Page 21 of Against the Odds
“Feel free to use me as a reference anytime,” I told River.
“Let me get a picture for my records, and then I’ll wrap it up for you.” He took a couple of shots of my arm, then applied some kind of lotion and covered it with an adhesive dressing. “This is second skin. It stays on for three days.” He pressed the clear wrap to my arm, then went through “start washing on day four” and “it will itch, don’t scratch” and “really, you can’t scratch” and “leave those scabs alone,” and the rest of aftercare.
As Callum and I headed out into the early evening, the cool air felt good on my face. Yet, despite its freshness, I wobbled, strangely woozy.
Callum grabbed my good arm. “Oops, you need some sugar. All those endorphins have to get energy from somewhere.”
I clutched him, my head spinning. “I feel really ridiculous. I got through the whole tattoo fine, and now I’m dizzy?”
“Low blood sugar, I tell you.”
“The last one didn’t do this.”
“Probably didn’t take half as long.”
“True.” I didn’t want to think too much about the dingy hole-in-the-wall parlor where I’d gone for it, or my paranoia afterward about whether the equipment had been clean. My post-undercover physical had all been negative, so I’d laid that worry to rest. With River, I’d seen how meticulous he was about everything.
Callum guided me down the sidewalk and tugged open the passenger door of my truck. “Here we are. In you get.”
“I can drive.”
“Bullshit.” He tapped the glove compartment. “You got any candy stash in here?”
“Sadly, no.”
“Milkshake, then. I saw a Timmy’s a few blocks back. Get your ass in the truck.”
“Not as good as your ass.” I blinked when he laughed, realizing that I’d said that out loud. Maybe I did need sugar. I managed to get into my seat, the new tattoo a heated pull on my arm, and closed the door.
Callum swung in beside me and headed us off down the street. He hadn’t been kidding, because a few blocks on, he pulled into the Tim Horton’s drive-through. The menu board was long, and it’d been a while since I indulged in sugar, trying to keep a muscular physique for my role. I stumbled out a request for a caramel-coffee something, and he ordered a box of chocolate Timbits. When the food came, he set the donut holes box on the console between us and handed me my drink. The first gulp gave me an icy head rush, as I realized I’d ordered an iced coffee with caramel, not hot, but after a moment, I felt my fuzzy-headedness improve. I drank again, slower, and sighed.
Callum put the truck in gear. “Better?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You were kind of off. Although I didn’t mind knowing you liked my ass.”
I felt my face flush. “Forget I said that.”
“Never. I’ll treasure it. Even if I don’t have the true hockey ass. Goalies don’t do all the skating that the other players do.”
A little hint of sourness in his voice made me say, “I have zero complaints, believe me.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.” We drove in silence for a couple of minutes while I downed half my drink and opened the donuts, biting off half of one. The chocolate hit was awesome.
At the stoplight, Callum grabbed two of his own and stuffed them in his mouth together. When the light turned, and he’d chewed and swallowed, he asked, “Are you out to your department? You seem real open with strangers about being gay.”
“Well, you told me River was gay. I don’t randomly walk up to people and come out. But yeah, my department knows. I’ve done a couple of interviews. I had a boyfriend for a hot minute, until he got tired of my shift schedule.”
“What is your shift schedule?”
I sighed because that was about to fuck up my life again. “We work four days on, four days off, rotating through five overlapping shifts. The rotation sucks, and if I’m on early morning or night rotations, then I’m basically crashed out for a couple of days afterward recovering.” I pressed the heels of my hands to my skull, the tug of pain in my arm evidence that I could change my life, but it didn’t solve this problem. “I had four weeks off, after all the overtime with the last assignment, but next week I start again. And I’m fucked, because I have Jos now, and no childcare backup.”
“He’s twelve, right? Does he need childcare?”
“Not in the days or evenings so much. But I can’t leave a twelve-year-old home alone at night. I can’t head out of thehouse at ten in the evening or three in the morning and leave him sleeping there all night with no one around.”
“I guess.”
