Chapter 25: The Drive and the Bond
The name hung in the air between them, a toxic fact settling into their bones. CPT. R. Vance. The silent partner in Forrester-Vance. Not some shadowy financier. A captain.
“We need to move,” Jennifer said, her voice cutting through the stunned silence. She snapped the laptop closed. “This kitchen is a target. Marcus’s place is a target. We can’t stay.”
“Where?” John asked, his voice thin.
“Somewhere no one expects.” She was already shoving the laptop into her bag, grabbing the flash drives, her movements sharp with a new, electric fear. A corrupt captain meant compromised resources, compromised channels. The department itself was no longer a sanctuary. It was the jungle.
The drive out of Brentwood was tense, every set of headlights in the rearview a potential threat. Jennifer took surface streets, her eyes constantly scanning mirrors, side roads, parked cars. She didn’t speak until they were merging onto the 101, heading north against the sluggish early commuter traffic.
“You okay?” she asked, not taking her eyes off the road.
John was staring out the passenger window, the city lights blurring past. “A captain. It’s really a captain.”
“It’s a captain. We don’t know who. ‘R. Vance’ could be a first name, a last name, an alias. We can’t spiral.” She glanced at him. The naive shine was gone, stripped away in the laundry room. What was left was raw, but it looked focused. “You asked earlier if the rookie feeling ever goes away. This is the answer. It gets worse. Because the monsters stop being faceless perps in alleys. They get badges.”
He finally looked at her. “How do you trust anyone after that?”
“You don’t,” she said simply. “You verify. You trust your partner until they give you a reason not to.” She paused, the unspoken question hanging. And can I trust you? She pushed it down. She had to.
The city sprawl gradually gave way to the darker, tree-lined curves of the Angeles Crest Highway. Jennifer took a lesser-known turnoff, the BMW’s headlights carving a path through a tunnel of towering pines. The cabin was Marcus’s, a relic from his first marriage that he’d never sold, a secret bolt-hole he’d shown her during a different case, a different life. It was perfect.
The cabin was a dark hulk against the deeper black of the forest. Jennifer killed the engine and lights, letting the silence and the cold mountain air seep into the car. They sat listening to the tick of the cooling engine and the distant whisper of the wind in the pines.
“No lights,” she said. “We use flashlights. Stay away from the windows.”
They moved like ghosts across the uneven ground. Jennifer found the key under a false rock near the porch steps. The door opened with a groan of dry wood, releasing a smell of old cedar and dust. Inside, it was a single, open room: a stone fireplace, a worn couch, a small kitchenette shrouded in sheets. It was cold enough to see their breath.
John flipped on his flashlight, the beam jumping over cobwebs and a pair of dusty deer antlers mounted on the wall. “Cozy.”
“It’s off-grid. No Wi-Fi. Cell service is a maybe if you stand on the roof and pray.” Jennifer dropped her bag on the rough-hewn dining table. “Which makes it safe. For now.”
She set to work, her movements efficient. She pulled the sheets off the furniture, found lanterns and a box of emergency candles in a closet. John checked the perimeter, securing the latches on the rustic wooden shutters. Within twenty minutes, they had a lantern glowing softly on the table, casting long, dancing shadows. Jennifer had also found a first-aid kit and a bottle of bourbon tucked in a cupboard. She poured two fingers into a dusty glass, took a sip, and let the burn steady her nerves before tending to the graze on her arm again.
John watched her clean the wound, his flashlight propped on the table. “You and Marcus,” he said, the words coming out in a rush. “It’s serious?”
Jennifer didn’t look up, focusing on applying fresh antibiotic cream. “It’s complicated. And currently, it’s the least of our problems.”
“I know. I just… I remember him coming by the house sometimes when you were watching me. He’d bring pizza. He seemed old.” He flushed. “I mean, older. Not old-old.”
Jennifer smirked, securing the gauze. “He’s always been older. And a pain in my ass. But he’s solid. In a world where nothing else is, he’s solid.” She looked at John then, her expression softening. “What about you? Anyone waiting up wondering where you are?”
He shook his head, looking down at his hands. “No. Not really. Been kind of focused on… this.” He gestured vaguely, encompassing the cabin, the case, her.
The air in the room felt suddenly thinner. Jennifer cleared her throat, breaking the moment. “Right. Well, let’s get focused. We need to see the full picture. Boot up the laptop. Battery’s probably low, but we should have a couple hours.”
