My head tipped back against the shower wall as I came so hard around my own hand that I thought when my inner muscles clamped down that they’d break the fingers I’d stuffed into myself to try to approximate that big dick I was dreaming of. Ugh. This had been a bad idea. Now I had an elaborate fantasy burned into my brain complete with detailed description of my boss’s dick. I washed up and got out of the shower, embarrassed at myself. I toweled off, put on my nightgown, and I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
10
Brody
The first twenty-four hours were crucial. We all knew it. But when twenty-four hours slipped into day after day with no lead in sight, no strategy for locating a missing girl, a girl who, according to the stats, was probably raped, murdered, and buried in a shallow grave by now. It kept me awake at night. We hadn’t found a damn thing since the phone on the first day. I was edgy, frustrated. I was a grouchy at work, and Mrs. Rook had taken to bringing me coffee without being asked, probably in hopes of appeasing my mood.
It didn’t help that the last three days I woke up hard as steel thanks to dreams about Laura. Correction, thanks to filthy dreams about my lifelong friend’s younger sister who was also my employee and direct report. That was nothing short of infuriating. After years of feeling only rare and muted desire for anyone, of being unable to muster the life force that seemed essential for sexuality, after years of mourning and living half a life, my body decided to come screaming back to full power when faced with the most impossible, inappropriate woman in the world.
She was a hell of a good cop. Her insight and her practicality, and even her joking around had been incredibly valuable the last few days. But I still rued the day she decided to move back to Rockford Falls. Because I wouldn’t have had to face the ache that grew every day, the fact that I looked for her as soon as I entered the station, my eyes seeking her out. I missed her if she wasn’t right beside me when I thought of something I wanted to tell her, to make her laugh or to bounce a theory off of her. I missed her like she was my closest friend, like she was the person I wanted at my side all the time. I missed her like she was mine. And that was the main problem. Not the lust. Lust could be ignored, could be channeled into workouts or a one-night stand with someone I picked up in a bar a couple towns over if it came to that. It was the caring about her, the connection we had from the minute she walked in that office. Her sharp wit and humor and warmth. Her bigger-than-life personality, her obnoxious jokes and the way she just sparkled, lit up from the inside and so beautiful and so increasingly necessary to me. She hadn’t been back a week and I was starting to need her.
I’d never laid a hand on her in all my life, but as soon as I closed my eyes at night I plunged into dreams of making love to her. Dirty dreams, and romantic ones, too. A dream one night where I tied a white silk scarf over her eyes and led her up on a rooftop for a candlelight dinner. I must have seen something like that in a movie once, because in Rockford Falls, we don’t have rooftop dinners. We only go on the roof if the shingles come loose after a storm.
Guilt swamped me. Not just because of Damon—whose calls I was dodging and sending straight to voicemail—but because of Missy. Because in the years since she died, I’d never thought to have another woman in my life, in my bed night after night. I’d hooked up a couple of times but never anyone I went out with them again, never a relationship. Never this craving that was so much like first love, that rush of desperation and greed and longing that chokes you up when you’re sixteen and get a glimpse of the girl you wish you could be with forever. I was ashamed of wanting Laura, of wanting anyone that way. I’d been a lucky man to have a good wife who cared for me, and when I lost her, I’d figured that was it.
She had told me at the end, when hospice came to bathe her and give her pain meds, she’d held my hand and told me to find love again, that I was a good man and a good husband. That I didn’t deserve to be alone. She had wanted me to be happy. That was what she worried about, her thin face contorted with pain. And here I was, face burning with shame because I felt like I’d been unfaithful to her. I’d stood in the church where I grew up and said my vows to her. But when death parted us, I never gave in, never stopped being her husband in my mind. I was married, as much today as I had been when she was still alive. Now, Damon had told me time and again I needed to go to grief counseling if I needed to. I couldn’t be a hermit, a celibate all my life, according to him. I hadn’t cared what he said. He and I were always roasting each other about something, so if Brody-needs-a-woman was the old saw he fell back on, I didn’t begrudge him. I just didn’t want to consider it.