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  “It’s been over a year since the recommendation, sir. I don’t think you have to worry about haste anymore.”

  I shouldn’t have said it, I know that the moment the words leave my mouth. It’s easily insubordination, something I could be written up for, and by the way the chief’s eyes narrow, I wonder if he is really considering it.

  “I’m sure what Officer Kelly means,” Sergeant Gutierrez cuts in smoothly, “is that most of the other agencies in the Kansas City metro already have body cameras built into their budgets in the coming years. If we’re not careful, our city could be the only one still using outdated policing standards.”

  “I just want to make sure we’re serving and protecting our citizens to the best of our ability,” I add to my supervisor’s remarks.

  The chief smiles again, a mechanical smile. We’ve got him trapped and he knows it, because in a room full of street officers, the chief can’t admit he cares more about preserving admin salary perks than spending money on citizen and officer safety.

  “Duly noted,” he says after a minute. “I’ll make sure to check on the status of the cameras today and send out another department-wide memo.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I say. It’s not what I wanted, but it’s not a total loss either. Like Livia and her teen friend, I live to fight another day.

  “Son, you’ve got to cut that out.”

  I look over from the couch I’m sprawled on to Pop’s chair, where Pop is drinking his third—or maybe seventh—cup of coffee for the day and searching for the volume on the remote so he can turn up the sound on the HGTV show he’s watching. Pop has two passions in his twilight years: shows about buying houses and bad coffee. The first means that he’s always fussing around outside in the quest for maximum curb appeal, even though he has no plans to sell the place, and the second means that our house always smells like the inside of a diner.

  Yes, our house. I live with my grandpa.

  It’s a long story.

  “What do I have to cut out?” I ask with a sigh.

  “That. That right there—all this sighing. I can’t hear these idiots arguing about which tiny house to buy over all your mooning.”

  “I’m not...mooning, whatever that means.”

  Okay, well maybe I have been mooning a little. I’m not normally the type to flop around on the couch on my day off—not when there are baristas to flirt with and some pavement to pound on my daily run. But I’ve already pounded seven miles of pavement and hit the gym, and I still haven’t shaken off this funk. It’s partly the meeting from yesterday—this body camera issue giving me the itchy feeling of work left unfinished, which I hate—but it’s partly something else.

  Someone else.

  The someone else being the reason I didn’t flirt with any baristas this morning or answer the texts I got last night from my latest crop of badge bunnies.

  Livia Ward.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and now, a full twenty-four hours later, it’s like she’s still in front of me, blocking my vision of everything else.

  I have to have her. Dinner, drinks, handcuffs—the Kelly Trio—and I need it all, the whole works, probably at least two or three times. Maybe then I can start thinking like a normal human being again.

  Pop takes a sip of coffee and puts it next to his iPad mini, which is only used for mah jong and some game called Ant Smasher. Then he folds his knobbled hands over his belly and levels a cut-the-bullshit stare at me. I call it the Vietnam look. It’s a look that says, I was in a fucking war...you think you can pull one over on me?

  “Son,” Pop says, still giving me the Vietnam look. “You’ve been sighing all morning. You sighed before the gym. You came back and sighed after the gym. Now you’re even sighing at the tiny houses, which don’t deserve any guff from you. Is it a woman? Did you meet a woman?”

  “I meet lots of women, Pop.”

  “I’m not talking about the women you pick up going quail hunting.”

  “Quail hunting?”

  Pop rolls his eyes. “Hunting for chicks! Finding a bird! I thought your generation was supposed to be smart!”

  I blink at him.

  “My point is, you don’t sigh over those women, ever. So this woman must be special.”

  Special.

  I think back to Livia’s thick hair, the color of coffee after a dash of cream; I think back to her skin, smooth and clear and the color of very light amber. I think of the way she faced down the swarms of teachers and me to protect her friend. And I think of those leggings, so tight and so flimsy—flimsy enough I could rip them apart with my bare hands to get to that perfect ass underneath…

  Yeah, Livia is something special all right.

