A couple of nights ago, he’d shared in my back room over beers, takeout cheeseburgers and onion rings that he’d had more experience than me, falling into the work within months of moving to Michigan. I’d shared that I’d started my training with Ron when I met him at a gun shop and range when I was buying my first gun about a week after I moved to Denver. I also shared that Ron offered to teach me how to shoot and, shortly after that, he took me on, we became partners and he’d taught me everything I knew.

I further learned about Creed that, whatever happened sixteen years ago, he was a decent guy or good at playing one.

He went with me every day to Charlene’s, even over the weekend, and there were no more donuts or Cocoa Puffs. Eggs and bacon that he made. Pancakes. Oatmeal. He was good with the kids and especially Adam.

I knew this when, two days before, Adam had broken a figurine, kinda went weird about it and before Charlene or I could wade in, Creed did, calming Adam and then going so far as cleaning up the figurine.

He also took them to lunch on Sunday then to the park while I went to Ron’s grave giving Charlene the house to herself to clean and then relax. It was a cool thing to do. They had to be a hand full but they came back excited and intact and Charlene called me that night to say they all were dead to the world within seconds of their heads hitting the pillows.

With all this, and more, it was coming clear there was a lot to this new Tucker Creed.

He did dishes. Put his towel on the towel rail. Rinsed out beer bottles before he recycled them and not only took out the trash but asked when trash day was and hauled the bins to the curb. He even went beyond the call of duty and, Saturday, took time out to mow mine and Charlene’s lawns.

Truth be told, I was a little worried about this. Worried Charlene would get used to the extra help and then Creed would go to Arizona and there’d be no one to fix her car or mow her lawn.

If I admitted it to myself, which I didn’t, I also worried about the fact that I really liked working with him and more, I liked having him around. And, needless to say, I freaking hated mowing my lawn so I liked not having to do that.

I missed Ron. I didn’t mind working jobs alone but there was no denying it was better to work them with someone else. It wasn’t the additional brainpower and firepower, it was the company. Knowing you weren’t in it alone even when you were separated. I missed that. I’d been alone a long time and the only times since Creed left I didn’t feel alone had been when I was working with Ron or spending time with Knight or Charlene. It was cool to wake up knowing your day would include someone else in a way that was integral to life.

Creed read all my open case files, sat down with me, made suggestions, we planned and we worked my shit together as well as Knight’s. Work got done and it shifted easily from me on my own to us working together. Life fell naturally into an order that was solid, comfortable. It was good. Too good.

Last, it was also good getting it steady and abundantly and it was better since that “it” was so f**king great.

I liked sex once it was about what I wanted and not what someone was taking from me. I lost myself in it. I was able to move total concentration to the good shit my body was feeling which meant I had no space to concentrate on the bad shit that was always at the edge of my mind.

It was better with Creed.

I couldn’t get enough of him. He couldn’t get enough of me. We jumped each other frequently, sometimes to f**k, sometimes to grope, sometimes just to kiss… and hard. He didn’t leave my presence, not even the room, without hooking me behind my neck, pulling my mouth to his and kissing me deep. I returned the favor. We’d done it on the couch in the back room (again), on the floor of the hall, in the shower and in my bed.

It was wild but not abandoned. This was because I sensed him letting me guide it. I didn’t explore the boundaries of this power he was willing to give me by making him do something he didn’t like, not again. He’d demonstrated he’d do that for me once, it touched me in a place I was denying so I didn’t push it because I was unwilling to go there again. That didn’t mean I didn’t feel him handing the reins over to me.

He took, absolutely. He flipped me when he wanted the top, he adjusted us when he was ready for a new position, he took my mouth when he wanted it. But there was always an underlying alertness and if I gave the barest indication something wasn’t working for me, he backed off and did something else.

It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t making love. It was f**king.

But, because of what Creed gave me, it was more. It skimmed the edge of making love because f**king was f**king but when you gave even a hint of more, which he did every time, it was something else.

And it was dangerous.

I knew it but I was powerless to stop it. This was not because it was Tucker Creed (or I was telling myself that). This was how I’d lived my life when I got free. I played with fire. I didn’t mind getting burned. It was a reminder that I was alive and it was a way to bury shit that, if it surfaced, would destroy me.

So as the days passed, I was finding it harder to hold him distant. I was finding it harder to convince myself he didn’t mean anything to me. I was finding it harder to deny that the new Tucker Creed wasn’t getting to me.

Right then, that tattoo nearly all I could see, my sleepy brain filled with all I’d experienced with him recently and waking up for the first time in my life beside him, I lost hold on all that. I lost control of my ability to separate the Creed that used to be from the Creed that was sleeping beside me. I lost the stranglehold I had on me.

I had my head on the pillow but my body was close to his, my side brushing his, my eyes level to his shoulder. His head was turned away from me.

We were both on our stomachs, his leg crooked, my leg crooked with his, the inside of my thigh resting on top of the back of his other leg which was straight. I had my arm curled around his back.

Yes, me cuddling Creed (kind of).

The sheets were over our legs and when I lifted my head slightly and looked down, I saw they were mostly over Creed’s ass but I could see the top of it wasn’t covered. None of mine was.

My eyes moved up, my arm shifting and I caught the flowered “Sylvie” in the dent of his lower spine.

Seeing my name inked in that vulnerable dent in his spine, a vulnerability surrounded by the power of his defined muscles, the beauty of the image of our place, my body moved before I told it to do so. My mouth hit his back at the lake then it glided down. His body twitched, shifted and I put my hands to him, one between his shoulders, one at his ass and pressed down lightly.