Page 94 of A Dirty Business
Me:I did. How are you feeling now?
Jess:Weird.
I grinned.
Me:Seems to be the theme tonight?
Jess:Just hard doing this with you but without you. And to type one handed. I tried kissing someone tonight, forcing you out of my mind.
I hit dial, and she picked up a second later, breathless. “Hello?”
“You did what?” I growled.
“It didn’t work.” She sounded drowsy and sad at the same time. “He wasn’t you. You’ve ruined me for men. You don’t get it.”
I quieted. “What don’t I get?”
“You and me, if we do this ... everything changes for me. Everything.”
Yeah. I was getting that. “The alternative is to go mad because that’s where I’m at, Jess. Are you?”
She didn’t answer.
I didn’t push her, but it felt right to be standing bare-ass naked in my bathroom, the shower on and waiting for me, listening to her breathe through my phone. I was in no hurry to put an end to this.
“I choose you, and I’ll lose everything else.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“It does, and you know it. It is how it is, so the question should actually be for you: Areyouokay knowing what it’ll costmeto haveyou?”
She hung up after, and it took me a long time before I pulled the phone away from my ear.
A long time.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
JESS
Weird things happened over the next week.
One, Trace stayed away from me. No contact. No texts. No calls. Anthony made a point to share that “he” wasn’t in the building and wouldn’t be during my shifts. The other thing: my parolees were perfect. They were almost gentlemen to me. The women weren’t. They still wanted to claw my eyeballs out, but the men: one accidentally shut his door in my face and was so apologetic afterward that I’d had enough.
I shoved into his apartment, the door banging shut behind me.
“Hey!”
I yelled through the door, “Give me one second, Officer Hartman!”
“What?”
“One second. Please.”
I could hear her grumbling. “Really fucking weird, but okay. One second. That’s all.”
“Uh, Officer Montell, I don’t want any trouble.” He was backing up, his hands in the air. He was a giant of a man, easily outweighing meby two hundred pounds, and he was pure muscle. And his attitude was a total changer because he’d recently come out of prison, and he’d not been one to take advantage of the many resources that were available to him on the inside. Sometimes that was an indicator how cooperative they’d be with us on the outside. This guy did nothing and had had an attitude every time I’d met with him since.
“What the fuck gives? You are my seventh parolee with a magical attitude change about me? What? Christmas Past come to visit you all? I want to know what’s going on and why.”
