by A. J. Downey
“Okay, so you got that Hugh Grant was all into Emma Thompson, right?”
“Right.”
“Then you got that he was trying to tell her something back in the stables at her old house.”
“Right.”
“Right, that something was that he was already engaged to someone else, but his sister interrupted before he could get that out.”
“Oh,” he made a face and finished with, “damn.”
“Right? Well, that’s here. She’s told Elinor that she’s heard so much about her from Edward and so she simply had to come out this way to where they live now to meet her – basically, she’s here to check out the competition.”
“What kind of high school bullshit is that?” he demanded and again I fell back against my end of the couch with laughter.
“Edward is rich, Lucy doesn’t want to lose her meal ticket to a poacher,” I said simply.
“God damn.” He shook his head. “Not sorry for sayin’ it but fucking white people.”
I died laughing all over again and I had to say, “I don’t disagree! It was really bad back then for women though. Keep watching.”
And to his credit he did, and what’s more, the questions became fewer and further between as he actually became engrossed in the movie and I smiled to myself.
It was a rare thing to find a modern man, hell, any man to watch a Jane Austen movie with you.
11
Oz…
She wasn’t like other girls. I mean, most women, if you didn’t get it, would be assholes about it all snippy and shit as they explained what was going on. Not Elka. She would just pause the movie and would explain it and talk about it like sharing it gave her life. She illuminated from the inside out with a glow of pride and pleasure when I caught on to what was happening and made a breakthrough on my own on what shit was going down on the screen.
She didn’t make me feel stupid for not getting the old-timey speak or how they were talking about one thing while meaning something completely different. I didn’t understand that shit. If you meant something, you said it, it was a different world I came from, but it didn’t stop me from trying to understand someone else’s.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said, confused, and she stopped it for the umpteenth time and looked at me expectantly, eager to answer my questions and it was adorable. I smiled and said, “What exactly is it with this Willoughby guy?”
“Ah ha, catching onto what a douche he is?”
I laughed. “I mean, he wouldn’t even acknowledge Maryanne at the party, so yeah, kind of a dick. Look at her.” I gestured to the sobbing Maryanne on the screen. Her sister trying to comfort her.
“Yeah,” Elka said softly, her face changing, a sadness settling over her features.
“You and Mia a lot like Elinor and Maryanne?” I asked softly.
Elka choked on a laugh and cleared her throat. “Yeah.”
“Let me guess, Mia was the Elinor to your Maryanne.”
She cocked her head and shook it. “Everybody said the opposite, actually. I was supposedly the one with sense while Mia would let her sensibilities take her away.”
I shook my head. “Naw, I think it’s the other way around. You got a fire inside, get so passionate about things. You’re definitely a Maryanne.”
She blushed faintly and mumbled, “Keep watching, if I explain Willoughby now, it would be giving something away. I don’t want to do that.”
“Okay.”
She started the movie again and I tried to wrap my head around it, but it had so many things going on, and it was like all these different threads were being pulled in and it was hard to follow.
Still, I exercised a little patience in hopes of a payoff and just generally enjoyed getting to know Elka more.
“Wait, what’d he say? Did that Willoughby guy knock somebody up?”
“Yes! Oh, my God!” She paused the movie and there was her infectious excitement again. I sat up and took a drink of the bomb ass tea she made me as she got ready to spill the tea.
“So, you remember when Brandon took off from the picnic like a bat out of hell, right?”
“Yeah.”
She went on like a freight train plowing through the complicated morass of drama unfolding on the screen and the way she went through it? It made it sound like the most fascinating thing. I was all up in these character’s lives by the time she had me straight and was genuinely wanting to know what happened next.
Me. A cop. A badass motherfucker. A biker. An alpha male among alpha males was sitting here watching a chick flick with this girl and I was actually enjoying it. I was suddenly rethinking and reworking this plan on why I suggested this.
I mean, my thought had been that I would do this and suffer through it just so I could get some leverage to get her out of her comfort zone. I wanted to take her for a ride, bad, and I figured if I did something she loved, I would be able to make a case to get her to do one of my favorite things.
It was still my master plan, but damn. Now it almost didn’t seem fair.
She turned the movie back on, grinning like a kid at Christmas and guilt aside, I really wanted to show her something new. Something about me when she’d shared so much about her even in her wounded state. I mean, it took some time to find a crack in her armor, but it was like once this chick decided to let you in, you were all-in and that was kind of intense.
I wasn’t like that, but I found myself wanting to try all of a sudden.
The brakes got pumped really fast when the waterworks started.
“What now?” I asked. “I don’t get it, why you crying?”
“Were you paying attention to the carriage ride?” she cried.
“Yeah,” I said stunned.
“Okay, so you caught the part where Hugh Laurie’s wife was prattling on about Willoughby’s house being five miles from their house, right?”
“Oh, shit, no I missed that, but why is that important?”
