I'm being brave. Enjoy. Constructive feedback is appreciated mucho!

Disclaimer: You know none of this is mine, right?

There are moments of time in my life where I wonder if I am going to die. Between exploding cars worth more money than I'll make over the course of my entire career and death threats from psychos in love with the idea of my mutilated corpse on display at Stiva's Funeral Parlor, it's no wonder that thoughts of my demise cross my mind more frequently than not. I mean, one person can only survive escaping a burning building so many times before the cumulative smoke inhalation from all of those incidences results in some kind of asphyxiation.

My name is Stephanie Plum, and most days of the week I'm a bond enforcement agent. Today, I am not. I am sick; I just regurgitated cheese doodles all over my kitchen sink… and I think I'm going to die. I might even hope it a little bit.

I am either going to die from seeing the neon orange contents of my stomach spilled and splattered at the bottom of my sink, a mess that I know my inattentive hamster, Rex, is not going to help clean up, or from this horrific flu bug that has been plaguing my system for two days now.

Mother Nature started ringing a bile fire alarm that roused me from sleep Sunday morning and has had me confined to my apartment ever since. After spending all day yesterday on the floor of my bathroom, praying to porcelain gods for absolution and spending last night wrapped in my comforter, trying to feed the fever that wracked my goose-pimpled body, I woke up feeling almost normal this morning. I had a cup of coffee with one cube of sugar instead of four, just in case. In turn, I decided to reward myself for not throwing up the coffee with five cheese doodles. Needless to say, my stomach is still wussy, my head is still pounding, and my spirits are still low.

But the tortuous illness isn't the only woe I've focused on the last two days; with all absence of responsibility revoked due to illness, I've been allotted many hours to moping over the vast vacancies of success in my life.

My boyfriend, now introduced with an "ex" prefix, Joe Morelli and I broke up last weekend. It started in a different way, but for much the same reason it always did. I had gone to Joe's house for the same purpose I do any other time: Pino's meatball subs, cheap beer, a boring baseball game, and a couple body-trembling orgasms.

We had started the foreplay early through the first half of the game with errant comments and teasing touches during commercials, when somehow the subject changed from My boys miss you and I bet your girls miss me, too, Cupcake to You're a lazy, fat loser, Stephanie Plum.

Okay. So, to be fair those weren't Joe's exact words, per se. But it ended up there…. Sort of.

"Do you think it's weird for me to say that Pino's is getting a little old?" he said as we lounged against each other, Morelli's floppy-eared dog, Bob, at our feet.

"I don't think that's possible."

Morelli sighed and I could tell that we were going to get into an argument about something. The Morelli Sigh; It was the prelude to every disagreement we'd ever had.

"We get Pino's almost every time we're together, Stephanie."

And there it was. Stephanie.

I had gone from Cupcake to Stephanie in a matter of seconds. This was phase two of pre-arguing. Step three was my choosing to reply to anything he had to say with something that sounded like it would placate, even though we both knew it wouldn't.

"Then maybe you don't need to be seeing me so often."

"Aren't I supposed to see the woman I'm dating as often as I see you?" He leaned away from me.

"Not to the point of sickness, Joe!"

"I said I was sick of the food, not of you!" He stood over me.

"You might as well have said that!" I stood to meet him, inches from his face. "And whose fault is it you eat Pino's every night? It's not like I force feed you!"

Morelli scoffed and crossed his arms.

"What?" I shouted, allowing my Italian blood to fill me with as much hot, irrational anger that I was being faced with. "You blame me?"

Morelli shrugged his shoulders and looked away from me. "It's not like you give us a whole lot of options, Steph."

The argument turned then to my unconventional lifestyle and commitment issues. Morelli wanted to know that I was safe at home, ironing his underwear, changing diapers, and giving him new options for dinner. And having grown up in the Burg where I saw this as the norm, I just wanted options period.

Soon, I was sobbing in frustration and hurt, emotional exhaustion.

"What do you want from me, Morelli? How many times are we going to have this argument?"

Joe plopped down on the couch, as defeated as I was, swiping a hand over his face. "I love you, Steph. I want you to be able to tell me as easily as I do that you're in love with me. I want marry you and raise our children together, sooner rather than later. I want you safe… I just want this to work."

I nodded and crossed my arms over my chest, steading my breaths so I could speak. "But it isn't going to, is it?"

He looked at me long and hard before standing up and taking three slow steps to meet me. I felt myself relax into him.

We stayed like that for a long time before I pulled back to look at his face, his eyes red and brimming with unshed tears his pride would not allow to fall. He dipped his head down and I tipped my chin up and somewhere in the middle our lips met in a hot, unhurried kiss, tongues dipping deeply and retreating in easy tandem.

Clothes were peeled off in quiet leisure and needy hands roamed aimlessly across familiar stretches of bare skin. Eventually, Joe lowered himself onto the couch and I straddled his hips, my long curly hair curtaining our faces from the rest of the world. We were lost in each other during our lovemaking. The fingers of my right hand tangled into the sweat-drenched locks at the base of his neck while my left hand splayed across the eagle tattoo centered on his firm chest. He fought for purchase along my slickened back and sides as I slid up and down his length in a slow, tenuous rhythm, our mouths gasping openly against one another, in-taking and expelling the same musky air.

I felt hot pressure building at my core, trembling in desire as Joe, too, began to quake beneath me. We were close.

Our eyes caught and I felt tears chilling their way down my cheeks, a sight that I was stunned to find had been being mirrored in the face of my lover. They fell unrestrained, falling to our bodies, but not between.

