by Dave Daren
“Christ, Archer,” she muttered. “I’ll be there soon.”
The line went dead before I could say anything else.
I supposed it could have gone much worse, but I still couldn’t help my guilt over the situation.
She’d waited for me for hours, and even if I’d had a good reason for leaving her alone, she hadn’t known that until nearly three hours later.
I shifted in the seat and reached up with my cuffed hands moving in tandem to take the phone from my ear and drop it back into the cradle.
Quentin moved the phone back on the desk.
I looked up at him in a question that I didn’t bother to say aloud. Now what?
But he seemed keen on playing the role of obstinate asshole, and I gave a deep sigh.
“How much longer do I need to be here?” I asked him finally.
He fixed me with a cocksure look.
“You’ll be released when she gets here,” he said as if he was doing me a favor and hadn’t been the one to cause this problem for me in the first place. “We don’t need you here any longer.”
I wasn’t sure what had caused his change in demeanor, because it wasn’t like he had stopped posturing at me, so why was he willing to let me leave now?
Maybe Thompson had told him to knock all his shit off and reminded him that I could try and sue, or maybe he hadn’t been supposed to drag me into the department in the first place.
I could imagine that being the case.
A deputy that’s too cocky for his own good thinking that he was doing exactly what his boss wanted but overstepped his bounds.
It didn’t fit what I knew about Thompson, however, because I doubted Thompson would be afraid of the law. Considering the behavior I’d observed from him in the last year, I knew Thompson saw himself as the law, and certainly above the rules the rest of us had to live by.
And then it hit me, and I nearly barked out a laugh.
It was nearly time for shift change. Maybe whoever took over at ten at night was much nicer than Quetin and his jackals.
I gave a nod and chewed at my lower lip.
“And my belongings?” I asked with a meager amount of hope.
Quentin scoffed, and he was back to being the same degree of asshole he’d been when he’d arrested me. Instead of answering my question, he simply sulked off to sit at a desk across the room that I assumed was his. Or at the very least, I hoped it was his, because he kicked his dirty boots up to rest on it.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, and I could have sworn I heard the sound of Candy Crush emanate from his speakers for just a moment before he quickly turned it down.
I shifted in the seat at Jenkins’ desk and half-turned my body toward the door. It wasn’t particularly comfortable, but I wanted to know as soon as Clara walked in.
The minutes ticked by in a slow, monotonous rhythm I counted out in my head, and I could feel my eyes hazing in and out of focus as I determinedly stared at the door. Despite my focus, I was still caught off-guard when it swung open, and I nearly jumped in surprise.
Clara stepped into the lobby of the sheriff’s department, and my breath caught in my throat for a split second.
She looked… fantastic.
Her thick red hair was loose around her shoulders and down her back instead of in its usual sloppy braid or messy ponytail that she wore to work, and I realized it was the first time I had seen it that way.
She wore a pale-green dress that followed the curve of her waist all the way down to her knees, and I was once again incredibly pissed I had been sitting in a police station for the last three hours, but now for a different reason than I had been before.
Her pale, freckled face was contorted in a look of obvious annoyance and distress as she scanned the lobby.
I could tell the second her eyes landed on me because she blinked through about a thousand different emotions in a few meager seconds. Anger at me for being late. Anger for the sheriff’s department for making me late. Relief I was okay. Concern about the handcuffs. What I hoped was appreciation of my outfit.
“Hey,” I said in a forced casual tone with a tilt of my head.
I wanted to laugh and scream at the same time over the absurdity of the situation.
Clara took a deep breath, and her lips pursed. I noticed that she was wearing a nice shade of pink lip gloss, and I wondered if she’d actually eaten at the restaurant, or if she’d reapplied it on the way to the department.
“Hi,” she replied with a similarly casual tone that wasn’t that casual at all.
She stood in the doorway of the department and seemed unsure of where she should go.
In an attempt to help her out, I gave a quick nod of my head back toward where Quentin sat with his feet up on the desk.
He’d been so involved in whatever it was on his screen that he hadn’t even looked up at the sound of the door opening. So much for professional security.
Clara’s eyes followed the trajectory of my nod, and she must have spotted Quentin, if the sour look that flashed across her face was any sort of indication. She adjusted the thin strap of her little purse over her shoulder and started to walk across the lobby with one of her well-groomed eyebrows quirked up in question.
I shifted in the uncomfortable plastic chair to watch the scene unfold like it was some sort of particularly intriguing play. After all, it wasn’t like I could be of much help to the situation while handcuffed, and given how much the members of the department hated me, it didn’t seem like a good idea to advertise my ongoing presence. So I stayed seated and watched the nurse approach her quarry.
Clara’s steps slowed to a halt in front of Deputy Quentin’s muddied boots, which were still propped on the desk, and only then did he seem to realize that someone else had walked into the lobby.
“Excuse me?” Clara asked, and despite the inherent politeness of the words, her tone was stretched paper-thin across their frame. She leaned forward to wrap her knuckles against the edge of the desk to punctuate her question.
