I spread my legs open, standing shoulder width apart. Feeling the air fill my lungs, I arched my back and pushed my ass into a squat. I felt his hands clutch around my waist. “That’s good. Real good.”

“Are you ready for it?” I asked him.

I heard him swallow before responding. “Go for it, tiger.”

As soon as my fingers pressed against the trigger, everything slowed down for me. Calm and still, I focused on the target. The kickback of the gun was substantial, a different feeling than I had been used to. Usually, I could shoot, but on this day, I couldn’t concentrate.

Walking over to the soda machine with a shit-staining grin on his face, officer Derrick Fulton let out a chuckle and dropped a few quarters into the coin slot. Cocking his head in my direction, he said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. This is why we’re here. To practice.”

“You’re distracting me,” I snapped. It was the guy’s first day at our station, and he was already going out of his way to fuck with me. Even if I could believe it, I wasn’t going to accept it.

“You’re too worked up. I need you to take a break,” he said, eyeing the bench nearby.

“Bullshit,” I said.

I turned to face the target, took aim, and fired two more rounds, careful and deliberate. When I lowered the pistol, I saw the clean sheet of paper staring back at me.

Derrick Fulton pointed at the bench. “Sit.”

Reluctantly, I followed his orders and sat down next to him. Holding a perspiring can in front of my face, Derrick asked, “Want one?”

“No thanks. I’m not that thirsty,” I muttered. I wasn’t thrilled to be partnered with him on this case.

Shrugging, he wiped his glistening forehead with the bottom of his shirt and sighed. “You know, sometimes, you just need to take a second to relax,” he said.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Derrick slumped against the bench, gut pressing against the midsection his shirt. There was a trying coldness to him, a vibe that seemed to suggest he didn’t care about anyone or anything, except his orders.

I was a police officer, but that didn’t mean I was willfully ignorant. I knew better than to be somebody’s lapdog. Getting partnered with Fulton could only mean one thing: Danger.

“Pottersville,” he said.

The town name came out of nowhere, taking me off guard. I knew the name only because I had driven up to Montreal a few times. It was a small town nearby, but I never thought it was that interesting.

“What?”

“That’s where I want to end up. Pottersville, over by Schroon Lake. Beautiful area,” he said.

“Sounds great, Fulton,” I said.

An awkward silence followed my words. Derrick turned to look at me. “You pissed I got assigned to your unit?”

I avoided eye contact with him, glancing back at the target every few seconds. I missed my old partner, David. He understood me, and the whole department was better off because of our teamwork.

“Did David say something?” I asked.

“No, but the chief told me you two were a force. It doesn’t make you wonder why he’d split up the dream team?” he asked.

With David, there were no questions of his loyalty to the department. He backed me up when I needed it too. Clearing up of the rumors about me, David made it known that he didn’t care if I was gay, straight, or anything in between. Despite putting his own ass in danger of ridicule, he did it because we were partners.

But good cops never last as long as the shitty ones. They put themselves on the line, over and over again. For what? When we found that opioid haven in the meatpacking district, the thirty men that were guarding the facility had nothing left to lose. They unloaded on us, and David was eventually blindsided.

“The pills,” Derrick muttered. “They’re no good. And look, I know he was injured on the job—”

I understood what he was alluding to, but David wasn’t a drug addict. He had been severely injured on the job, forced to spend the year in and out of hospital beds. Anybody and their mothers would have taken the pills their doctor prescribed them.

“Attacked. He was attacked,” I said.

Derrick shifted his weight against the bench and slumped over. “Right. Attacked,” he said. “You both did your job, but sometimes, you lose partners. It’s a part of the job. Leave the emotions out of it and move forward, officer.”

Feeling my temper start to rise, I bit the edge of my tongue and held my breath. Of course, once he got me going, I couldn’t hold back from saying something. David wasn’t weak. He was recovering.

“They gutted him, Fulton. You weren’t there. I waited with him for the ten long minutes it took the ambulances to get there. He bled out onto my hands,” I said.

I watched my friend, my partner, and a good cop hang on the brink of death.

“I think the chief is just worried about a potential problem. Opiates are no small cookie. They hook a lot of good people,” Derrick said. “It’s just a few months vacation. He still has a job.”

In the basements, sorting the files. What a heroic life. “Right.”

“Our job is to find the narcotics kingpins that run the blocks in the south. What you found with David was big, and now we have all the answers we need. I need to know you can handle this,” he said.

