by JD Nixon
I settled down to sleep, and as usual, I dreamed.
In a beautiful old church I’d once visited in the city, a wedding was taking place, a huge, lavish affair. The church was festooned with large ribbons, loops of delicate gauze hanging from the ceiling. Crowds of guests sat and smiled, enjoying witnessing a display of love so strong it must be formally united for life.
I hadn’t been invited to the ceremony, but I crept into the church unnoticed, my sneakers deadening the sound of my movement. The bride and groom stood with their backs to the crowd, listening intently to the minister, Len Whittaker. A long row of bridesmaids, ten at least, all dressed in blood red, stood beside the bride. An equal amount of groomsmen stood next to the groom.
Minister Whittaker pontificated on how the curves and planes of a woman were best appreciated by her husband, and when the bride and groom said they agreed with him, he pronounced them husband and wife. He called for the rings and a naked Phoebe and Philippe appeared at the door of the church, jointly holding the red velvet cushion on which the gleaming golden rings nestled. I skipped to one side, out of their way, as they solemnly carried it down the aisle to the applause of the guests.
As the groom slipped the ring on his bride’s finger, she turned her head towards me and I saw it was Melissa, stunning in a beautiful white silk dress that enhanced her curvy figure. She smiled with a smugness discordant with the joyousness of the occasion. Then the groom turned to face his bride with adoration and I saw it was Jake.
“Jakey?” I called out in distress. “What about us? What about me?”
He winked, putting his finger to his lips to shush me. And when his lips hungrily claimed those of his new wife, I thought my heart would explode with pain.
“And the other groom?” asked Minister Whittaker and the Sarge stepped forward from where he’d been hidden in the shadows. He claimed Melissa’s other hand, slipping a ring on it and kissing her in an equally passionate way. A huge cheer rose from the guests.
“There is nothing greater than love in all its forms,” smiled Minister Whittaker, slipping an affectionate, caressing arm around each of Phoebe and Philippe’s shoulders. He glanced up at me. “Though some unfortunates in life are destined to always be without.”
The crowd turned to look at me, collective pity in their eyes. I felt conspicuous and alone, my face flaming with humiliation.
Hand-in-hand-in-hand, the ecstatic newly married trio made their way down the aisle, Melissa kissing one man and then the other as they did. Forgetting me, the overjoyed guests showered them with warm congratulations and confetti.
“Jakey?” I asked, on the verge of tears as they drew closer to me.
“Sorry, babe. I finally found a woman I want to marry.”
“And so have I,” agreed the Sarge, smiling, leaning down to kiss Melissa again. “Sorry, Tess. You’re on your own now.”
They exited the church, leaving me rooted in place with shock, watching after them. They stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back.
“She’ll always be on her own,” giggled Melissa, and the three of them laughed as they walked away.
Chapter 25
I didn’t wake with a jolt as with most of my nightmares, but instead with a dull moroseness that swamped me all day. Although I knew it was only a dream, a fantasy concocted by my stressed subconscious, like most dreams it held enough power to negatively affect my mood. It made me cast miserable sideways glances at the Sarge who didn’t even know he’d starred yet again in one of my nocturnal narratives.
At the station, when I hadn’t said a word for over an hour, the Sarge asked me what was wrong.
“What makes you think there’s anything wrong?” I asked, keeping my eyes firmly on the screen in front of me, typing up my incident report.
“You’re not your normal self and you’re doing your paperwork without complaining.”
Ignoring that regular jibe, I decided to be honest. “I had a dream last night that Jakey married . . . someone else.”
His gaze was intense. “If you want to marry him, you should give him an ultimatum to get a divorce, Tess.”
I shrugged one shoulder and made a noncommittal noise in response. “I could never marry Jake.”
“Not now, but if he divorced his wife, you could.”
“That’s not the problem. The problem is that he’s a Bycraft. I would never marry a Bycraft. It’s impossible for me to even contemplate.”
“I don’t understand why you’re together then?”
“It’s good when we’re together.”
“Take it from me, that’s not enough for a long-term relationship.”
“I know.”
“You’re going to be twenty-eight in a few months. You should be thinking about what you want for the future.”
“I know.”
“I’m just saying all this as a friend.”
“I know.”
The station phone rang. “Well, as you seem to know everything, you can answer that.”
I smiled, some of my humour returning. “I knew you were going to say that.”
And so began a fairly routine day for us. We spent the time filing our incident reports on the knife abduction last night with the Big Town detectives (who didn’t care), processing gun licence renewals, checking on Young Kenny and Phoebe, and answering another pilfered food call-out, this time at an outlying property. The only adrenaline moment was when we unwillingly became embroiled in a spat between Lola Bycraft and one of her unfortunate neighbours that required the threatening use of our spray to force her out of her terrified neighbour’s yard. And in the afternoon, we walked the beat.
“God, what a day! Even when it’s an ordinary day here, it’s busy,” complained the Sarge as we packed up for the evening.
