All Kinds of Tied Down (Marshals 1)

“Ohmygod, no wonder he’s not getting laid, look at those pajamas.” Min was aghast.

“I just saw the cutest lounge pants when I was online before my run,” Janet said, getting up to grab her iPad from the end table. “You know what we should do….”

“Shopping!” Catherine yelled, and she gave a war-whoop for good measure.

“I can’t go, I’m convalescing,” I reminded them all.

“Like you need to go,” Aruna said indignantly. “When have you ever needed to go?”

“Please don’t throw out anything I own now,” I begged.

“No, of course not,” Min promised, holding out her hands in reassurance.

Aruna put a glass of water in one and a pill in the other.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You guys can’t drug me. I’ve slept enough.”

“Listen to your doctor,” Catherine said, giving me a big cheesy smile.

“But I’m hungry,” I whined.

“You can eat first, honey,” Aruna promised.

I gave in, took the pain pill that would knock me on my ass, and patted Chickie, who walked over beside me and flopped down on his side. I sat up and took the plate of tandoori chicken, masala dosa, and korma salad she had made special because it was my favorite.

“Thank you,” I said sincerely, and Aruna leaned over and kissed the top of my head.

“Where’s mine?” Janet wanted to know.

“The rest of you can get your own damn plates.”

“You are getting so hormonal,” Min griped at Aruna.

“It’ll only get worse,” Catherine explained in her doctor voice, as if we were all having a consult.

The food was amazing; I had seconds, drank a lot more water, and then lay back down.

“I love you guys,” I said as I felt my body getting heavy.

“We know, baby,” Aruna sighed. “We know.”

I fell asleep listening to my friends talk as they sat around me on the sectional and coffee table and ate. It reminded me of how it was before I had a job where I could die and a partner I wanted badly enough that frankly no other man would do.

Chapter 10

TWO WEEKS later, I went with Ethan Sharpe and Jer Kowalski—Jer was short for something I had no hope of ever learning—to visit Sharpe’s partner, Chandler White. We were ridiculously happy to see him cleaning his back-up gun, a sub-compact Stainless Kimber Ultra Raptor, on the coffee table in his living room.

“Why can’t he go with you guys now?” His wife, Pam, whined when she got home from work. Originally she had taken family leave time, but she went back early to escape him. That she was a high school English teacher and still would rather deal with hormonal teenagers than her husband said a lot about how annoying he had become.

“Next Monday,” Sharpe said, picking up the PS4 game controller as White grabbed the other. “I’ll pick him up bright and early.”

As it was only Thursday afternoon, she whimpered before she went to the kitchen. They looked good on the couch together, the freckle-faced, brown-haired, blue-eyed White and his taller, darker, sleeker partner. Sharpe had told me at some point that his parents met when his father was stationed overseas in Paris; his mother had just recently relocated from Delhi, so with both being new to the city, they had fallen into friendship and love fast.

“You never know when you’re gonna fall in love, Jones,” Sharpe had told me. “The girl for me could be just around the corner.”

I had argued that he perhaps needed to slow down auditioning women for the lead role in his life. Between him and Kohn, they were running through the lovely ladies of Chicago fast.

“We gotta go,” Kowalski announced, rising from the linen-covered wing chair he’d been sitting in. “Sharpe, you coming?”

No, he was going to stay and have lunch with his partner—I understood the desire, I wished I could break bread with mine—so Kowalski had to ride with me back to the office.

“Tell me about the wolf again,” he asked as he got into the black Nissan Xterra I was currently driving. The Jungle Boogie car had recently been sold at auction, so I got the next vehicle seized in a drug bust.

“Ian’s dad went out of town last night, so I had no place to dump him off this morning.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But my friend Aruna, she called me last night and said that she and her husband could take him this weekend since they’re driving out to Wisconsin for a family reunion.”

“Okay.”

“I guess it’s at some lodge where he’ll have a place to run and do whatever.”

“You’re not afraid someone will mistake him for a real wolf and shoot his furry ass?”

“With a big lime-green collar?”

Kowalski shrugged. “I guess. At least he doesn’t have one of those douchey bandanas.”

I chuckled.

“So that’s why you were late getting over here, ’cause you had to drop off the dog.”

“Right.”

“Has Doyle’s wolf been with you for the whole two months?”