Shift Happens (Providence Family Ties 2)

Blowing out my breath, I rubbed my face roughly with my hands. “I can’t lose her, Remy. She’s my world.”

A huge hand clapping me on the back made me wince. The guy just didn’t know his own strength.

“It won’t come to that. If Fita doesn’t get charged with what she put Sasha through, she’ll get charged with what she put the other people through once they get statements and the victims feel safe enough to show them the emails and evidence they’ve got.”

It seemed so simple.

But it wasn’t. Things like this never were.

Chapter Seventeen

Sasha

That was it—the school year was over. I still had another year left before I had to make moves on what I wanted to do with my life, but I’d already decided. I wanted to move back home and do my master's at a college there.

Jackson was staying on in Arizona with me and doing a year with the crime scene department here after deciding he didn’t want to specialize in a specific area of the field right now. He was so undecided on which would be his expertise that narrowing it down without even experiencing a real scene wasn’t what he wanted.

He’d been put forward for the position by one of his teachers, who was the head of the department, after he’d wowed him with his ability to think outside of the box during simulated scenes. So it was a huge honor for him to be going into the position.

I just hoped he was up for the move. What if he decided he wanted to stay in Arizona?

I’d been stewing from the minute we’d left to drive home for the summer, with Milkshake wearing his latest helmet and a pair of goggles with a blue mirrored effect on them.

“Wanna tell me what’s on your mind, baby?” Jackson asked once we were roughly two hours away from Kissimmee.

There was one answer to that—no. I didn’t want to tell him in case he said he didn’t want to do it. I also didn’t want to tell him in case he felt he had to do it, and it fucked up his life.

But we were in a committed relationship that looked like it’d last a long time, so I was going to have to. Fuck my life.

“Have you ever thought about moving back home?” I blurted out, then winced when I realized I’d practically shouted it.

Smiling apologetically at the old lady in the car next to us who’d heard it through the window, I slowly turned my head to look at him, bracing myself for the bad news.

What he said shocked the hell out of me, though. “Of course I have. I figured we’d do that once you graduated.”

Chewing on my lower lip, I thought about how proud I’d been last week when he’d had his graduation ceremony, collecting his degree from the man who’d offered him the job. At the same time, the dean had stood behind them both, laughing at Jackson’s family’s shouts, hollers, hoots, and whistles. Yeah, the whole family had turned up, even both of the Texas ones. They’d filled up the back of the room and had yelled so loudly most of the audience had screamed and jumped.

I wanted that. Before now, it’d been me and my dads, with my cousins and their parents. I loved all of them, but I wanted more.

I wanted my dads to have more family in their lives, too. I wish they’d had five more kids at least because they were so good at being parents, but they’d said they’d been blessed with a magical gift once, and it was time for someone else to experience the same thing, so they hadn’t pursued another child.

I didn’t know what to do for the best.

The longer I stayed silent, the more frustrated Jackson became. Not in an angry way, though, that wasn’t in his personality. No, he became worried because he knew something was eating away at me and wanted to help me fix it.

As we pulled away from the lights, he reached out and squeezed my thigh. “Sasha, you know what we’ve got is for life, right?”

I blinked at the change in topic, then what he’d said warmed me to my soul. “I was hoping it was, yes.”

“Well, it is. But my reason for saying that isn’t just to make you happy and give you security. It’s the truth. And because it’s the truth, that means whatever you want to do, whatever plans you’re stewing over, all you need to do is share them with me, and we’ll look at weaving our lives around them. I’m pursuing what I want to do come September, so why shouldn’t you?”

Picking up the excess fabric from the strap on my cat’s helmet, I twiddled it around my fingers.

When Milkshake was at home in the apartment, he didn’t wear the damn thing. But my boy had decided he kind of liked being outside, so now he was walked around the ornamental gardens of the apartment complex on a leash, and he was a complete asshole if he didn’t have his helmet on.