Rude Awakenings: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 2)

Chapter Forty-Three: Al, Tuesday

In the taxi back home, Al stared at his wife as if she might disappear if he took his eyes off her.

"Al," she said. "I'm not going anywhere, and you're kind of creeping me out."

"Sorry," he said. "I really was afraid I'd never see you again, you or Joe."

She looked at him a moment more before staring ahead. "If something happened to me and Joe, would you..."

Al felt a tightening in his chest. "Would I what?"

"Would you go on?"

Al didn't think that was what she was originally going to ask. "I couldn't," he said.

"Of course you could," she said. "You'd have to. You have people who depend on you. Your mother, your other friends and their kids."

"I'm only an uncle in name. They have their own families to look after them."

She turned back to him and put a hand on his face. "I know you love me, have loved me since we were kids, and I feel so lucky to have your love, and I love you just as much, but I couldn't die in peace if I knew you couldn't go on without me." She tapped his face so hard it was almost a slap. "I'd come back and haunt you until the end of your days."

"Ow. And I'd wake up to your ghost every morning and say goodnight to it every night, and count myself lucky."

She growled in frustration and said, "You're so fucking weird!"

"How about we stop talking about death, then, and just be glad you're still alive."

She nodded and wiped a tear from her eye. "It wasn't a foregone conclusion there for a while, I can tell you that."

He kissed the other tears on her cheeks and said, "What else are you comfortable telling me?"

She flinched and looked to the taxi driver, whose eyes flicked to them in the rearview mirror more often than they should have for safe driving. "Not here," she said sotto voce.

They rode in silence as the taxi crossed the Cambie Street Bridge and made its way into the downtown core. Al paid the driver when he dropped them off at their building, feeling lucky that his card still worked; when they'd married, they'd joined their accounts, an act of great optimism on both their parts, especially Al's, who'd known very well the financial troubles Rachel had when they'd reunited, and now that Rachel's purse was stolen, there was every possibility that whoever stole it maxed out their account. It occurred to him only now that he should have called his credit card company to track any expenses that were made in the time since Rachel left Saturday night, and try to find her that way. Then again, that might have led him to the robbers, not to Rachel and Joe. Hopefully the police would use that method to find and arrest whoever was responsible for beating up Joe like that.

Samson met them at the door, yowling his head off. "Oh, shit, he must be starving," he said, remembering the last time he'd fed him was yesterday afternoon. It was now almost a day later.

Rachel, to his surprise, scooped him up and pressed her face into his fur. "Oh, sweet boy," she said, kissing him repeatedly. "I thought I'd never see you again."

Samson's purr seemed to shake the room. He never let anyone pick him up. He came to you if he wanted affection. It had to be his idea. Once again, though, Rachel upended everything Al thought he knew about his own cat, and he had no idea she felt this way about him; he thought she just tolerated him and gave him lap time when he wanted it, but he knew she also got pissed when he scratched something of hers, and hated being woken by his need for his morning feeding. This... love... she was displaying knocked him off balance, and it made him wonder if it was being close to death that made her look at everything in her life in a new light, or if he'd misjudged how much she felt for Samson all along.