They sat side-by-side at the table, the laptop screen a cold blue rectangle in the warm lantern light. Jennifer opened the ledger again, scrolling past the damning ‘Vance’ entry. She started from the beginning, this time with a notepad and pen.
“Okay,” she said, her detective’s brain clicking into its analytical gear. “Forget the names for a second. Look at the patterns. Transfers happen in clusters. Every three to four months. See?” She pointed to the date column. “February, June, October. Like clockwork.”
John leaned in, his shoulder brushing hers. He pointed to the ‘Assignment’ column. “And the assignments get farther away. This first batch is all ‘Local Asset – LA Metro.’ Then it’s ‘Arizona Support.’ Then ‘Nevada Disposal.’ It’s like they’re being graduated. Or exiled.”
“Or promoted,” Jennifer murmured. She zoomed in on one of the ‘Asset ID’ codes: OP-12. She opened a new search window on her phone, using a satellite map app. “OP. Could be Operational? Out of Place?” She typed ‘OP-12’ into the department’s internal personnel database she’d cached offline. No result. Not an official badge number.
Frustration gnawed at her. They had the evidence, but it was written in a cipher.
John was staring at the ‘Source’ column, his brow furrowed. “These numbers here… the first six digits. They look familiar.” He pulled out his own phone, swiping to his photos. He had pictures of the financial documents from the storage unit boxes. He zoomed in on a wire transfer confirmation. “Look. The routing number for the First Pacific Bank wire. It’s not an account number. It’s a department code. I’ve seen it on requisition forms.”
Jennifer’s pulse quickened. “What department?”
John scrolled, searching his memory. “It’s… it’s from the Property and Evidence division. The fiscal office. I did a rotation there last year. All the budgets for evidence storage, transport, and disposal go through that code.”
A cold understanding dawned. “They’re not just moving dirty money. They’re using the department’s own financial plumbing. The evidence transport budget. It’s a ghost lane. You could move anything—cash, drugs, people—and it would just look like a logistical line item for moving confiscated property from Point A to Point B.” She leaned back, running a hand through her hair. “That’s how they move the ‘assets.’ The cops. They’re logged as evidence couriers.”
The scope of it was breathtaking in its audacity.
Suddenly, the laptop screen flickered. A low-battery warning flashed. Then, in the bottom right corner of the screen, a small notification icon appeared. It was for a cloud storage service, auto-syncing. A progress bar began to fill.
“No,” Jennifer breathed. She hadn’t connected to Wi-Fi. There was no Wi-Fi.
John saw it too. “Is it using a cellular modem? A built-in one?”
Jennifer stabbed at the trackpad, trying to cancel the sync, to turn off all network connections. It was too late. The progress bar zipped to 100%. A tiny dialogue box popped up: ‘1 file uploaded to secure backup.’
Then the screen went black. The battery was dead.
The lantern light seemed to gutter in the sudden, profound silence.
“What file?” John whispered, dread thick in his voice.
Jennifer’s mind raced back through everything they’d opened. The ledger PDF. The video. Had she accidentally saved a new file? Had it auto-saved their scroll position? Had Kyle Brennan set up a dead man’s switch to sync if the laptop ever woke from sleep in a new location?
It didn’t matter. A signal had been sent. A packet of data had left this mountain, headed into the ether. To a cloud account. An account someone else could access.
“We have to assume they now know someone has the laptop,” Jennifer said, her voice flat. “And they might know it’s not in Vernon anymore.” She stood up, her chair scraping loudly. “We can’t stay. The syncing would have generated a rough IP location. They can’t pinpoint this cabin, but they can triangulate the general area.”
“Where do we go?” John asked, standing as well, his earlier focus morphing into a new, fresher panic.
“We split up the evidence.” She grabbed the flash drives. She handed one to John. “You take this. Get in your car. Drive to your father’s house.”
“My dad? You said we couldn’t trust—”
“We can’t trust the department. We have to trust your father. He’s a captain, but he’s not ‘R. Vance.’ We know that. You need to tell him everything. Show him the video. He has the rank to initiate a clean investigation, outside the usual channels. He can bring in the FBI, the Office of the Inspector General. Someone without a vested interest in the LAPD’s dirty laundry.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to be the distraction.” She shoved the laptop and the other flash drive into her bag. “I’ll head the opposite direction. Make some noise. If they’re looking for the signal, let them find me.”
“That’s insane! They’ll kill you.”
“They’ll try,” Jennifer said, a grim smile touching her lips. “But I’ve got the original. And I know where one of their cleaners is.” She thought of the suspect, stashed in Marcus’s cabin in Big Bear. He was no longer just a source. He was bait. And she was the hook.
