Page 44 of Forced Proximity
His shoulders slumped.
Damn, I’d been a complete ass. I should’ve seen what I was doing to my family.
“How does that work?” Dru yawned. “You just go, ‘I’m done?’”
“I can step down anytime I want. The hard part of replacing a representative is on the state’s end, not mine,” I explained.
“Fuckin’ finally,” Webber said as he pulled into my driveway.
My fully packed driveway.
“Is everyone here?” I laughed.
I swear I heard Dru gulp.
I looked back at her and said, “As if you didn’t have enough excitement, my family decided to come over.”
“Your friends?”
I corrected. “My family.”
She smiled apologetically. “Are you sure you don’t want to drop me off at home?”
Over my dead body. “No. Stay.”
She swallowed and nodded.
She was terrified.
We got that a lot.
The Truth Tellers weren’t for the faint of heart.
We did illegal things, and the government was having a hell of a time proving it.
Everyone who was anyone knew what we stood for, though.
We ran on the mantra of an eye for an eye. You fuck with us, we fuck with you. There was no hesitation on our end, and that gave a lot of people pause.
Including, apparently, Dru.
But she’d warm up to us.
Everyone started out a little weary at first.
“Come on,” I said as I got out and opened the back door. “They won’t bite.”
She muttered something under her breath that sounded a lot like “I’m not so sure.”
I took her hand and led her up the front walk to my home, ignoring the small crack in the brick next to the door from that one time Tavi had dropped his bike and it’d chipped the brick there.
I also ignored the scuff on the hardwood floor from where he’d thought it would be funny to slam a hammer into the wood paneling when he noticed a spider.
There were a lot of those memories at my home, and if I let it, it’d overwhelm me.
Instead, I focused on the woman and how I wanted to pull her protectively into my side.
Nine