“Agreed. All I want is a nice dinner and a glass of wine. Maybe even some crappy TV. And just forget about everything.”
“The young lady’s wish is my command.”
My phone trilled. “Tess Fuller.”
“Tessie, babe.”
“Jakey.” He seemed to have forgotten about our recent sharp words, but my greeting probably wasn’t as warm as it should have been, remembering my dream again.
“Great news! I’ve been forced to swap shifts with someone, so I’m free tonight. You and I now have a date, and I can’t wait.”
Desperate to push those feelings of his rejection of me in my dream away, I jumped at the chance. “Oh, but I’m at the Sarge’s house at the moment.”
“I’m not staying there. We’ll go to your house.”
“Um . . .” I glanced over at the Sarge. “I guess that will be okay.”
“See you there in thirty minutes, babe. I’ll bring some dinner with me, and then you are going to feast on me.”
My smile was unstoppable. An evening of good loving and physical release was exactly the antidote I needed to all the horrible things that had happened so far this week.
“You’re not going to your house,” decided the Sarge with imperious directness when I told him of my new plans, immediately raising my hackles. “The Super said we had to stick together.” His lip curled with unconcealed scorn. “Jake can come to my house.”
And have the Sarge in his bed, fully aware Jake and I were having sex a few rooms away? Maybe even hearing us? No, thanks.
“No Bycraft will come near me when I’m with Jakey. Not even Red,” I insisted.
“You’re not going to your house.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“If you want me to pull rank, I’ll pull rank.”
“Guess what? I’ve clocked off the job for the day, and I sure don’t remember signing up for my boss to tell me what I can and can’t do in my private life. And that’s the operative word here – private. So, butt out.”
“I’ll butt out when everything you do stops having a direct effect on me.”
“You’re not stopping me from going.”
“Listen to reason, Tess.”
&nbs
p; I beseeched him with my eyes. “I need to spend some time with Jakey. Can’t you understand that, Sarge? I need to.”
His gaze was searching, but his voice cool. “I’m concerned that his mind will only be on one thing, and it’s not going to be your safety.”
I smiled. “Isn’t every man’s mind mostly on that one thing?”
He turned and strode to the door. “No.”
I trailed after him up to his house to shower and change, leaving him cooking his solo dinner while I drove to my place. Jake was already waiting for me with a plastic bag full of containers of Chinese takeaway food. After we ate, we sat on the lounge, leaving the kitchen table full of dirty plates and empty containers.
“What do you want to do tonight?” I asked, my eyes captured by his.
“We could practise guitar,” he suggested, his arm creeping around my shoulder, his voice a little husky.
“We could . . .” I sounded a little husky myself as I leaned into him and ran my hand up his thigh, not stopping until I reached the end, feeling him stiffening under my touch.
“Or we could do something else,” he said, slipping his hand under my t-shirt and pushing my bra to one side, caressing my breast.
When our lips met, it was as if we hadn’t seen each other for weeks, months, instead of the few days it had been. We ended up leaving a trail of clothes on the floor on our way to the bedroom.
Afterwards, in post-coital bliss, we dozed for a while. When we roused, we lay on our sides and gazed into each other’s eyes.
“Are we okay, Jakey?” I asked hesitantly, leaning over to kiss his lips.
“What do you mean, babe?”
“I dunno. We don’t seem to spend much time together anymore, and when we do, all we do is . . . you know, this.”
“What’s wrong with ‘this’?” he asked smiling, tickling my side and kissing my neck. “It’s my favourite thing in the world.”
I wriggled in ticklishness. “Stop it. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’d just like to see you more.”
He threw his arms out, grinning. “Hey, you can see all of me – there’s no more to see.”
I slapped his chest. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. We need to spend more time together.”
He flung himself on to his back. “It seems to me that you spend too much time with Finn. It shits me. Every time I try to see you, he’s there.”
“Fiona insists we stick together at the moment.”
“All I know is if my boss told me I had to spend every single second of the day with one of my colleagues, I’d tell him to go to hell. There’s no call for that kind of thing.”
I sat up, staring down at him, clutching the sheet to my breasts. “There is call for it, Jakey. The Sarge is trying to help keep me safe while your brother is a fugitive.”
He avoided my comment about Red. “It’s almost as if you want to spend all your time with him.”
“Jake! How can you say that? Of course I don’t want to be exiled from my own house, with Dad forced to stay with Adele. I want to be back here, living my own life, not living with the Sarge. You’re looking at this the wrong way around.”
“I’m looking at it the wrong way around? Why is it always my fault? Why am I always the one who’s over-reacting? You could interview any random guy on the street and he’d tell you he wouldn’t be happy about his girlfriend spending all her time with another man. That’s the way I look at it.”
My tone was snarky. “Maybe if we lived together, I wouldn’t have to depend on the Sarge. My own man would have my back.”
He was immediately contrite, knowing this was yet another touchy topic between us. “Tessie, you know it helps me save money to live at the prison.”
“Money for your family to leech from you.”
