Page 102 of Not Mine to Rescue

The party got wilder. Yet through it all, there was a bubble of invisible protection around me. Fly introduced me to each prospect, there were three. The one who had been bartending had bloody knuckles. I ignored those as well. Discreetly, I slipped him the firm’s business card. He stuffed it in a pocket inside his vest. “Thanks, what are you drinking?”

“Seltzer, I’m driving.”

“You got it.”

No questions, no hassle, no pressure at all. Refreshing.

Mary joined me later. “I hear they kicked someone out over you.”

“He touched my ass.”

She laughed. Her eyes were a little glassy from drinking. “When I used to strip, they’d take someone like that out by the collar. There was this hole about five feet wide in the parking lot. Water always collected there. Those guys made sure they dropped the body right in it. Whoopsie. Must have slipped.”

“Bodies?”

“Still breathing, doesn’t count.”

I laughed along with her. When it died I asked, “They are all kind of old fashioned, aren’t they?”

She sent me a speculative glance. “To a fault. But, I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She gazed out on the crowd. “I got stabbed. It almost killed Walt, not me.”

Her throat worked and her eyes watered. “That’s how you know.” Her smile faltered, then rallied. “Wombat, huh?”

“I’m with a man named Wombat.”

A snort leaked out of her.

“His real name is worse,” I confessed.

“I know. I see the club’s records. Random? What were his parents thinking?”

I shook my head. “They probably weren’t.”

She laughed. “I named my oldest Connery… Connery Fallon. Brave Leader, or War Lord if you care to know. She’s living up to it.”

“You have two children, don’t you?”

“Four. My brother’s two are ours even if we have to share.” She smiled. “Devon, Linnea, Connery, and Sam.”

Four. A twinge of—hopefully not jealousy—whatever it was, I shoved it aside to let her show off photos of all of them.

Sierra joined us. She pulled out pictures of her twins.

Twins. I brushed my hand across my abdomen and down one leg as if I weren’t contemplating how risky that pregnancy would have been.

Then Olivia joined us.

“It’s photo session time?”

They tucked the pictures away.

Very bluntly, she turned to me and said, “Boots and I decided we weren’t going to try. We’re both on the spectrum and life is kind of shit right now.” Her eyes went a little distant. “Plus I’m on a new medicine, so…”

Mary wrapped around her despite her initial stiffness. Her quickly whispered, “We’ve got you,” made those prior pangs of jealousy look amateurish.

Sierra stared at me. “You and Wombat, huh?”

I laughed. “Mary already nailed me with that.”