No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

Interestingly enough, the only person I saw him have dinner with or go to the movies with or attend the harvest festival with was Anne Stratton. It was unexpected—the stunningly elegant older woman and the rough-around-the edges retired SEAL turned deputy sheriff. I didn’t pretend to understand their dynamic, but it was a pleasure to have Anne over for dinner with him the few times she accompanied him, because she was amazing with the girls, and Emery always enjoyed talking to her about the resort.

Emery and I had a new routine where he dropped the girls off in the morning and I picked them up after school. They enjoyed getting into the cruiser, and I would do it until the novelty wore off. I suspected that as soon as April hit middle school I was going to need to change it up.

After school, I was still in charge unless there was an emergency, at which time Huck was on deck or Mal or Jules, and even Anne when it was time to pick out a dress for April for the winter song contest. Each grade sang, and April had been chosen as a soloist.

In the back of my mind, I had worried about me being an openly gay sheriff in a small mountain town in Montana. But there weren’t any whispers about it, as far as I could tell. Emery had one parent who wanted his daughter moved out of his AP English class when he disclosed that he was going to be marrying the sheriff, but when the principal called the young woman into the office with her parents to explain what was about to happen, she lost her mind about college credits and her GPA and basically explained to them that Yale didn’t accept classes from her school not taught by Emery Dodd. He was published in scholarly periodicals, did they know?

There was no more talk about moving kids out of any of his classes after that.

April and Olivia had some questions from kids they knew but nothing ugly, just confused, and the one boy who thought to take out his father’s homophobia on Olivia ended up with his face in the grass at recess. She already had a blue belt in karate.

I went with Olivia to the boy’s home to meet with the single dad and ended up inviting them over for dinner with all of us, including, as usual, Huck. I made arrangements to get the guy’s son into karate with Olivia, and Emery got the father some grief counseling over the loss of his wife from breast cancer the year before. The boy, Crew Markham, soon became one of Olivia’s best friends. Emery said I needed to put that in the win column.

When I visited Chicago with Emery and the girls over fall break, I took them to Navy Pier, to the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium, and to Chinatown for my favorite dim sum. We had dinner with my buddy Anthony, and April was thrilled to see him in person, and when he offered to give her a behind-the-scenes tour of the hospital the following day, Emery did that with her while Olivia and I had lunch with Jared Colter. It was amazing the questions Olivia got away with asking him, things I would have never had the balls to bring up, like was he ever in the military like I was? He was exceedingly patient with her and explained to her about black ops, and what the CIA did to protect her freedom, and why it was important to vote when she got older and ran for office.

“What should I be?” she asked him brightly.

“I think you’d make an excellent prosecutor, because it seems like you enjoy digging for the truth.”

Like everyone who ever met Jared Colter, she took his words as gospel and went on a fact-finding mission to see if that could truly be her life goal at six. I told her she had some time to consider all her options, since the day before her plan had been to be an astronaut.

I got a strange call from Locryn Barnes, who asked to see me the last night we were there.

“You could have gone, you know,” Emery told me that night as we lay in bed together, the girls in the adjoining room, our door closed and locked, theirs open on the other side.

“What?”

“Locryn Barnes,” Emery reminded me, slipping his hand across my chest, touching me like he always had to. “You could have gone to see him.”

“I know that.”

“And I wouldn’t have insisted on going with you,” he imparted quietly, leaning close to kiss over my pectoral as his hand slid down over what he called my bumpy abdomen.

“I know that too.” I sighed, my breath catching as his hand slipped lower under the blanket to my cock. “But Locryn Barnes and I are not friends, which is why we had dinner with Cooper tonight and not him.”