“Babe, don’t. You know I need the money to pay off my ute.” The ute that received more loving attention than I did in any given week.
The Sarge’s comments about Jake and a divorce sprang into my mind again. “Have you seen Chantelle much lately?”
He virtually squirmed. “Now and then. At family things. Not on her own.”
“You giving her money?”
“On occasion,” he said evasively.
“Why, Jakey?”
I thought he wasn’t going to answer for a while. “I suppose I feel a bit responsible for her. She’s still my wife.”
That was a slap in the face I didn’t need. “You planning on getting back together with her one day?”
He laughed at that, “No! Of course not. That bridge has been crossed and burned down.”
I wanted to test him. “Time for a divorce then, right?”
More squirming. “What difference does it make? We’ve been separated for years.”
That saddened me. “Maybe I’d prefer not to be going out with a married man. Maybe I need to start seriously thinking about our future,” I said quietly.
Sensing I was in a dangerous mood, he flicked a switch to charming mode. “Let’s not fight, babe,” he coaxed. “Not tonight. Not when I can think of better things to do.”
His lips blazed a hot trail up my arm and across my shoulder. He nibbled on my neck.
“Jake . . .” I protested, wanting for once to have a real conversation with him about the important sticking points between us. But it was increasingly hard to concentrate as his hands started caressing my body, his talented tongue finding my pleasure spots. I tried again. “Jakey . . .” My voice weakened and petered out. My body would not be denied its desires, so I surrendered all thoughts and gave in to him.
We could always talk tomorrow, I told myself. And that was the last coherent thought I had for a while before that final burst of passionate activity sent us both to sleep. There couldn’t be anything better in life than snuggling into a warm, cosy bed with Jakey, I thought with happy sleepiness, slipping an arm around his body, every cell in mine relaxed and satisfied. I patted my knife for reassurance and pushed all thoughts of Red Bycraft from my mind. I found myself thinking about the Sarge instead, before pushing all thoughts of him from my mind as well, willingly giving myself up to oblivion for a while.
Something woke me a few hours later. I sat up in bed, hand on my knife, my ears and eyes straining into the silent darkness surrounding me. A long, slow minute ticked by, then another. False alarm, I chided myself, preparing to settle back down into bed when I heard a noise. I froze, ears burning with the effort to hear.
A faint scraping sounded from under my bedroom window, followed by the quiet crunching of the gravel I’d deliberately landscaped under every window in the house. Nobody was entering my house without some warning.
It was probably just Denny Bycraft, I argued to myself. For some indefinable reason, tonight didn’t have the feel of Denny though. He was usually rather careless, making more noise than my current intruder. So I ruled out Denny. The big question for me then – was it Red?
I crept out of bed without waking a slightly snoring Jake, and rounded up my crumpled clothes I’d discarded earlier. I crawled around on my hands and knees and located my runners. Tugging them on without socks, I took my utility belt, which the Sarge insisted I bring with me, and slung it around my hips. Strapping my knife back on my thigh, and with my phone shoved into my front jeans pocket, I headed for the back door, taking a second to tie my hair up into a ponytail.
I knew my house and yard intimately, even in the dark, having lived here most of my life. I quietly slipped through the back door, down the ramp that we’d installed a few years ago for Dad’s chair. The smells from my herb garden were always strong at night, and the aromatic and competing smells of basil, rosemary, parsley and thyme assailed my nostrils as I crept to the side of the house, sticking closely to the back wall. My presence passing the coop stirred up my sleepy chickens and there were a few soft complaining clucks and flutterings until they settled themselves back to sleep again.
I stood still at the corner between the back and the side, flattened against t
he house, holding my breath, gun up and ready. I waited to see if the small fuss the chooks had made drew anyone to the backyard to investigate. Muted footfalls slowly approached from the side. Whoever my mysterious midnight visitor was, they were taking great care not to be heard. I shrunk into the shadows thrown by our big mango tree, my heart thumping. I took a couple of steps backwards towards the ramp.
A dark shape cautiously peered around the corner of the house, scoping the immediate vicinity. I didn’t dare to breathe. It was Red. I could tell by his profile in the moonlight as his eyes roamed over the backyard. His hair had grown longer again since I’d seen him last in court, trying to convince the magistrate with his neat attractive appearance and new suit that he wasn’t a violent recidivistic offender. It hadn’t worked.
He smiled to himself when he noticed my chicken coop and my blood ran cold. Not my girls, I thought. Not again.
Time to act.
“Hello, Red,” I said quietly from the shadows, my gun trained on him.
He spun around, his own gun out, waving it in my general direction. He was a lousy shot, but he was a lucky man and had managed to shoot me once before by chance. And although he had nothing but a pissy little pink-handled gun he’d stolen from an elderly lady, I wasn’t keen for a replay. That bullet wound had hurt like crazy.
“Tessie,” he said, delighted, his white teeth flashing in the moonlight. “Wait a minute.” He put his nose to the air and sniffed dramatically. “Yum! I can smell that beautiful sweet pussy of yours from here. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”