Vic has his daughters; Eddison has his sisters, even if he still struggles with naming Priya that way.
I change for sleep, boxers and a T-shirt I accidentally stole from Eddison during a case and declined to return, while he digs through his linen closet. Together, we put sheets and a blanket on the couch. He waves a yawning goodbye and disappears into his room, where I can hear him moving about for a few more minutes as I brush my teeth and scrub off two days of makeup at the kitchen sink.
I’m bone-deep tired, the kind of exhausted where my eyes hurt even when they’re closed, but despite the comfort of the couch I’ve slept on countless times, I can’t seem to fall asleep. I keep seeing Ronnie, his eyes so shattered and wounded within a mask of blood. I shift positions, hugging one of the pillows to my chest, and try to settle.
Eddison’s snores rumble through the silence, courtesy of a long-ago broken nose that he couldn’t be bothered to get set properly. They’re not loud, his snores, it’s never been a problem to share a hotel room with him, but they’re reassuringly familiar. I can feel my bones getting heavier, the stress gathering and slipping away in rhythm with the soft sounds.
Then one of my phones rings.
Groaning and cursing, I roll over and grab it, squinting at the overly bright display. Oh mierda, it’s my tía. I know exactly why she’s calling. Fuck. I don’t want to talk to her right now.
Ever, really, but especially not now.
But if I don’t, she’ll keep calling, and the voice mails will get increasingly shrill. Snarling a little, I accept the call. “You already knew I wasn’t going to call,” I say instead of hello, keeping my voice down so I don’t bother my partner.
“Mercedes, ni?a—”
“You already knew I wasn’t going to call. If you pass over the phone or put it on speaker, I’m going to hang up, and if you keep calling after what has really been a hell of a day, I’m going to change my number. Again.”
“But it’s her birthday.”
“Sí, I know.” I close my eyes and burrow back into the pillows, wishing the conversation was just a part of a nightmare. “It changes nothing. I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to talk to you either, Tía. You’re just more aggressively stubborn than she is.”
“Someone has to be stubborn as you,” she retorts. Her voice is surrounded by chaos, the kind of noise you can only get at a birthday party where “immediate family” still means some hundred or so people. The bits of speech I can make out are mostly in Spanish, because the madres and tías and abuelas have rules about using English at home if it’s not for schoolwork. “We never hear from you!”
“Well, it’s hard to be estranged from people if you give them regular updates.”
“Tu pobre mamá—”
“Mi pobre mamá should know better, and so should you.”
“Your nieces and nephews want to know you.”
“My nieces and nephews should be grateful their abuelo is still in prison, and if they’re very lucky, none of the other men will take after him. Stop stealing my contact info from Esperanza, and stop calling. I am not interested in forgiving the family, and I am sure as fuck not interested in the family forgiving me. Just. Stop.”
I hang up, and spend the next several minutes declining her repeated calls.
“You know,” rumbles a sleepy voice from the bedroom doorway. I look up to see Eddison leaning against the frame, his boxers and hair both sleep rumpled. “That’s your personal phone. You can shut that off as long as you keep your work one on. She, uh . . . she doesn’t have your work number, does she?”
“No.” And if I weren’t so fucking tired, I’d have thought of that myself. I always remember that there’s a difference between my two phones; I just tend to forget why that difference is important. After double-checking that it’s my personal phone—identical to my work phone, except for the Hufflepuff case—I turn it off and feel a palpable sense of relief. “Sorry for waking you.”
“Was it anything specific?”
“It’s my mother’s birthday.”
He winces. “How did she even get your number? You just changed it a year ago.”
“Esperanza. She keeps my number under a different name, but I’m the only person she knows with an East Coast area code, so her mother always snoops and finds it. She just can’t make up her mind whether she should be haranguing me to come back to the family, or haranguing me for leaving it in the first place.”
“Your dad’s still locked up, right?”
“Yes, my great sin as a daughter.” I shake my head, hair falling in my face. “Sorry.”
“I forgive you,” he says sententiously.
I throw a pillow at him, and immediately regret it despite his goofy, confused blinking. Now I have to get up and retrieve it unless I want it thwacked back in my face.
Instead, he picks it up and offers his free hand. “Come on.”
“?Qué?”
“You’re never going to get any sleep now. You’re just going to lie there and brood.”
“You’re going to accuse me of brooding?”
“Yes. Come on.”
I take his hand and let him pull me up, and he uses it to tow me into the bedroom. He steers me to the left side of the bed, because he doesn’t really care which side he’s on as long as it’s the one farther from the door. A minute later, he returns with my gun, which I’d put under the couch where I could easily reach it, and puts it into the holster nailed to the side of the left nightstand. He gets under the covers first, sliding over rather than walking because he’s tired and lazy and I really can’t blame him, and for a moment it’s all shuffling linens as we settle in comfortably.
“You don’t have to feel guilty for it,” he says suddenly.
“For what, Ronnie showing up?”
“For not forgiving them.” He reaches out in the darkness, finds a handful of my hair, and uses it to find my face so he can tap the parallel scars that run down my left cheek from just below my eye. “You don’t owe them that.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not right for them to ask it of you.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
A few minutes later, he’s fast asleep and snoring again, his hand still splayed across my face.
I honestly can’t imagine how half the Bureau thinks Eddison and I are hot for each other.
5
Saturday is spent back at the office, catching up on what was supposed to be yesterday’s work. After several months of so many back-to-back cases that we were barely home long enough to change go bags before being sent out again, Vic put us on desk rotation for a few weeks so we could catch our breath. Basically that means paperwork, and a lot of it.
I spend Sunday on Eddison’s couch with a stack of logic puzzles to get my brain off worrying about Ronnie, while Eddison has the Nationals game up on his insanely large television. His laptop is open on the coffee table, Skype running to show Priya stretched out on the bed at Inara and Victoria-Bliss’s New York apartment. She’s got the game streaming on another computer at her side, so they can watch the game together across two hundred fifty or so miles. She set up in the bedroom so as not to disturb her summer hosts, neither of whom give two shits about baseball, but they both drifted in anyway, sprawling over her, each other, and the bed in equal measure with their own projects.