Fit to Be Tied

by Mary Calmes

“Why would I do that?”

  “To get away from me.”

  “And why would I wanna do that?”

  He seemed genuinely confused and I took that as a good sign.

  “To give us both time to sort things out.”

  “Fuck that,” he growled. “I don’t run away and I’m not leaving you, so you can figure out a way to live without me. That’s—”

  “I don’t ever wanna live without you, that’s the whole fuckin’ point!”

  “Well, I’m not going anywhere, so I guess you’re just gonna be miserable for the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not miserable,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “Listen. I’m not leaving, either, that’s not what partners do.”

  “How would you know?” he volleyed. “All you’ve been thinking about is yourself and what you want. What you have to have to be happy.”

  “Ian—”

  He shook his head. “You can’t want a change and not think about the consequences. I know what I can do, what I can give and still be me. I thought you’d ask before you went ahead and threw out ultimatums.”

  “I never threatened you,” I insisted.

  “Oh no?”

  “Fuck no! I said what I wanted, but that was all.”

  “That wasn’t all. How could that be all?” He crossed his arms, in his battle stance, ready to fight. “You asked me to marry you; you had a ring and everything.”

  “And you said no,” I husked, feeling the pain all over again.

  I had made his favorite meal, the beef stroganoff he loved, and then in the kitchen, right about where I was standing now, I had gone down to one knee, and with the plain thick platinum band, asked him to spend the rest of his life with me. His face, in that moment, had turned my blood to ice. I saw fear there, pain, not a trace of happiness, not a drop of joy.

  “Because I want to spend the rest of my life with you. But why do I have to wear a ring to do it? Why is that bullshit important?”

  “If I was a woman, would it still be bullshit?”

  No answer.

  “See,” I sighed. “Marriage is what straight people do, right?”

  Still silence.

  “Do I not deserve to be married?”

  “I just don’t understand why you want to be.”

  “Because I love you.”

  “Love me, M, not a piece of paper that says you have to.”

  “Fine,” I sighed, giving up, so tired of it being a thing. “I’m sorry I ever brought it up.”

  “Yeah, but you did.”

  “So what,” I muttered, turning to the sink to rinse the dishes. “Like I said before, let’s just forget it.”

  “I already told you we can’t. You can’t let it go and neither can I. We’re both screwed.”

  “But we wouldn’t be if you just married me.”

  “Sure,” he replied stoically. “And we wouldn’t be if what we have now was enough for you.”

  “You—”

  “We need to go to bed. We gotta work tomorrow and it’s already midnight.”

  “You’re going to bed now?” I was incredulous. “In the middle of a fight?”

  “We’ve been fighting about this for three weeks, what’s another night?”

  “How can you sleep?”

  “Training,” he said flatly.

  “Clearly this is not that important to you.”

  “You’re wrong,” he replied. “But I think we both need some time to think about what we want and what we can do.”

  “What we want? What’re you talking about?”

  “You want a husband, right?”

  “Ian—”

  “If that’s not gonna be me, then what?”

  “Then fine, I’ll deal with it.”

  “Why should you have to? Why shouldn’t you find someone who wants the same things you want and will give in?”

  “I don’t want someone to give in. This isn’t about winning.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, idiot, it’s about me wanting to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  “Which is all I want, but without the fuckin’ ring and the bullshit piece of paper!”

  “Why do you always gotta call the marriage license a piece of paper? It’s more important than that.”

  “To you,” he reiterated.

  “To a lot of people!”

  “This isn’t about a lot of people; it’s about you and me, period.”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s fine?”

  I sighed. “You figure out what you want, and when you do, you’ll let me know.”

  “I already know. I want things just like how they are.”

  “Okay,” I sighed, too tired to fight with him anymore.

  He murmured something I didn’t catch and pounded up the stairs. In his absence I cleaned the kitchen, got the dishwasher running, and was preparing to take our dog, our werewolf, Chickie, out for a run.

  “What’re you doing?” he yelled down to me.

  Normally I walked out into the living room so I could see him when I yelled up into the loft. “I gotta take Chickie out.”

  “Just let him go in the backyard. I’ll clean it tomorrow when we get home.”

  “No,” I called up to him. “We could both use the air.”

  “Whatever you want,” he grumbled. “I’m taking a shower.”

  I didn’t wait to hear the water running. Instead I went to the front door, took a breath of the crisp fall air, and stepped out into the night. It was already getting chilly, but not cold enough for me to put on a heavy jacket. The hoodie I had on would be enough.

  Closing the door behind me, I went quickly down the stairs and was almost to the end of our street in Lincoln Park when I heard my name yelled out.

  I turned in time to have Ian run into my arms. He hit me hard, grabbing me tight, crushing me, wedging his head down in my shoulder.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  I realized I hadn’t even been breathing moments before. Only Ian could do that to me, freeze me in absolute limbo—physically, mentally, emotionally—and turn me into the guy who waited.

  Inhaling deeply, I clutched at him, my lips on the warm skin of his neck, savoring the feel of him in my arms, not wanting to let go, terrified that what we had was slipping away and we were both trying so desperately to hold on.