“Because! She walked five miles pining for that dumpster fire of a human being and Colonel Brandon is so in love with her, he not only walked five miles to go after her, in the rain, that man just carried her five miles back to the house. He loves her so much!”
She stared back at the television with the freeze-frame on Alan Rickman, soaking wet and looking helpless, standing in the doorway and I got it. I had completely missed that shit, and it made me think about some of the guys in the club, finding the women they would do that for. Happy with them, partnered up with them for life, and I felt a spike of jealousy.
I wanted that bad when I’d married Regina. I thought I’d had it. What I’d had was a younger prettier woman in my ex-wife who never in a million years should have ever become my wife in the first place. Her ass should have stayed the brother loving badge bunny I’d found her as.
Her appetites for brand-name expensive shit was way above and beyond my fuckin’ pay grade but that hadn’t stopped her opening up credit cards and shit in my name and running them up to their max.
When she’d divorced me, she’d stuck me with a lot of shit and had demanded half my retirement to boot. She was fuckin’ lucky she got what she did. I was fuckin’ lucky she hadn’t gotten alimony.
That’s what I got for marrying a chick fifteen years younger than me. It’s part of why I worried so much about Skids hookin’ up with a twenty-something-year-old girl when dude was in his fifties.
For a while, I thought some lessons were learned the hard way and I’d been right. Not about Coco and Skids. The two of them were solid. I’d learned my lesson the hard way about not being such a judgmental bastard. I was learning a lot of new tricks in my middle age and I guess I should be grateful I wasn’t an old dog. At least not yet.
“Aw c’mere,” I said, setting my tea aside and opening my arms. “Bring it in.”
Elka laughed but scooted closer and let me hug her. I held her tight and she shook slightly before she really started to sob, and I think she just needed the hug. Had needed it for a whi
le now.
“I’m sorry,” she warbled pitifully, and I shook my head, resting my chin on the top of her head.
“Naw, you just go ahead and cry,” I told her. “You ain’t gotta worry about me.”
And she didn’t. I was right where I wanted to be. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have been there.
“What are you doing?” she asked when I shifted and snatched the remote off the table. I didn’t answer immediately, manhandling her a bit so we were both cuddled in a pile on her couch. I hit play and held her tight and said, “I’m finishing the movie, and you ain’t gotta go anywhere so settle down.”
She laughed, and it sounded a bit watery.
“Thank you,” she said and let me hold her. I smiled and breathed in her clean vanilla scent and said, “You’re welcome.”
12
Elka…
It was with great reluctance that I dragged myself out of the comfortable cocoon of his arms. I couldn’t believe myself. I wasn’t typically so audacious and now that my feelings were back under control for the most part, I didn’t know how to feel anything except awkward.
For Oz, it was like water off a duck’s back. He just didn’t pay it any mind as the credits rolled and I pushed myself up off of him to clear our tea plates and to blow out the candle that was still going beneath the much-depleted teapot.
“Be right back,” he said gently. “All that tea has caught up to me.”
I smiled and murmured, “You know where the bathroom is.”
He smiled back and pushed himself smoothly up off the couch. I gathered the tray and took it to the kitchen, taking my time to wash everything up by hand.
“So, what are you gonna do with the rest of your night?” he asked.
“Paint, maybe… go to bed, probably. What about you?”
“Definitely headed home and hitting the hay,” he said.
“Well, thank you for this. I guess I hadn’t realized how much I needed just a low-key night spent with company… sorry if I –”
He cut me off with, “Hey, no, you ain’t got nothin’ to apologize for. It’s cool, alright?”
“Okay.” I nodded and swallowed hard.
“Come take a ride with me next Saturday,” he said, and I looked up at him like he was crazy.
“Me? On the back of a motorcycle? Yeah, right.”
“Come on,” he said with a wicked grin. “I did something you liked tonight, fair is fair.”
I frowned at him and opened my mouth to protest but he was right.
I closed my mouth and took a deep breath and said, “I’m afraid.”
He simply shrugged and said, “So? Be afraid but do it anyway.”
I blinked in surprise and looked at him. I didn’t have a retort. I mean… he smiled at me and said, “See you next Saturday. Text me if you got any questions.”
And with that he backed out of my kitchen archway and throwing the locks back deftly, slipped out my front door. I rushed out of the kitchen and stood staring at the new wood for a second before taking the last few steps and locking up behind him.
I felt my shoulders drop as I asked myself, What just happened? Did I agree to go for a ride next week?
I moved automatically through the rest of my clean up and back into my little artist’s studio where I flipped on the light and dropped onto the stool in front of my unfinished canvas. I picked up a brush and considered it before dipping the bristles into the pigment to resume my work as my mind raced.
What would Daddy think?
He’d throw an absolute fit. I was, after all, the only daughter he had left.
I paused in my work and stared at my sister’s face, the only finished part of the painting.
“What do you think I should do?” I asked her, and my immediate thought was go.
I knew I was right. That Mia indeed would want me to go and was surprised to find that I really wanted to go. I mean, it was something new and something I would never do, and Oz’s words had stuck with me.
