Father Christmas

by Judith Arnold

  “Okay.” He told himself he was agreeing to let her transport him and Mike because she was right, he shouldn’t get behind the wheel. But there was that selfish yearning again, that giddy defiance. He’d been stabbed. He deserved to have his needs met. In his condition, stitched and patched and dazed, he didn’t have to be responsible. If he absolutely had to, he could let someone else take charge for a few minutes.

  Especially someone like Molly, who would do the right thing. She would make sure Mike’s needs were met. She might even fix that stiff drink for John. Hell, he couldn’t take more than a drink from her right now, anyway. He was sore. His hand was useless, and less than an hour ago his blood pressure had plummeted low enough to freak out the ER nurse. Any woman who got personal with him in the condition he was in would only wind up disappointed.

  And he must be delirious, thinking about Molly in the context of disappointing her that way.

  The doctor reappeared with Bud Schaefer, John’s frequent partner. Carrying the apparel John had worn to the station house that morning, Bud was a welcome sight. “Hey, Russo, how’s it going?” Bud said almost shyly. It was bad form for fellow officers to reveal anything too intimate to each other, like fear or concern. Seeing a colleague hurt was one of the hardest things a cop ever had to endure.

  “I’ve felt better,” John responded, attempting a smile. His head had started to throb.

  Bud turned his gaze to Mike, who was still playing with the Velcro fastening of the blood pressure cuff. “Hey, Tiger, remember me?”

  Mike raced over. “You’re a policeman guy.”

  “That’s right. I work with your dad.”

  “That means you’re a policeman guy.”

  “Well, I’m going to help your dad get into some real clothes. So maybe you might want to go back out to the waiting room.” He eyed Molly, searching for assistance.

  “Michael, come with me,” she said, extending a hand and a warm grin. “Let’s go look at the nurse’s computer again. Would you like that?”

  “Will she make the colors change on the screen?”

  “Maybe she’ll do that again, if you ask her nicely.”

  Mike skipped over to Molly, took her hand and dragged her past the curtain, out of sight.

  Bud directed his inquiring gaze to John. “Who’s the lady?” he asked as he shook the wrinkles out of John’s shirt and held it up, positioning it so John could slide his left arm into the sleeve.

  John hated being assisted into his own shirt, but he didn’t have much choice. Swallowing his anger—none of this was Bud’s fault, after all—he thrust his good arm into the left sleeve. “She runs Mike’s preschool.”

  “Yeah?” Bud’s tone left no doubt that he sensed that more than just preschool was going on between Molly and John. “She’s cute.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Very cute. On a scale of one to ten, I’d give her an eight at the very least. Nine, if she was taller.”

  John said nothing. He didn’t like the idea of Bud—or anyone—assigning Molly a score, but if he said so Bud might guess that John had special feelings for her. Instead, he concentrated on easing his injured arm into the other sleeve. “Could you drive my car home for me?” he asked. “She’s going to take me and Mike home. She’s got a kid seat in her car.” As if that was why John wanted her instead of Bud to drive him home.

  “Yeah, sure.” He reached into a pocket of the slacks he’d brought for John and pulled out the key ring. John identified the car key and Bud manipulated it off the ring. They collaborated to get him out of his Santa pants and into his slacks. Closing the fly turned out to be not too hard—he wasn’t too clumsy with his left hand—but buttoning his shirt was a bitch. He wound up sitting helpless while Bud did the buttons for him.

  “How are you going to do this on your own?” Bud asked.

  “Unbuttoning it won’t be so hard. After I get the shirt off, I’ll stick to pull-overs.”

  “You taking tomorrow off?”

  “I’ll see how I feel.”

  Bud tied the laces on John’s boots. It was humiliating to be so dependent on someone for such rudimentary tasks. He wondered if Mike ever felt this way when John helped him in and out of his boots. “Do us all a favor and don’t come in,” Bud said, kindly keeping his gaze on John’s feet. “You’ll be useless, and you’ll have all the secretaries fussing over you and ignoring the rest of us.”