  “Chase, my boy, you’re mooning again.”

  “Okay, okay,” I admit. “There was a woman yesterday on a call. And she was beautiful and feisty and—” I search for the right word. “Fragile?”

  Pop shakes his head at me. “Now, don’t you go saving some damsel just because you think she’s in distress. She probably doesn’t need saving, especially from the likes of you.”

  The doorbell rings once, then four more times in rapid succession, as if someone is really excited about the opportunity to ring a doorbell. And I know exactly who that somebody is.

  I swing my legs off the couch and stand as I ask Pop, “From the likes of me? I’m a police officer. Saving damsels is in the job description.”

  “I don’t mean as a police officer. I mean as a man who likes to go quail hunting.”

  I open the front door as I mumble, “I still don’t get what quail hunting means.”

  My brother-in-law, Phil, stands in front of me holding one very sleepy toddler and the hand of one very bouncy four-year-old, who is almost certainly the manic doorbell ringer.

  “Ah, ‘quail hunting,’” Phil says, dragging his sons over the threshold. “A beatnik slang term for dating, or more specifically, searching for women to date.”

  “See? You’re the only one who doesn’t know what it means, Chase,” says Pop from the living room. My oldest nephew, Keon, runs right up to his chair and clambers on top of Pop’s belly. He immediately grabs for Pop’s iPad.

  “Ant Smasher,” he demands seriously.

  At the mention of Ant Smasher, my other nephew, Josiah, lifts up his head from his father’s shoulder. He squirms down silently, his binky firmly in his mouth and his stuffed cow in his fist, and he also makes his way over to Pop’s chair. Soon the two boys are arranged happily with the iPad balanced on Pop’s belly between them, and Pop is even happier snuggling with his great-grandsons and cradling their curly heads in his spotted and gnarled hands.

  I turn back to Phil, holding my hand out for Josiah’s diaper bag. “Nice one with the quail hunting,” I tease.

  He grins. “It’s cheating a bit, since both my sections this semester are on mid-century American lit. I’ve been reading nothing but beat poets for the last three weeks.”

  Phil teaches American Lit at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Thursdays are the days that both he and my sister work evenings, which means Thursdays are my days to watch my nephews. Those boys are everything to me, feisty, dimpled, squirmy balls of everything, and I would do anything for them. Which doesn’t just mean being the best Uncle Chase I can be, but also the best Officer Kelly.

  You see, Phil is black. Which means my nephews are black. Which means this has been an occasionally uncomfortable few years for our family, with me also being a police officer.

  But I’m working on it, on learning and listening. Phil helped me write up my body camera proposal for the department, and I’ve gone out to his classes to talk about the nuts and bolts of policing. There’ve been hard parts, hard conversations, and there’s still so much I don’t know, but as a family, we keep trying. For Megan—my sister and Phil’s wife. For Keon and Josiah, who are currently squealing over the dead ants on the iPad and making Pop chuckle as they wrestle to smash the virtual bugs.

  Phil gi
ves Pop a handshake and then gives me a quick inventory of the diaper bag as we walk back to the door. “JoJo only wants grapes today, but if Megan asks, he had veggies and protein too. She’s on a food pyramid thing lately.”

  “Got it. And if she catches me lying, I’m blaming it on you.”

  Phil shakes his head. “Grown man’s afraid of his baby sister.”

  “Have you met her? Of course I’m afraid of her.”

  After a pause, Phil admits with a smile, “I’m afraid of her too.”

  After my brother-in-law leaves, I stand for a minute in the doorway, thinking about my sister again. When Phil said her name, a little bubble of a thought had emerged...a bubble with dark eyes and leggings…

  Livia said her teen was someone she worked with at the library—did that mean she worked at the library? Surely not—Megan has been working there for years, there’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed Livia before.

  So maybe she’s actually a tutor? I know lots of local tutors met up with their students at the library. Or maybe a volunteer?