  “We’ll figure this out,” he said shakily. “Don’t do anything like take my name off the deed to the house or anything.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said around the lump in my throat. “And I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  He nodded into my shoulder.

  “There’s a middle ground,” I sighed, tightening my hold. “We’ll figure it out. I swear.”

  “I thought I was gonna throw up when you walked out of the house.”

  “We just have to figure this out. It’s not terminal.”

  “No,” he agreed quickly.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said, easing back so I could see his face.

  Fucking Ian. Only he could turn the tables and get me to reassure him that everything would be okay even when I wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. For fuck’s sake, I was the one who was the most upset; I was the one with the hurt feelings and wounded pride, like I had skewers in my heart because he didn’t want to marry me. I should have punched him in the face, but he was covered in worry. I could see it in the pinch of his eyebrows, the darkness in his eyes, the tight press of his lips, and the clench of his jaw. He was spooked good, and because I was the one who always took care of that, fixed that, I couldn’t stop now just because it affected me.

  “Okay.”

  “We’re supposed to be together,” I said as much for my benefit as his.

  “I know.”

  I took a step back and still saw the haunted look in his eyes, like I’d been gone and it had scared the crap out of him. It turned out, from how shaky my knees were, th
at I felt the same.

  We walked Chickie together, and when we got home his phone was ringing. I was anxious for a second that he was being deployed. Ian was Special Forces so whenever they called him up, since he served at the pleasure of the president, he had to get on a plane. But since he didn’t stand at attention as he listened, only swore a little, I knew we were being called back to work.

  “What happened?” I asked when he got off the phone.

  “Your boss just loaned you, me, White, and Sharpe to the FBI for the night.”

  “How come he’s my boss whenever he does something shitty to us?”

  “Lemme think,” Ian said, grinning evilly at me.

  It was nice to have even a small amount of normalcy restored. We needed a ceasefire between us even if neither of us was sure how long it would hold.

  “WHAT WERE you even shooting at?” Chandler White asked from where he sat across the table from me the following night.

  “At the guy trying to run you over with his car,” I explained again, since he’d missed it. I should have been on the receiving end of some serious gratitude, but instead all I was getting was grief.

  “Yeah, but you missed,” Ethan Sharpe, White’s partner, reminded me.

  “I didn’t miss,” I argued. “You missed.”

  He scoffed. “In your dreams, Jones. I’m the one who shot the car. I made him swerve and run into the side of his own house!”

  “Again with this?” Ian sounded bored as he sat down beside me at the table, having returned from the bathroom. “Just wait for the damn ballistics report to come back. Why’re you even wasting your time arguing?”

  After work on Wednesday night, White and Sharpe had invited us to have dinner at Haymarket Pub & Brewery down on Randolph. Since it wasn’t far from work, right there in the West Loop, and since we were both on our second wind—not having slept in a full twenty-four–hour period—we went along. Normally, White went straight home to his wife, but apparently she was out having drinks with her friends, so he had decided to hang with his partner and colleagues. I was wishing Ian and I had begged off, though, if White was going to keep believing his partner instead of me. I got that, the loyalty, but not in the face of overwhelming empirical proof otherwise.

  “I shot the car,” I reiterated to Ian, growing more indignant by the second.

  “Okay.”

  “No, not okay, you have to believe me.”

  He shrugged, taking a sip of his beer, the Angry Birds Belgian Rye IPA he liked. He preferred the Mathias Imperial IPA, but that wasn’t always on tap. I was not the beer drinker he was, but I did like The Defender American Stout I was drinking at the moment—on my second glass, feeling better than I had when I came in.

  Because we’d all been involved in a shooting that day, our primary weapons were collected for processing, and we were all carrying our backups at the moment. A deputy US marshal had to be strapped at all times. That didn’t mean it had to be the standard issue Glock 20, as long as the gun was approved to carry. It also didn’t need to be in plain sight, which, when we went out, it normally wasn’t. I’d been caught without a weapon on a few occasions, once even by my boss, who’d been good enough not to write me up for it, but since then, I’d never once been in breach of protocol.

  “Not from where I was.”

  “What?” I was lost, thinking about our guns.

  He snickered, pointing at my glass. “How many of those have you had?”

  “Two,” I said defensively.

  “Try four,” he said with a chuckle, draping his arm around the back of my chair.

  “Who cares, not the point,” I flared. “I was in the driveway. How could you even see what I did or didn’t hit when you were in the front yard?”

  “Because I ran up behind you.”

  “Not before I fired.”

  “Yes, I did,” Ian said patronizingly. “It was way before you fired.”

  “Obviously not, since you didn’t see me shoot the car.”

  “I shot the car from the street,” Sharpe chimed in.

  I turned from Ian to him. “How? You were behind me.”

  “You don’t think I can shoot from behind you and not hit you?”

  “That’s not what I said,” I muttered. “I know you don’t have to hit me, but I also know you didn’t hit shit.”

