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ONE
“Don’tyou ever want to do something wild? It’s Halloween, for pity’s sake.”
I peered at the side of my best friend Mickey’s face and wondered how much wilder the girl could get. Then again, I probably didn’t want to know.
On a dare, she’d gone streaking across the college football field last summer during a full moon—and she’d caught the attention of one of the star athletes who’d been celebrating turning legal with some buddies. She’d decided to hang out with them for a while—luckily, her clothes had been nearby—though she was half a dozen years older than that crowd and had last hooked up with one of her teacher’s assistants before she’d graduated the previous spring.
She’d delayed getting her degree due to her changing her major, something I understood all too well.
Of course now I was a college dropout entirely. Something my serious, stern, cop older brothers didn’t yet know about and I hoped they wouldn’t anytime soon.
Not that I could hide the truth forever.
“Not everyone is built like you, Michaela.” I tucked the bag of oats and rice I’d brought to feed the ducks back in my purse. My favorite one, Arlo, had been the only one around today, so I had most of their snacks left for tomorrow.
I came by the lake to feed the ducks more often than anyone would guess. Sometimes even in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, if any of them happened to be around. It helped that my new apartment was across the street from the lake.
“Michaela, huh?” She rolled her eyes at my use of her full name. “All you do is work at the bakery and hoard money to pay for your new apartment. Now you want to work on the side of law and order? Bor-ing.”
“Boring isn’t always a bad thing.”
She flashed me a grin and tossed her long dark hair. “You should be happily breaking laws at your age, not helping to keep the peace.”
“Halloween or not, I have different priorities at the moment. I finally moved out, man. Thanks to my new sister-in-law, I inherited a sweet apartment, but it doesn’t come cheap.” I snapped the scrunchie off my wrist and yanked my hair up in a quick bun in deference to the surprisingly warm late October day. “I don’t care how many extra shifts I have to pull, I’m not losing my new place. I don’t care if I have to get a job on the pole in Syracuse, I’m not moving back in with my mother.” I shuddered while Mickey let out a loud laugh. “My father is only marginally better. At least he gets blissed out every night while he’s listening to Elvis so he doesn’t treat me as if I’m perennially ten years old.”
“Well, you were the only one left home. Both sons having babies and wives now…”
My older brother Brady definitely had done that, just a couple months ago, in fact. My other older brother Maverick was seemingly headed down the same path with Brady’s new wife’s twin sister. Not that the jerk told me anything. He so did not. I just had to listen to the grapevine and come to my own salacious conclusions.
Which I had no problem doing.
“Yeah, but your parents don’t smother you and your older brothers are off and happy. Well, Bishop is anyway. Can Adeline be any cuter?”
“No. She cannot.”
Mickey’s one-year-old niece was possibly the cutest child in the history of the planet. Well, besides my own new niece Presley, who was only a couple of months old but certain to be a child prodigy. I fully expected her to be able to enroll in college by age ten.
I was not experiencing any sort of baby fever myself. That would be foolish, even if I had been born and raised in the unplanned baby capital of the Northeast—maybe even the whole north, period. I’d just had my birthday and I was in my mid-twenties, single and ready to mingle.
So single. While my best friend was happy to meet guys and party and occasionally hookup, other than a few random dates over the past year, my own relationship status was: yeah, right, good one.
“And my parents don’t smother me because I wisely moved out to live on campus the minute I turned eighteen. Something you should have done. Or at least gotten out of the house for something other than work more than once a season.”
I let out a heavy sigh and picked at my peeling vamp red polish. Mickey had a point.
Damn her.
I worked far too much. My shift at the bakery was an early morning situation most days, and I’d just had a first interview yesterday for the dispatch position recently vacated by Bonnie at the police station. They were supposedly hiring two people for it to work in rotation, and my first interview with my brother Brady had gone well after Officer Masterson had unexpectedly not been available.
My brother hadn’t asked me softball questions. In fact, he’d been pretty damn invasive about my schedule but I suspected that was more him in older brother mode than what the Chief actually needed to know about my availability.
Becoming a father had made Brady even worse when it came to being protective. For a second, I’d wondered if I really wanted to work with the two dolts who shared my last name. Working with my sister-in-law at the bakery was one thing, but she wasn’t in full on bossy sister mode yet.
My brothers, however? They’d watch me like hawks.
Especially after I told them my temporary leave of absence from school was actually permanent.
Possibly forever.