She saw the protest in John’s eyes, the fear for her, the vestige of his childhood crush warring with his adult understanding of the danger. “John, this is the job. Now go. Don’t use your phone. Don’t stop. Just go.”
For a moment, he didn’t move. Then, impulsively, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her in a tight, clumsy hug. It was brief, charged with terror and something else he couldn’t name. “Don’t die, Jenny,” he mumbled into her shoulder, using a name he hadn’t called her since he was ten.
She patted his back once, firmly. “Not planning on it. Now move.”
They blew out the lantern and slipped out of the cabin into the deep mountain dark. Two car doors opened and closed with soft, definitive thuds. Two engines turned over. At the end of the dirt driveway, Jennifer turned right, heading deeper into the forest. In her rearview mirror, she saw John’s taillights turn left, descending toward the city and whatever fragile hope his father represented.
The road ahead was a black ribbon. Jennifer turned on the radio, found a static-filled classic rock station, and cranked the volume. Let them hunt the noise. She pressed the accelerator, the BMW responding with a smooth, powerful growl.
Her phone, connected to the car’s Bluetooth, buzzed on the dashboard. An unknown number. She let it ring three times before answering.
“Hello, Detective Wu.” The voice was calm, polished, utterly devoid of warmth. “You’ve been busy. We’d like our property back.”
Jennifer’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The laptop. The ledger. The video. It’s proprietary information. Return it, and we can discuss… leniency. For you and the young detective.”
She saw headlights appear behind her, coming fast from a side road. “Leniency sounds great. Let’s meet. Public place. Union Station. Noon tomorrow.”
A dry chuckle on the line. “We’re not that far away, detective. In fact, we’re right behind you.”
The headlights behind her flashed to high beam, flooding her car with blinding white light. Jennifer squinted, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“Let’s discuss it now,” the voice said, and the line went dead.
The vehicle behind her—a dark, heavy SUV—surged forward, its grille filling her mirror. It was going to ram her. On a dark mountain road with a sheer drop on one side.
Jennifer swallowed, a feral grin cutting across her face. “Alright, you fuckers,” she whispered to the empty car. “Let’s play.”
The high beams carved everything into stark slices of white and impenetrable black. Jennifer’s world shrank to the glowing dials on her dashboard, the vibrating steering wheel, and the predatory grill eating up the mirror.
She eased off the accelerator, just a touch.
The SUV surged closer, a black metal whale. She could hear the roar of its engine now, a deeper, angrier sound than her BMW’s purr.
"Come on, get closer," she muttered, her eyes flicking to the passenger seat where her bag with the laptop lay. Her wounded arm protested as she tightened her grip.
The road curved ahead, a blind left-hander following the contour of the mountain. A rusty guardrail was the only thing between the asphalt and a long, dark plunge.
This was the spot.
She stomped the brake pedal.
Her car shuddered, tires screeching in protest. The BMW’s nose dipped violently.
The SUV driver, overconfident and too close, reacted instinctively. He swerved hard to the left to avoid plowing into her trunk.
He put himself exactly where she wanted him.
Jennifer released the brake and slammed the accelerator to the floor. The car’s traction control whined as she cranked the wheel right, swinging the back end around in a controlled, brutal arc.
The BMW’s reinforced side panel, just behind the driver’s door, met the SUV’s front quarter-panel with a deafening, grinding shriek of tearing metal and exploding glass.
The impact was a jarring, physical shock that traveled up her spine and rattled her teeth. Her seatbelt locked, punching the air from her lungs.
The SUV, caught mid-swerve, lost all purchase. It glanced off her car with a final pathetic scrape and plowed headlong into the corroded guardrail.
The metal shrieked, bent, and gave way.
The dark vehicle nosedived over the edge, its rear tires lifting uselessly off the ground for one suspended second before it vanished into the blackness. A series of crashing, echoing thuds followed, then a distant, final crunch of compaction.
Silence, broken only by the ragged hiss of her own car’s damaged radiator.
Jennifer sat gripping the wheel, her heart pounding a frantic tattoo against her ribs. The smell of burnt clutch fluid and spilled coolant filled the cabin. Steam billowed from her crumpled hood in the chill air.
She slowly unclenched her hands, flexing her stiff fingers. A sharp pain flared in her neck. Whiplash.
“Okay,” she breathed to no one. “Okay.”
