The bailiff hadn't been friendly this morning at 7:30AM, but who was at that hour? Her suddenly sour mood didn't quite jive, though. Dawn wondered at what was happening in the courtroom to make the guard so grumpy, and the possibilities disturbed her.
The wilted salad and chicken patty sandwich hadn't been appealing minutes ago, and it certainly wasn't now. She pushed the tray away after grabbing the tepid coffee off of it. Taking a sip, she was sorry she had. It tasted like dirty water, and nothing made her want Mallory's strongly brewed coffee even more.
Mallory always brewed the morning coffee extra-strong, ever since she was told that Dawn preferred it that way. She never forgot that.
That memory brought tears to her eyes, and Dawn wiped them away angrily before plunking the plastic mug of gross back onto the table. It was plainly undrinkable, and while whomever had prepared it might think her a snob, she refused to even chug it for the caffeine content.
She hugged her knees back to her chest and laid her head down atop them, dozing again. Thinking of anything but the vetted testimony by the prosecution was impossible now that the bailiff was surly.
Ms. Baxter wanted her to steer clear of mentioning anything of consequence regarding her and Mallory's 'sexual liaisons,' or so the prosecutor had deemed their relationship. Her father's barrister was all about exploiting it, and wanted to make the jury think that Mallory was some sort of evil deviant for it.
Both versions of what Dawn considered the most encompassing love she'd ever known made her angry. She had no idea how to reconcile what the barristers wanted her to say, with what she knew was the truth in her heart. The only thing she knew for sure was that their versions were lies, and Dawn had always been taught never to lie.
Suddenly, the door to the holding room jerked open to reveal a very distraught Ms. Baxter. The woman snapped her fingers in pique at Dawn, and bid her to stand up and come towards her with a wave of her hand.
"W-What's going on?" Dawn yawned and stretched out her back. It was awfully sore, and a quick glance at her watch revealed that she'd napped for just short of an hour.
"We're done for today," Ms. Baxter snapped, and the short attitude surprised her. The prosecutor had never been anything but nice to Dawn before.
Standing up to grab her purse, she then rubbed at her bleary eyes. "What do you mean, done for today?"
"Come on, come on," the barrister grumbled, guiding her along the corridor and towards the back door of the courthouse.
She was walking so quickly, Dawn had to jog a bit to catch up, and to hear what else she was saying. "We've only a few minutes before the press escapes the courtroom, and I want to have you out and in the car to the hotel before they do."
Dawn couldn't do much else but slide into the waiting unmarked police car with the prosecutor. Where else would she go?
Once the constable began driving, she turned towards Ms. Baxter. "I don't understand. Emily, you told me that I might be testifying today. And what are you talking about – a hotel?"
Ms. Baxter rested her forehead against the window's interior and closed her eyes. "You're not testifying until tomorrow, Miss Rose. I have to re-draw all of your testimony, and you'll have to meet with the Defense for a short while in the morning, all thanks to Miss Moore's antics in court today," she groaned. "You can't go back to your cottage, because that's where she is going."
The barrister looked so stressed at the prospect of more work that Dawn didn't have the heart to ask any more questions yet. Instead, she crossed her arms, and worried at her bottom lip with her teeth.
Mallory must have made a ruckus in court today. She was done testifying somehow, and going home... to their home. Dawn would not be there to greet her.
She hadn't realized that tears were streaming down her face until Emily shoved a packet of tissues at her from across the back seat.
"Christ, Miss Rose. Between Miss Moore's mood swings and your own, you're both going to give me a stroke. Please don't do this to me now – "
" – I'm fine, I'm fine," Dawn assured her, before blowing her nose.
"Liars, the lot of you. You're not fookin' fine." Emily was so vexed that she fell back into the heavy Teesside accent, and covered her eyes with a hand. She must have a headache.
Dawn's heart ached for Mallory. She wished that all she had was a damned headache.
_____________________________________
Margaret's sedan came to a stop in front of the cottage, and the doctor stepped out of the car before slamming the driver's side door. They had driven past the police cruiser parked at the top of the property, DS Reid giving a small wave from inside.
Mallory sighed, both in relief and consternation at Dr. Sheehan's silence since stuffing her inside the passenger's side of the car at the courthouse. She didn't say anything during the journey home, either.
The forensic psychologist tapped her foot as she waited for Mallory to exit the car, so she purposefully took extra time in stretching out the sorest of her legs before hefting up onto the support of the cane.
"I don't suppose you could unlock the door for me?" Mallory dangled the keys in her outstretched hand.
"I don't suppose you think your behavior today was very helpful, do you?" Margaret finally broke her muteness with a biting retort, and grabbed the keys. "Dear God, Mallory. What was that today?"
Not answering just yet, Mallory walked slowly through the slippery gravel and into the foyer of her home.
The doctor busied herself in throwing a tea kettle onto the hob, and yanking out a gallon size ziploc bag full of pill bottles from the tote on her shoulder.
