Closing the distance, I threw my arms around him, my heart beating a mile a minute at what this meant. I was happy, fucking beside myself with it.
That was until Rissa asked, “How are you going to ask her, honey?”
Here’s where I had an issue. I. Had. No. Fucking. Clue!
RoseRaoul had moved in with me last month, preferring the extra space of my house to the one he’d been living in. Garrett now lived in it on his own, and he loved it. It was close to us, it was close to town, it was close to the police department, and he had space to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it. He was still on inactive duty and would be for another fifteen months, but so far he was adjusting well to life outside the military. My brother’s business partner Mace helped this because he was a former marine and he got how hard it was to adjust from military life to a civilian one. The two of them had become close, and I think it also helped Mace who had periods of withdrawing into himself. Like I kept telling Garrett, though, it was one day at a time. He was also good friends with Zuri, and a lot of the time when I saw him at work it was because he was there to see her, but only as friends as he kept telling me. He’d friend zoned himself there, not the other way around. Where he saw friends only, I saw the beginnings of something beautiful, but we’d just have to see.
This meant that at the end of a long day or night, I came home to Rex, Ranger, and Raoul. And I loved it.
Kicking my shoes off, I followed the sound of the television into the living room and found Garrett grinning over the back of the couch at me. “Welcome home, dear. How was your day?”
Dropping down beside him - and narrowly missing Rex - I pulled the lever for the leg rest and groaned when it took the weight of my legs. Some days I was good and I could come home and do shit and not feel a thing. Other days, like today, it felt like they were filled with lead. “Long ass day,” I muttered, staring blindly at the movie playing. “Where’s your brother?”
Clearing his throat, he choked, “Sleeping it off.”
“Sleeping what off?”
“He… uh…,” he started, and then swallowed a couple of times. “He had a drink with your brother.”
Groaning, I let my head fall back with frustration. “Did my brother get him drunk and try to put him on a bus to Alaska?”
“I can whole heartedly confirm that you’re not even close to the reason,” he choked.
Righting my head and looking over at him, I watched him trying to fight a smile. “Then why?”
Shrugging, he stared at the movie, doing his best to ignore me. When I just continued to watch him, he rubbed his hand across the couch cushion. “Have I told you how much I love this new couch? It’s so much more comfortable than mine. What do they call this fabric?”
“Leather!” I ground out.
“Like the stuff they use on shoes?”
“The very same.”
“Huh,” he huffed sounding surprised, but it was a blatantly fake version of it which made me even more suspicious. “My shoes aren’t as comfortable as this. I wonder if they come from different breeds of co…”
Patience completely lost, I stood up on my lead legs and leaned over him. “Garrett…” I growled warningly. “Today I had to put these two fingers,” I held up my index and middle fingers in front of him, “in a patient’s artery to stop them bleeding out. A doctor wiggled a clamp in the hole beside them to take over, but I was doing the job for a total of fourteen minutes before I could take them back out. Do you know what that means?” I was lying, but I’d done it before so that counted.
With his eyebrows almost touching his hairline, he watched the two fingers I was still holding up. “That you’re good with your fingers?”
Leaning in closer to him, I hissed, “It means I know exactly where to push to stop the flow of blood to your brain. Do you want me to show you how that feels?”
Eyes narrowing, he considered the threat for a second, and then leaned until only my death fingers separated us. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Straightening up, I crossed my arms over my chest and shrugged. “Fair enough, but you brought the retribution on yourself,” I warned him, and then turned around leaving him staring after me with his mouth open.
RaoulTwo hours later…
Day drinking was a different thing when I was younger. I could go out with my friends and if I drank too much, I survived. I was only thirty, but I didn’t think I was going to survive this day drinking hangover. I vaguely remembered Garrett pouring me into bed when I got home earlier, and a quick look at the clock showed I could only have been asleep for a couple of hours, but I had King Kong trying to burst out of my skull.