Connor’s head tipped the way it did whenever he was about to say something he shouldn’t. “You said you haven’t had sex in a while.”
I shifted. “We surpassed a while six weeks ago.”
To his credit, he tried to suppress his disbelief. “Maybe it’s time you quenched that dry spell. See if that does anything to bridge the abyss.”
“That would require carving out more than five minutes of each other’s schedules.”
“Then get to carving.” Connor waited for a nearby family to move past us before continuing. “I know I’m not married or anything and barely thirty, but in my experience, there aren’t many problems in a relationship that sex can’t fix. Just give it a shot.”
My throat cleared from the next protest bubbling up. “What if he’s not . . . interested?”
He rubbed at his mouth to hide his smile. “I take it that since you two have a child together, you’ve had sex at least once.”
“Yeah. Andee was the result of an undergrad and graduate student drinking five too many drinks at a stupid frat party and decided getting it on in the back seat of Noah’s ’92 Camry was the height of romance.”
“Fairy tale meeting.” Connor chuckled when I glared his direction.
“Nothing about Noah and me has been a fairy tale. Not even the honeymoon in Maui, which I spent locked inside the hotel bathroom with morning sickness. He married me because he got me pregnant, viewing it as some kind of duty. I married him because I was scared shitless. The past seventeen years have been a blend of bearable years mixed with some really bad ones . . . especially the last few.”
Connor rubbed my arm. “It will get better.”
“You ever notice that when someone says ‘it will get better,’ things tend to get worse first?” Before he could respond, I pasted on a smile. “Enough about my disaster of a life. How are you? How’s Samuel?”
The softening I saw in Connor’s eyes was something I remembered from what felt like a different life. “I’m great. He’s really great.”
“Things are getting awfully serious for a couple of guys who weren’t looking for anything serious.” I raised my eyebrows in mock sternness while he pulled up a couple of photos on his phone.
“Yeah, yeah. The commitment-phobe is contemplating notions of forever and always and it’s not even freaking me out the way it should.”
I smiled at the stream of photos he showed me from what looked to be a hiking adventure he and Samuel had recently gone on. They looked happy—they were happy. You could see it brimming in their eyes, settled into the planes of their faces. I wasn’t sure I remembered what happy felt like.
Warm, I thought. Childlike, perhaps?
“I’m so thrilled for you. You deserve it all.”
His shoulders moved as he pocketed his phone. “I’m actually on my way to meet him for drinks. Some local band trying to reincarnate Seattle’s grunge roots is playing at a club on Pike Street.”
I gave him a look as I moved through the door he’d opened for me. “You hate grunge music.”
“But I love him.”
“So you’ll suffer in silence because of that?” I inhaled the cool night air tinged with the promise of rain.
He held out his arms at his sides. “Gladly.”
“Have fun.” I waved as I turned down the sidewalk.
“Want me to walk you to your car?” The sound of his footsteps slapping the pavement behind me grew louder. “Rephrase. I’ll walk you to your car.”
“Don’t take this as a hit against your sense of chivalry, but if we women are going to achieve any sense of equality in the future, we have to start asserting ourselves as strong and capable enough to make it to our cars on our own, sans white knights at our sides.” I winked at Connor before digging out my keys inside my purse. “Soapbox aside, I’m going to drop by the office. Spending all week in court has put me way behind.”
“You should go home. To your family. Work can wait.”
Checking my phone, it took me less than two seconds to read the missed texts from Noah and Andee. “My family isn’t there, and I hate stepping inside an empty house.”
“You realize you do have to fight for the things you want, right? Good things might fall into your lap, but if you want to keep them, you have to go to battle.” Connor’s shoulder bumped mine before he turned down the next sidewalk.
“You really should have gone into psychology. It pays better,” I called after him.
“Good to know if I want a career change, I have an in with the wife of a well-known psychiatrist.”
“Noah wouldn’t hire you. You’re too cheerful.”
Connor’s laugh dripped into the darkness. “Dr. Wolff would love my unfounded sense of optimism.”
Fighting the urge to follow Connor to whatever club he was meeting Samuel at, I watched him disappear around the next corner. Back when Connor had first started working for me, he was attacked by a group of men who touted homosexuality as a sin. Of course, as with most hate crimes, those men were using moral superiority to mask a deep-seeded sense of fear and ignorance.
Connor had spent ten days in the hospital, half of those in ICU. The men had never been brought to justice. Cases like his, and now Skovil’s, scratched at the doubt I kept buried deep as to the effectiveness of the legal system.
But by the time I made it to my office, I’d shoved any ribbons of escaped doubt back into the cavern I kept them trapped in.
Justice, like life, wasn’t always fair.
“Why did I have a feeling I might find you at your desk at this hour?” A familiar voice streamed into my office.
Composing my face, I shuffled through the stack of folders on my desk. “Because a workaholic recognizes another workaholic?”
The floor creaked when he moved closer, but I stayed focused on the paperwork—for more reasons than trying to catch up.
“How was court today?”
“Rough,” I answered, realizing coming here was a bad idea. When the office was empty and dark. When there were no distractions.
“Then you probably need this more than I do.” A cut-glass tumbler slid across my desk, amber liquid rolling across three cubes of ice.
My gaze shifted, landing on him. “I shouldn’t.”
“You should. I’ll pour myself another one, and we can share a drink and lament the life of a public prosecutor.”
Dean Kincaid had been hired around the same time as me, and the two of us were in constant competition for percentage of cases won. He was in his early forties, never married, yet still possessed the kind of youthful attractiveness that caught the eye of women half his age. He drove a nice car, wore an expensive watch, and dressed like he was walking in fashion week, but beneath all of the clichés, he was a decent guy. One who brought in doughnuts for the whole office, remembered the secretary’s birthday, and was always willing to lend an ear or a hand when I needed it.
He’d returned with another drink in less than a minute, his tie loosened and his hair tousled. After clinking his glass to the one on my desk, he lifted his drink and waited for me to do the same.
“To the hope that Skovil gets his one day,” Dean said in that authoritative voice he used in the courtroom. “If not in the prison system, be it the fires of hell.”