by E. Jamie
“Don't touch me. I don't know you. You don't touch me, got it?” she ordered, watching warm blood slide down her fingers to stain the immaculate sheets. “Now look what you did,” she said to herself, and it was almost like there was no one else in the room with her. She stared at the blood while the doctor tended to Karl's bleeding nose.
The sheets weren’t so clean anymore. She’d made them dirty. That's what I do, she thought, starting to laugh again. She made things dirty, she ruined them. Garbage was a very dirty thing. How could it be anything but dirty? She watched the doctor fix her hand. It was supposed to hurt but didn’t. Laura felt nothing. Garbage didn’t feel. It wrecked, it destroyed. My baby, I'm sorry I wrecked you. I'm so sorry I wrecked you. Then she was laughing again, only her face was wet. Were her eyes bleeding? She curled up again when the doctor left with that guy and was laughing so hard she was shaking.
The sound of Laura Thatcher’s screams followed Doctor Beauchamp and Karl out of the room.
Karl explained later that the driver of the car that hit Laura Thatcher, Jack Kennedy, had panicked and run out of the car, leaving Karl, shaken but uninjured, behind. He'd called for an ambulance from the car and waited with a semi-conscious Laura in the middle of the growing crowd on the street. She’d repeatedly called for Caleb.
Laura had finally stopped screaming when the doctor injected her with a sedative, and a few hours later, she awakened to find Karl sitting next to her again. Her eyes didn’t really see him, though they looked in his direction “I want you to do something for me.” And her voice sounded as dead as she felt inside.
****
She’d made him go back and clear out her apartment and help her disappear. She knew she could never face Caleb, never love him again knowing she had killed his baby. He would hate her if he knew she had killed their unborn child. Over the years,
Karl had tried to remind her that she was not at fault for the accident, but Laura knew better.
Caleb had begged her not to go see her mother that day, and she had gone. She hadn’t listened to him and had put herself on that curb when the car came.
Laura realized with a start that she was crying, and she grabbed at the towel to wipe her face and forced herself to push that secret pain down deep inside of her where she always kept it.
Chapter Ten
“It looks okay,” Laura assured him while she changed his bandage.
Her fingers were warm on his skin. Caleb inhaled. Under the faint tang of blood was her perfume. It was the same vanilla scent she always wore. The scent he had bought for her when they were teenagers.
When they were perfect.
“I’m sorry I blew up at you.”
She blinked in surprise, and her green eyes softened before she shrugged. “Okay.”
“I would like you to stay,” he admitted.
She moved her gaze from his, and that oddly encouraged him. “I went to see Mankell today.”
His mouth dropped open in shock, and then he cried out when she chose that moment to pull off the bandage. “Ow!” Caleb narrowed his eyes at her when it occurred to him she had blurted that out to distract him. “Tell me you didn’t actually do that.”
She nodded. “Yep. Got to him too.”
She sounded so smug, Caleb didn’t know whether to smack her or kiss her with that little smile she now had on her face.
“You went to see that monster? Without backup? Have you completely lost your mind?”
“No, I was doing my job. Going after bad guys? Sort of in the job description.”
“Not alone. Not without backup, Laura. Hello?” He poked her side while she focused on bandaging his shoulder. “Are you listening?”
“The man was pissed that his guy shot you. He’s not stupid, Caleb. But now, he is scared because we got the shooter to talk. Scared will make him stupid. Mission accomplished.”
“Mission accom—” He clenched his jaw, trying to get his anger under control.
“He wasn’t about to do anything to me in a crowded club, Caleb. Come on. Now, when we go back with our search warrants, we’ll have a better chance of finding something incriminating, something he might have forgotten to get rid of.”
He shook his head at her. “I should take you over my knee.”
Laura glared at him. “Not unless you want a matching hole in the other shoulder. Now can you just nod and say, ‘Good job, Laura,’ and then we can have dinner?”
“You’re not kidding.” Caleb sighed, watching her walk back toward the kitchen.
“’Bout what?”
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
****
She had fallen asleep on his good shoulder. Caleb looked down at the lock of blonde hair that rested against her cheek. It made him feel too good to have her pressed against him the way she was. She almost looked like that young girl he had fallen in love with. It had taken her a while to feel at ease with him, but when she had, she had been that open with no one else. Just him. It had made him feel special. To have that little glimpse of her again, here against his side, her body rising and falling with each soft breath, tugged at his heart.
Jesus Christ. Just the idea of her going up against Mankell by herself made his blood freeze. Proof he was letting her get way too under his skin again. Oh, right, as if the fact that you slept with her again didn’t do that. He squeezed his eyes shut. That had been a drunken mistake, and not one he would repeat. Ever.