Quentin’s eyes drifted up from his phone for a moment, then back down to his screen, and then back up again in some sort of double-take that would have been comical had it not been more than a little infuriating. He scooted back in his chair with so much force that the metal legs gave an awful screech against the tile that made my skin crawl, and then he dragged his eyes from Clara’s pretty face all the way down the line of her body. He didn’t even try to hide the fact he was leering.
For the thousandth time that night, I wanted to punch him.
Clara, however, seemed annoyed but unbothered by the clear skeeviness of his gaze.
“Howdy,” Quentin drawled with a wide grin that showed off his unflatteringly large teeth. “What can I help you with, Miss?”
I had better teeth and that small, petty knowledge felt like a victory.
It was apparent that he hadn’t put together that the woman I’d been speaking with on the phone was the woman now in the precinct at ten o’clock at night.
Clara’s eyebrows furrowed for just a moment at the idiocy of his question and glanced back toward me as if making sure I hadn’t disappeared before she looked back at Quentin.
“You’re detaining my date,” she answered in the tone I assumed she used with her patients’ parents, slow, careful, obvious.
Clara had thought of the dinner as a date, which meant that I hadn’t misread the situation at all. That caused something warm to bubble up in my chest and a grin to crack across my face against my better judgement. But that glee was replaced with annoyance that I had in fact been kept from a date, and guilt that she’d probably thought I’d stood her up for a good three hour stretch of time.
In that moment, I experienced a wide breadth of emotions in an incredibly short period of time, but that was nothing to the sort of emotions that seemed to rock through Deputy Quentin in the same amount of time.
I wished I had access to my phone, because I would have loved to record his reaction as she told
him that. His face contorted in what I could only call mild disbelief, to blatant disbelief, to annoyance, to anger, and back to a carefully constructed veneer of cool that didn’t actually make him seem that cool.
If I already held zero regards for what he thought of me as a person, I might have been offended that he’d assumed someone as stunning as Clara wouldn’t have gone on a date with me.
“Landon is your date?” he said a bit dumbly as his eyes darted between the two of us. “Really?”
Okay, now I was getting a little offended.
Clara gave a slow nod, and I nearly laughed aloud.
For all of his posturing and acting like a particularly mean rooster, Quentin seemed incapable of speaking with a pretty woman.
“Can you uncuff him, so we can leave, please?” she asked, and I could tell that the apparent nicety in her tone was more than a little fake. “Are there any forms I need to sign?”
She took a few steps back from the desk as Quentin stood up, and I could have swore he tried to flex the muscles in his arms in the process.
If this situation wasn’t so absurd and probably traumatizing overall, it would have been funny, but I’d take my amusement where I could find it after the night I’d had.
“No forms,” he said with a shake of his head, and I once again wondered how they would justify this detainment legally if it ever came in front of a judge. Not that it ever would, but the curiosity was still there.
Quentin walked across the room toward me and whatever pleasantness he’d painted on his face for Clara’s benefit disappeared when he looked at me. Instead, I found myself the recipient of a deep-set scowl.
I flashed him a cheeky smile and thrust my cuffed wrists out toward him. The metal clanked in time with my gesture, and I shook it again when he hesitated.
His face was still creased in that sour look as he reached his hand toward his belt for his ring of key. He quickly yanked the ring free with a strangely musical sound, and then stared at the assortment of keys for a moment like he’d never seen them before. Then, he seemed to relax his posture back onto his heels as he began to sort through each key individually, as if he didn’t know which one was the key for the handcuffs.
I heaved a sigh and leaned back in the seat again because I was prepared to wait for another hour while he continued to act out his petty revenge against me. I couldn’t even be sure if this act was because he was simply one of Thompson’s lap dogs, bred to hate me, or if he was pissed that my date was pretty.
It was rather telling about him that I couldn’t tell which of those insane crimes had caused him to be an asshole once again.
Clara, meanwhile, had moved closer to the center of the lobby. Her glossed lips were pressed into a tired line as she watched the back of Quentin’s head as he flipped through key after key, and I felt a twinge of guilt that she’d been kept away so late for so little.
With a sigh, I turned back to face Quentin. I was nearly certain that he’d already made two rounds of all his keys by the time he finally settled on what was obviously the correct key.
He didn’t even pretend to look apologetic as he bent forward and grabbed the thin chain between the two cuffs and yanked on it to pull me forward.
A slight breath was knocked out of me with the force of his tug, and I leaned forward into his grasp so I didn’t further hurt my already aching wrists any further.
The deputy slotted the key into the lock and took his sweet time turning it, but eventually, the lock sprung with a soft click, and the cuffs practically dropped from my aching hands. Deputy Quentin caught the cuffs and took a rapid step back as if he couldn’t even handle being that near to me for too long. He hooked the handcuffs back onto his belt followed by his hefty ring of keys.
I rubbed at my aching wrists and looked down at the tender skin. The flesh was discolored from where the metal of the cuffs had spent the last few hours biting into it. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t pleasant, but I’d fared worse.
I rose up to my feet, rolled my back, and then slowly moved my neck from side to side to crack the tension from my spine.
