Page 7 of Running Scared
Laure:You all suck.
Prock:Except me.I’m the straight one, remember?
Laure:Fuck you all.If there is a Goddess, I’ll be reborn into a family of Amazons.Peaceout.
Sal:She’d lead that army into glorious battle too.
Prock:But we’d miss her cooking.Reg, you need to ask Dean who he’s dating.
Reg:Why me?
Prock:Trust me.Not making the rest of us hate you is your superpower.You get the info from Dean, and then we can chill Laure the fuck out and she won’t stop cooking for us.
Reg:That is actually a threat.Fine.I’ll get back to you losers.
Chance:We’re still on for a movie tonight, right?
Reg:Course.I’d invite Sal, but he lives three hundred miles away.
Sal:*clutches heart* Now that you’ve made me regret my life choices, I have a business to run.
Prock:That was genius.You both hit him where he lived and told him he was loved.Reg, don’t ever doubt your superpowers, they’re golden.I gotta run.I too have a business to run.
Chance:Reg, you’ll always be my ride or die, right?
Reg:Until you fall in love, baby brother.
Chance:Screw that.Forever.
Reg:Sure.
Royally Busted
DEAN WRAPPEDhis arms a little tighter around Bailey’s long, lean body and sighed.
God, he was delicious.
Three months ago when Dean had first met him, in the ER tending to Val, Dean had thought he was cute.Then he watched him be competent and compassionate and kind to Dean’s brother, and Dean had thought he was more than that.He wasworthy.
And then—and this was the true miracle—Dean had seen him befunny.
Dean himself wasnotfunny.He knew this.He took everything too seriously, too literally to be funny.Humor relied on different levels of meaning, and Dean’s specialty, the thing he wasreallygood at, was drawing a straight line between ideas.
This was harder when you were working with two levels of meaning, so Dean often didn’t bother.
But he did appreciate it when somebody was naturally funny.Sal, his older brother, was naturally funny.Laure, his sister, was also pretty quick on the draw.Their mother was ariot,and Dean would make no apologies for thinking she was the greatest woman of all time.
But Dean was not funny, and when Bailey had made him laugh, he had been… charmed.
And then Dean had analyzed Bailey’s long frame, his narrow face, his square jaw and graceful brow, and he’d been… well, more than charmed.
Smitten.
He’d expected their brief interlude in the bunkroom at the hospital to be all he needed, but, well, he’d needed more, so he’d taken Bailey’s card, and since then any excuse to fly to Austin—including two days off in a row—had gotten him on a plane.
It didn’t hurt that he and his partner at the Bureau had been working a case involving the Russian mafia and a nearby cartel south of Austin that threatened to become a bloodbath—he and Marcus practically had their own suite at a nearby Holiday Inn Express.After his injury wrestling cattle (and hearing an earful from Marcus via text about how they wereneverhiding in a cattle truck again; he didn’t care if there was a sign from God saying “Bad guys hid their stuffhere!”), Dean had spent a week in Bailey’s apartment, bringing takeout, petting the cat, watching TV with Bailey, falling asleep in his arms.No, it wasn’t ideal—Bailey hadn’t known he was coming and hadn’t known how long he’d been there, but for a week they’d lived almost like a normal couple, and Dean had found it….
Comforting.