While Margaret began to take them out one by one to line up on the counter top, Mallory wandered the cottage. She hadn't seen it since the night... well, she hadn't seen it in a good while. Shaking her head, she tried to quell the odd feeling that she was seeing it for the first time at all.
This was her home, she assured herself, walking the length of the kitchen and into the library nook.
Her hands ran over the dusty shelves. Dawn must have been too busy to clean. That ought to have pleased her, but it didn't. It probably meant that her amare had been caught up in the all all-inclusive strain of preparing for the trial, or something along those lines.
"I have to go to the hotel, and meet up with Ms. Baxter to fix the chaos you've created, you disobedient prevaricator," Margaret teased half-heartedly from the kitchen, and awaited her goodbye. "I trust that you can make your own tea and find your way upstairs all right?"
It was good to know that Margaret wasn't only angry at her, but with the situation.
"I didn't... lie, you know. Not really." Mallory whispered as she made her way over to the cooker.
Margaret hummed in disagreement.
The steam began to escape the tea kettle's spout, and it was warm enough to steep Mallory's tea weakly. She honestly didn't have enough energy to stand up for much longer, but wasn't about to tell the doctor that.
She wanted to be alone.
Once she'd tossed a tea bag into her favorite cup and poured the hot water over it, Mallory shrugged. "I just didn't tell them which part of me recognized him."
"Ah," her unlikely friend and caretaker nodded once, frowning at what she was saying. "You've come to accept both sets of memories, then? What about the different emotions that accompany them?"
"I wouldn't go that far." Mallory swallowed two Clonazepam dry, just to spite the naughtiness that threatened to rear her ugly head.
As always, Margaret's studying eye figured her out in short time. "Don't be too hard on yourself, hmm? You have to learn how to coexist."
"Have a good night, Margaret." Mallory shuffled towards the stairs without bothering to wait for the doctor to show herself out. It went unsaid that she was done speaking now, and Dr. Sheehan would understand.
Climbing the steep stairs of the cottage was far more taxing than she had expected, and once the front door closed gently downstairs, Mallory realized with a start that Margaret hadn't bothered to men
tion that she forgot both her cane and her tea in the kitchen.
"Fuck.” Mallory leaned against the wall just outside of the bedroom. Maybe Margaret had been more offended by her short goodbye than she originally thought.
Faster than she expected, the pills she'd swallowed less than five minutes ago began to take effect.
Mallory knew this to be her own fault. Only eating one piece of dry toast prior to being carted off to the courthouse wasn't a good idea, but nothing could have been done to help it. She certainly didn't want to vomit on the stand.
It was only just six o'clock in the evening, and the sun outside still lazed warmly in the blue sky. She fumbled towards the bed, collapsing atop the fluffy white duvet with an oomph.
Mallory's leg ached horribly, but her stubborn eyelids drifted shut. The fast descent into slumber began before she could think long on the particular pain.
The emptiness that sat heavy in her chest, where her heart lay, was far more excruciating. There was nothing that she wanted more than to feel the young woman who filled her heart with light beside her, safe and sound. It agonized Mallory to no end that in order to keep Dawn safe, she'd been forced to push her away.
Thinking on it was causing a war between consciousness and repose. Her hands flailed out as she startled half awake two more times. In those moments of semi-wakefulness, she managed to grasp onto a pillow, and hugged it close to her chest. It smelled of Dawn, and the scent invoked a whimper of recognition.
The swirling gray-blue that lay just outside of her closed eyelids faded to black the more deeply she fell asleep. The fragrance emitting from the softness that she snuggled brought forth flashes of her own sultry laughter, and a bright smile framed by petal pink lips.
"Are you sure?" her blonde goddess giggled, almost nervously.
Her dream self nodded curtly, and Mallory remembered why she had been so tense. A half-hitch of rope was fastened taut against the headboard of the bed, which lead down to her left wrist, wrapped in nylon cordage that she taught Dawn how to tie into a single column knot minutes before. "If I wasn't sure, I wouldn't have allowed it, amare."
Dawn sat cross legged, well aware of the view it gave Mallory. She knew that her right arm couldn't be tied – the knot would aggravate the old break injury to Mallory's wrist – but she wondered about what else she could practice on. "And your legs?"
"No. No, never my legs," Mallory insisted, drawing them up and away.
Testing out the word they agreed would halt anything she was doing until given further instruction, Dawn puzzled out the anxiousness she was seeing. "Okay, okay. Your legs are a Red?"
Mallory took a shuddering breath as she willed herself to relax. "Yes, that would definitely be a Red. What happens if I need to be released quickly?"
"Freedom!" Dawn joked playfully while holding up a pair of bandage scissors.
While the frivolity was refreshing, Mallory needed Dawn to understand the gravity of what was happening before they went any further. "Promise me, darling. Placet mihi lenis.” Be careful with me.
Dawn's sweet blue eyes eased into comprehension. She leaned down and brushed soft lips ever so gently against Mallory's own. "In aeternum."
Though the dreamscape was lacking in the fluidity of real life, it still punctuated the most unforgettable moments that had passed between them that evening.
