I take a quick shower in my tiny bathroom, noticing a small area of rust at the base of the faucet. Fingering it lightly, I add a mental note to get that fixed when I get back. So many plans to update this house, yet I keep putting it off. I suppose that’s because of my continued hope I’ll get transferred to the BRIU, and that I’ll be buying another house in Quantico, Virginia.
After donning a clean pair of underwear and an old Old Miss Law School t-shirt—a product of a short but failed love affair with a fellow FBI agent who also had graduated from law school there—I park myself on my faded brown couch with my beer and pull up the Contact list on my iPhone. A tap of my thumb to the screen and I’m dialing Kyle’s cell.
“What’s up, LPA?” Kyle says gruffly into the phone after the second ring.
LPA stands for Little Pain in the Ass. A bigger brother’s prerogative, I guess.
“Not much, BPA,” I say with a grin as I kick my bare feet up on the coffee table. And yeah… that stands for Big Pain in the Ass.
Kyle and I are fairly close, despite the physical distance that separates us. Strangely, I haven’t told Kyle yet that David and I are no longer together. Maybe I’m hoping David will have a change of mind, or maybe I’m scared that the minute I tell Kyle, it will be real. Regardless, I have more important things with him to discuss right now, so my broken engagement will have to remain on the back burner.
“Catch any bad guys today?” he asks. I can hear ESPN’s Sports Center on in the background, and I can envision Kyle sitting on his couch with a beer in his hand as well, booted feet kicked up on the coffee table, alone in his bachelor pad. He’s three years older than me at age thirty and in many ways, we are eerily similar.
In other ways, not so much.
Kyle works as a mechanic for a motorcycle shop in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He moved out there from our small town of Little River, Alabama when he graduated from high school. We had moved to Little River from Washington, D.C. after Dad died to be nearer to my mom’s family, and it’s all I ever really knew. I loved it and missed it, but Kyle? Not so much. He never looked back after he left. He’s a biker through and through and belongs to a pretty tight-knit motorcycle club out there, and the way he tells it, they are just as much his family as I am.
Regardless of his close connections out in Wyoming, Kyle would never turn his back on me and would come running if he was needed. Just three weeks prior to my graduation, my mother died from a brain aneurysm and I was left all alone. That is, until my BPA came home and stayed with me for a few weeks, nursing me through my heartache and bitterness at being left fully parentless. I obviously don’t remember my father, and neither does Kyle for that matter, but both of us were extremely close to our mom. Kyle’s visits back home may have been infrequent and brief, but he talked to Mom and me every week on the phone.
After I graduated high school, Kyle took back off to Wyoming and I puttered around my mom’s house all summer until college started for me in the fall. We still stayed in close contact although we didn’t see each other often. Kyle had his life and I had mine, and my goals were set. I was going to be an FBI agent like my dad and the first step was to graduate college. The second was to graduate law school. Third was to become a special agent.
I accomplished those goals but not without tremendously hard work. With mom dead and unable to help with my tuition, I started dancing halfway through my freshman year of college at UVA. I had to brave lecherous touching from drunk men who wanted to put dollar bills in my panties and knowing smirks from some of my classmates who ventured into the strip club where I worked, stunned to see me on stage. Didn’t matter to me though. I looked right through their judgment, turned my nose up at their requests for dates, and kept repeating my goals.
College.
Law School.
FBI.
“Sis… you there?” Kyle says into the phone, and I blink my eyes.
“Yeah… sorry… went down memory lane for a moment,” I tell him sheepishly.
“Thinking about Mom?” he asks gently, and I smile to myself. Kyle is a big dude… has long hair, tats, and most people think he’s pretty scary. I think he’s a big teddy bear.
“Yeah… just thinking about how you came back home after Mom died so I wouldn’t be alone.”
“Stop being such an LPA,” he fake sneers into the phone. “You’re going to make me cry.”
“Dork,” I tell him fondly.
“So why did you call?” he asks. “I just talked to you day before yesterday.”
Absently fingering a lock of my blonde hair, I tell him, “I’m going to North Carolina on an assignment. It’s undercover, and we won’t be able to contact each other. If anything happens and you need to get word to me, you need to contact my SAC, Dale Lambert. I’ll text you his info.”
“What’s the case about?”
“You know I can’t tell you that,” I admonish gently.
“Then why you? Why are they sending an agent from Pittsburgh to North Carolina?”
It’s classified information but even if I could tell him, I wouldn’t. I’m not about to divulge to my older brother that I stripped my way to a higher education, therefore I’m the perfect candidate. He’d never understand and then feel guilty as shit that he couldn’t help contribute to my education.
“Top secret,” I tell him.
He sighs in frustration, and I can just imagine him running his hand through his own long, blond hair. “For how long?”