You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Sixteen

I had expected things to get a little strange now that it was only Shawn and I in the house. Margot hadn't been much of an icebreaker but she was still a distraction, and now that it was the two of us I expected a period of settling in, a time when things would be unsteady between us before we figured out a rhythm again.

I was wrong. I'd underestimated Shawn, of course. Apart from me taking over helping out with his morning therapy session (we usually spent it solely on walking, saving the workshop stuff for the afternoon) everything was the same. We cooked together, ate together, watched movies on my computer together— I'd never bothered to get a TV. The only thing he did by himself was the speech therapy, and he was adamant about that so I didn't fight him on it.

One thing we didn't do was go back to sleeping in separate beds. There was no reason for me to keep sleeping with Shawn now that my bedroom was my own again, except for the fact that neither of us seemed to want to give up being with each other at night. Watching Shawn sleep calmed me down, made it easier for me to fall asleep myself, and Shawn was comfortable enough now that he'd started moving in closer to me, his back to my chest, until finally I woke up one morning to find him in my arms with no memory of him getting there.

What was happening between us was intimate without feeling forced, which was nice. Shawn's libido was diminished by the extensive cocktail of drugs he was on, and I rarely got hard when I didn't want to, so there were no opportunistic boners interrupting the— Jesus Christ— the cuddling. The first morning I figured out that was what we were doing, I could barely look my reflection in the face when I brushed my teeth. Cuddling, for fuck's sake. I had never cuddled in my entire goddamn life, not even with Dom— when we shared a bed we kept space between us as a courtesy, as both of us could get violent in our sleep— but with Shawn cuddling just happened.

Even worse, I started to let it happen at other times. He'd be grating something at the kitchen table and I'd brush my fingers over his neck, and get a smile like the rising sun out of him. My arm found its way around his shoulder during a movie and Shawn just snuggled in deeper, perfectly content. Holding him did something funny to me, made me want more, like a drug, and Shawn seemed happy to be my fix. When we got close together sometimes he would look at me like there was literally no place he'd rather be, and I desperately wanted to believe him. Slowly, I was beginning to believe him.

Naturally, the idyll couldn't last.

I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming, really, there was no excuse for my lack of attention. I saw Janich's life going down the drain, heard it in his phone calls and read it in his texts and sensed it, like a predator getting a bead on the weakest prey. I saw Janich heading for a crash and burn, support drying up for him on both sides of the law, and I loved it. I let it happen, I delighted in it and after a few weeks of voyeurism, I ignored it. I checked on him once a day; I let it go for two, because I had things to do, a new focus for my attention and for the first time that I could remember, something like hope in my heart. I had better things to do than worry about a washed-up cop dancing on the edge of the end.

But he didn't have anything better to do than look for Shawn, and I— and Della— became a part of that somehow.

The alarm was tripped at four in the morning. It was the one on the perimeter of the back lawn, a simple motion detector that had gone off twice before since I'd installed it. One time was a raccoon, one time was Princess, who'd jerked her leash out of her doting mother's hand and run for the last place she and Della had played together. I sat up immediately and pulled up the security camera feed on my laptop. It was a high quality camera, gave me everything from infrared to night vision, and when the image showed a human-shaped heat signature creeping toward my back door, I needed five tense, furious seconds to swear at myself in my head before I could get up and deal with the situation. And deal with it I fucking would.