by Meli Raine
“Go on,” she says, propping her head up on one hand, her elbow against the pillow. “What is such a secret about the fact that you’re not the only person watching me right now?”
“That’s it. That’s all you need to know. There’s another team outside. They can keep an eye on you. I just need to go for a run.” My heart is hammering in my chest. I can’t admit to her that a part of me forgot for a few seconds that she was even here.
“How long are you going to be gone?”
“Three miles.”
“That’s a distance, Duff, not a time.”
“I don’t know. Three miles. However long it takes me to run three miles.” If she keeps looking at me like that, it’s going to take me an hour to run with this broomstick between my legs.
“Tell me more about all this behind-the-scenes stuff.”
I groan. “Let me go for my run. When I come back, I’ll tell you everything I'm allowed to.”
“Will you bring me back a coffee?” she asks.
“Do I look like your errand boy?”
“Well, yes.” She perks up. “You are my errand boy. You’re protecting me. You help me. You’re invested in my well-being. If I have to get up at 4:45 in the morning, my well-being includes coffee. Cinnamon latte. Almond milk.”
“I know how you like your coffee, Lily.”
“Then this is even easier.” She’s teasing me. She’s killing me.
“I’m not going to get you any coffee, Lily, but,” I hold up one finger to quell her protests, “I’ll come back. I’m going to go for my run. When I get back here, be showered. Then I’ll take a shower. And then we’ll take you to your physical therapy appointment.”
“I don’t hear any coffee in there.”
“I’ll take you to my kind of coffee shop.”
“I don’t have the best track record with coffee shops these days, Duff.”
“Trust me. This one isn’t going to involve any gang-related shootings or anyone trying to finish the job they didn’t do properly two years ago.” The minute the word properly comes out of my mouth, I realize it’s a mistake.
Her face confirms it.
“Lily, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I know. I know,” she says. She looks down, taking a deep breath. “I know you didn’t mean it that way, but it’s true.”
“No one wants you dead.”
“Oh, no, Duff. That’s not true. Someone wants me very, very dead.”
“We don’t know that. They could have been aiming for Jane. Silas is going nuts about it and–”
“You really believe that,” she interrupts.
“No,” I say honestly. “I don’t know. You–you take all of the clear-cut boundaries in the world, Lily, and you make them blur.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. You do.”
And with that, I grab the doorknob, open it, and leave.
Three miles takes me exactly nineteen minutes and forty-six seconds. I’m slow this morning. It’s the first third of the run that requires some loosening up–if you know what I mean. By the time I’m back, she’s sitting on the couch, reading some stupid magazine from five years ago that’s from a magazine rack in this rat trap. Her hair’s wet and she smells like my shampoo.
As I walk in the door, I grunt at her and go straight into the tiny bathroom, which also smells like my shampoo. Stripping out of my sweaty clothes, I climb in, trying damn hard not to think about the fact that she was just naked in the same space moments ago.
In the army, I learned to take a sixty-second shower. This one I manage in forty-nine. That’s the advantage of short hair. I run a hand along the scruff on my jaw. I should shave. I know I should. Professional guidelines dictate that I need to, but I don’t care about professional guidelines right now.
Nothing about my relationship with Lily is strictly professional anymore.
“I need coffee,” she calls out as I throw on some clothes. My leg gets caught in one of the pants cuffs. I stumble and almost fall to the floor. I catch my hip on the bed, feet landing on the area rug.
It slides.
Once again, an object that is meant to protect turns into a vehicle for disaster. One hell of an allegory for life.
I come out of the bedroom nook to find her standing there, an expectant look on her face.
“Where to?” she asks.
“Physical therapy,” I tell her. “Remember? 6:30.”
“No. No. Before that, I need coffee. I know you're a coffee snob.”
“I’m not a coffee snob,” I protest. “I just like the really good stuff.”
“Then show me the really good stuff, Duff,” she says, her joints loose.
The joke's making me hard again. I turn away. I reach into my cupboard and pull out a small manual espresso maker, a device close to a one-shot French press. Filling the tea kettle, I turn on the burner and get things started.
“What’s this?” she asks. “Aren’t we supposed to go out for coffee?”
“Best coffee in town is right here, Lily.”
“You’re kidding. You’re going to make coffee? What is that?” she asks, stumbling over her words as she watches me set up the espresso maker.
“This is how you make real coffee.” I set the cone up over the coffee mug. Add the tiny circular filter. Screw it into place. Sprinkle exactly two level tablespoons of coffee grounds inside and then wait for the water to do its job.
“You make coffee like this every day? One cup at a time?”
“Only way to do it.”
“It’s so much effort.”
“All the good things in life are.”
We’re bantering, laughing side by side. Having her in my personal space is disconcerting, but then again, this isn’t really my space.
This is just a space that I occupy in the line of duty.
Is Lily someone I can occupy in the line of duty?