  Megan will know, I decide. Megan knows every coworker, volunteer, and patron that enters her domain. And especially someone like Livia, all fired up and ready to fight with the police and the school and anyone else she has to.

  I grin to myself, remembering her waving that sign in the air. I wonder if she’ll be that fired up in my bed—and there’s no doubt in my mind that she will be in my bed. I’m Chase Kelly, man. I always get the women I want...and I get them fast and easy. It’s time to shake off my funk about this body camera drama at the department and get my head back into the game.

  My favorite game.

  I grab my wallet and phone, glance in the mirror at my jeans and Captain America T-shirt, and then, like the sexy badass I am, shoulder the diaper bag and drag the Red Flyer wagon out of the garage. I walk back inside to my nephews, prepared to bribe them with promises of grapes and as many picture books as they can carry.

  “Who wants to walk down to see Mommy at work?”

  3

  Livia

  “It happened again?” Megan half asks, half exclaims.

  “Yep,” I stage whisper. The children’s section of the library is quiet tonight, but this is the kind of conversation that would be particularly bad if an overprotective parent overheard. “Watching a Logan O’Toole video. This time I caught the guy in the act.”

  “You mean, he was actually—?” She holds up her hand to make sure no patrons can see her and makes a motion as though she’s jerking off.

  I nod. It’s the third time in a month I’ve caught someone using the library computers for VPU—Very Personal Use—and though I should be used to it by now, I still continue to be astonished every time.

  “What did you say?” Megan’s eyes are wide. So far this has been the only bit of excitement on an otherwise slow night. As the children’s specialist, she doesn’t generally have to deal with the VPUs anyway, which makes the tale extra enthralling. She did, however, once have a flasher—an old man in a trench coat, stocking cap, and white knee socks who loosened his belt in the middle of a story time reading of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

  “Trust me,” Megan says every time she recounts the story, “Brown Bear didn’t see much.”

  Though I’ve seen many VPUs in my day, tonight has been the first time I’ve actually caught a man with his Personal Item in hand. I’m still a bit stunned, but I think I did well in the moment. “I told him, ‘Sir, these computers are for public use and the viewing of pornography is strictly prohibited. Please kindly log off and leave the library.’ Then I handed him a box of Kleenex and walked away.”

  Megan laughs, clapping her hand over her mouth when she realizes she’s been a tad too loud. “Lysol that computer down. Then spray it with bleach. And tell me which one it is so I can make sure to never use it myself.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I tell you which one it is. They’ve all been used for that purpose at some point, I’m sure! Men are disgusting!”

  I lean across her desk and prop my chin up with my hand. I’m still getting to know her, but I’ve already learned a few things about her. I’ve met her husband and two boys a couple of times, and I’ve heard her mention her only sibling is a brother. “You’re surrounded by them. How do you manage with all that testosterone?”

  She shrugs as she goes back to cutting out shapes from colored paper for an upcoming children’s program. “I grew up with just my Pop and my brother. Guys are all I know.” She cocks her head and looks at me. “Do you really hate men that much?”

  I stand up, affronted. “I don’t hate men at all! I don’t hate kangaroos either, but I’d probably have better luck at getting one to stick around.”

  “That’s a stupid analogy. Where the hell are you going to find a kangaroo in Kansas? You just haven’t found the right guy yet. The right guy will stick around. Look at Phil.”

  She’s missing the point, which is that it would be just as hard to find a decent man as it would be to find a kangaroo. It’s why I’ve stopped looking.

  It’s a hard point to explain without sounding like a quitter. Or asexual.

  But I like Megan, so I try anyway. “You didn’t know Phil was the right guy until you gave him a chance to be the wrong guy, did you?”

  She pauses her cutting, and for a moment I worry she’s going to tell me she knew it was love at first sight. After a beat, she says, “I guess not. No.”

  “Right,” I say, as though I’ve just gotten a Bingo. “And I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to not know. I don’t want the uncertainty part. I’m done giving chances.”

