It was my turn to hold his face. I put both hands up and kept them there.

“Vance –” I started but he interrupted me again.

“I’ve been playin’ this cool so I wouldn’t scare the shit out of you because you’re jumpy as a f**kin’ jackrabbit but I’m done with that now. I won’t listen to you call yourself a freak and I’ll let you know something else and I don’t give a f**k if it flips you out. If you ever think of takin’ off, if you ever get scared enough at what I do for a living that you decide you can’t hack it, then you best think again because unless what we have turns shit like everything else in my life, I’m not ever letting you go.”

“Listen to me –”

“Do you understand what I just said to you?”

“Vance, please listen –”

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said softly.

He stared at me or more to the point glared at me.

I decided it was time to come clean too. “Well then, maybe you should also be aware of the fact that I know you have a reputation as a player and I know a lot of other people know that. If any woman tries to cut into my action, I’m taking her down.”

I thought I sounded relatively badass and super-cool, for a girl.

Vance just kept staring at me a beat, still tense then his body relaxed and his lips turned up at the ends in an amused mini-smile.

Um.

No.

“This isn’t funny. I’m serious. I’m a head crackin’ mamma jamma. You’re too handsome for your own good. I’ll have to deck most of the single female population of Denver.”

Even though I was, indeed, being perfectly serious, his body started moving and it felt a lot like laughter. He twisted and we went down, me on my back, him on top of me. By the time he came over me, I knew it was laughter mainly because it had become audible.

I was offended.

“Excuse me! This is not funny. How come you can make intense, macho man statements and I can’t?”

His lips touched mine. He was still laughing.

“Shut up, Jules,” he said there.

“Do not tell me to shut up,” I snapped.

So he didn’t. Using hands, mouth, tongue and other parts of his anatomy, he shut me up a different way.

* * * * *

Vance made love to me, he did it slow, took his time and it was beyond beautiful.

We took a quick shower, got dressed and went back into town.

In a morning of significant moments, two more were still to come.

First, he told me to leave my stuff in the bathroom.

“I can’t, I need it,” I told him.

“Buy more,” he replied then walked into the kitchen to make toast (or, remake toast, I’d had a go and I’d burned it, twice).

I added a trip to the mall on my mental agenda for the day and I had no problem with it whatsoever. In fact my pug had never been to the mall and he was all excited to go (something else about my pug, his fur and face and little wet nose felt like velvet too).

Second, Vance followed me on his Harley all the way into Denver. I saw him in my rearview mirror and I didn’t lose sight of him until I turned my car into the garage behind the duplex. I knew this took him out of his way. His offices were in LoDo (lower downtown). He’d gone ten, fifteen minutes out of his way.

I could not explain why this was significant but it was. I’d been on my own a long time and knowing someone had my back as it were, was just, plain nice.

I dropped off Boo and his litter and my bag and went to King’s.

May descended the minute I came through the door.

I took one look at her stormy face and asked, “What?”

“You still together with Crowe?”

What now?

“Why?” I asked.

“Tell me,” she snapped.

“Yes. Why?” I snapped back.

Her face melted and she was all smiles. “Just checkin’,” she said, storm cloud gone, all bouncy and happy. “You want a pudding cup?”

“May, it’s eight thirty in the morning.”

“There’s no time limit on pudding cups.”

Jeez.

She was grinning at me, pleased as punch that I was getting it regular.

I looked at her.

Home, the word came into my head in Auntie Reba’s voice and a warm shiver ran along my skin.

“Love you, May,” I said softly.

May blinked at me. “What’d you say, hon?”

I walked the step of distance between us, put my hands on either side of her neck, bent at the waist and laid my forehead against hers.

“Love you,” I whispered.

I watched close up as tears filled her eyes.

She tried to pull away. It wouldn’t be cool for the kids to see us like this but I didn’t care and I held on tight. Maybe they should see.

“I think Vance loves me,” I whispered as I lifted my forehead from hers but kept looking in her teary eyes. “He looked at me this morning in a way, May, you wouldn’t believe. And he told me he’d never let me go.”

May was still staring at me. She’d never heard me share information about myself freely, certainly not something important, without her having to drag it out of me.

I let her go but put an arm around her shoulders and walked her toward the office. The whole time my head was bent to hers and I told her about my morning.

“Praise be to Jesus!” she shouted right before we disappeared into the hall.

All the kids (luckily, there weren’t that many of them that early in the morning) stared.

* * * * *

The morning was its usual madness.

I called my doctor to make an appointment to discuss birth control because I was done with the condom business. There might be ways to make it fun but Vance and I were kind of active (okay, really active) and spontaneous and enough was enough.

My cell rang mid-morning. The display said “Crowe calling”.

I flipped it open. “Hey,” I said.

“Got time for lunch?”

I didn’t and that sucked. “Not really,” I told him.

“I’ll bring something to the Shelter.”

I smiled into the phone. “That’d work.”

“See you around noon.”

My pug gave me a sleepy, puppy cuddle.

“Okay,” I said.

I went in search of Martin and Curtis and hustled them into the yellow room. It was time to get to the bottom of why they’d run away so I could start fixing it but even though I knew I had their respect, they gave me nothing.

We walked out of the yellow room and one of the tutors, Stuart, was coming at me. The boys took off. Most of the kids avoided the tutors like the plague.