crash & burn - e. buckley

010

01x10

Jamie had been ignoring Collin's calls for the past few days. Since he told her that he loved her. She needed time to think. She felt horrible about it, of course, but she didn't want to tell him that she was having doubts so he would overthink.

So, in order to have an excuse not to see him, she found herself in Abby's apartment helping her and Buck pack up her deceased mom's stuff.

"Hey, hey," Buck whispered as he entered the kitchen where Jamie stood with Carla, the woman who had been helping Abby with her mother. "I found another Patricia box."

Carla reached into the box with a chuckle. "Wow, she kept it all."

"Yeah. It seems like Abby doesn't want to keep any of it."

"Everyone grieves differently, Buck," Jamie said. He only gave a hum in response before getting distracted by something he found in the box.

It was a newspaper's clipping of Abby in her teen years winning gold in swimming. "Abigail Clark!" he exclaimed as he entered the dining area where she was sitting with her brother. "You never told me you made the Olympic team. What is this?"

"200-meter butterfly," her brother, Matthew, chuckled with pride. "She was a rock star."

Seeing Abby and her brother made Jamie think about her own siblings. She had never been close to them, she had barely spoken to them in years, but she missed them. She hoped that one day they could have the closeness that these two seemed to have.

"You got to have this out," Buck said to Abby, "you should be proud. You were an Olympian. I'm gonna grab a frame for it. You got some empty ones in the closet, I'm... That's going up for sure."

When Buck left Matthew turned to his sister and with a hushed voice said, "you didn't tell me he moved in."

"He didn't move in," Abby denied.

"Abby, he knows what's in your bedroom closet," Carla pointed out.

"Yeah, he doesn't even know what's in my closet," Jamie agreed. "I hope."

"And he's taken over the medicine cabinet," Matthew added.

"Girl, what's in your closet?" Carla whispered to Jamie with curiosity after leaving the siblings to talk on their own.

"Trust me, you don't wanna know," Jamie assured her.

————

At the station, something suspicious was happening. Their captain was typing something on his computer but when Jamie, Hen and Chimney entered, he quickly closed the laptop.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What was that all about?" Chimney interrogated him.

"What?" Bobby asked as he took a sip of his coffee, pretending like he had no clue what he was talking about.

"You closed your laptop as soon as we walked in here like you were hiding something." Chimney pointed out.

"No, I didn't." Bobby denied.

"Yeah, you did," Hen chimed in.

"I just took a sip of tea."

Jamie grabbed their captains laptop and handed it to Chimney before Bobby would have time to protest.

"RomancingTheUniform.com?" Chimney read from it. "That's my dating site, that's where I met Tatiana."

Buck came over to them and placed his hands on Jamies shoulders, glancing over her head, intrigued by the revelation.