Page 92 of Newly Tied

He indicated Lang with his glass. “You two. I know what it’s like to moon over your partner. I’m glad you sacked up and told him how you feel, so now you can be more.”

“Sacked up?” I asked him.

Quick grunt from him. “Those are the words that were used when I finally got the balls to tell Bodhi how I felt. It took a minute.”

“It took five years,” Callahan said, stepping up beside him with a beer for me and an Old Fashioned for Lang. He had a beer for himself as well, which he took a long pull of. “But who’s counting?”

Redeker shot him a look that made him choke on his drink.

“I wasn’t complaining,” Callahan chuckled, as Miro, who was walking by, passed him several napkins and kept going. You had to keep moving when you were the host. “I am more than happily married, so go me.”

When Redeker turned back to me, I said, “I didn’t sack up. Lang did.”

He looked at my partner. “All right, then.”

“Well, I was the one with my head up my ass, so it had to be me.”

“Always good to realize that it’s up there, though,” Callahan told him. “Some people never do.”

“Do all these people stay to play poker?” I asked them.

“Oh no,” Redeker scoffed. “Ian gets way too serious about it. People start bailing the second the card table comes out.”

“Lang’s sister wants to play with him.”

Callahan looked almost startled. “Has she met Ian?”

“Not yet.”

“Oh, Lang, does she cry easily?”

“Because she’s a girl?” he asked, not bristling with Redeker as he normally would have with others.

“No, sir. Ian scared off some very nice FBI agents and some vice detectives not too long ago. If you hadn’t noticed, he’s kind of a dick.”

Lang’s smile was wide. “He is that.”

I told Lang I was fine, which I was. Mostly. Not like I was some wallflower in need of his constant attention to prop me up in public. I normally did well on my own. But I was still a bit tired, Lang and I had been through an emotional grinder, and my social battery had a time limit, which was definitely somewhere right around when we left his mother’s house hours earlier.

I was sitting on the top step of Miro and Ian’s small back porch, looking out at the beautiful area that resembled a small park with both lush green grass and tall trees, when there was a sound behind me, like the whack of a baseball being thrown into a mitt, and when I turned, I was startled to be face-to-face with a wolf.

“Oh, hi,” I said, not frightened—dogs had never scared me; I’d had my father for that—just aware that he, or she, was very big and could eat off my face if they wanted. The thing was, the dog immediately walked over to a bucket, dipped their muzzle in, and retrieved a fuzzy yellow tennis ball. Returning to me, they waited patiently.

I wasn’t stupid, so I held out my hand, and the ball was deposited gingerly in my palm.

“Yeah, all right,” I told the animal, then threw the ball away from me hard.

The dog’s speed was impressive, first down the twelve stairs, I’d counted, and then flying across the grass. Such a big dog, probably with some wolf in there; a hybrid, no question. I hated backyard breeders, and there had been so many when I was growing up. I was thrilled with Chicago’s fuck-around-and-find-out, animal-cruelty laws. That did not fly in the land of Lincoln. I was guessing that the mutant was a rescue, Miro struck me as the type to save a life.

When the ball was returned, it wasn’t even as gross as I thought it would be. I did need to descend the steps, because it was spit out in the grass at the base of the stairs, and the look I got, like, Are you coming? made me smile.

I heard the door open behind me, and when I turned to look, the woman from earlier, married to Thor, was smiling down at me.

“I see you found Chickie, or he found you.”

“Chickie?”

She nodded, descending the stairs. “He’s Ian and Miro’s dog. Started out just as Ian’s, then Miro’s too and now he’s mine as well.”