  John grunted. If he couldn’t even tie his own shoes, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be worth much tomorrow. But it wasn’t Bud’s privilege to decide for him. Nor was it Coffey’s, or the doctor’s, or anyone else’s. It was John’s decision alone.

  He had to write up a report on today’s arrest. He had to take the victim’s statement, if that hadn’t already been done by someone else. And she’d have to do a visual ID of the perp—but someone had probably taken care of that for John, too. Anything he couldn’t do over the phone tomorrow could wait a day, he supposed. Or one of those fussing secretaries could drive over to his house with a laptop and get him through the paperwork.

  He didn’t want a department secretary at his house. He didn’t want anyone...except Molly. Molly, whose eyes had filled with tears for him.

  He gave himself a quick inspection and found himself fully attired. Moving his head made it ache. His chest ached, too, on the bruised side. At least his arm and hand were still numb from the anesthetic. But once that wore off...

  Bottom line: he was a wreck, barely held together by surgical thread and the ministrations of Bud Schaefer. The high was gone and John was crashing.

  He smiled weakly. “I’m going to try to stand now.”

  “I’ll catch you if you fall.” Bud took a half-step backward, giving John room to set his feet on the floor.

  He wobbled. Cymbals crashed inside his skull and the muscles along his spine threatened to contract. His knees felt liquid, and if there were anything in his stomach it would have come back up. The room tilted slightly and he closed his eyes.

  He wasn’t going to fall. Not when the only person around to catch him was Bud. If falling was his fate, he wanted only one person to pick him back up. She was way too small to lift him, but what she lacked in physical mass she made up in inner strength. He had no doubt she could catch him if he went tumbling.

  “Go get Molly,” he said.

  ***

  HIS HOUSE WAS EXACTLY what she would have expected if she’d ever thought about it: a neat, nicely proportioned ranch, not too big and not too small, sitting at the center of a well-tended half-acre lot. The snow had stopped, leaving a thin veneer of white blanketing the front yard and driveway. “Let me open the garage,” he said, twisting in the passenger seat to reach the door latch with his left hand.

  She touched his shoulder to stop him. Through the leather of his jacket she felt bone and muscle, strength and stubbornness. He went still beneath her touch, but didn’t turn back to her. “First of all,” she said, “you shouldn’t be yanking on garage doors. Second, if I park in there, where will your friend from work park your car?”

  Slowly he relaxed under her hand, shaking his head and smiling wanly. “If you pull in—” he waved toward the garage door “—I’ll have less distance to walk.”

  “Okay. I’ll drive in and drop you off, then pull back out and park on the street.” She let go of him, only to extend her hand palm up for him to pass her his keys. He was obviously reluctant to cede them, but he must have realized he couldn’t hoist the hinged door up on its tracks with only one functioning arm.

  “Dana says you push a button and his garage opens,” Michael reported from the rear seat. “Like magic.”

  “That’s called an automatic garage-door opener,” Molly said, closing her fingers around John’s key ring and yanking on the parking brake. “I’ll be right back.”

  The cold air slapped her cheeks as she climbed out of the car. She needed its bracing refreshment to clear her mind after the shock of seeing John sitting on the examining table in
the emergency room. That shock had lingered; maybe the winter night would chill it out of her.

  She’d been horrified by the bandages, of course. The officers pacing the waiting area had told her about the knife. In fact, they’d described its size with relish, until she’d pointed out Michael and they’d realized that the gruesome details of John’s injuries would frighten him—to say nothing of scaring the hell out of her. Knowing the size of the knife, she could guess at the wounds beneath the gauze. She could figure out how bad they were.

  But more than John’s injuries had affected her. She’d been stunned by the sight of his chest, lean and streamlined and utterly male. Her gaze had taken in the narrow indentation of his navel, and his nipples, and the arch of his collarbones, and his broad, bony shoulders, and his biceps, not bulging with brawn but firm and sinewy, hinting at his strength without bragging about it.

