Page 6 of Shield
Oliver glanced at me, his gaze as weary as my body was.
“Sorry, that was… I didn’t think I would be here this long. The girls are going to be worried about me not showing up.”
“Feel free to call your wife to go get them.”
Oh. Oh, Jackson, that was lame. So lame. So obvious.
“My wife died two years ago.”
Fuck. I inhaled, then let it out slowly. “Sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, Detective. Can we get on with this?”
“Yes, of course.” I dove into procedure to help bury the tremendous shame that overwhelmed me at that moment. Drooling over a widower with two daughters at a crime scene.
Yeah, I was heading to the nearest gay bar as soon as my shift was over.
ChapterThree
Oliver
I was sittingon a chair in an exam room set up for pediatric clients, surrounded by cheerful ducks, peeps, and bunnies scampering around the brightly painted walls, and there wasn’t much else I could do. One of the cops had told me to stay—Mack, I think his name was—and the other one, Jackson, said I should arrange for the school to keep my girls. Then he’d left me to do what I needed to do.
I’d lied when I called. I told the school I was stuck at the arena— no way was I telling them anything about guns, guys with guns, blood, or the guy my girls called Uncle Joe now lying in the hospital. The school was fine with it and asked if there was someone else who could help me, and I immediately thought of Clare, our captain’s wife. Their kids were at the same school, but much younger, and she’d already said there was a group of Storm wives who shared pickups. I was on my own, and I couldn’t be there for my girls every moment, as much as I wanted to be, but I hadn’t asked the group for help yet.
What if I didn’t make it back to the school, and the girls were stuck there and…
I needed help.
I didn’t know how long I had until the cop was back in here, so I quickly messaged the chat for the Storm players—my first message in there, actually—asking Cap for a number to call Clare. He was on the phone within a minute.
“You okay?” he asked me, without even a hello. Talk about taking captaincy a step too far. He’d gone into default fix-it mode in an instant.
“Your wife said if I ever needed help with the girls, I could ask. I can't pick them up from school on time. Would she pick up the girls for me and maybe take them out for pizza or something? I can pay.”
“Fuck no,” Cap huffed, and my stomach fell. Putting myself out there was hard enough without my teammates not helping me out. Then he carried on talking. “No way will she get them pizza, because don’t get me started on e-numbers and carbs. She’ll take them back to our place. I’ll message you the address to pick them up. Is everything okay?”
Relief flooded me. “It’s all good. I’m just running late.”
“Sending you the address now. Call me if you need anything.”
I didn’t know what he meant by that, and I didn’t really need anything except for the kids to be safe. The message arrived, along with confirmation that Clare was so happy to have more around the table.
I sent a message to my best friend—Jamie—asking him how he was and that I wished he was here. He was in Australia right now lecturing at some kind of math symposium, and I wished he was here. I missed him like a limb. He’d paid his way through getting his doctorate by caring for my girls when I couldn’t. He took on the nanny role when Melissa had been ill, and after she’d gone, he’d simply never left. I wished that I could have brought him from New York as easily as I’d brought my bike, just scooped him up into a box and packed him with everything else. Not only to care for the girls, though. He was my best friend, my sounding board, and the girls loved him. But he wasn’t an inanimate object—he was someone who had his own life.
Jamie: What’s wrong?
Oliver: Nothing
Jamie: What’s wrong? And don’t lie.
Oliver: Can’t a bro miss a bro?
I added a stuck-out tongue emoji and imagined Jamie smiling. I didn’t have a great emoji game, and he still hadn’t gotten over the emoji shopping list I’d once sent him with eggplants on it. How was I to know? I was a hockey player, not an emoji-expert.
Jamie: Gotta go, sorry
My stomach fell. I was alone in this room and didn’t even have Jamie to chat with. I hadn’t gotten close to any of the Storm players yet, although Ash was a good guy, with his supply of candy in case I hypo’d on his watch, and his incessant need to call me old man. My head hurt, mind still reeling and the adrenaline slowly ebbing away, leaving cold shock in its wake. I checked my sugar levels, but my system was looking after me, and there was no way I was messing with that.