He would have to work just that much harder at keeping that wall up between them. Caleb heard about exes who managed to be friends. It was hard to imagine thinking of Laura as just a friend.
Maybe if he found someone else? He had tried with Eve, a woman he had met and had a semi-serious relationship with a few years ago. Mike had jokingly called her the Anti-Laura because she really could not have been more different from Laura.
****
She was a nice girl. Beautiful, sweet, funny and a knockout in bed. The perfect girl to bring home to meet his mom this weekend. While Caleb stared down at Evie's sleeping face, he considered it. The perfect 'move-on' girl. He imagined what their kids would look like and shook his head violently when visions of blonde toddlers assaulted him. He ran his fingers through her long black hair and dropped a kiss on her forehead. Her brown eyes fluttered open, and she gave him a sleepy smile.
Tell her now. Invite her home with you. But a nervous clench in the pit of his stomach held him back.
“Love you,” Evie murmured, wrapping an arm around his waist, and within seconds, she was sleeping again.
She’d made that declaration for the first time earlier tonight. Then she’d shaken her head when he’d opened his mouth to automatically respond in kind. “No you don't. Not yet. It's okay. Just wanted to lay my cards on the table.”
They’d met six months ago when she was roaming the halls of the apartment building she shared with Caleb, looking for her dog at five in the morning.
He came out of his sleep hearing someone calling for Apollo. She was dressed in pink-striped pajama pants and a navy blue t-shirt, with neon orange slippers on her feet.
“Can I help you?” he snapped. He wasn't supposed to be awake for another two hours at least.
Her black eyes widened when she saw him, and her gaze ran down then up the length of his body. He realized he’d forgotten his shirt and was clad just in black pajama pants.
She let out an appreciative little whistle. “Maybe later, gorgeous. Damn it, Apollo, come back here, boy! I'm gonna kick your damned four-legged ass when I find you!” And then she was stomping down the hall away from him.
“You named your dog Apollo?” Caleb asked, unable to hide a snort of laughter.
“Yeah. You didn't happen to see him, did you? A little ball of white fur? Looks like a strong wind could knock him over?”
“I was asleep,” Caleb reminded her.
She grimaced. “Right, sorry about that. I'll try and be more quiet. 'Night.”
“Well,
to hell with it now. I'm not getting back to sleep, so you wanna hand?” he asked, yawning.
She laughed a lot, and Caleb found himself laughing a lot with her.
When she invited him up for drinks, he said yes.
When she invited him out for dinner, he said yes.
When she invited him into her bed, he said yes and for the first time in years, didn't think of Laura.
When she told him she loved him for the first time, he remembered Laura and forced himself past the pain of remembering and wanted to say the same.
But Eve stopped him. She knew there was something there. A pain he didn’t speak of, and she told him she wouldn’t push, but he must promise to always be honest with her. Caleb agreed and prayed that she never asked him about Laura.
He could feel the door with Laura’s name on it start to close, the more time he spent with Eve. He called her Evie, and she liked that. She made him feel so good. Maybe even happy. He found himself looking forward to seeing her at the end of his day.
His mom noticed the change in Caleb before he did himself. When he told her about Eve, his mother smiled, but her eyes flickered with a spot of sadness. She loved Laura and missed her and, for the first year, insisted that he try and find out what happened, but Caleb's pride had been too destroyed, and he’d refused.
They didn’t talk about Laura anymore.
When he finally brought Eve home to meet his mom, he was not surprised that both women got along. He knew his mother was happy her son was no longer living in a haze of pain. But Eve wasn’t Laura, and he knew that his mother had hopes that someday his first love would come back.
Still, Caroline welcomed Eve, and the two women talked and laughed about things Caleb was not entirely sure he understood. His mother shared stories from his childhood he knew he should have been embarrassed by, but he was just glad that being with Eve was so easy. Uncomplicated. Painless.
He bit into a steak sandwich, half listening to Caroline tell Eve about the time Caleb made Mike swallow a garden snail when the phone rang and his mother rushed to answer it.
“I didn't know you had such an evil streak, McKinney. It's kinda sexy,” Eve said, nudging his knee.
He smiled at her and offered her a bite of his sandwich.
Excited murmurs came from the kitchen, and his mom told him that it was Mike and that his younger brother wanted to talk to him.
“I'll be right back.” He leaned in, kissed a few breadcrumbs off of Eve's lips, and she grabbed his sandwich.
“I'll hold on to it for you,” she assured him with a devilish grin that told Caleb the sandwich would be gone when he finished his phone call.
“Hey, Mike. How ya doing?” he asked when his mother handed him the phone with a very odd look in her eyes. She stood in front of him for a second and then must have remembered she had a guest because she left him alone in the room, looking back over her shoulder at him and biting her lip.