  She’d seen his shaggy hair, his jaw shadowed by a day’s growth of beard. She’d seen the odd shimmer in his eyes. And then she’d seen the bruises discoloring one side of his ribcage. She’d stared at the bandages again. And then his eyes. And then his naked chest.

  Myriad responses had buffeted her. She’d been so afraid for him, and so relieved. She’d been appalled by his wounds, and sympathetic about his pain. But underlying those rational reactions, like a soft, pulsing bass riff almost drowned out by the high notes, she’d been aroused by his profoundly male beauty.

  He hadn’t accepted her offer of a lift home because he wanted to be ogled. If anything, he wanted to be assisted into a comfortable chair and left alone. He wanted her to take care of Michael so he could rest. That was the only reason she was at his house.

  She heaved the garage door open, got back into the car, and coasted into the garage. Before John contorted himself to reach the door latch, she was out of the car again, racing around to his side and opening his door for him. He shot her a look of resignation combined with annoyance. She knew he resented his helplessness, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, other than what she was doing.

  Michael tumbled out of the car as soon as she released him from his child seat. “Is it dinner? I’m hungry, Daddy,” he announced, as if this were a night like any other.

  Molly unlocked the door connecting the garage to the house and stepped aside. Michael slipped his hand into his father’s as they went in.

  After moving her car back out to the street, she returned to the garage and entered the house. John and Michael were in the kitchen. It was cleaner than she would have expected a male-dominated kitchen to be, but devoid of decorator touches. The curtains were plain, the refrigerator without magnets, the days of the wall calendar marked with an angular scrawl. Michael was seated on the linoleum floor, struggling to remove his boots. John leaned against a counter, his face pale and his mouth taut.

  “Sit,” Molly commanded, figuring he would probably prefer to be ordered about than to be babied. “I’ll help you with those boots in a second, Michael,” she added, unfastening her jacket and shrugging out of it. She glared at John, who hadn’t moved. “Sit,” she repeated. “There.” She pulled a chair away from the table and pointed to it, then turned her back on him and draped her jacket over another chair.

  By the time she knelt down next to Michael, he’d triumphed over his boots. He tossed them into a corner and frolicked off, shouting, “I’m starving! I’m gonna play now.”

  Without Michael to focus on, she had no choice but to look at John. He had freed his left arm from his jacket and was gingerly easing his right arm through the sleeve. He tossed the jacket onto the seat of the chair where she’d draped her parka, then lifted his gaze to her. His cheeks looked hollow, their contours emphasized by his five-o’clock shadow. His eyes seemed haunted.

  “Did the doctor give you any pain-killers?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small bottle of pills. He read the label, then set the bottle on the table. “There’s a bottle of scotch in the cabinet above the fridge,” he said. “Glasses are on the shelf above the toaster.”

  She caught herself before lecturing on the dangers of mixing liquor with prescription drugs. He hadn’t taken one of the doctor’s pain-killers—and he had read the label with its numerous warning stickers. He was a cop; surely he knew what he was doing.

  Gail would give her a long, vehement reprimand for placing that much faith in him. But Gail wasn’t here now, and Molly’s only purpose was to make this evening work out for him and his son.

  She dragged a chair over to the refrigerator, climbed onto it, and opened the cabinet above it. Pulling down the bottle of scotch, she told herself that just because she was puttering around in his kitchen didn’t mean she was making herself at home in his house. Her friend Allison would feel more comfortable in this situation. She was a nurse, used to seeing that patients’ needs were met.

  Molly brought the chair back to the table and then located a glass on the shelf he’d indicated. She presented him with the glass, and the fingers of his left hand brushed hers as he took it from her. He set the glass on the table, twisted the cap off the bottle and poured an inch of the gold-hued liquor for himself. She stuffed her hand into the pocket of her jeans, as if that would erase the feel of his callused fingertips whispering against her skin.

