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"Go home, Jim." There's command in Simon's rasping voice, command and something more (something Jim carefully doesn't notice).
If there's one thing the Army teaches you, it's how to keep your spine straight under fire. "I'm fine, sir," Jim says. He knows he nails the respectful yet confident tone that always got the brass half hard underneath their BDUs, and he focuses his gaze straight ahead like the good soldier he used to be.
He can't say he minds that focusing straight ahead means staring at the wall above the back of Simon's desk instead of looking at Simon himself, however. No, he can't say that.
"You're not fine," Simon says sharply. Jim keeps his eyes fixed on the wall, keeps his posture locked and his face impassive as Simon goes on, "You want to know how I know you're not fine? I know you're not fine because I'm not fine, and nobody else here is fine, and if we're not fine, you sure as shit aren't, either."
After twenty long, silent seconds Simon sighs. "Go home, Jim. Get some rest. That's an order."
Jim's eyes are still boring a hole in the plasterboard, but somehow that doesn't keep him from seeing the expression on Simon's face suddenly falter. It's apparently just hit Simon that "home" isn't maybe the most likely place for Jim to find any rest these days.
Simon opens his mouth but Jim beats him to the punch. "Yes, sir," he says, making it crisp and performing an about-face that's deliberately not quite up to boot camp spec (Simon doesn't deserve that kind of sarcasm from Jim, especially not over this), then gets the hell out of Simon's office.
The bullpen isn't much better, but it's easier for Jim to let his fellow officers stay a blur at the edge of his awareness. They're all giving him "space," and nobody comes up to bother him as he grabs his jacket from his desk and starts for the exit.
A hand on his arm stops him, though, just as he reaches the door.
Connor's hand. He doesn't turn his head, doesn't look at her. He knows what he would see if he did: drawn face, red-rimmed eyes, haunted, hollow expression.
"Don't do this to yourself, Jimbo," Connor says.
Jim wants to laugh. If Connor really knew what he was doing she'd fucking shoot him in the nuts. Not that he would blame her.
Instead of laughing in her face all he does is brush her hand off his arm and pull the door open. He's halfway out of the bullpen and into the hallway before she adds, "Sandy wouldn't want you to —"
He suspects the sound he makes is close to a snarl. Maybe a growl, who knows. It gets him free of her, and he hits the stairs almost at a run — keep moving; he needs to keep moving, needs to stay ahead of all these words, of all this fucking sympathy —
He needs —
God fucking damn it, he needs what he's going home right now to get.
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The loft is silent.
He used to say he wanted that, but he never really meant it, even when he meant it. Irony is his bitch these days.
(He should be used to that by now.)
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He knows he should grab a bottle of water and go sit on the couch, read the goddamned newspaper or go through the mail that keeps piling up. Do something normal.
He knows he won't. He doesn't need normal. Doesn't want normal.
Not anymore.
(Yes, sirree: Irony is Jim's personal, highly attentive bitch these days. He's getting used to it.)
The stairs to the loft call to him. They're just wooden planks, climbing to an ordinary bedroom, an ordinary bed, an empty bed, but he's finding it harder and harder to think of them that way. They look more and more like steps carved from stone, worn from weather and age, encroached on by an ever-hungry jungle.
They look seductive.
He doesn't even try to resist. Not these days. Not anymore.
The climate-controlled air in the loft turns humid as soon as he mounts the first step. Not quite steamy yet, just… filled with damp (sweat-damp) possibility.
Probability.
Certainty.
He sheds clothes as he climbs, letting them drop where they will, uncaring. (Irony, a distant part of his mind whispers, there's more irony for you.) By the time he reaches the bed he's naked — free of clothes, free of inhibitions, free, probably, of sanity. Certainly free of —
The light begins to change around him and his mind…stops.
Golden light — not blue, never blue again (Jim isn't sure if that's irony; he is sure it's the truth) — golden light blankets his skin with warmth, and the air grows salt-fresh and steam-heavy, all at once. The tide of blood flowing through his heart sounds like faraway surf, and he closes his eyes and waits.
As soon as the slim, strong fingers he's waiting for wrap around his arm possessively he opens his eyes again.
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She's as beautiful as ever. As deadly. As ravenous.
As irresistible.
He no longer even pretends to try to resist. What would be the point in resisting, anyway? Now?
She devours him and he returns the favor, helplessly borne along on a tidal wave of heat, of tongue, clit, cunt, sweat, semen, satisfaction — and need, need, fucking need; he stutter-pumps into her, almost whiting out from the intensity, and even before he stops reeling from coming like a fucking freight train, he can feel the need snaking up again through his veins. She calls to him, to something in him that can't get enough, can't bury itself often enough, deep enough in her so very fuckable flesh.
The light never changes, gilding her pale skin, her pale hair. Her eyes (familiar blue eyes, but not the right shade of blue, never again the right shade of blue) are dark and dangerous and knowing.