The burning stare between us was not broken until we were suddenly shuddering against our shared climax, violent pleasure quivering through our bodies. I couldn't help but cry out, and found similar sounds of desperate satisfaction pouring from his lips as well.

We leaned heavily against one another, panting into each other's necks as we waited for the residual shivers to calm. Eventually, when I thought I could stand without toppling over, I raised myself off of him, both of us sighing as he slid out of me. I leaned forward and brushed the damp curls from his forehead, planting a hard kiss against his sweat-soaked brow.

It was the final goodbye of a relationship we both wanted, but could never have had.

I found irony in the fact that the last time we would ever be together was the first time we'd ever finished anything on the same fucking page.

I sighed deeply and shut the sink.

I loved Morelli; I think in some untouchable recess of my mind I always had. And I probably always would. But sometimes despite how much you want something, you aren't supposed to have it. In the end, Morelli had been a lot like birthday cake. I craved and indulged myself more often than I should have, and as a result I had a tiny pudge of tummy over the top of my jeans and a broken heart.

I made my way to the bathroom to shower off the barf cooties and to brush the acidic aftertaste from my tongue.

The water ran cool far too soon and while brushing my teeth I made a mental note to burn my toothbrush and invest 87 cents into a replacement.

I slipped on a pair of light blue boyshorts and an oversized tee shirt I'd recently commandeered from a tall, dark, and dangerous man with a lifestyle similar to that of Robin Hood, including the Merry Men but minus the green tights.

Ranger, my mind sighed.

If Morelli was birthday cake then Ranger was dark chocolate, 70% cocoa.

Ricardo Carlos Manoso, known as Ranger since dropping out of college and enrolling in the military, had also been a subject that my mind had allowed itself to obsess over the last few days.

See, Ranger started out as a mentor, whose gun I wanted to shoot and whose biceps out girthed my thighs. Then we had somehow become friends whom shared a palpable sexual tension that was only fueled by our steamy forbidden tongue wrestling competitions behind the bonds office.

And then what was supposed to only last one night, under pretense of a deal, we shared a bed as lovers. But then it happened again, and a couple more agains, almost every time Joe and I were on one of our common "breaks". It wasn't until a psycho delivered steaming bullets into his chest, that I realized I was sorely in love with him. And long before that realization, I knew that allotting him that much power over my emotions would only allow for a constant stream of pain and heartache to cascade into my world and drown me.

Ranger could be my mentor, and my friend, and my sometimes lover. But Ranger is the CEO of a top preforming security institution, with a broad definition of the word "security". He recruits top-notch men with concrete criminal records and of questionable sanity because he believes in second chances and in everyone's inner Army Ranger. He only pursues the highest bonds my boss and cousin, Vinnie, writes because he's the biggest, baddest bounty hunter in the whole damn state, probably the world. Ranger belongs to his job, to putting away the scum of the earth, and to protecting the innocent. He belongs to his men, any of which would gladly lay down their life in order to ensure he continues breathing. Ranger belongs to a whole slew of people, which is why he can never belong to me.

As of late, he's been MIA, saving the world… again. He has been gone for more than three weeks now. I haven't heard from him, and don't expect to until he returns. He hadn't stopped by before he left, but had called with his usual, "Babe, I have a plane to catch. Call Tank if you need anything" spiel.

And I hadn't needed anything that required merry man assistance or Batman resources, so I'd kept to a basic routine of bounty hunting, always stopping by the bond's office before making my way into the world to round up slippery Burg scum.

Well, until my immune system shut down and decided to let my body die a slow, painful, cheese doodle-free death.

I hadn't checked my phone since I'd called into work the day before and decided it was probably time to assure everyone that I was still alive.

I had eight missed calls and three voice messages. The first message was from my mother.

"Stephanie. This is your mother. Why didn't you answer your phone? Dinner is at 6 o'clock on Saturday. Your sister is bringing the girls and Albert. You should bring Joseph."

The second was from Vinnie's bond receptionist, Connie. "Hey, Steph. Wanted to see how you were feeling. Give me a call at the office if you're up to it."

The third was from my best friend, Lula, ex-ho, part-time filer for the bond's office and sometimes side-kick bounty hunter to yours truly. "Where have you been? Connie says you're sick. You better stay right on home if you're sick. Being around sickness gives me the runs. And how am I supposed to be filing papers when I got the runs? You stay home and sneeze all them germs out before you think about coming back to the office. If you need anything, like chicken or doughnuts or some of that cough syrup that makes you real sleepy, you can call Tank on account of he's my boyfriend and he works for Ranger, so he has to listen to two people who like you, and he can't get sick either on account of Merry Men can't get sick, or even the runs, I think. "

Tank is Ranger's second in command, currently first in command until Ranger's return, of the Rangeman of Trenton, the Merry Men. Tank and Lula have been steadily dating for five months now. By steadily dating, I mean Lula talks, Tank listens, and then they get down to dirty business.

The other five missed calls were from a number that I didn't recognize. I made an executive decision to postpone calls that I should have made and give in to my curiosity about the stranger number. Plus, I figured that since my brain was already pounding itself against my skull and my illness was causing me to have exceptionally ill-flavored thoughts, I should postpone any conversation with my mother about Joe or with Lula about "the runs".

I plopped on my bed and held the phone up to my ear while it rang. After a fourth ring the line connected, but no greeting was uttered.

"Hello?" I said into the receiver.

I heard nothing. No creepy breathing. No shuffling. Just silence.

"Hel-"

And there was an explosion.