  “Would you like me to fix something for dinner?” she asked brightly. “I could run out and pick up some fast food, if you’d rather.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, then took a sip. “If you could throw together a sandwich for Mike, that would be great.”

  She surveyed the contents of the refrigerator, found bread and American cheese, and pulled them out. Then she eyed John reproachfully. “I don’t care if you’re hungry or not. You have to eat, too.”

  He sent her what began as a scathing look but softened into a grudging smile. “You’re going to make me?”

  She smiled back. “You bet I am. Where do you keep soup?”

  “Do you boss the kids around, too?”

  “Where’s the soup?” she persisted, planting her hands on her hips and giving him her sternest frown.

  He shrugged in defeat, then took a sip of his drink. “Left of the sink,” he said. “Do you boss the kids around?”

  She swung open the cabinet, pulled down a can of tomato soup, and proceeded to locate a pot on her own. “Yes, I boss the kids around. I boss everybody around. That’s me, the Boss of Bosses. I’m trying to train Michael to say, ‘Yes, Boss,’ whenever he addresses me. I’d also like to train him to salute, or maybe to bow in my presence, but we haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  John surprised her by laughing. She was glad she’d managed to defuse his tension and distract him from his pain. She was also glad she’d gotten her mind off that vision of him sitting on the ER table, shirtless and unbearably sexy despite his wounds.

  She worked at the stove, stirring milk into the soup, then preparing cheese sandwiches to be grilled in a frying pan. Every now and then she heard the dull thud of John’s glass meeting the table as he lowered it. It was a friendly sound, the sound of a husband keeping his wife company while she fixed supper.

  Stupid thought, she chided herself.

  “Why do you call him Michael?” he asked abruptly.

  She turned from the stove and frowned. “As opposed to...?”

  “Mike.”

  She smiled and pivoted back to her cooking. “If he asked me to call him Mike, I would. He’s never asked.”

  John said nothing. She stole a glimpse of him as she searched the cabinets for bowls and plates. He appeared to be in deep thought. When she carried the bowls to the table, he glanced up at her. “That’s nice,” he said. “Respecting him that way. Not presuming.”

  She didn’t respect Michael’s choices to be nice. Respecting children was the foundation on which the school rested. But she was glad John thought it was nice, anyway.

  “My family still calls me Johnny,” he admitted. “They used to call me
Johnny-Come-Lately.”

  “Really?” She treasured this revelation. John exposed so little of himself, and like a hungry soul, she savored every small scrap. “Why?”

  He shrugged again, then winced and repositioned his right arm on his lap. “I was always the last to speak up. If everyone else was shouting, I’d just sit back and listen until they were all done. Then, maybe, I’d say something—if I had something to say. I was always late with my comments.”

  “Listening is better than talking, sometimes,” she said.

  “They thought I was slow. Not slow,” he amended, tapping his finger against his temple to indicate that he meant mentally slow. “But slow on the draw. Late to react.”

  “No,” she argued. She’d seen him react with terrifying speed to the pick pocket on near the bank on Dudley Street. She assumed that he’d reacted with equal speed today, when he’d taken on an armed hoodlum. She pictured him chasing down a man with a big, horrible knife in his hand. She pictured him knocking the man over, fighting off his slashing attacks.... The very idea made her shudder.

  “Did you draw?” she asked quietly, bracing herself to accept whatever answer he gave.

  He frowned. His gaze traced hers to his right hand, tapped around the spherical gauze packing, resting motionless on the table. He raised his eyes back to hers. “You mean, did I draw my weapon on him?”

  She nodded and swallowed her anxiety. She had seen his gun once. She could imagine the metal coldness of it, the lethal force. The thought that he’d clutched that gun in his hand, his finger on the trigger, the power of life and death in his grasp...

  She couldn’t stand to think of him shooting at anyone. But he’d been deflecting the lunges of a hunting knife. He should have shot the thug. Right between the eyes. He should have killed him without pause, without mercy.