She forced herself to move, pushing the deflating driver-side airbag out of her way. The BMW was a wreck, the front right corner mangled and the entire chassis groaning. But it was still running, a tired, wounded animal.
She put it in gear. The car limped forward, dragging something metallic.
A hundred yards down the road, she found a wide turnout, a dirt pull-off for hikers. She coaxed the dying car into it and killed the engine.
The sudden quiet was immense. Then the adrenaline crash hit, a cold, trembling wave that started in her gut and radiated outward. She fumbled for the bourbon bottle in her bag, took a burning swallow straight from the neck, and coughed.
Her hands shook. She let them. She’d earned the tremor.
After five minutes, the trembling subsided to a manageable hum. She got out, her legs unsteady. The mountain air was sharp and clean, scrubbing the stink of fear and collision from her lungs. She walked back toward the broken guardrail, her flashlight beam cutting through the mist.
At the gap, she looked down. The SUV was a dark, twisted lump about eighty feet down the steep slope, wedged between two pines. No movement. No sound.
One problem solved. Temporarily.
Her phone, miraculously intact, buzzed in her pocket. A text from an unknown number. It contained just a set of coordinates and a time: 0400.
Then a second text followed: Bring the package. Come alone. Or the kid’s visit to his dad ends badly.
A cold that had nothing to do with the mountain night seeped into her bones. They hadn’t been following just her. They’d been tracking John, too. Or they’d guessed his move.
The coordinates weren’t far. An old fire lookout station deeper in the national forest.
They had John.
The casual summer romance with Marcus, the hope of reconnection, the professional shield—all of it felt like debris from another life, scattered by the crash. All that remained was the stark equation: they had her partner.
She limped back to her wrecked car. It wouldn’t make it to the coordinates. She grabbed her go-bag, the laptop, her Glock. She started walking up the dark road, toward the deeper woods, her breath puffing in the beam of her light.
A set of headlights appeared around the bend below, moving slowly. She faded into the tree line, hand on her gun.
An old, boxy Jeep Wagoneer, its paint oxidized to a non-color, rolled to a stop near her BMW. The driver’s door opened.
Marcus Cole stepped out, his silhouette unmistakable. He surveyed her wrecked car, then the broken guardrail, then the woods where she stood. He didn’t call out. He just waited.
Jennifer stepped onto the shoulder. “You’re supposed to be in Big Bear with a package.”
“Dropped him with a Fed I actually trust. Had a feeling your diversion might need extracting.” His eyes scanned her, noting the fresh tear in her jacket, the dirt, the pale set of her jaw. “They called you.”
“They have John. They want the laptop at the old fire lookout. At four.”
Marcus absorbed this, his expression not changing. He walked to the passenger side of the Wagoneer and opened the door. “Get in. We’ll take the logging roads. They’ll be watching the main routes.”
“Marcus, this is ‘R. Vance.’ A captain. It’s inside the house.”
“I know.” He slid behind the wheel. “The suspect talked more in the Jeep. He gave me a first name. Robert. Captain Robert Vance. Commands the Metro Division’s Special Operations Bureau.”
The name meant nothing to her, just a title and a face at a distant podium during department briefings. A man who controlled tactical units, budgets, movements. The perfect cover.
She climbed into the Jeep. It smelled of old vinyl, gun oil, and pine. A relic, like him. Solid.
“Why are you here?” she asked as he turned the Jeep around on the narrow road, his movements economical. “You’re clear. You’ve got the suspect stashed. You could walk away clean.”
He glanced at her, the dashboard lights etching the lines of his face. “You rammed an SUV off a mountain, Wu. Who’s gonna buy you a drink afterward if I’m not there?”
A faint, real smile touched her lips. It felt strange on her face. “That’s your reason?”
“One of ’em,” Marcus said, his eyes scanning the unpaved logging road splitting off into the darkness. He downshifted, the Jeep’s engine groaning as it took the incline. The pines closed in tighter, branches scraping the sides like skeletal fingers. “You got a plan for when we get there, or are we just walking into the crossfire?”
Jennifer checked the magazine on her Glock, the click loud in the cabin. “They want the laptop. We use it. You provide the distraction from the tree line. I go in through the front.”
“That’s not a plan, that’s a suicide note.” He gripped the wheel, avoiding a deep rut. “They won’t trade. They’ll take the laptop and put bullets in both of you to tidy up.”
“Then we don’t give them the chance to trade.” She pulled the laptop from her bag, powered it on with the dwindling battery. The screen glowed, illuminating the determined hardness of her face. “Brennan was an architect. He built traps. Maybe he built one more.”
