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Elio’s eyes snap up to mine. “Wait. Can I come?”
“No.”
He groans. “Can you stop hiding me like I’m some sickly street urchin now that everyone’s seen me coughing my lungs up?”
“Street urchin?” I pass a hand down my face to hide my groan. “Where did you learn that?”
“School,” he says flatly.
I roll my eyes. “I’m not hiding you. It’s just not take-your-nosy-preteen-to-work day. That’s next month.”
“Amazing,” he says. “I’ll pack a change of clothes in case they want to take me in the truck and I get smoke all over myself.”
I turn and leave before I say something I regret and make the short drive to the station.
It’s well past sunset, so the windows are shining brightly against the backdrop of the dark sky, and it feels a bit like coming home. At least, it feels more like that here than it does my apartment. I haven’t set foot there since Elio was released from the hospital, and I don’t want to go back until I know that Neal’s been served and we have a court date.
And even then, all I really want to do is wait out my lease so I can move and start fresh. Somewhere Neal has never been. Somewhere the memories aren’t tainted.
Taking a deep breath, I shove all that to the side and park beside North’s truck. I can see his crow nestled in the back on a pile of blankets, and I watch him for a moment before turning away and heading to the side door. My badge beeps loudly, then the lock clicks, and I let myself in.
The station is fairly quiet. All the trucks are in the bay, and from what I could see of the parking lot, the EMT station isn’t busy either. I wonder how Logan is faring, and I make a mental note to go say hi to him the second I get a chance.
For now, I head through the common room and up the stairs to Camilo’s office, where I find him on his couch with his feet up on the arm, tossing a hacky sack in the air and catching it.
He glances over when I knock, and he smiles. “Hey. Thanks for coming by. I hope I didn’t fuck up your evening.”
“Nah. Dinner at my parents’, where my kid was giving me shit for existing.”
He laughs softly. “Is it weird that I miss those days?”
Camilo’s daughter is going to be off to college soon, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ll have that experience with Elio. Right now, we still don’t know how far his SMA is going to progress and if the treatments he’s on right now are going to help him retain some of his upper mobility.
“I’m looking forward to missing it instead of being in the thick of it,” I tell him.
He snorts. “Fair enough. Anyway, you’re welcome to use my computer to take a look at everything.”
I prefer that. The other office smells like gym socks and old burrito farts, and I’m really not in the mood for dude-stench right now. I walk over and sit in his very comfortable chair and get to work trying to fix whatever Easton fucked up.
“Can we install a parental lock?” I say as I begin to load up the audit logs. “So about what time did this massive fuckup occur?”
“Oh, uh…” Camilo rolls to the side and grabs his phone off the floor and begins to scroll. “He started panic-texting me around six forty-five.”
It’s easy enough to find what time the cron job fired off, and luckily, it was half an hour before that. It takes me minutes to restore everything to what it was, then restart the computer to make sure it properly loaded.
“Done.”
Camilo sits up. “Wait. Seriously?”
“It wasn’t that hard.”
“Easton was literally snot-crying. He thought he broke everything.”
“I’m sure,” I say flatly. “But I made sure we have plenty of ways to back up everything once I realized what a goddamn disaster he can be.”
Camilo’s face goes a little soft. “He’s not that bad.” When I quirk a brow, he sighs. “Okay, maybe he is. But he doesn’t mean to be.”
“I know.” I want to argue, but I can’t. Easton has been a weird, steady rock in this choppy sea of bullshit, and I’m realizing I don’t want to hate him the way I used to. Which does make me feel off-kilter because detesting him was the one thing I could count on. It made wanting him and maybe even being half in love with him easier to bear.
