Peace.

It was nearly enough to bring tears to my eyes.

My cheek rested on Lia’s abdomen, and I felt her hand against the back of my head, cradling me to her body.  I had my arms wrapped around her center, and I held her close against my chest as I lay beside her on the small bed that reminded me too much of the one in the cabin.

I didn’t move.  I only inhaled deeply to embrace the scent of her.  It was her own, sweet fragrance combined with the smell of our activity from the night before.  I curled my fingers around her hip, touched my nose to the skin against her belly, and I inhaled again.  My fingers reached up to briefly touch the quarter on its chain around her neck.  I had to pee pretty badly, but it wasn’t worth disconnecting myself from her flesh, so I didn’t.

I don’t know how long I stayed that way, eyes closed and just reveling in the sensations around me.  At some point, Lia’s fingers twitched, then slowly started massaging my head, which caused me to moan out load.

Lia’s soft laugh filled my ears.

“You like that?”

“Mmmhmm,” I replied as I snuggled against her stomach and tightened my grip on her.  “Feels good.”

She kept it up, slowly dragging her fingertips from the top of my head, through my hair, and down to the back of my neck before she started all over again.  I lifted my head and shifted up until I was face to face with her and wrapped both arms around her shoulders to hold her against me.  Lia’s hand stroked my cheek, and I watched her eyes as she gently traced the veins in my arms.

“I could wake up like this every day,” I said.

“Me, too.  You’re gonna have to let me up, though.”

“Why?” I protested.  “I don’t want to.”

“I have to go to the bathroom!” Lia laughed.

“So do I.”

“Well, this time would be a lot worse of a wet spot than what I put up with last night, so you better move.”

Something about the crudeness of the remark amused me to no end.

“Come right back,” I ordered as I held in a laugh.

“Yes, sir,” she responded with a grin that made my cock twitch.  “Now let go.”

I sighed but rolled away from her so she could get up.  True to her word, she curled right back up with me when she returned and started to run her hands up and down my arms again as I tucked my head against her chest.  I dozed off briefly, and when I woke, she was propped up on an elbow and just looking at her fingers wrapped around my bicep.

“What?” I questioned.

Lia smiled and looked away as her cheeks tinged with flowing blood.

“Nothing,” she said softly.

“Tell me.”

Her eyes met mine again.

“I just…I feel so safe with you, like nothing could ever happen to me as long as I was with you.”

I wanted it to be true so much.  Maybe I went ahead and believed it on some level.  After pondering a moment, I leaned back and repositioned myself so I was lying next to her and looking up at her face.

“What is this?” I asked tentatively.

“What is what?”  Lia stifled a yawn with her hand and then turned her head back toward mine.

“This,” I said as I tightened my grip and held her body more firmly against my own.  “Us.  What are we?”

She eyed me for a moment.

“What do you want this to be?” she asked quietly.

I thought about it for a minute, but I really wasn’t sure how to answer.  Whatever this was, it was foreign to me.  I didn’t know what to call it.

“What are my options?”

Lia raised both eyebrows at me and tilted her head a bit.  I only shrugged in response, so she tapped her finger against her bottom lip as she answered me.

“Well, you could buy me a giant diamond and be my fiancé.”  Lia dropped her finger down and tapped her chin instead.  “Or we could just go to Vegas and have Elvis or maybe Darth Vader marry us.  If commitment isn’t your thing, we could just be fuck-buddies.”

She turned her eyes back to me and smiled softly as I raised my eyebrow at her.

“Then again, maybe we should just try the boyfriend-girlfriend thing for now and see what happens,” she suggested.

“It seems a little more…realistic than the other ones,” I admitted.  I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes.  “I’ve never done this shit before.”

“What?  Dated?”

“Have we been on a date?”

“I guess not.”  She eyed me with a cynical gaze.  “What do you mean, then?”

I didn’t even know what I meant, which was part of the problem.

“I’ve never put a label on a…a relationship,” I said.  “I don’t even know what that means—boyfriend.  Should I go get flowers and chocolates now?”

“That doesn’t seem your style,” Lia snickered.  “Have you ever bought a girl flowers before?”

I licked my lips and considered the daffodils I had yanked out of a window box for Bridgett.  Since they were neither bought nor ever delivered to her, I had an honest answer.