Quentin turned his focus back to Clara, as if he’d rather look at her than me, and for once I couldn’t even fault his decision.
“You’re free to leave now,” he said with a little less enthusiasm than he’d used to address her earlier, before he’d been informed she was there for me.
Clara kept a polite look on her face as she nodded her head, though I could see the spark of something less pleasant in her eyes.
“Right,” she began. “Can we have his keys, then?”
She thrust a delicate hand out toward Quentin, as if he would simply deposit the keys into her hand. I appreciated her level of confidence with the situation, but from the moment I’d been forced to step out of my car, I’d had the sinking feeling I wouldn’t be seeing my car again any time soon.
Deputy Quentin bared his teeth in what should have been a smile.
“Oh, that’s already been taken to the impound lot,” he said without even pretending he wasn’t thrilled to inconvenience me. “Oops.”
Chapter 13
I held open the narrow door of the sheriff’s department for Clara before I followed her out into the cool breeze of the night. The sky that had still been a dusky-gold when I’d started my drive to our date had turned into a nearly black, starless night.
I inhaled a deep breath to try and rid my nostrils of the musty scent of the department. I met with minimal success, though, and I had a sneaking suspicion that I’d be stuck with the smell at least until I made it into the shower again.
Once we were a few feet away from the building, I gave a long, slow sigh, and reached up to rub at the back of my neck as I tried to think of what to say to break the uncomfortable silence that stretched between us.
“I’m sorry,” I said once I realized that was the best starting place. “I know this is a shit excuse, but I didn’t have access to a phone until I called you.”
I moved my hand from the back of my neck to scratch at my neck and watched her from the corner of my eye. In the yellowing dimness of the lampposts in the parking lot, her freckled face seemed gold, and I tried not to stare too hard, though all I wanted to do was drink in her presence. I slipped my hands into my pockets as we walked toward her car, and I could feel the distinct weight of “having fucked up” atop my broad shoulders.
But Clara’s brow furrowed, and she let out a surprised little laugh before she stopped in the center of the lot and turned to face me. She reached out to grab my arm so that I couldn’t keep walking before she dropped her hand back down to her side.
“Archer, you were arrested,” she said with a flat edge to her voice, as if she didn’t understand why I was apologizing, even though I thought my reasons were fairly obvious.
“Technically, not arrested,” I pointed out with a small smile twitching at the corners of my mouth.
She rolled her eyes but there wasn’t any sort of maliciousness in the gesture.
“Detained, then,” she corrected, and a small smile fought its way onto her face as well. “You sort of had a good reason for standing me up.”
I couldn’t help but flinch at the term, because even though I had a good reason, it still didn’t make the term feel any better to hear aloud.
Clara seemed to realize what she’d said because her full lips spread into a thin line, and she exhaled a sigh through her nose before she reached out to touch my arm again.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said with the same sort of gentleness someone would use when speaking to a wounded animal.
I offered her a small smile, and it was thin but genuine. I couldn’t help the guilt I felt over the situation, because even if she didn’t mean it like that, she had a point. I’d unintentionally stood her up for our date, and she’d sat and waited for hours on end in a restaurant alone.
It made me feel like a gigantic ass.
“I know,” I assured her. “I just feel guilty is a
ll. I’d never have done that intentionally. I got all dressed up and everything.”
I had shifted to trying to joke about the situation, as if that made it less awful. But I still felt terrible, and she didn’t seem to quite believe the smile on my face, but she didn’t question it, either.
But more than that, I was hyper-aware of the fact her hand still rested on my arm.
“What happened, anyway?” she finally asked.
I appreciated the slight shift in conversation, and I gave a deep sigh before I glanced behind her to the sheriff’s department that all but loomed over us, despite how low to the ground it sat.
“Not here,” I said with a shake of my head.
Clara turned her head to follow my line of sight before she gave a slow nod. When she turned back to me, she gestured toward her little white car that sat a few yards away.
I nodded and waved for her to lead the way before I followed closely behind her.
“Sorry, the locks are broken,” she said with an apologetic little smile as she manually slid her key into the lock and twisted her wrist to unlock the car.
I gave a soft laugh as I kept my hand waiting on the door handle for her go-ahead.
“It’s alright,” I assured her with a nod as I waited.
Clara ducked down and disappeared into her car, and through the window on my side of the vehicle, I was able to watch as she leaned over to push open the passenger side door. I pulled at the handle to swing it open when I heard it pop, and she rocked back into her seat with another sheepish little grin as I slipped inside. I tugged the door shut behind me with a soft thump and watched as she did the same for her door.
Clara tucked a loose strand of hair back behind her ear before she slipped her key into the ignition and gave it a harsh turn. The engine sputtered to life with a small groan.
“Sorry, my car’s older than Emma,” she admitted.
I laughed and gave a small shake of my head.
“Well, right now it’s leagues better than my car,” I reminded her with a cock of my head.
My car was, most likely, trapped somewhere in the county impound lot, but the more I thought about that, the more sick to my stomach I felt. At least I’d never kept case files in my car for this very reason, but it still annoyed the hell out of me.