She navigated to the system folders, her movements hurried. The ledger file was massive, encrypted. But the sync function… it required credentials. “The cloud backup it tried to send. If we trigger another sync attempt, from this location, it might send a location ping to their server. A digital flare.”
Marcus glanced over. “So we tell them exactly where we are.”
“We tell someone where we are. The account it syncs to… it might be Brennan’s own fail-safe. An email to a reporter. A draft in a shared drive.” Her fingers flew over the keys. “Or it’s theirs, and we’re just inviting more company. It’s a gamble.”
“Better than walking in blind.” He nodded toward a break in the trees. “Lookout’s about a half-mile up this ridge. We go on foot from here.”
They left the Jeep concealed in a thicket of manzanita. The air was thin and piercingly cold. They moved through the underbrush, the only sounds their controlled breathing and the crunch of dry pine needles underfoot. The old wooden structure emerged against the bruised pre-dawn sky, a stark silhouette on the rocky outcrop.
A single light glowed from the main cabin on the second level.
Two figures were visible outside, silhouetted against the light, standing near a parked black Suburban. One held a rifle loosely at his side.
Marcus touched her arm, pointing with two fingers. He gestured east, then to his eyes, then made a circling motion. I’ll flank. You watch. She nodded.
He melted into the shadows, a veteran ghost. Jennifer found a vantage behind a fallen log, the scent of rotting wood thick in her nose. She raised her phone, zooming the camera on the two men.
The taller one lit a cigarette, the flare momentarily revealing a hard, familiar face. It was the driver from the storage unit, the one who’d gotten away. The other was younger, nervous, shifting his weight.
Her phone vibrated in her hand. A text from Marcus: 1 more inside w/ John. Front door clear. On your move.
Jennifer took a deep breath, the cold air burning her lungs. She opened the laptop, the screen brightness turned low. She initiated the cloud sync again. The progress bar appeared, spinning. Searching for network. It would never find one out here. But the attempt, the error message… she hoped it was enough of a signal in the digital void.
She closed the laptop, stowed it, and began her approach, using the natural cover of boulders and scrub. She was twenty yards from the Suburban when the younger guard turned and peered into the darkness directly at her.
She froze, her body pressed against coarse granite.
“You hear that?” he asked, his voice carrying in the stillness.
The tall driver took a long drag. “It’s a deer. Relax.”
“I don’t think it’s a deer.”
A sharp, sickening crack echoed from the far side of the lookout. The sound of a branch breaking underfoot, but loud, deliberate.
Both men snapped their attention toward the noise, raising their weapons. “Check it,” the driver ordered.
The younger one moved cautiously toward the tree line where Marcus had been.
Jennifer didn’t hesitate. She moved fast and low, covering the open ground to the Suburban. She crouched by its front tire, listening. The younger guard was swallowed by the trees. A muffled thump, a brief scuffle, then silence.
The driver heard it too. He dropped his cigarette, raising his rifle. “Jason?” he called out.
Marcus stepped from the shadows behind him, his large frame sudden and solid. He didn’t speak. He drove the heavy steel barrel of his revolver into the base of the man’s skull. The driver crumpled like a sack of wet cement.
Jennifer was already at the wooden stairs. They creaked under her weight. She took them two at a time, her Glock leading the way. The door to the lookout cabin was slightly ajar, yellow light spilling out.
She heard John’s voice, strained but defiant. “He’s not coming. She’s smarter than all of you.”
A deeper voice, calm and authoritative, answered. “We’ll see.”
Jennifer kicked the door open.
The scene imprinted itself instantly. John sat on a dusty wooden chair, his wrists zip-tied to its back. His left eye was swollen shut, a trickle of blood drying at his temple. A man in a crisp, unmarked tactical vest stood beside him, a pistol aimed at John’s head. He was in his fifties, with a trimmed grey goatee and the poised, relaxed bearing of command. Captain Robert Vance.
His eyes flicked to Jennifer, then to the laptop in her other hand. A slight, professional smile touched his lips. “Detective Wu. Punctual. Place it on the table and kick it over.”
“Let him go first,” Jennifer said, her aim steady on Vance’s center mass.
“That’s not how this works. The asset is my leverage. The data is my priority.” He pressed the barrel harder against John’s temple. John flinched, but held her gaze, his good eye wide with apology and fear. “Now.”
From outside, the distinct sound of multiple vehicles skidding to a halt on gravel, doors slamming.Voices shouted. Not Marcus’s. Reinforcements.