“Never bought a girl flowers.  Bought a few other things, I guess.”

“Such as?”

“Is this normal girlfriend-boyfriend conversation,” I asked, “me telling you what I’ve bought for other chicks?  What did William get you for your last birthday?”

Lia’s throat bobbed up and down as she looked away from me.

“Fine, you made your point.”

The tension in her face and her refusal to look at me told me enough.

“I must be a boyfriend,” I said.  “I’m already pissing you off.”

She looked back at me, and her face relaxed as she cracked a smile.

“That isn’t a requirement,” she said, “just in case you were wondering.”

“Duly noted.  All things considered, though, I’ll likely piss you off again.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“I just want to know more about you,” she said.  “I still want to know what happened to you.”

I shook my head.

“I need to get to my apartment,” I said.  “You also need to get your shit out of this little hellhole.”

“It’s not that bad,” she said as she looked around.

“Yes, it is.”  I untangled my limbs from her body and stood up to take a piss and pull my clothes on.  I shifted a little bit in the pants—they were starting to get a little rough on my ass from the lack of clean underwear.  I definitely needed to get to my place for supplies.

Odin followed me into the bathroom and sat there as I dressed, wagging his tail with his bone hanging part way out of his mouth.  I grabbed it, ordered him to drop, and then tossed it to the other side of the room.

“I can’t really afford anything else at the moment.”  I glanced in Lia’s direction and watched her pull her shirt on over her head.  “I haven’t even found a job here yet.”

“You don’t need one,” I countered.  I grabbed the bone back from Odin and threw it again.

“Of course I do,” she said.  “I only have enough to cover rent and utilities for another month or so.”

“You don’t need any more.”  I was dismissive in my tone but didn’t want to come right out and tell her just how much money I had stashed away in various places.

“Well, then I guess I’ll be staying in this hellhole.”

I watched her for a moment, trying to judge her mood.  She certainly sounded pissy, but her posture was casual.

“I’ll take care of you,” I finally said.

“Evan, you just got out of jail, and we don’t even know when your hearing will be or anything yet.”

“There won’t be one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I cupped her face in my hands, placed my lips against hers, and kissed her deeply.

“I’m going to take care of it all,” I promised.  “Then we’re going to leave Chicago altogether.”

“And go where?”

“I have a few options.”

“You’re being very vague.”

“Yep.”

“Evan!”  She took a step back from me and placed her hands on her hips.

“Lia,” I mocked back.  I smiled warmly to try to break the building tension.  “I can explain more later.  Right now, I just need to get back to my apartment and assess the damage.”

With minimal additional protest, we collected Odin and his stuff, and I called a taxi from Lia’s phone.

“That’s going to be expensive,” Lia remarked.

“No one’s going to let him on a bus,” I said, nodding toward the dog.  “A big tip goes a long way with a taxi driver.”

“I don’t have that much cash.”

“We’ll take care of it when we get back to my place.”

When we did get there, the apartment was a disaster.

The scene was almost enough to remind me of a warzone, but not quite.  There was still crime tape up on the door, but I tore it away and shoved the door open to reveal most everything I owned spewed out all over the floor.

Papers, boxes, even dishes and shit from the cabinets in the kitchen were lying all over the floor, the counters, and the dining room table.  My desk drawers were all pulled out, and papers were everywhere.  All the cords and shit for my laptop were there in a heap, but the machine itself was gone.

“Wow.” Lia breathed out the word with a huff of air.  “This is a mess.”

“I’m going to guess the housekeeper hasn’t been by recently,” I joked.  Nothing about it was funny to me, but I didn’t want her to see just how irate I was.  I was pretty particular about my place and my things.  Seeing them just…everywhere was increasing my blood pressure by the minute.  I wondered what was missing besides the laptop.

The back of the closet in my bedroom, which should have contained my firearms and a couple duffel bags filled with around eighty grand in cash was empty.

“Fuckers,” I mumbled as I moved over to my dresser.  All the drawers had been pulled out and dumped, but no one noticed the envelope secured to the underside of the dresser’s top.  I pulled a few bills out of it, ran down to pay off the cab driver, and then returned to check out the rest of the mess.