Cuff Me

She definitely couldn’t be changing in the window. That was only for us. Fuck, I knew it was serious when the thought of sex didn’t do anything to stop my thinking.

“Maybe not officially. For now. But if someone is watching her, that’s serious. Obviously, we can’t handle it ourselves. It would be worse for something to slip by us because we didn’t make the right call,” Alex said.

“You just described our job, man. Nothing much different here except our dicks are involved.” Nate said.

“Well, mine is.” Alex cracked a slight smile. “We don’t have to tell her everything. Just let her know we’re just being safe. I just don’t want her to worry.”

“Okay. But it would be worse if she does find out and she thinks we assumed her stupid or something, or couldn’t handle it,” I said.

Alex huffed. “Right.”

“Look, I think we’re getting ahead of shit. Let’s just check out this new vic and go from there. If we link everything together, we’ll make a decision then,” Alex decided.

He could always be the level headed one that made the most logical choice. It sounded good, but my head was still swimming with all the fucking unknowns. Was Rose even safe at that moment? I already worried about her from day one, but just knowing that someone was taking photos of her, that someone could really be planning something…

I almost wish she never made a statement that first day. Never even called the police to begin with.

But then how would I have met her? Of course, it was my fucking luck that the woman who got my wires all crossed was one that could be in danger. I took on a job that required me to protect people all the time, so why was it so hard to protect Rose?

It felt like every choice I was trying to make towards her was wrong. I was second guessing everything and I didn’t like it, because I just wasn’t wired that way. All the cases I worked required some hard choices and a tough gut, so I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t apply that to Rose. Sure, I worked mostly on exploited children cases, but I had the basic skill set of a cop.

Rose had a way of making me forget everything I trained for and stumble around looking for the right answer.

“Sounds good, man. You should head to the hospital…is it the same one Rose works at?” I asked.

“I would assume so. I’ll check in with you guys later, maybe come down and see what’s up?” He asked us.

We both nodded. We had nothing planned for the day other than patrol.

“Yeah.”

Nate and I gave each other a look as Alex left.

“So, someone was really watching Rose last night?” I asked him.

I sat on the bench next him and he nodded in response. It seemed to be weighing pretty heavy on him. “Yeah. At first, she called me when she was coming home, but she didn’t tell me why at first. Not until we were at her place and she told me she felt like she was being followed. Later on, I saw a guy on her water tank with a camera.”

“Fuck. Any chance they were on something else? Maybe some landscaping shit or something.” I was semi-hopeful, but it didn’t seem likely otherwise.

“Not likely. Just doesn’t seem so since she felt like someone was watching her earlier. I don’t know.” Nate hated the real stuff, and if he couldn’t make a joke about it, he would rather avoid it.

“I don’t know anything at this point.” I almost laughed.

“Yeah. Let’s go run patrol and then head to the hospital,” Nate said.

We left together and tried not to talk about how worried we were about Rose.

Chapter Seventeen: Rose

I was somehow beside myself since the night before. Finding out I was being watched was still a shell shock to me.

I wished I was just overreacting at the grocery store, but I wasn’t.

There really was someone watching me, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. All I could do was go to work and pretend everything was okay. I had gotten super good at that over the years—the pretending.

I was two hours in before I took a much-needed break to the restroom. When I saw my face in the mirror, I felt almost unrecognizable. I always had a permanent tired look that I covered with concealer, but this time I could really see it in my eyes. I didn’t get much sleep after Nate took off just because I was still scared, even though he took watch outside. I wished he could have just snuggled up in b

ed with me and did…well, more than snuggling.