Vance’s smile widened. “My backup. Your distraction was admirable, but the signal from the laptop worked as intended. For me. It pinged my server.”
Jennifer’s heart sank. She’d gambled and lost. The footsteps pounded up the stairs behind her.
But the voices that called out weren’t what she expected.
“LAPD! Captain Ruiz! Everyone freeze!”
Vance’s composure fractured for a microsecond, his eyes darting toward the doorway. In that fragment of hesitation, Jennifer moved.
She didn’t shoot. She threw the laptop.
It spun through the air, a silver projectile. Vance, instinctually, shifted his gun hand to bat it away, breaking his aim from John’s head.
Jennifer fired twice.
The first round took Vance in the shoulder, spinning him. The second hit his thigh. He cried out, stumbling backwards, his pistol clattering to the floor.
John heaved himself and the chair sideways, crashing to the ground away from the line of fire.
Captain Carlos Ruiz filled the doorway, his service weapon sweeping the room. Two of his most trusted detectives, faces Jennifer recognized, surged in behind him, securing Vance who was writhing on the floor.
Ruiz’s eyes found his son, then Jennifer. The relief on his face was a physical force. “John. Jennifer. You’re both okay?”
Marcus appeared behind them, slightly breathless. “Took your sweet time, Carlos.”
“Had to trace the ping and round up men I could swear weren’t on Vance’s payroll,” Ruiz said, holstering his weapon. He looked at Vance with pure disgust. “Robert. Internal Affairs and the FBI are down the mountain. Your little empire is done.”
The cleanup was a blur of sirens, flashing lights, and procedural chaos in the grey dawn. Vance and his captured men were loaded into vehicles. FBI agents took possession of the laptop as definitive evidence. Jennifer gave her initial statement to a stern-looking woman from the Office of the Inspector General, her words feeling thin and distant.
She stood by the hood of an FBI sedan, watching as John was checked over by paramedics. His father had an arm around his shoulders. Marcus was leaning against the Jeep, sipping terrible coffee from a paper cup, watching it all with tired, satisfied eyes.
The system, for once, was working as it should. The right parts of it, anyway.
A few days later, the arrests had been processed. The story was a seismic scandal in the news, but the work was done. Jennifer pulled up to a small, neat bungalow in Silver Lake. John answered the door, looking older, the fading bruise around his eye a badge of its own.
“Hey,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. The place was sparsely furnished, but it was his.
“You settled in okay?” she asked, handing him a six-pack of craft beer.
“Getting there.” He shrugged. “Dad helped. Insisted I not live in my childhood bedroom anymore.”
She smiled. “You did a good job. For a rookie.”
He looked down, a genuine smile breaking through his somber expression. It made something warm unclench in her chest. “Thanks. I… I had doubts. Seriously. That night in the cabin, in the car after… I didn’t know if I was good enough. If I was just gonna get you killed.”
“You didn’t,” she said, her voice softer. “You pulled through. That’s what matters.”
“You made me pull through,” he said, his eyes meeting hers with an earnest intensity that was both touching and slightly overwhelming. She looked away, breaking the moment.
“Well, if you’re so grateful, tell your dad to give me a promotion,” she joked, nudging his arm.
He laughed, the sound easy in the quiet room. “I’ll see what I can do.” He paused, a more playful, familiar glint in his eye. “So. You gonna go hang out now? Keep banging the guy who’s comfortably old enough to be your father?”
She rolled her eyes, a real, unfettered laugh escaping her. “Shut up,” she said, swatting at him as she turned to leave.
He chuckled, holding his hands up in surrender. She walked out to her car, feeling lighter than she had in weeks.
Unknown to her, he watched from the doorway, his gaze lingering on the perfect, confident curve of her ass in her jeans as she walked away. He sighed, a quiet, wistful sound. Maybe one day, he mused, I’ll be the lucky guy. Not Marcus.
But today was not that day to go into that complication. He shook his head, smiling faintly to himself, and headed back inside.
A few weeks later, the last of the paperwork was filed. The summer night was warm, the air through Marcus’s bedroom window smelling of jasmine. They were lying in bed, tangled in his sheets, the only light from the streetlamp outside.
He traced a slow kiss down the line of her spine, his lips warm and familiar on her skin. “Missed this,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble she felt through her bones.
She shivered, a moan of pleasure escaping her as he nuzzled the sensitive spot below her ear. She arched back against him, the last of the tension finally, truly gone. “Yeah,” she sighed, her words slurred with contentment. “I could definitely get used to this.”
The End.