I dug through boxes to find stuff we would need for the first few days. I heard how people always forgot something when they were moving, and I was doing my best to make sure we had at least some clothes, silverware and dishes, cups, our bathroom stuff and?—
“Ah, shower curtain!” I said, digging into another box. “Never again!”
“Never again?” Clay asked as he appeared in the living room, looking irritated.
“Got booted out ’cause ya don’t know how to control your temper, huh?” I asked him, laughing when he gave me a dirty look. “And yeah, there was a time when my team rented this little house on leave, just for a couple of months. Had to bunk up, but that was fine. But when we moved in, we forgot the curtain and liner. Turns out usin’ a blanket ain’t the same.”
Clay squinted at me. “Does being in the Army require you to leave your brain at home?”
“Sometimes,” I said, tossing the curtain and liner with the rest of the stuff.
“Do I hear…Spanish?” Clay asked, squinting toward the open apartment door.
“It’s Tucson, of course you hear Spanish,” Isaac called, and then. “Huh, is that Walker?”
“How can you…” Clay began, glancing back at the bedroom before shaking his head. “Nevermind, I know better than to ask. What’s he doing?”
“Making nice with the neighbors,” I said with a snort. Our neighbor across the way was a tiny old lady and, what I guessed, were her grandchildren. She had come out of her apartment while I had been carrying stuff in, and I thought she was going to use her cane to beat me when she saw me. Apparently she hadn’t been expecting a six-and-a-half-foot man to suddenly appear, filling the hallway, muttering curses about how unnecessary and annoying things were when you had to carry them up flights of stairs. “I kinda scared her earlier, and he’s smoothing things over.”
“I didn’t know he spoke Spanish…fluently?”
“Yeah, he also knows Farsi, and…Korean?”
“Huh, the things you learn about people. Babe, did you know that?”
“I knew he knew Korean; he pronounced last night’s takeout order too well,” Isaac said with a chuckle. “And I caught the Spanish because he hits his Rs kind of funny sometimes, and once he forgot how Js are pronounced.”
“And he wondered, with insight like that, why Reggie and Marc wanted him to be a Guide,” he said with a shake of his head. “Half the year, anyway.”
“That wasmychoice, not theirs,” Isaac said with a snort.
“So that means we’ll be your neighbors half the year, but I’ll be your neighbor all year,” Clay said with a grin.
“Ya live on the other side of town,” I told him as I pulled a box out and began going through it.
“Hey, careful with that!” Walker barked as he entered the room. “Raymond said I would probably still need all that.”
“Oh,” I said, looking it over and sure enough, it was mostly stuff from the court proceedings. “God, can we stuff this somewhere I don’t have to look at it?”
“He’s a little traumatized,” Walker said to Clay with a snort, putting the lid on the box and leaning over to kiss me. “Aren’t you?”
“No,” I lied.
Okay, the court had beenawful. Even with Raymond assuring us everything was going exactly the way he expected, I had spent months in a constant state of worry. If I’d been on my own, I probably would have lost my mind completely, but thankfully, we had bailed Walker out, though it had cost a pretty penny. We had to live off the jobs we could scrounge, with him making money off safe, non-political writing and delivery jobs. Those months had been hell, but they had been…well, they had been wonderful in their own way. It wasn’t ideal, but we’d had each other the whole time, and that was the only reason we were able to get through it in one piece.
The other was that Raymond was worth every penny we paid, and probably every penny he normally charged. Although I was sure he had been confident, he was also patient and meticulous. But I’d seen him in court as well; he was like a snake, calm and not paying attention, but the minute he sensed an opportunity, he struck. He spent weeks painting the FBI as foolish, impulsive, and convinced to act by a standing agent with an axe to grind against Walker specifically. By the time he was done, the agents ended up looking like kids playing cops and robbers, and the arrest had looked sloppy and unnecessarily rough, and not just because I had laid into them.
Yes, I had to sit there with my family and the other families and watch as my naked ass flung agents around the room and then dropped onto the ground when shocked…three times.
No, I didn’t like to think about that.
As for the evidence against Walker? Raymond had been just as meticulous and vicious there as well, picking it apart and casting doubt on everything. By the time he was done, it looked like a case of a passionate, vulnerable veteran with a great sense of harsh patriotism was taken advantage of by a third party, and now his country was punishing him after years of having abandoned and mistreated him. It was hard to deal with every day, but when I stood back and looked over everything, the way Raymond worked was as terrifying as it was impressive.
So now me and the freshly freed man were going to start a life together.
“Ew,” Clay groaned. “Isaac, they’re doing gay things!”
“Mmm,” Walker said with a smirk, pushing against me, and I grabbed his ass as he kissed me again. “Hear that? You’re doing gay things.”