  She opens her mouth, and I sense a rebuttal coming, but I don’t need to hear it. I’ve made up my mind on this. So I jump in before she gets the chance. “Look. I’ve had three serious boyfriends. Not as many as some, but enough to learn that relationships are like playing roulette—odds are, the ball isn’t going to land on your number. You got lucky with Phil. But how many times did the ball land somewhere else before Phil landed on you?”

  She doesn’t bother to hide her smirk. “I don’t know. Phil landed on me pretty quickly.”

  I run two fingers over my forehead and sigh. “I didn’t mean…”

  “I know what you meant,” she huffs. “That’s how life works, Liv. You don’t get anything good without risk.”

  I can tell by her tone that she’s annoyed with me, and I hate it when people are annoyed with me. So much that, if I hadn’t just turned twenty-nine, I’d tell her she was right (even though she clearly isn’t, in my case.)

  But since I am now on the path to death, I feel bolder about the things I believe in and this point is one I believe in particularly strongly. “I prefer living without that heartache, thank you very much. I like the safety zone. Maybe the returns aren’t as exciting, but I know what I’m getting.”

  Megan’s jaw tightens into a frown. “Let me guess—you don’t like going to Vegas either.”

  “Ew. No.” I shudder.

  She shakes her head, unable to solve the mystery that is me. “Well, if you’re happy in your career, happy in your home, and you don’t want a man, I don’t know what you’re missing. Maybe you need a dog.”

  Her eyes light up, and I turn to follow her line of vision and see Keon, Megan’s oldest son running toward us. Behind him, Josiah, her youngest, toddles after his brother. He barely manages to cross the distance without tripping over his feet, his stuffed cow flapping at his side as he waves his arms for balance, and my chest fills and tightens with the overwhelming cuteness. Is this what they mean by ovaries exploding?

  “Yeah, something like that,” I reply, with no intention of getting a dog. But something. For sure.

  Josiah coos behind his binky as he nears his mom, and I’m grinning ear-to-ear when my eyes casually drift to meet those of the man who is following behind the boys. I’d expected it to be Phil, and so I’m surprised when it’s not.

  Then I’m shocked when I realize who it
is instead.

  Officer Panty-Thief Kelly.

  Officer I’m-Sexy-in-Blue-Jeans-Too Kelly.

  Officer I’m-Not-Wearing-My-Sunglasses-and-Now-You-Must-Drown-in-My-Eyes Kelly. His blue, blue eyes. They’re pools of cobalt, and I forget to blink when I look into them. Forget how to breathe. Forget how to look away.

  Now this is what they mean by ovaries exploding. Mine are exploding. They’ve exploded. Kaboom. His manly aura has sent signals to my baby-makers and caused instant combustion. That’s how hot this man is. And he’s not even in his uniform.

  Imagine him not in anything at all…

  Bad idea, bad idea. My knees buckle, and I have to grip the counter. I will him into his clothes again in my mind, but not before imagining the washboard abs he’s barely hiding under that tight T-shirt.

  Oh God. I’m woozy. Too woozy to even question why he’s here.

  Thank god for Megan.

  “Let me guess,” she says, gesturing with her scissors toward the diaper bag that I now notice is slung over Officer Kelly’s shoulder. “Phil forgot to pack something.” However impossible, she seems completely unaffected by the cop’s magic manliness and super-blue death pools.

  Also, she’s familiar with him. Which is a good thing since it seems he’s the one who brought her kids.

  I’m not usually this slow. It’s just. That body. That beard. Those eyes.

  Speaking of those eyes...they dart over in my direction, sending sparks shooting like fireworks throughout my body, then return to Megan. “No, everything’s there. Kids wanted to pick out a book.” He picks up Josiah who goes easily into the cop’s arms. “Didn’t we, buddy?”

  Josiah grins and makes an mmm sound behind his binky, kicking excitedly.

  “Unca Chase pulled us in the wagon,” Keon says, tip-toeing so he can see over the edge of the reference desk. “He said we can fill it with all the books!”

  “Only five each!” Megan says in a rush. “Which is plenty!”