It wasn’t as though he didn’t know she was scrappy. He knew that if she was going to fight for anything or anyone, she always went all in, no holds barred.
But now that all the fury and adrenaline had ebbed, she was embarrassed. And ashamed. She didn’twantto need Eli. But she’d wound up biting a guy in the back of a seedy dive in large part due to her own stubbornness. And Eli, who knew her better than anyone, had probably anticipated it even if she hadn’t.
“His real name is Todd,” he said finally. “He has priors.”
Theof course he doeswent without saying, so neither of them said it.
She didn’t ask whether he was cuffed in the back of Eli’s patrol car, or whether Eli had snapped him into a few pieces like he was made of Legos and hurled all the parts into the canyon. Probably not on the last one. After all, rules were rules. Eli did love him some rules.
She cleared her throat. “Thank you,” she said stiffly.
Eli just gave a short nod.
She couldn’t get a read on his mood, either. He was distracted and subdued, and he seemed full of the need to say something, but he wasn’t saying it. For a number of reasons, Eli never used superfluous words.
But whatever he said was always worth hearing.
His hair used to flop down over his forehead. He’d been a little vain about it when he was a teenager. It was now buzzed no-nonsense short, which made the planes of his face—cheekbones like battlements; a right-angle jaw softened by the dimple in his chin; a nose with a slight bump, which she knew was from when he broke it trying to jump a big rock with his mountain bike back when he was twelve—seem even more uncompromising. He had this way of not blinking, and his eyes seemed silver in some lights and a sort of pale blue in others, and he had a way of fixing them on you that made you feel like the only important person in the world. It was like he could see right through to the contents of your soul, so you might as well yield your secrets.
She’d once found standing in the beam of his gaze the safest place in the world.
Useful quality in a cop.
He’d never been pretty. Not like her ex-boyfriend, Mick Macklemore, anyway.
Still, she never really wanted to look away from Eli.
His eyes dropped to the table, and she realized he was following the movement of her finger. She was tracing an old scar dug into the table. Someone had carvedFUCinto the veneer. She wondered whether they were someone’s initials or whether someone was rudely interrupted in the process of immortalizing the thing that she and Eli probably would have done to each other that night if they hadn’t been interrupted, too.
She jumped when, behind her, Carl noisily clunked a chair up onto a table, just in case she’d missed his earlier sarcasm.
And still neither she nor Eli said a word.
And for a brief vertiginous moment, it was like they’d never even met. Like that table between them was as vast as the sea and they were on separate skiffs floating farther and farther apart.
“Anyway, Todd won’t be bothering anyone around here anymore.”
“Well, that’s good news. I know how you love to get those bad guys off the street, Eli.”
Eli’s head went up slowly. And he stared at her in something like cold amazement.
But she couldn’t help it. She wasn’t even really sorry. Every time she tried to tamp the hurt and anger down, it popped out again, like Whac-A-Mole. She didn’t know how or if that could ever change.
He stood up, slowly, resolutely.
She looked up at him. Way up.
She felt the collision of their gazes physically. A ping at the base of her spine that rocketed through her like the puck on the carnival strong-man machine.
For a moment he stared down at her. But all he finally said was “You should make better decisions, Glory.”
And then he walked out the door.
Chapter3
Eli stripped off his uniform a piece at a time and chucked it into the washing machine and threw in two of those squishy little detergent pods instead of one, because psychologically that’s what it took to get the scent of the Plugged Nickel out of his clothes.
He pivoted and frowned at his living room, which was the living room of the house he’d grown up in. Something seemed off.