  “No, you’re right, I didn’t hit shit—I hit the car, asshole.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Ian groaned before eating another of the smoked chicken wings we’d ordered for an appetizer. He really liked the buffalo ones while I preferred the barbecue.

  The thing was, Sharpe thought he got the car, but I knew it had been me. It wasn’t like Tony Bayer, the driver of the car, could tell us who put the bullet in the radiator of his Ford Focus, thus making him swerve and hit the side of the split-level ranch, because he’d have to come down from his PCP high, first. He’d violated his parole in Austin, Texas, and then skipped town. But we’d gotten a tip from the Dallas field office that he was out in Northbrook, laying low at his sister’s, and it had turned out he was.

  He’d come running out of the house—naked—with a gun, car keys, and his brother-in-law’s wallet. Once he was in the vehicle, he came barreling down the dirt and gravel driveway from the back of the house and tried to run over Deputy US Marshal Chandler White. It was then that I fired at, and hit, the subcompact getaway car. The best part of the whole thing was that his brother-in-law, Bobby Tanner, came out of the house after we had Tony cuffed and facedown on the front lawn and brought us some of Tony’s clothes. He hadn’t wanted to see the guy naked any more than we had.

  Sharpe interrupted my thoughts as he pointed at Ian. “Wait. You think Miro shot the car too?”

  “No,” Ian grunted. “I shot the car.”

  White’s laughter drew all our attention. “Are you kidding? You too? All you fuckers hit the car? Are you fuckin’ kidding me?”

  “When,” Ian began sanctimoniously, indicating us all with an imperial wave of his hand, “we get the ballistics report back, you two are gonna be really fuckin’ embarrassed.”

  “I hit the car,” I repeated as our waitress brought burgers for me, Ian, and Sharpe and a grilled chicken breast for White. “What the hell is that?” I asked, horrified, pointing at his food.

  “That’s why I will outlive all of you by a great many years,” White assured me.

  “Maybe,” Sharpe said in disgust. “But we’re gonna have way more fun.”

  “I’ll say nice things about you at each of your funerals.”

  We all threw fries at him.

  AFTER DINNER White got a call from his wife and she wanted him to meet her at the club she was at in Lakeview. He of course didn’t want to go alone, and Sharpe had no choice, as a partner never did. Ian and I begged off, but White was insistent and very whiny, so we all piled into a cab and took the twenty-minute ride, in traffic—because there was always traffic—to join her and her friends.

  “Maybe the ballistics report will come in tonight,” I said from the backseat where I was sandwiched between Ian and Sharpe. White was in the front seat with the driver.

  “Oh, will you let it go,” White groused, turning in his seat to gesture at Ian. “He’s supposed to be the competitive one.”

  Normally Ian was, and for whatever reason, that filled me with affection for him and I let my head fall sideways onto his shoulder.

  I realized what I’d done as soon as it registered how comfortable I was, and felt my stomach drop. We had agreed that work was work and home was home and never would we mix the two. With how things were going lately, it was especially important. And even though we weren’t on the clock at the moment, we were still with Sharpe and White, and they fell more into one category than the other. Plus, we didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. It was great that no one on our team cared that we were together, but none of them wanted to sit through us making out, either. At least none that I knew of.

  I lifted my head a bit, but I
an reached up and pressed gentle fingers into my hair, keeping me there, wanting me there. I loved it when he was affectionate, whenever he let me see his desire, and it took more concentration than usual, as tired as I was, not to simply burrow against him. I really wanted to go home and get in bed with him.

  White was texting his wife and Sharpe was asking him about her friends—who was single, if any of them were hot, and which, if any, were married. That last part caught my attention.

  “Why does that matter?” I asked, sitting up and turning my head so I could look at him.

  “What?”

  “The married?”

  He shrugged. “If they’re married, they just wanna screw around. There’s no bullshit.”

  “Ohmygod,” I said, thoroughly revolted.

  “You’re a pig.” Ian passed judgment on him.

  “What?”

  “You cannot sleep with a married woman,” the cabbie informed Sharpe. “You will go to hell. Consider your immortal soul.”

  “And the fact that the husband who finds out might be packing,” White added.

  “And if he is packin’, I might not be there to shoot him for you,” I threw in.

  “I shot the car,” Ian insisted.

  “Jesus, where is the fuckin’ ballistics report?”

  What was interesting, even to my inebriated, exhausted brain, was that no one in the car, even the driver, gave a crap that Ian and I were very obviously together.

  THE CLUB was noisy and packed in the front but not in the back, where it was more lounge than bar. White’s wife, Pam, had a table with her girlfriends and three male admirers who were buying the five women drinks. I noticed the round of cosmopolitans on the table that looked untouched.

  “Ladies,” Sharpe announced as he got close, and Pam was up quickly and in his arms, hugging him tight before turning to the others and introducing her husband’s partner.

  “This is Deputy United States Marshal Ethan Sharpe, everyone, who’s very newly single.”

  The marshal part did the trick, and the guys, apparently looking to score, disappeared and a waitress came by to collect the drinks no one wanted.

  “I liked your partner better when he had a girlfriend,” I told White.