“Let’s take a stroll.” Mike bumped her shoulder to get her going, but not before glancing back at Laura and Gordon, who were clearly involved in a heated discussion. “Are they seeing each other again?”
They were, but Andrea wasn’t going to feed her mother’s handler any information.
Mike tried again. “I’m glad Gordon is supporting your decision to join the good guys.”
Gordon was a black man with an Ivy League law school degree who broke out into a sweat every time he saw a police officer in his rearview mirror.
She said, “My father has always supported me.”
“So has your mother.” Mike grinned at her skeptical look. The fact that he was taking up for Laura when she’d nearly cost him his job a few years ago was either a testament to his resilience or a sign of traumatic amnesia. “You should cut her some slack. This can be a risky job. Laura knows that better than anybody. She’s scared you’re going to get hurt.”
Andrea steered the conversation away from her private life. “I bet your mom threw a huge party when you graduated.”
“She did,” Mike said. “And then I found her bawling her eyes out in the pantry because she was terrified something bad would happen to me.”
Andrea felt a tinge of remorse. She had been so hell-bent on completing her Marshal training that she hadn’t stopped to think that Laura might have more reasons to hate this recent life choice than the obvious one. Her mother was a lot of things, but Laura Oliver was not a stupid woman.
“Tell me something.” Mike nudged her toward the administrative building. “Are we pretending like you’re not eaten up with regret for bailing on me a year and a half ago?”
More like Andrea was pretending like he hadn’t edged her so hard that she didn’t know whether to scream his name or burst into tears.
If memory served, they had each done a little of both.
“Hey.” He playfully bumped her shoulder again. “I think that question deserves an answer.”
She came up with one. “I thought we were keeping it casual.”
“Were we?” Mike reached ahead to hold open the glass door. “Casual doesn’t usually include me driving over to West Jesus Alabama so you can meet my mother.”
His mother had been the exact opposite of Laura, like June Cleaver wrapped up in Rita Moreno with a side of Lorelai Gilmore.
Still, Andrea said, “Casual encompasses many things.”
“I don’t remember getting that message. Was it in a text? Voicemail?”
“Carrier pigeon,” she quipped. “Didn’t you get the tweet?”
The lights were off inside of the utilitarian office building, but the air conditioning made it the most beautiful place Andrea had ever been. She felt her skin tingle as the sweat dried.
Mike turned uncharacteristically silent as he walked down the hall and opened the door to the stairwell. Andrea let him go ahead of her for the sake of feminism and also to enjoy the view from behind. The lean muscles of his legs stretched against his tailored pants. His strong hand gripped the railing as he pulled himself up two steps at a time. Andrea had slept with boys before Mike, but he was the first man she had ever been with. He was so smart, so damn sure of himself. There hadn’t been a lot of room for her to be the same when she was around him.
He opened the door at the top of the stairs. “Tweets before twits.”
Andrea guessed she was the twit because Mike went first. She squinted down the dark hallway wondering what the hell they were doing here. This was Mike’s gift—he made her brain tune out the sensible things. She should be out of the shower by now. She was going to be late for her own graduation.
She asked, “Where are you taking me?”
“You’re the one who likes surprises.”
She was the exact opposite of the one who liked surprises, but she followed him into an empty conference room anyway.
The lights were off. Mike opened the blinds so that sunlight streamed in.
He said, “Have a seat.”
He technically outranked her, but Andrea was never going to follow Mike’s orders.
She walked around the room, which was used for surveillance and fugitive apprehension drills. The whiteboards were wiped clean now that classes were over. Framed portraits on the walls showed various Marshals of yore. Robert Forsyth, who in the 1790s was the first Marshal killed in the line of duty. Deputy Bass Reeves, the first black Marshal who served at the turn of the last century. Phoebe Couzins, who was not only the first female US Marshal but also one of the first women to graduate from law school in the United States.
The largest framed piece was a poster from the 1993 movie The Fugitive starring Harrison Ford as an escaped con and Tommy Lee Jones as the Marshal who tracked him down. Andrea supposed it was better than the giant Con Air poster with Nicolas Cage that adorned the break-out room in her dorm. Marshals didn’t often get the Hollywood treatment.
Mike stood in front of a giant map of the world. Blue pins dotted the various USMS outposts. The service was a tight community of roughly three thousand agents serving worldwide. They all either knew each other or knew someone who knew someone. It wasn’t lost on Andrea that her exile from Mike had landed her in a job where she was bound to run into him again.
He asked, “What’d you put in for?”
Andrea hadn’t made a specific request. She would get her assignment after graduation. “I asked for somewhere out west.”
“Far from home,” he said, knowing very well that was the point. “Have you decided what you want to do?”
She shrugged. “Depends, doesn’t it?”
To their credit, the USMS really wanted you to do the work that you wanted to do, so they put you through rotations your first year. For two weeks at a time, you got to do a little of each—fugitive apprehension, judicial security, asset forfeiture, prisoner operations and transport, sex offender management, the missing child program, and of course WitSec.
Andrea’s hope was that a giant lightbulb would turn on once she found her calling. Failing that, there was always the excellent retirement package and paid time off.
Mike said, “Those offices are tiny out west. Not a lot of local manpower to lean on. You’ll probably be hookin’ and haulin’ most of the time.”
He was talking about prisoner transport. Andrea shrugged. “You’ve gotta start somewhere.”
“That’s a fact.” Mike walked over to the window. He looked out at the practice field. “It’ll be another few minutes. Why don’t you sit down?”
Andrea should’ve pushed for more transparency, but she could only stare at his broad shoulders. The sexiest thing about Mike Vargas wasn’t his muscular body or his deep voice or even his hot new beard. He had a way of talking to Andrea that made her feel like she was the only person he had ever shared anything with. Like that he loved magical realism yet didn’t buy into books with dragons. That his feet were ticklish and he hated being cold. That he sometimes resented but always loved his three bossy older sisters. That when he was a kid, his saint of a mother had worked two jobs to keep the family fed but he would’ve gladly skipped a meal in order to spend more time with her. That he had lied to Andrea about his father the first time they had talked about their families.