Then a third.
Dante:And Mickey? Wear the uniform. Good luck.
The afternoon crawls. At four-thirty the sergeant tells me to knock off early and go home. I don’t argue but I don’t go home.
I text Dante to give him a heads up. The frame goes on the passenger seat. I pull out of the station lot and head toward Seagrove.
The hand controls respond smoothly to my grip. Gas with the left hand, brake with a push, steering with the knob. The road looks different from the driver’s seat than it looked from the cruiser, but the road is the same.
I find the cottage and notice the parking spot is empty. Dante knows when to be present and when to disappear. After parking on the street, I transfer to the chair. The sidewalk is smooth. I wheel between the two rocking chairs and stop at the front door.
I knock and hear footsteps coming. Light, quick. The footsteps I’ve been listening for since the first night Benji stepped into my hospital room.
“What did you forget this time, Dante?” Benji says as he swings open the door.
Benji looks like the same man who walked into my hospital room carrying pizza and changed my life. Except the weekend has cost him something I can see from the doorway.
He’s hurting and I caused the pain.
I flash my badge at him. “Officer Weaver with the Bay County Sheriff’s Department. I’m looking for a missing person.”
His eyes go to the uniform. The badge. The patch.
“Who is missing?” he asks, still not opening the door fully.
“The love of my life,” I say. “It’s critically important that I find him before dark.”
“Why is that?” he asks.
“Because I love him and don’t want to spend another night without him knowing how sorry I am for hurting him. Have you seen him?”
Benji shrugs. “What does he look like?”
“He’s about your height. Blonde hair. Eyes that I always thought were blue-grey until I saw them in the sunlight and realized they were green around the edges. He’s gorgeous. Has a fast mouth that I love. Wears eyeliner and is the most visible person in any room he enters. He’s the perfect size to sit cuddled up right here on my lap where I can wrap my arms around him.” I pat my thighs and he glances down at the photo frame. “Are you sure you haven’t seen him around? I’ve got to find him.”
“He sounds like someone I used to know,” he says. He points at the frame. “What is that?”
I hold it up for him to see. “This is a photo frame I bought to sit on my desk at work. I need a photo of me and thelove of my life to go in here. But I can’t take the photo if I can’t find him. Once I do, we’ll take the photo and then I’ll upload it to an app from a drugstore down the road. I’ve already downloaded it to my phone. They’ll print it, I’ll pick it up, and this frame will go on my desk so I can show off my boyfriend to everyone who walks past. The sergeant saw it today and asked me when the photo was coming. I told him tomorrow.”
“How did you get here?”
I point to my truck parked on the street. “In my truck with the hand controls. I came straight from work.”
“Mickey.” His hand tightens on the doorframe. “ You drove here yourself?”
“Yes, and I can drive you around now too. If you trust me enough to do that. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. I’m sorry, Benji. For what I did at the party. For more than the party. For every time I made you feel small, because you are the most important person in the world to me. You kept me going during the darkest time in my life. I love you and there’s no version of my future where I don’t see you in it with me.”
He blinks and looks away from me. “How do I know it won’t happen again?” he asks.
“Because I’m giving you my word. When you told Stormy to tell me that you should’ve left the first time Sheila asked you to, it broke me. To think that you’d be willing to go back and erase us and everything that happened. If I had the chance to go back, I would do everything exactly the same because you are more important to me than my legs. You’re more important to me than anything.”
His face breaks. His eyes spill over and tears roll down his cheeks. He steps onto the porch and bends down. He grabs my face with both hands and he kisses me. I reach up and wrap my hand around his arm. When he pulls back his forehead is against mine.
“Will you forgive me and give me another chance? I love you, Benji. I want to be a man that you deserve and that you can be proud of.”
“If we take this photo and you put it on your desk, who are you going to say I am?”
“I’ll say, this is me and my boyfriend, Benji Bennett. The love of my life.”
