C4 Chase

“Son, you’ve got to cut that out.”

I look over from the couch I’m sprawled on to Pop’s chair, where Pop is drinking his third—or maybe seventh—cup of coffee for the day and searching for the volume on the remote so he can turn up the sound on the HGTV show he’s watching. Pop has two passions in his twilight years: shows about buying houses and bad coffee. The first means that he’s always fussing around outside in the quest for maximum curb appeal, even though he has no plans to sell the place, and the second means that our house always smells like the inside of a diner.

Yes, our house. I live with my grandpa.

It’s a long story.

“What do I have to cut out?” I ask with a sigh.

“That. That right there—all this sighing. I can’t hear these idiots arguing about which tiny house to buy over all your mooning.”

“I’m not...mooning, whatever that means.”

Okay, well maybe I have been mooning a little. I’m not normally the type to flop around on the couch on my day off—not when there are baristas to flirt with and some pavement to pound on my daily run. But I’ve already pounded seven miles of pavement and hit the gym, and I still haven’t shaken off this funk. It’s partly the meeting from yesterday—this body camera issue giving me the itchy feeling of work left unfinished, which I hate—but it’s partly something else.

Someone else.

The someone else being the reason I didn’t flirt with any baristas this morning or answer the texts I got last night from my latest crop of badge bunnies.

Livia Ward.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and now, a full twenty-four hours later, it’s like she’s still in front of me, blocking my vision of everything else.

I have to have her. Dinner, drinks, handcuffs—the Kelly Trio—and I need it all, the whole works, probably at least two or three times. Maybe then I can start thinking like a normal human being again.

Pop takes a sip of coffee and puts it next to his iPad mini, which is only used for mah jong and some game called Ant Smasher. Then he folds his knobbled hands over his belly and levels a cut-the-bullshit stare at me. I call it the Vietnam look. It’s a look that says, I was in a fucking war...you think you can pull one over on me?

“Son,” Pop says, still giving me the Vietnam look. “You’ve been sighing all morning. You sighed before the gym. You came back and sighed after the gym. Now you’re even sighing at the tiny houses, which don’t deserve any guff from you. Is it a woman? Did you meet a woman?”

“I meet lots of women, Pop.”

“I’m not talking about the women you pick up going quail hunting.”

“Quail hunting?”

Pop rolls his eyes. “Hunting for chicks! Finding a bird! I thought your generation was supposed to be smart!”

I blink at him.

“My point is, you don’t sigh over those women, ever. So this woman must be special.”

Special.

I think back to Livia’s thick hair, the color of coffee after a dash of cream; I think back to her skin, smooth and clear and the color of very light amber. I think of the way she faced down the swarms of teachers and me to protect her friend. And I think of those leggings, so tight and so flimsy—flimsy enough I could rip them apart with my bare hands to get to that perfect ass underneath…

Yeah, Livia is something special all right.

“Chase, my boy, you’re mooning again.”

“Okay, okay,” I admit. “There was a woman yesterday on a call. And she was beautiful and feisty and—” I search for the right word. “Fragile?”

Pop shakes his head at me. “Now, don’t you go saving some damsel just because you think she’s in distress. She probably doesn’t need saving, especially from the likes of you.”

The doorbell rings once, then four more times in rapid succession, as if someone is really excited about the opportunity to ring a doorbell. And I know exactly who that somebody is.

I swing my legs off the couch and stand as I ask Pop, “From the likes of me? I’m a police officer. Saving damsels is in the job description.”

“I don’t mean as a police officer. I mean as a man who likes to go quail hunting.”

I open the front door as I mumble, “I still don’t get what quail hunting means.”

My brother-in-law, Phil, stands in front of me holding one very sleepy toddler and the hand of one very bouncy four-year-old, who is almost certainly the manic doorbell ringer.

“Ah, ‘quail hunting,’” Phil says, dragging his sons over the threshold. “A beatnik slang term for dating, or more specifically, searching for women to date.”

“See? You’re the only one who doesn’t know what it means, Chase,” says Pop from the living room. My oldest nephew, Keon, runs right up to his chair and clambers on top of Pop’s belly. He immediately grabs for Pop’s iPad.

“Ant Smasher,” he demands seriously.

At the mention of Ant Smasher, my other nephew, Josiah, lifts up his head from his father’s shoulder. He squirms down silently, his binky firmly in his mouth and his stuffed cow in his fist, and he also makes his way over to Pop’s chair. Soon the two boys are arranged happily with the iPad balanced on Pop’s belly between them, and Pop is even happier snuggling with his great-grandsons and cradling their curly heads in his spotted and gnarled hands.

I turn back to Phil, holding my hand out for Josiah’s diaper bag. “Nice one with the quail hunting,” I tease.

He grins. “It’s cheating a bit, since both my sections this semester are on mid-century American lit. I’ve been reading nothing but beat poets for the last three weeks.”

Phil teaches American Lit at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Thursdays are the days that both he and my sister work evenings, which means Thursdays are my days to watch my nephews. Those boys are everything to me, feisty, dimpled, squirmy balls of everything, and I would do anything for them. Which doesn’t just mean being the best Uncle Chase I can be, but also the best Officer Kelly.

You see, Phil is black. Which means my nephews are black. Which means this has been an occasionally uncomfortable few years for our family, with me also being a police officer.

But I’m working on it, on learning and listening. Phil helped me write up my body camera proposal for the department, and I’ve gone out to his classes to talk about the nuts and bolts of policing. There’ve been hard parts, hard conversations, and there’s still so much I don’t know, but as a family, we keep trying. For Megan—my sister and Phil’s wife. For Keon and Josiah, who are currently squealing over the dead ants on the iPad and making Pop chuckle as they wrestle to smash the virtual bugs.

Phil gives Pop a handshake and then gives me a quick inventory of the diaper bag as we walk back to the door. “JoJo only wants grapes today, but if Megan asks, he had veggies and protein too. She’s on a food pyramid thing lately.”

“Got it. And if she catches me lying, I’m blaming it on you.”

Phil shakes his head. “Grown man’s afraid of his baby sister.”

“Have you met her? Of course I’m afraid of her.”

After a pause, Phil admits with a smile, “I’m afraid of her too.”

After my brother-in-law leaves, I stand for a minute in the doorway, thinking about my sister again. When Phil said her name, a little bubble of a thought had emerged...a bubble with dark eyes and leggings…

Livia said her teen was someone she worked with at the library—did that mean she worked at the library? Surely not—Megan has been working there for years, there’s no way I wouldn’t have noticed Livia before.

So maybe she’s actually a tutor? I know lots of local tutors met up with their students at the library. Or maybe a volunteer?

Megan will know, I decide. Megan knows every coworker, volunteer, and patron that enters her domain. And especially someone like Livia, all fired up and ready to fight with the police and the school and anyone else she has to.

I grin to myself, remembering her waving that sign in the air. I wonder if she’ll be that fired up in my bed—and there’s no doubt in my mind that she will be in my bed. I’m Chase Kelly, man. I always get the women I want...and I get them fast and easy. It’s time to shake off my funk about this body camera drama at the department and get my head back into the game.

My favorite game.

I grab my wallet and phone, glance in the mirror at my jeans and Captain America T-shirt, and then, like the sexy badass I am, shoulder the diaper bag and drag the Red Flyer wagon out of the garage. I walk back inside to my nephews, prepared to bribe them with promises of grapes and as many picture books as they can carry.

“Who wants to walk down to see Mommy at work?”