"Someone found out about the plan to murder that girl and wanted to do something about it?"
We step through the sliding doors into the bracing cold of the heavily air-conditioned store. I chase out the humid outdoor air threatening to steam the insides of my lungs with a deep breath.
"By calling in a federal agent with no jurisdiction to happen to be in the right place at the right time to hear the woman who found the body screaming? That doesn't seem very efficient. Besides, there was no plan. Not a long, drawn-out one, anyway. Rose died because she was going to leave with Emmanuel and reveal the secrets of the resort," I say.
"But you don't think the sweepstakes was real?" he asks.
"At this point, no."
I yank a cart from the row lined up at the front windows. "But I don't know how. The manager wasn't confused or surprised when Gabriel told me I won. She knew all about it, gave me all the information. Which means it came from somewhere else. I just don't know who would want me there. Or why."
Chapter Eight
“Fair enough,” Dean says. “Quick change of topic.”
“Thank you,” I say, relieved. “Sam and I have been over this so much. I just need it out of my head right now.”
“That was actually a really good transition,” Dean chuckles.
“What do you mean?”
“I just want to ask you… what's going on with you and Sam?”
“The… same thing that’s always going on with us?” I raise an eyebrow.
“No, more like… why don't you live together?”
“Oh,” I say, heading into the baking aisle to start gathering up the ingredients I need. “That is quite the detour, isn't it?”
“I'm sorry. Should I not have asked that? Am I being too nosy?” he asks.
“No,” I shrug. “No, really, it's fine. It's not as if it's a sensitive subject or anything. The truth is, we're really good. We're in a great place in our relationship, and I guess we just don't want to mess with that. As I told you, we're not officially living together, but we spend more of our time together than not. We have a good, steady rhythm of life.”
"Are you saying that genuinely, or is there something you're trying to compensate for with an excessive amount of canned icing?"
I look down in the cart and see the growing pile of frosting in various flavors. I've already tossed in five, and I have two more gripped in my hands. Cream Cheese and Chocolate Fudge.
"No," I say, holding up the cans to emphasize them. "These are in case everything goes terribly wrong with my recipes, and I have to cobble together a cupcake mosaic in the shape of a game board in the very short amount of time I have left before Janet's party. And because Sam likes to eat the chocolate one in bed, straight out of the can."
"Well, that was unnecessary."
"On a couple of levels, but it's him. That's Sam. I know that about him when nobody else does."
"Except me, now, which… thanks."
"Okay, I'm sorry. The point is, I like that I know that about him. I like that I'm the one who taunts him about it but ends up bringing it to him. Everybody else knows this big Sheriff Samuel Johnson persona he puts on for the town. But I know Sam, the boy who rescued my ball for me when I was a little girl and kicked it into the street. The guy who held my hand for the first time when I was twelve and we went to a movie for the first time without any parents. The teenager who made me feel beautiful and safe and loved. The one who I poured everything out to when I had nightmares about my mother, and again when my father disappeared. I see the man who I knew I wanted to marry, so I left him behind to go into the Bureau. And the man who loves me despite that and everything else I drag into his life pretty much every day."
It’s a lot for walking down a grocery store aisle tossing cake-making supplies into my cart, but Dean isn't the first to ask that question. Plenty of others have wondered the same thing. They might not have asked the same questions, but the way they look at us is enough. The way they call him my “boyfriend”, in a slight whisper as if I might be offended by it. Right down to the way each of us has gotten individual wedding invitations that offered plus-ones.
The thing is, I'm not offended by it. I don't feel as if I have to follow anybody else's pattern or live up to what anybody else thinks I should be doing. Sam and I are happy just the way we are.
"Is this one of those situations when you don't talk about the future because you're both in law enforcement and you don't want to set yourselves up?" Dean asks.
“Set ourselves up for what?” He looks at me in that way that means he doesn't want to say it, and I know exactly what he's thinking. “The chance that one of us will get hurt or die in the line of duty? That's not just an abstract to us, Dean. You should probably realize that by now. He and I have faced horrible things together. There have been moments in the last couple of years when each of us has wondered if the other was going to survive. That doesn't make us hesitant to be together. It makes us happy that we have the chance," I say.
"Have you ever thought about anything else?” he asks.
“Of course we have. This also isn't the kind of relationship where we pretend the future doesn't exist or get weirded out by acknowledging it. Neither one of us questions that we want to be together.
