Just Good Friends (Cheap Thrills #5) - Mary B. Moore Page 0,19

beside me. It looked like a glass jellyfish covered by a dome, and every time I blinked, a flash of light would appear in a different tentacle.

Blink—light flash.

Blink again—light flash.

It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

I was communicating with jellyfish like I was their queen.

Coolest shit ever.

Chapter Five

Garrett

It’d been five days since the accident, and I’d been on desk duty since while my shoulder healed. I was bored out of my tiny little brain.

Homelife was now a new adventure that I enjoyed a helluva lot, though, with Zuri and me swapping nights between my house and hers and just getting to spend time with her relaxing.

Every time she winced or groaned in pain, I felt guilt of unimaginable levels even though she told me to “cut that shit out” and that accidents happened.

The morning after we’d unpacked her, she’d woken up and immediately started talking about a dream she’d had about how she could talk to jellyfish now and how it was like in the movie Abyss. When I’d picked up the glass jellyfish I’d had made for her, which had lights that pulsed in each tentacle randomly, she’d thought it was awesome and made more sense than some sort of Close Encounter type thing with them.

Then she’d taken it out of the display box, turned it upside down, and spent a good twenty minutes trying to find its butt holes.

She’d also put the hoop with the jellyfish charm in her ear, and so far, it hadn’t got caught on anything. I didn’t understand that, but she seemed relieved about it, so that was good.

They were supposed to be kind of meaningful joke-type presents, but the way she stared at both of them made me feel like I’d hit the nail on the head big time.

I’d developed some new skills over the last five days, too. I could now wash a woman’s hair over the side of a bath, spray shit in it that stopped it from getting knots, brush it without making her scream, and put it in a ponytail.

See, Zuri couldn’t use her left hand to do anything, so she swore a lot instead of asking for help. That’s how the brushing and ponytail things had been added to me washing her hair.

Last night, I’d come home early just in time to hear her yelling from the bathroom. I’d panicked, thinking she’d fallen or something, but when I’d gotten to the door, I discovered that the reason for it was because she had to wipe herself with the wrong hand. When she’d opened the door and seen me leaning against the wall waiting for her, she’d turned bright red and threatened me with pain if I ever told anyone.

I hadn’t… yet. I’d made sure she knew I wasn’t helping her with that issue, though.

“Meeting,” DB yelled, then walked over to the door that led to the back of the station.

Getting up, I followed him, hearing the others doing the same behind me. We’d known there was a meeting happening today, but he’d kept quiet on what it was about, so I was intrigued.

Opening the door to the hallway, he motioned for us to go through while he held it open.

Stopping about ten feet in, I waited for him to close the door and join us.

“Okay, I know this is strange, but with shit going on just now, I wanted us to discuss how Piersville Police Department operates. You’ll think you know all of it anyway, but this is important for me, you, and the rest of the town to know,” he told us as he moved over to the door to the first conference room.

Walking in behind him, we all sat down at the table and waited. “As you know, we’ve expanded the building. With the increase in the population and size of Piersville, we have to keep up and have enough facilities available just in case,” he said, looking at us all one by one. “We also have an official dedicated safe room now.”

I knew that citizens had come to DB to sit securely in one of the cells on some occasions, but hearing one was dedicated to them?

“Uh,” one of the newer guys, Carter, murmured. “A dedicated safe room? What for?”

Resting his ass on the corner of the table at the top of the room, DB looked at us all with a grim expression. “As you know, Jarrod Klein was attacked last year by a man who was beating his woman in a bar. Jarrod