Page 195 of Back in the Saddle

Then I continued planning. “Tomorrow, hopefully we’ll have a normal day, outside early morning stakeout, of course. Then come home, pass out, wake up, another stakeout, and we can go look at kitties.”

“Again, absolutely.”

Oh yeah.

Earlier, we both felt it.

We were in deep and getting deeper every moment.

And we liked it there.

I smiled.

Eric kissed me again.

Yeah.

We liked it there.

TWENTY-ONE

PAIN IN MY ASS

My alarm went off, I told it to shut up, then I rolled to my back and stared at the ceiling, blearily trying to recall whose bright idea this stakeout business was, and if I could stop myself from murdering her.

Since it came to me it was Harlow, and then it came to me I loved her, I then came to the realization that I’d need to adjust my plans for the day to ones that were less homicidal.

It was the next morning, post-stakeout, and I needed to get up and get to work.

But first, allow me to catch you up from then to now.

After Eric left yesterday, I texted the girls (and Tito) that I wouldn’t be in and thanked them for covering for me.

I then resisted the urge to text my brother and ask him how he was doing, because I knew how he was doing (rotten), I knew what he had to do that day with his friends’ families had to stink, and I didn’t want him to think I was going to get up in his shit now that I had his new number.

I then dove into research on how to fry the best burger and discovered the mind-boggling number of philosophies regarding this concept (approximately 25,739—perhaps a slight exaggeration).

And I might have spent a few minutes (okay, it was more) looking at black wedding gowns.

Eventually, I morphed a few of the recipes together and realized, in all my kitchen accoutrement buying, I didn’t own a cast iron grill pan.

So I took a shower, swiped on some makeup, went to the mall to grab a pan and the grocery store to get the food.

Eric came home, we ate, and he declared my burgers were fantastic. I thought they were only pedestrian and made a mental vow to try again.

Though, the roasted fingerling potatoes with rosemary were da bomb.

We went to bed early because we had to drag ourselves out of it to go to the stakeout.

Important note: twice in this time I discovered Eric could fuck just as good as he could make love. And my testimony to that was the fact, after the nighttime version (the afternoon version was a quickie, still good, but it only hinted at what was to come), I passed out pretty much right after I got back in bed from cleaning up, which I barely had the energy to do, the sex had been so physical, and I’d come so hard.

Mm.

Onward from that…

My early morning QuikTrip choice was a bacon, egg grilled cheese, and proving he could surprise a girl on occasion, so was Eric’s.

We munched them on the way to the warehouse, and when we got to the stakeout zone, I saw Harlow and Brady there instead of Cap and Raye (she told me she was first up to spell their shitty timeslot, Luna and Knox were doing it tomorrow, and I hoped we’d wrap this case up before it became Eric’s and my turn, because our timeslot already sucked, it was just that Raye and Cap’s sucked more).

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