“You swaddled her?”
“It was the only way. She was like a fucking hurricane, thrashing everywhere, and I didn’t want her to hurt her back. I’ll teach you before the twins arrive, it’s pretty easy.”
“What’s stopping her from rolling forward?”
“Me.”
Whatever else the voices in my head had to say was lost on me, though, because I fell asleep mid-plan for future flying adventures.
Movement woke me up. For some reason, I was shifting across the mattress toward the other side of the bed.
“Sorry, pretty girl. If I lie on my bad shoulder, it hurts like a bitch, so we’re swapping sides so I can keep an eye on you.”
I would’ve asked who was there and thank him for calling me pretty, but I was focused on something beside me. It looked like a glass jellyfish covered by a dome, and every time I blinked, a flash of light would appear in a different tentacle.
Blink—light flash.
Blink again—light flash.
It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
I was communicating with jellyfish like I was their queen.
Coolest shit ever.
Chapter Five
Garrett
It’d been five days since the accident, and I’d been on desk duty since while my shoulder healed. I was bored out of my tiny little brain.
Homelife was now a new adventure that I enjoyed a helluva lot, though, with Zuri and me swapping nights between my house and hers and just getting to spend time with her relaxing.
Every time she winced or groaned in pain, I felt guilt of unimaginable levels even though she told me to “cut that shit out” and that accidents happened.
The morning after we’d unpacked her, she’d woken up and immediately started talking about a dream she’d had about how she could talk to jellyfish now and how it was like in the movie Abyss. When I’d picked up the glass jellyfish I’d had made for her, which had lights that pulsed in each tentacle randomly, she’d thought it was awesome and made more sense than some sort of Close Encounter type thing with them.
Then she’d taken it out of the display box, turned it upside down, and spent a good twenty minutes trying to find its butt holes.
She’d also put the hoop with the jellyfish charm in her ear, and so far, it hadn’t got caught on anything. I didn’t understand that, but she seemed relieved about it, so that was good.
They were supposed to be kind of meaningful joke-type presents, but the way she stared at both of them made me feel like I’d hit the nail on the head big time.
I’d developed some new skills over the last five days, too. I could now wash a woman’s hair over the side of a bath, spray shit in it that stopped it from getting knots, brush it without making her scream, and put it in a ponytail.
See, Zuri couldn’t use her left hand to do anything, so she swore a lot instead of asking for help. That’s how the brushing and ponytail things had been added to me washing her hair.
Last night, I’d come home early just in time to hear her yelling from the bathroom. I’d panicked, thinking she’d fallen or something, but when I’d gotten to the door, I discovered that the reason for it was because she had to wipe herself with the wrong hand. When she’d opened the door and seen me leaning against the wall waiting for her, she’d turned bright red and threatened me with pain if I ever told anyone.
I hadn’t… yet. I’d made sure she knew I wasn’t helping her with that issue, though.
“Meeting,” DB yelled, then walked over to the door that led to the back of the station.
Getting up, I followed him, hearing the others doing the same behind me. We’d known there was a meeting happening today, but he’d kept quiet on what it was about, so I was intrigued.
Opening the door to the hallway, he motioned for us to go through while he held it open.
Stopping about ten feet in, I waited for him to close the door and join us.
“Okay, I know this is strange, but with shit going on just now, I wanted us to discuss how Piersville Police Department operates. You’ll think you know all of it anyway, but this is important for me, you, and the rest of the town to know,” he told us as he moved over to the door to the first conference room.
Walking in behind him, we all sat down at the table and waited. “As you know, we’ve expanded the building. With the increase in the population and size of Piersville, we have to keep up and have enough facilities available just in case,” he said, looking at us all one by one. “We also have an official dedicated safe room now.”
I knew that citizens had come to DB to sit securely in one of the cells on some occasions, but hearing one was dedicated to them?
“Uh,” one of the newer guys, Carter, murmured. “A dedicated safe room? What for?”
Resting his ass on the corner of the table at the top of the room, DB looked at us all with a grim expression. “As you know, Jarrod Klein was attacked last year by a man who was beating his woman in a bar. Jarrod came here to remove himself from the situation after the asshole expressed his intent to ‘hunt him down,’ making it easier for us to catch him with less threat to people around. This isn’t the first time this has happened. We also had some people try to attack Lars and Tony.”
Lars and Tony were married with two young daughters. They were some of the friendliest and funniest guys I’d ever met, so someone targeting them pissed me off.
I couldn’t help the question that came out of me. “Because they’re gay?”
DB’s look answered it perfectly. Fucking assholes.
“We’ve assisted people in this way since the Department was first built here. It doesn’t matter if it’s a woman who feels threatened by a man or if someone’s being singled out because of color, religion, sexual preference, gender, anything at all. If we can keep them safe, we do it.”
Thank fuck for that.
Glancing at Alejandro, another one of the newer members, I saw him frowning and understood his confusion. This wasn’t run of the mill behavior or policy, but we were a small town that looked out for our people. “How does it work, though? Surely it wouldn’t be safe if someone told outsiders about it because then everyone would know about the room and where to get the person they were after.”
Nodding, DB shifted slightly to get more comfortable. “That’s a good question. It’s not a secret to the residents of Piersville that the room exists. Before now, we would pretend to arrest them, or they’d come in voluntarily, and they’d be locked in a cell. Now we have a room downstairs set up like a panic room. It was financed by someone who wants to remain anonymous, but it’s an important addition.”
Anonymous my ass. I’d bet anything it was Hurst Townsend who’d done it.
“That’s freaking cool,” Alejandro murmured.
“Safety for everyone is the priority as law enforcement officers. I have a zero-tolerance policy, and I expect you all to abide by it. Everyone is to be treated equally and fairly, and we protect people who can’t protect themselves.”
All of us murmured our agreement.
“Now, the next point,” he tapped a box under the table with his foot. “Over the last two years, the mayor has kindly changed our uniforms five times. This is apparently the last change.”