“Good. Good. Classes are a bitch, but what else is new, right? I'll have some time off in a couple of weeks, and maybe we can hang out.”
“That'd be great. You can meet Evie,” he offered, again feeling that uneasy knot that whispered he wasn’t ready for a relationship so serious that the girl was making nice with his family. He pushed the thought away for the hundredth time. He would just make himself ready.
There was silence on Mike's end for a few seconds.
“You still there, man?” he asked.
“Yeah, right. Listen...there's, um...something I think you should know.”
A chill ran down the back of his neck, and for some reason he turned to Eve, needing to see her face. She gave him a little smile and wink from the couch.
“It's about Laura.”
Caleb's vision blurred a little, and the breath was knocked out of him. His throat closed and he coughed.
“You okay over there?” He heard Eve's voice, and his stomach lurched. His grip on the phone tightened to the point where he thought it might shatter in his hand, and then his mom would be pissed at him because he broke her phone.
No. Not so okay.
“I've found her, Caleb. She's my goddamned instructor, if you can believe that. Small world, huh?” Mike asked with a small, nervous laugh.
Caleb's knees buckled a little, and he grabbed the counter. Oh God...oh God...
“Caleb?” Mike pressed after a few more seconds of silence.
“Yeah. Yeah. I'm here. That's...uh...wow. That's something.” He was gonna throw up. Oh God.
“Definitely. She's okay. Doing great. She told me that she just wasn't ready for marriage, you know? She feels terrible about leaving like that, but she just didn't want to hurt you.”
If Laura Thatcher was standing in front of him, Caleb was certain he would have choked the life out her. His blood was roaring in his ears, and he shook. Didn't want to hurt him? Bitch! Cowardly bitch! Rage like he had never known surged up in him, and it took all he had to not to pull the phone from the wall and throw it across the kitchen.
“Right,” he forced himself to say through clenched teeth.
“But it looks like it all worked out for the best though, right? I mean, you've got Eve now.”
“Right,” he repeated.
“So. Is there anything you...uh...anything you want me to let her know? Anything you want me to say? Maybe you guys can talk sometime. Work things out?”
The palm of his hand stung, but it took a moment through his haze of anger for Caleb to feel it. A ball of ice formed in his chest, amid the heat of his anger. Cowardly bitch. Coward. Coward. That was what he wanted to say, wanted to shout in Laura's face while he strangled her. It all meant nothing to her. It couldn't have meant anything if it was so easy for her to walk away. Oh, he could play that game. If the bitch wanted what they’d been to each other to mean nothing, Caleb could play.
“Tell her I said hi,” he responded. Hi, Bitch. Hi, Nothing. How are you doing today, Ms. Coward? Screw you.
Caleb looked down and realized with a start that he'd impaled his hand on the knife his mom had used to make his sandwich.
****
Caleb slid his finger along the lock of hair on her cheek, and Laura wrapped an arm around his waist and snuggled closer. God, she terrified him. It was horrifying the way he wanted to stay right there with her arms wrapped around him like they’d never hurt each other at all.
He shook his head. No way. There was no way he could allow it to happen again. Caleb disentangled himself from her embrace and stood up, gathering her in his arms and carrying her into the bedroom.
He set her down on the bed and forced himself to walk out, closing the door to protect himself from her, and from himself.
****
Caleb was quiet while they drove to search Mankell’s house.
“You wanna share with the class?” Laura asked him.
“Mm?” he asked, jerked from his thoughts.
“You’re looking more brooding than usual. What did I do this time?”
“What? No. Nothing. Just trying to think about what we need to look out for at the house,” he lied. He was both looking forward to and dreading the end of this case, because then Laura would have no excuse to stay with him.
That was a good thing. It’d be easier on his peace of mind. First thing he was going to do was give Eve a call. He’d broken up with her not long after Mike’s death, unable to deal with the fact that Laura had gotten involved with his brother along with his grief. It was too much. The breakup had been amicable, and he wondered sometimes if he should try again.
Then, of course, Laura walked back into his life.
“You don’t think he’s got like a secret passageway with kids stuck in a dungeon, do you?” Laura grimaced.
“Nah. I don’t think so.” He radioed in to backup that they were approaching the house.
Mankell’s house was an impressive Georgian-style mansion in the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Laura shook her head while Caleb announced their arriva
l over the intercom in front of the black iron gates.
“Miss me?” she asked, smiling as she and Caleb showed their warrants to Mankell while the doorman let them in.
“I of course offer my full cooperation to the New York City Police Department. Just let me know if there’s anything I can do to help,” Mankell said with a smile. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Aw, a pedophile with manners,” Caleb said, turning away from him while their fellow policemen were let in past the gates up the driveway.
“Just stay out of our way,” Laura said when she turned left into what Caleb found was the den.