I couldn’t figure out why Derrick was throwing David under the bus without even knowing the guy. It was inconceivable to me, but I had to drop the subject before I started throwing punches.

“There’s more on my mind than you taking David’s position,” I said.

“Look, if this is about—”

“It’s not,” I said. “I’m a good shot, and I know how to do my job. I can hit a damn target, Derrick.”

As I blinked my eyes, I saw myself in Sawyer’s room. The darkness shrouded his masculine body, but the slivers of light that came through the cracks in the door revealed more than I could handle. I could still feel the warmth of his tongue sliding against me, sending shivers throughout my body.

I missed him.

It was a hard truth to accept. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sawyer, but we lived two very different lives. He was a hip bartender who proudly put his kinks on display. I was an officer of the law, and to a lot of guys at the station, that meant walking a straight and narrow path.

Derrick popped open his soda and took a long sip. Sighing from the carbonation bubbling against the roof of his mouth, he scooted forward. “Here’s what I want you to do. Go home. Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll come back here tomorrow, and you’ll show that target who’s boss. Okay, pal?”

I nodded in acknowledgment, but I’d have been lying if I said I was happy about it. If I didn’t go, the chief would start asking questions, and I sure as hell didn’t want to stay in his radar of all things.

“I have to take a piss. You go on ahead,” I said.

Derrick patted my shoulder. Who did this guy think he was, my father? Wincing, I issued a quick goodbye. I waited until I saw him leave the building before I turned back to face the target.

As soon as the door closed, I pressed my thumb against the safety and aimed. “Fuck off, Derrick,” I whispered. Firing one round, I barely felt the kickback. As soon as I lowered the weapon, I saw the hole.

Bulls-eye.

Walking out of the building, I got in my car. I pulled out my phone and held it in the palm of my hand, staring at the bright screen. I wanted to talk to Sawyer, but he had been avoiding me for a while now.

When he didn’t call me to do more security work this month, I knew he thought the worst of me. He could never understand what it was like to be a city cop. That was the biggest reason why a relationship would never work out.

Closing my eyes, I tried to calm myself down. I whispered, “It’s going to be okay,” before opening my eyes again. I could do this. I was strong enough.

When I got home, I set a case of beers on the counter. My father was sitting in the living room, scrolling through channels on the old television set. When he saw me, he took off his glasses and muted the noise.

“You’re home late.”

I turned around to face my father who was shrouded in darkness. “Chief called me into his office. He wanted to discuss the case,” I lied.

“Oh?” Standing up, my father made his way toward the case of beer. He was a tall and rough man, with traditional sensibilities. For decades, he got to live his dream of being a cop, but he never got to rise in the ranks. When he injured his leg in the line of duty, he was forced to retire. The dreams then fell to me.

My father eyed me, but his hands were fumbling to grab a beer bottle from the box. When his fingers found the right one, he pulled it out and smiled. “So? You’re finally getting promoted. It’s about time.”

I lowered my head and sat down, grabbing a beer of my own, now my third of the night. I’d been lying about a possible promotion to my father for a long time now because I knew it’s what made him happy. When we talked about other things, he didn’t have the same vibrancy or energy in his responses.

I shifted back and looked down at the counter. “Well, I’m not sure. They assigned me a new partner. Chief said it was because of my strong work ethic,” I said.

“You aren’t getting a promotion,” my father said. It wasn’t a question, but what came after was. “Is that what you came to tell me? It almost seems like you’re happy about it too. Given what you’ve done for them, you ought to cause a scene.”

No, I wasn’t getting a promotion. I didn’t want to give in to my father’s wishes, but he was right. David and I both did a lot for the department that day. The stash house we found was huge, and it secured us some pretty decent headlines.

But the chief thought it best to kick David off of the team and reward me with a new partner. “Keep doing a good job,” chief Flegenheimer said.

“I’m sure it’ll happen sooner or later,” I said. “But for now, I’m going to bed.”

My father nodded, but his silence only expanded my guilt. I just wanted to prove to him, to the entire world that I was as capable as I thought I was.

“Do try to do better, son.”

I walked into my room and calmly shut the door. In the dark recesses of my room, I was safe from my father’s criticisms, but it wasn’t a time to run away.

With no support system around me in sight, I only had one man that I could speak to about my problems. That man was Sawyer. Calling him, I anxiously waited to hear his deep voice.

There was no answer.