The kettle whistles. We both jump, taken by surprise at the known intrusion. I reach for the kettle handle and pour the water into the cylinder to make the coffee. She watches as I grab the paddle, swishing the hot water and grounds around, then slowly push the plunger down to produce the cup of espresso.
“This is like a French press,” she observes. I shrug.
“Something like that.”
The details don’t matter. What matters is that I’m doing this with her. She asked me to invite her into my world and I did. There’s no better way to do it than to show her what I like.
I hand her the cup of coffee. She wrinkles her nose.
“Got any almond milk?” she asks.
“No.”
“Got any milk of any kind?”
“Yes. Cow's milk.”
“I'm lactose intolerant.”
“Sorry.”
“Got any cinnamon?”
“Yes.”
“I’m one for three.”
For some reason, that makes me laugh as I reach into the cabinet and pull out the cinnamon.
She sprinkles it liberally on top.
“Go ahead,” I tell her. “Trust me.”
One wry eyebrow raises at my words. She takes a tentative sip. Her eyes light up.
“This is good.”
“Told you. All that other stuff you’ve been drinking is crap.”
She takes another sip. As her mouth wraps around the edge of the cup, I'm reminded of the fact that those lips once touched mine. “This is really good, Duff.”
I take a partial bow.
“How does this thing work again?”
I slowly disassemble it, naming each part, pulling the dirty filter out and rinsing the contraption until I reassemble it, put a new filter in, add fresh grounds and reheat the water.
“It’s a simple set of steps. Each methodical. Each important. You can’t mix them up or get them out of order. They have to happen as intended.”
Lily watches my hands moving through the steps as if following a rigid set of guidelines. She’s smiling, sipping her coffee
, chatting animatedly, and I ponder the fact that emotions don’t have that kind of order.
I make my own cup of espresso and we go into the living room.
There’s nowhere to sit other than the couch, so I take a spot next to her. She leans forward, casual and relaxed, elbows on the ends of her knees, the cup held up to her mouth. Steam rises off both of our drinks. The coffee is rich, with a cherry-and-caramel edge to it and smokehouse flavors that linger on my tongue.
This is exactly how I drink my coffee every morning, with the exception of Lily’s presence. A guy could get used to this.
Tension in her shoulders drains out slowly as the coffee sinks in.
She looks at me, dark circles under her eyes, and asks, “I really have to do PT?”
“That’s your choice,” I say, taking another sip to shut up.
“I know I should go,” she groans, “And I like Rhonda. Clem will probably be there. He’s a creepy old guy, but he’s harmless. It’s just that going to PT is a reminder. It’s a reminder of being shot. It’s a reminder of being disabled. It’s a reminder of all the ways that life is so much harder than it was supposed to be. I wasn’t born like this, Duff. I was made like this. I had a dream last night,” she says.
I jolt. “Yeah? What happened?”
“I was in a desert,” she starts.
The hair on the back of my neck tingles.
“I was wandering completely alone, wearing this long, thin white robe. It flapped in the wind, like hands clapping. I walked slowly, until suddenly I wasn’t walking on the sand. I was in the air, only I could walk. I could move. It was freeing. I opened up my arms and I stretched them out like that couple in Titanic. Like a bird flying with big wings. Only I wasn’t flying. I was just walking. I heard you call my name. I turned and looked and there was this tent in the middle of the sand. Only that was it. There was nothing else. Not a single other person. No cars. No buildings. Nothing.”
I don't know how to breathe.
Her eyes narrow as she looks over my shoulder, caught up in the memory. “You were in this tent. I could look and see the outside of the tent bulging like something inside was trying to get out. Except there was no door.”
“You dreamt that? You dreamt about a tent?”
“Yeah. Did you dream about a tent last night, Duff?”
“No,” I lie. “I don’t dream.”
“At all?”
“No. Not since I got back from Afghanistan.”
“That’s weird. My neurologist says that people who don’t dream are rare. Maybe you dream and you just forget what the dream is about.”
I stand. “It’s time to go to PT.”
“We have a few minutes, don’t we? It’s not far.”
“Traffic.”
She pulls her head back, offended by my abrupt words. “I don’t care.”
Chugging down the rest of my coffee, I reach for her empty cup, walk them into the kitchen, turn around, and walk straight out the front door, assuming she’s behind me.
How the hell could Lily have had a dream just like mine? At what point did we become that connected? We get to the bottom of the second landing and I feel her hand on my shoulder.
“Duff,” she says. I turn around. She’s standing two steps above me. We’re face to face. “Duff, that dream, there’s a part of it I didn’t tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“There was no door on that tent, but when I walked closer to the side of it, there was this bulging part. I realized it was a face.”
“A face?”
“It was your face.”
You ever kiss someone before you realize you’re doing it? And you ever have them kiss you right back, twice as hard?
Her hands slide around my waist, slipping up under my jacket. Her fingers brush against my gun belt and I move, angling just enough to get it out of range. My hip twists just so, her pelvis connecting with mine. The kiss deepens. Just then both of our phones buzz.