Triumphant.
He eats her out, revels in the way her hands twist and clench in his hair, feels her moans and whimpers reverberate through his entire body. Makes it good, makes her writhe underneath his tongue, makes her hiss and growl and claw at his shoulders.
She'll ride him after this, rising and falling on him like the waves he can't quite see behind her shoulders, wickedly relentless.
Wickedly perfect. As perfect as she is on her hands and knees in his bed (that perfect ass), as perfect as she is sucking his cock into her mouth and swallowing him down whole (perfect, so fucking perfect), as perfect as she is at twining her body with his, taking and giving until he's rutting helplessly against her, rutting helplessly inside her; taking and giving until he's helplessly…
Helpless.
It's perfect.
It's all so fucking perfect.
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She never says a word.
It occurs to him (afterward, always afterward) that he doesn't, either.
What is there to say, anyway?
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He falls asleep eventually, like he always does; a brief, restless sleep littered with sharp-edged, broken crap he tries to forget as soon as he wakes up.
The light is always ordinary when he wakes up. The loft is ordinary, his bed is ordinary. He's the only one there. (The way it's supposed to be, probably. Now.)
But when he wakes up his sheets are always a mess, his belly is always itching with drying come, his muscles are always aching. Every inch of him is always over-sensitized, exhausted. Sated.
And not sated at all. These days, both those conditions feel pretty much the same.
The first time, the very first time it happened, thirty-six hours after Simon knocked on the loft door with an expression on his face Jim never wants to see there again, he rolled out of bed so fast after he woke up that he nearly fell face first onto the floor; yanked the sheets off the mattress so hard their corners ripped, threw the sheets in the trash, threw himself in the shower with his toothbrush and toothpaste and an extra bar of soap. Stayed there forty minutes. Didn't go to bed again for forty-three hours.
Now, he just lies in bed for a while, aimlessly, stretches out some of the aches — not all of them; he doesn't want to stretch all of them entirely away, not anymore — thinks about ordering some Chinese.
Gets up when the immediate future narrows down to a choice between taking a piss in the bathroom or adding more bodily fluids to his already sweat-and-sex-damp, redolent surroundings.
Doesn't look in the mirror.
Doesn't brush his teeth. He'll do that later.
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Sometimes (not as often anymore, somehow) he thinks about telling Connor and handing her his gun. DBC. Death by cop. Death by Connor.
The irony would be perfect.
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They haven't had the funeral yet. Jim's pretty sure they never will, not here. Naomi needs to "process" first. Needs to process somewhere far away, apparently.
Jim doesn't blame her. A year or two from now he'll probably come home one evening to find her sitting on the couch holding a blurry videotape from some fucking back to nature "Return to Mother Earth" service she and her weird cronies cooked up in Big Sur or maybe Katmandu, who the Christ cares, and she'll still be feeling guilty and pissed off, still be grieving like fuck, but she'll hide it all like a pro.
Maybe she'll take some of Blair's shit with her when she leaves. Maybe she'll take it all.
Jim hopes so. Right now Blair's room is one of those things Jim tries not to think about. (He's getting better at it. Sometimes.) It's not really a room any longer, not to Jim; it's just a closed door.
Nothing more than a closed door.
What lies behind that door — used to lie behind that door — Jim doesn't want to think about. (He's getting better at that.)
(Sometimes.)
There's enough of Blair left out here in the rest of the loft anyway, more than enough. That godawful mask on the wall, all gaping eye-holes and clumps of straw, smelling like cattle dung. Boxes of tea in the kitchen cabinets. A carton of tofu (expired, but Jim doesn't care, the carton's still sealed; he'll toss it out soon) in the refrigerator. A stack of books on the coffee table.
Four pairs of socks, a pair of jeans, two T-shirts and a flannel shirt, three pairs of boxers in the laundry hamper.
Jim's washed them three times now, mixed in with his own clothes. After they're clean and dry he puts them back in the hamper, waiting to mingle with the next load of Jim's dirty clothing.
Of Jim's dirty sheets.
Jim's dirty laundry.
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His order from Ming Palace arrives, and Jim takes the boxes over to the couch, starts picking through the chunks of sweet and sour pork with his chopsticks. He turns on the TV — background static to fill the silence around him (within him) with something (anything) — but he doesn't really listen to it (he doesn't need to listen, to hear, not anymore).
He doesn't listen, that is, until a reporter breaks in with a story about a beat cop getting shot this afternoon. Which would be enough on its own to make Jim reach for the remote, but he isn't quite fast enough to miss the start of Ace Reporter's rehash of other recent events this shooting will surely bring to his (sensation-avid) viewers' (tiny, vicious) minds.
So after he finally gets the remote back in his hands and the power button flattened underneath his fingers, he tosses the thing across the room at the wall. The black plastic case hits the bricks with a small, sharp, final-sounding crack, and the batteries part company with the casing and roll underneath the table where the key basket sits, and Jim goes back to his sweet and sour pork.
