Page 25 of Doing Life

“You said you showed her the door?” Lance asked.

“Yeah.”

“She’ll let you know when she needs to go.” Lance grinned, loving on her. “She’s smart as a whip. I swear to God, she’s clever.”

“She is. I like her.” He did. He’d had dogs all the time he was growing up, and he’d had a Belgian Malinois in the?—

He swallowed against a rush of nausea. His partner.

Abby went right to him, barking, alerting.

“What’s wrong? Abby? Sloan, what’s wrong?” Lance stood up, the chair crashing down behind him.

He held out a hand to Lance. “No. No, it’s okay. I just got to thinking about Radar, and it froze me up. I’m sorry, honey.” He took Lance’s grasping hand in his. “It made me feel sick.”

“Jesus, Sloan. I’m sorry. I never thought Abby would…”

“No.” He laughed a little, hand on Abby’s head. “She sure was telling me, huh?”

“She was alerting. She’s not just trained to see for me. She tells me when I’m about to have a panic attack, or she finds someone to help me.”

“That’s wild.”

“Yeah. I mean, you might think about talking to someone about a wounded warrior support dog.”

“Me?” Sloan blinked. Surely not. There were guys who needed those dogs way more than him.

“Why not? You have PTSD. Dogs need homes, man. There’s all sorts of breeds that do PTSD work too.”

It was an idea, but what if it messed with his police work? It wasn’t as if he could explain to his boss, “Hey, I have PTSD. Here’s my dog.”

Although he’d already pretty much figured out he didn’t tend to freeze up on the job. It was at night, or in his kitchen when he was supposed to be seducing his former lover.

“I guess…I guess I could look into it.”

“I’ll tell Luke if you want, he’s got a shit-ton of contacts. He can tell you where to go. Meet the dogs.”

“Thank you.” His cheeks were beginning to heat now, and he was embarrassed as fuck. “I’ll think about it.”

“It’s okay, man. Seriously. I don’t think I have a day that goes by that I don’t have something that happens like this. If anybody understands, it’s me. I was there.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I hear you. I’m sorry.”

Lance cocked his head. “That I was there?”

“I guess…I guess I’m sorry it wasn’t me. I mean, I didn’t want it to be me, but…”

“I hear you. Survivor’s guilt, it’s a thing. I get it.” Lance looked through him with a serious expression. “I mean that. It’s okay. It sucks. Bad shit happened, but we didn’t do it toeach other. At least on that front, we’re both off the hook. We didn’t do this to each other.”

Yeah, but he didn’t want to keep doing this to each other either. He wanted to admit that he was still in love. Sometimes he didn’t get what he wanted, at least not right away.

“I should make enchiladas.”

Lance grinned at him. “Get with the program, man, I’m hungry.

That was something else that hadn’t changed. Lance sure could eat.

Chapter Eight

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