So? Be afraid but do it anyway.
It sounded so easy when he put it that way, but nothing about this was going to be easy for me. I mean, what if I fell? What if I got hurt, or lost the use of my hands, or developed something awful like a permanent tremor?
What if, what if, what if! What if you actually had fun for once in your life?
I smiled at the face of my sister, eyes misting with tears as I replayed the familiar counter argument in my head.
“As always, when you’re right, you’re right,” I murmured and then I set my brush down and covered my face with my hands and sobbed.
God, I wished my sister were here to have this petty argument with me. I missed her so much.
Out of the two of us, she had certainly been the Marianne. Passionate, vivacious, so much more passionate and fuller of life than I was. Always pushing me, especially after he-who-shall-not-be-named had broken it off with me and married someone more fit to his station in life.
I’d done everything he asked me to. Had become everything he had wanted or needed me to be in the moment, only for it to have never been good enough, and now? Now, I didn’t feel like I was… for anyone. For anything.
Certainly not for someone like Oz, I thought derisively.
Oh, knock it off! I was really starting to wonder if it was still me conjuring my sister’s voice or if she were indeed here.
“Mia?” I called out softly, and listened ears straining… but of course, there was nothing.
“Okay, Ellie. Enough is enough,” I told myself. “It’s time for bed.”
I cleaned my brush, used the bathroom and brushed my teeth, and with one final lingering look behind me at my unfinished painting, snapped out the light and crossed the hall to my bedroom.
13
Oz…
“Got a live one for you,” Golden declared, as he and his partner dragged a hobbled man between them.
“Whoa, busted out the extra chains and a spit mask, huh?”
“Yeah,” Golden’s partner for the night grunted and I pointed over at single cell one.
“Let’s get him in the restraint chair and into one. What’s he on, anyway?”
“Fuck you! You fucking pigs! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you all, man! Fuck you!” the man was screaming.
“I dunno, combo of alcohol and something. Could just be a head case.”
We three struggled with the dude who kept trying to spit but was having no luck with the fine nylon mesh face hood he was rockin’.
“Hey, knock it off!” I put down the law. “Ain’t nobody disrespecting you, my man! You done this to your damn self. Act like a man, you get treated like a man. Act like an animal, you get this. It’s all up to you in here, buddy.”
He went from screaming at us to hyperventilating but I’d seen this shit before. He was doing it on purpose. We got him unhooked and hooked back up in the restraint chair, but it was a fight. Hobbs, another one of the jailers had to get in there and help us, one of the jail nurses standing by and documenting with a video camera, writing the occasional note on her blue latex glove.
“You good?” I asked the dude and he hacked a fat one and tried to spit it at me, but again for the mask.
“Mm-mm.” Hollis, the nurse, shook her head. “Another fun one.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“John Doe. Didn’t have any ID on him.” Golden shook his head and I sighed.
We locked dude up in the observation cell with its thick, scratched, but still serviceable glass door and I headed on over to the computer to do the intake paperwork. Golden and his partner stood by at the corner of the desk flipping through pages on their clipboard and marking things off.
I finished up my shit and went back over to the previous screen.
“What’s that?” Golden asked.
“Tryin’ to convince Elka to come out for a ride with me on Saturday,” I said. “I think she will, now I’m just lookin’ at a few places to take her.”
“Whoa, hold up,
you actually getting into a relationship here?”
I shook my head. “Just friends,” I told him, half distracted, reading through what was on my screen.
“Uh huh, is that why you’re looking at ‘Fine Art Galleries Near Me’ then?”
I shrugged. “She likes art.”
“Yeah, but you don’t,” he said laughing.
“How do you know what the fuck I like?” I demanded with a frown. Motherfucker just laughed at me.
“Man, get on out of here with that mess.” I waved him off. “Go do your paperwork in your patrol car. Get some coffee and a doughnut or some shit.”
Golden guffawed and grabbed up his clipboard he and his partner wandered to the sliding doors that led to the garage and he shot me a one-fingered salute over his shoulder.
“Love you, too, my brother!” I called after him.
“Man, that’s some gay shit,” one of the prisoner’s waiting in the DMV style waiting area for the rest of his intake called out.
I spun on my stool and pointed at him. “You, shut up!”
He cracked a grin that was more gums than teeth and I fought not to roll my eyes. Meth was a fuckin epidemic, same as the opioid crisis, only less headline inducing.
I spun back around and pulled my notepad out of my breast pocket and a pen out of the slim pocket on my sleeve. I flipped open the pad and jotted some things down then went over to google maps and plugged a few things in.
“Eh, a little rough for a first ride,” I muttered, looking at the time and distance. “Go big or go home, I guess.”
I had a plan, and I had all week to change it, so it wasn’t a big deal. This was just one of a few ideas I had, but it was the best one I think I’d come up with out of all of them. I guess we would just have to wait and see.
“Hey, Jones!”
I perked up dragging my eyes off the screen. “Hey, yeah?”