The egg rolls aren't really up to Ming's usual standard, but he eats them anyway.
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The salt air smells like sex. (Like a beach in Mexico. Like compulsion, like betrayal.)
(Like home.)
He feels her nails dig into his back, scraping his skin. She moans into his mouth, and her breath merging with his is as essential to him as his own breath is.
Need floods through him, through every nerve and muscle, leaks from his cock as she rubs herself against him like a cat in heat: a wildcat (jaguar), lethal, purring at his touch but ready to demand whatever she wants whenever she wants it.
He gives it to her. He gives her everything he can, everything he has left. They're in this together.
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When Blair left him, Incacha left him, too.
Jim can't say he was surprised.
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Gray morning light seeps in through the skylight and spreads through the loft. Jim watches it stalk the shadows and gradually edge them out, crowding in everywhere. (Gray light, meaningless light. Still, he watches it for a while. It's something to do.)
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He can't blame Simon. The Cascade Police Officers' Union in all its self-righteous hundreds is mightier than one cigar-chewing MCU captain, no matter how determined. There was nothing Simon could do; six months first on a beat, riding a patrol car, "learning the ropes," or else.
Six months on the front lines (without Jim), paying his fucking dues.
Jim doesn't think about it anymore. He doesn't think about why Blair (Officer Sandburg, not Dr. Sandburg) was carrying a badge in the first place.
He tries not to think about it. (He can't blame Simon, though. It wasn't Simon's fault.)
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The light's a brighter gray now (but still gray, still meaningless).
It might be Saturday. Jim isn't sure.
Isn't interested enough to find out.
He is interested in morning coffee, at least interested enough to get up and go downstairs and start a pot brewing before he heads toward the bathroom. He finishes up there before his coffee's ready, so he walks back into the kitchen and around the island, crosses to the living room, and slouches down onto the sofa to wait.
(He always walks through the kitchen now to get to the hallway, to leave the hallway. If he walks too close to Blair's door — his closed, always-closed-now door — he imagines he can smell the dust settling in behind that door, growing thicker.)
(He doesn't want to think about that.)
It's drizzling outside. He watches random raindrops meander down the glass of the windows and the balcony door, listens to the sound of the coffee pot getting ready to make one last, effortful gasp before its morning job is accomplished.
Maybe he'll do the laundry again today. He's running out of sheets.
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He lies in a pool of blue that tangles around his legs.
Cotton, not water: sheets. A bed, not a water-filled grotto.
Here, not there.
Now, not then.
That doesn't stop the memories. Simon goes down, Megan, Danny Choi. Lila. Veronica.
Blair.
Incacha's gone, but that doesn't stop the memories:
— Incacha says, What do you see?
— Incacha says, What do you fear?
— Incacha says, The light must shine from within, I cannot bring it to you.
Incacha says fucking shit, as far as Jim's concerned.
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Rain drizzles against the skylight, distorting the sky behind it, distorting the gray (meaningless) light coming through it in tiny circles and ovals and runnels of watery magnification.
It doesn't matter. Watching the rain is something to do, that's all.
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Sometimes (after, never during), the sheets tangle around Jim's legs, and the bed becomes an ancient stone grotto, and Blair's face flashes in front of Jim, floating in an obscenely bright, obscenely viscous, obscenely large puddle of red.
It isn't real. (This is not Jim's life. This cannot be Jim's life.)
It isn't real: for one thing, there's far too much blood — half of a fucked-up domestic disturbance call suddenly pulls a gun out of nowhere, points it vaguely in your direction, pulls the trigger and somehow, despite being higher than a kite and shaky as a drunk with the DTs, puts a bullet right between your eyes, you don't bleed that much.
You don't have time to bleed that much.
Jim knows. He's seen it before.
He's lined up that shot (with steady hands) and pulled the trigger (with steady hands) before. More than once. The person you shoot between the eyes doesn't ever really bleed that much.
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He goes downstairs. Stares out into the rain.
Still gray, still a drizzle. It doesn't matter.
Maybe today (what is today, anyway? Sunday? Monday? Jim isn't interested enough to find out), he'll tell Megan. Maybe he won't.
Maybe today he won't wonder (afterward, always afterward, never during) if it ever could have been dark-bright, curly hair he threaded his fingers through instead of the pale gold hair he runs his hands through now. If he could ever have walked in through Blair's (open) door, and taken — no, given — everything he ever wanted to give (take). If he and Blair could ever have been —
…in this together.
Irony has a perfect ass and takes what she wants with bright white teeth and flawless nails, takes what she wants and gives what she chooses. Maybe she's always been his bitch and Jim just never noticed it before.
(Maybe he's got it backwards. Maybe he's always been her bitch. Maybe he always will be.)
He detours through the kitchen on his way to check the hamper. He should probably do the laundry again today. He's running out of sheets.
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