She makes a guilty sound and pulls away, sticking her hand in her front pocket. She looks at the glass screen. “Reminder,” she reads. “It’s just a reminder of my appointment.”
I look at mine. “Same.”
“I think it’s a reminder of a lot more,” I say, pulling away, questioning every part of me in the blink of an eye.
“You said earlier that you wanted to talk about that kiss.”
“I said that yesterday, Lily.” And now there's another.
“Well,” she says, leaning into my space, tilting forward until I have no choice but to hold her, “maybe we can talk about it now.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I think there’s a lot to talk about, Duff. How about the fact that half the people involved in my security think that you’re the one who tried to kill me and half think Romeo is the one who tried to kill me?”
“It doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks, Lily. What matters is what you think. Who do you think tried to kill you?”
Long breaths fill the space between us. We smell like coffee. Like hope. Like two damaged people realizing that you can find something more than pain when you search long enough.
“What if I told you,” she says, so serious, brow down, shoulders rigid, “that I don’t have any new memories. Would you believe me?”
“I’d want to.”
“That’s not the same thing, Duff.”
“I know it’s not. Is it true though, Lily? I think you know exactly who did it. I think you know his name. I think you know what he looks like. I think you’re hiding him for a reason.”
“Does that mean you think you know who it is?”
“Yes,” I tell her.
“Then go ahead, Duff. Who do you think shot me?”
Chapter 10
I have to give her an out.
People need outs.
They need safe strategies for saving face. You don’t get what you want by directly confronting someone who has something to hide. You have to make them want to share it.
For some people, that’s all about ego. They want to prove they’re smarter than you. That they’re more powerful than you. They want to tell the thing that you are trying to unearth because they think it makes them look better. That it gives them more authority.
Other people just want to confess and get it over with.
And then there are the people who are hiding something for reasons that even they don’t fully understand. They think it’s for one reason, but it’s really another. Those people are the hardest nuts to crack because the reason they’re hiding something is often damn good.
“I’m going to give you a scenario, Lily. You tell me whether this hypothetical situation might be plausible.”
“I’m not playing this game, Duff.”
“You don’t have a choice, Lily. You’ve been playing it all along.”
Fear flashes through her eyes.
“Fine.”
“'There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you,'” I whisper. “Maya Angelou said that.”
“You're quoting literature to me? Now? Really, Duff?”
I shrug. I expect to get an eye roll in return.
I don't.
So I press on.
“Hypothetically, there’s a young woman working in a flower–in a greeting card shop. And she’s working at the counter with her back turned to the front door. She hears the door open. She looks up, but she doesn’t turn around. And then bam! Shot in the back of the head. What could she have looked at from her vantage point to have allowed her to see her killer?”
She sighs heavily. “Her 'killer' didn’t kill her, so he’s not really her killer. He’s just a crazed asshole who decided to shoot her, Duff.”
“Fine. The crazed asshole who tried to kill her.”
She smirks. “Well, hypothetically,” she says, “she could have caught a whiff of his cologne. Or she could have seen his image in a piece of glass, like a picture frame, or a window, or—”
She licks her lower lip and says, “Yeah, sure. A mirror.”
“Okay.”
“Okay...” Lily says. She’s still standing on that stair. We’re still eye to eye. I peer at her.
“And let’s say that greeting card woman nearly dies, over and over, throughout the course of the first week after the shooting. But she’s a fighter. She’s strong. She comes back. She’s unconscious. No one can talk to her. In fact, the doctors give up on her. But her parents don’t. Neither does her bodyguard.”
There’s a stillness to her that makes me ache.
“And then one day, fourteen months after the shooting, on the night that Harwell Bosworth wins the presidency of the United States, she wakes up. Coincidence?”
It’s clear she didn’t anticipate that turn in the conversation.
“What do you mean, coincidence? It’s not like I planned to be unconscious for fourteen months and spontaneously wake up on the night he won. What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything, Lily. I’m being hypothetical, remember? Nobody’s talking about you.”
“Of course we’re talking about me, you idiot.”
She gets a pass on the insult.
“This greeting card woman comes out of her coma and her personality’s different. She’s still the same person. No question there. No doppelgängers, no body swapping going on here. But she’s harder, tighter, more closed off, colder.”
“I’m not cold.”
I shrug. “She’s that way–hypothetically–because she’s keeping a secret. She knows the identity of her killer. She has evidence that she hasn’t revealed to anyone else. What would it take for people who care about her to get the truth out of her?”
As I say the words, “care about her,” I reach up and stroke her cheekbone, pulling a piece of hair away and sliding it behind her ear. The cinnamon from her morning coffee tickles my nose.
She curls her face into my hand.
“She would, well... she would need to know that the killer can’t ever hurt her or her mom, or dad, or siblings.” The words come out haltingly as she trembles. “She would need to know that the killer isn’t being helped by other people in her life.”
