“Thank you.”
I set my laptop bag down on her kitchen table and turned around. I pointed to the wall behind me. “I don’t remember that window being there.”
Addison looked. “Oh, I used to have a big bookcase in front of the window because it has a direct line of sight into that room, where Tommy is staying. These buildings were built very close together, so I put the bookcase there when I first moved in because I didn’t want my previous neighbors looking in and catching me naked or something. The bookcase was there so long that I forgot about the window until I moved the bookcase to the new house.” She tapped her chin and said to herself, “Why didn’t I remember that when Maddox moved in? I could have spied on him.”
“Addison.”
“What?”
“You can’t spy on someone even if he is now your husband.”
She rolled her eyes. “I was kidding.”
“No, you weren’t.”
She laughed. “You’re right. I wasn’t.” She walked over to the small pane of glass. “You honestly can’t see much anyway, but you still might want to put up a towel or something.”
I walked up behind her. I could barely make out furniture in the apartment next door, to the point that I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
Addison turned around. “I’ll leave, so you can get situated.” She looked at her watch. “We’re grilling out at our house for dinner, so you should have plenty of time to unpack and go to the store.”
“What time should I come over?”
“Maddox will probably pick the boys up from day care at five, so around then.”
“I’ll be there.”
She put her hand on my arm. “But no earlier, okay?”
I laughed. “Okay.” I liked being early to everything.
“I’m serious,” she said with a smile because she knew I was always punctual.
I put an X over my heart. “I promise.”
5
Tommy
After lunch, I walked over to Maddox and Addison’s place because their town was that small. It took me a good twenty minutes, but it wasn’t worth having Maddox come and pick me up.
When I got there, I walked around to the backyard and pulled out my earbuds. When Maddox had said he was keeping me busy while I was in town, he’d meant it. His house was old, and while he had already updated a lot of things upstairs, his basement still gave off a dungeon vibe with half of it unfinished. Before we started on the inside though, we were going to make the tiny windows into full-sized ones, so they would bring in more light. We would also make them big enough that someone could crawl out of them if there was a fire.
Maddox looked up from his work and rested his arm on the shovel he’d just been using. “Hey, Addison told me you apologized to Olivia.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. It was the right thing to do.”
I waited for him to add that I had come on to her and canceled out any apology I had given.
“Thanks. It was going to be a long week if you and Olivia were butting heads the whole time. It makes things easier on Addison and me.”
Interesting. So, Olivia hadn’t told Addison that I’d offered to have sex with her.
Or Addison hadn’t told Maddox that.
Nah. Addison totally would have told her husband. Those two hardly kept anything from each other.
Which meant I needed to file this information away for later.
“It’s the least I could do. I was pretty rude to her. I don’t know what came over me.”
Maddox laughed. “I do.”
I picked up the other shovel. “Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”
He wiped off a bead of sweat from his forehead. “You were just being you. You always speak your mind. It’s one of the things I like about you.”
“Yeah, it worked well when we were active duty.” When we had been out in the field, there hadn’t been time to tiptoe around things. When issues arose, they needed to be dealt with immediately. “But being a civilian now, I might need to reevaluate the things I say.” Maybe my nickname was Flash because I made people disappear by being so blunt.
“Nah,” Maddox said. “Now, help me dig, so we can put in the new windows tomorrow.”
I put in my earbuds, turned on my music, and went to work.
After a couple hours, Maddox approached me, so I hit pause on my phone and took an earbud out so that I could hear him better.
“Hey, Addy is going to be home soon, and I have to pick up the boys from day care, so we should probably call it quits.”
I looked at my watch and furrowed my brow. “It’s only three in the afternoon. Don’t you usually pick the kids up at five or something?”
“Yes, but I need to shower and also get ready for dinner since everyone is coming over tonight.”
I still didn’t understand why he needed that much time to get ready. “Do you need any help?”
“Maybe later, but Addison and I have it handled for right now.”
I studied my friend. We’d worked together a long time, and I could tell when something was up. “So, you and Addison are going to be making dinner, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what we’re calling sex these days?”
Maddox shook his head and threw his hands up. “Yes, my wife is coming home a couple hours early, so I can fuck her, okay? You and I have been busy working on the house, she’s been preparing for Olivia’s arrival, and the boys make it really hard to get more than a quickie in.”
I started laughing. “Dude, you don’t have to justify having sex with your wife to me. If I had a wife”—I was going to add like Addison until Maddox narrowed his eyes, so I left that part off—“I would want to have sex with her, too. I mean, why else have a wife?”
Maddox snorted. “That’s why you don’t have a wife. They are not your personal sex worker.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Sex worker?”
“My lovely wife has been keeping me on the up and up and says that I spend too much time in an all-male environment. She said that if I’m going to work in law enforcement, I need to eliminate sexist ideas that many police officers practice. One of those is to stop calling women who work in the sex industry prostitutes and hookers. Sex worker recognizes that that they are workers, and it loses some of the negativity that is associated with the other titles.”
“Wow. That was more of an explanation than I needed.”
He shrugged. “You asked.”
“You’re right; I did. And while I’m glad your wife is educating you, I could have gone with the CliffsNotes version.”
I was happy that Maddox was liking his new career and was actually trying to be a good sheriff, unlike the previous guy. But jealousy turned in my gut. I’d retired from the Navy four months ago, and I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I tried to blame some of my waiting on my knee surgery, but I was just putting off the inevitable. I was going to have to find a job.
First, I’d have to find a place to live. I still lived in my house in Virginia, but being away from there, even for only a few days, had made me realize I couldn’t stay there and not feel homesick for the SEALs. And I didn’t want to return to New York, where I’d grown up. I’d never loved it there, which was one of the reasons I’d joined the military.