Dawn's hands had found their way to her skin, teasing with light circles of her fingernails. It had been more than difficult to keep her right hand from releasing its grip from where the rope tied the left to the bed, but the bite of the nylon against her skin was an adequate reminder.
The gentle tickling turned into firmer grazes of Dawn's nails over the sharp planes where hips met her stomach, and the sensation of them digging into the sensitive area drove Mallory mad. It didn't help that her amare was cyclically kissing and sucking her neck, and down to the valley between her breasts.
"Nngh!" Mallory moaned.
"I want to hear you," a hot breath puffed along the shell of her ear. "Tell me what you need."
She complied, especially when one of Dawn's hands traveled even further down to cup between her writhing legs. Searching fingers mapped their way lovingly around the sensitive folds – too lovingly for her taste.
For all of her apprehension when Dawn had expressed wanting to experience her this way, Mallory wanted to experience it just the same, caution be damned. She could trust this soul, her match, so her words were brutally honest. "I need you to fuck me already... before I break the bed."
Dawn's fingers plunged inside her.
Mallory's back arched away from the mattress.
"Yes! Yes, oh yes!” She was incapable of intelligible speech past that.
Time faded away as the heat of Dawn's skin lay against hers. They moved in a rhythm as old as the stars, and Mallory saw them burst behind her eyelids. Oh, how she wished she could hold off the inevitable forever, and relish in the delight of how these touches felt even more close to heaven than the gentlest ones.
"I never knew-" her little supernova was in awe. "I never knew you could be even more beautiful to me."
"No, just a little bit longer," Mallory begged. "Don't go away. Don't go." She came awake, her hands sliding over the duvet in search of the woman who had only seconds been right beside her.
Finding nothing but coolness on Dawn's side of the bed, Mallory curled back up with the pillow, and attempted in vain to blink back her tears. "Stay.”
The bedroom was silent except for the dull thudding of her heart, still coming down from her dreams.
Chapter 22: Labra Lege (Read My Lips)
Exhaustion permeated every part of Dawn. She swore that the lingering ache from lack of sleep and security these past weeks even touched upon the tips of her hair. It was in the cold sweats that she broke out in for no good reason, every few hours. The pent up anxiety escaped from her very pores.
Detective Superintendent John Reid came to pick her up from the hotel, just after 5:45 AM – the better to avoid nosy photographers, and better for safety. He blathered on for most of their drive; about how Stella had recovered enough to come back to work on light duty, how the trial would go from here on out, and commented that the second button down on her oxford shirt was hitched up into the first button hole. It was all she could do not to snap at the man, but she managed to nod politely at appropriate intervals to make him think she was actually listening.
It wasn't that Dawn didn't care about Stella Stewart's well being, but she had other things on her mind. Her shirt being rumpled certainly wasn't one of them, either.
From the hasty testimony coaching with the prosecution, the subsequent follow up interview with the defense, and to yesterday's marathon of questioning, baiting, and rebutting in court, it had become crystal clear to Dawn what Mallory had implied during her own testimony.
The defense hadn't really wanted to deny that Mallory sought to keep Dawn and drag her down as some sort of revenge plot gone completely mad, but they couldn't allow the jury to think that she remembered Dawn's father so clearly from the start. They couldn't afford that kind of blow to their assertion that Mallory's memory had holes in it larger than the Parliament building. While both barristers and their teams danced around these issues during her testimony, it wasn't hard to infer. After all, if anyone present in the room knew Mallory best, it was Dawn; Elisabeth Sørensen notwithstanding.
It was just the thing she'd do, Dawn thought sardonically. Yes, that was Mallory.
Of course, it was entirely untrue. It had to be.
"We're here," John announced, his concern breaking through the fog of thoughts. "Are you sure that you don't want me to go in, too?"
"I'll be fine, Mr. Reid. She's really all bark and no bite," Dawn said. "Give Stella my best?"
Her shaky hands refused to cooperate twice as she attempted to unlock the door to the cottage, but Dawn's mind was more determined than her traitorous body knew.
Once inside, she wasted no time in sl
ipping off her shoes and tossing her purse down. Her stomach did flip flops in warning, but Dawn made it all the way through the small foyer, down the hallway, into the open living area, and up the stairs.
Still early, the sun barely peeked over the horizon. It bathed the home in an almost eerie glow as the shadows now seemed even darker than where the light touched. A similar glow filled the space of the bedroom as Dawn softly padded her way in.
Mallory laid on her stomach, sprawled sideways on their bed. The poor duvet was pushed aside, and almost off the end of the mattress. Sunlight kissed what bits of skin it could find, highlighting the bare flesh of shoulders and a leg as it curled around the tangled blankets. The thigh more readily visible still bore an angry red scar covered by steristrips, but Dawn's eyes skipped over this in favor of looking longingly at the beautiful face of her beloved in repose.
Peccatum in Carne: Sins of the Flesh (The Three Sins of Mallory Moore Book 1) Page 34