases, most are emails from victims or victims’ families from other cases, asking for updates. I go through my files and do my best to answer each one as best I can. I glance up at Val, who looks like she’s contentedly knitting a scarf or something.
“What’s that?” I ask, gesturing at her project with my chin.
“A shawl. And don’t you dare say I already have too many.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. You make them look sexy as fuck. Make a hundred more. Wear ’em, don’t wear ’em. Do you, sweetheart.”
Val’s tongue pokes out with the effort of doing some complicated shit with the needles and yarn, and I am done for.
I would be grabbing her up in my arms and kissing her like a madman if my brother Marty weren’t standing behind me, breathing down my neck all of a sudden.
“Hello, Marty,” I say with a heavy sigh while continuing to click through my emails.
“Murph fill you in?”
“Yup.”
To Val, he asks, “Any updates? Any more contact from the guy?”
I look up at Val, who’s looking at us with a haunted expression and shaking her head. “No, nothing since Max has been on me…in…uhm, assigned to the case.”
I interject to say, “Other than the drive-by the other night, no.”
Val sets her knitting down on the desk. “Drive-by?”
“Shit,” I breathe. “I forgot to tell you. I saw a car pull up and wait for a bit, like the driver was checking out my truck, then drive away. Dispatch sent out some cars to track him down but he disappeared.”
Val pulls herself up taller in her chair. “What did the car look like?”
“Dark blue Chevy Malibu.”
Val breathes out a breath, and her chest falls like she’s been holding it in for a while.
“What?”
“I’ve just been worried it could be Ross. I know it’s irrational. I’ve made him out in my head to be worse than he is. But that’s not his car, so never mind.”
My squeaky office chair protests when I lean forward across my desk to show Val how serious I am when I say, “Listen, you’re not crazy. He is a bad dude; I can tell that. He may not be our stalker, but he’s an ass. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the suspicious car earlier; I forgot.”
Val chews on her bottom lip then says in a low voice, self-consciously glancing at Martin who I can feel is analyzing the intimate dynamics of this conversation, “Max. I am made of worry.”
M
artin’s voice cuts through in that irritating way that only family can achieve. “Anyway,” he says, “I want you to look into this.” He drops a manila folder onto my desk and I flip it open, perusing the contents. “Try not to bungle it, big guy.”
I snort. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
My twin and I are gearing up for an old-fashioned brotherly love sesh filled with mildly witty insults that I’m really not in the mood for—not because I’m in a bad mood, but just the opposite. However, Val cuts us both off at the pass by sticking up for me.
“Max didn’t get a commendation from the governor for catching the Smith Park rapist three years ago by bungling, did he?”
My jaw hits the floor. She knows about that?
I still cringe when I think of the details of that case. It was truly atrocious. Val did some homework on me.
“I fell ass backwards into that one,” I say.
“I’ll say you did,” Marty says gruffly.
“And,” Val continues, training her lovely brown eyes on me, “you didn’t get promoted for cracking that other cold case last year by being a bungler.”
I smile at her. “Thank you, Val.”
She picks up her knitting again. “I do my due diligence when someone new comes into my life.”
The layers of meaning in that statement threaten to make me turn beet red, so I focus on the file in front of me as Martin mumbles something about wanting a status report in twenty-four hours and leaves.
All I see in the file are incident reports from the past few weeks. Nothing stands out to clue me in on a motive. I’m missing something. “Hey, I need to head down to the archives. It’s pretty boring and dusty down there, so you should stay put. Finish your shawl, help yourself to some coffee. I think I have some magazines in my desk if you’re into sharpshooting or perfecting your pile-driver.”
Val interrupts me with avid eyes. “Basement? Archives?” She sets her knitting aside.
“Uh, yeah,” I say cautiously. “But there’s nothing down there, like nobody else to talk to…”
“I’m coming with you!” she says, bolting up to follow me.
“Don’t you want to take your knitting? Coffee?”
