by Sonya Jesus
“What the fuck?” he shouts between chuckles.
My lips turn inward, stifling my smile.
In his rounded eyes, I can see his heart swell as he watches me hide the sticky notes behind me. “You could have stuck that on the lady’s forehead.” He points to the intercom. “After all these years, you’d figure she’d get used to the people being impatient.”
The minutes spent on this drive-thru used to be annoying when we were itching to get to work, but after Tyler’s death, things that once irked me no longer had the same impact. “She has to deal with a lot of yous, and you only have to deal with one of her. I’d be grumbly too.”
“Right?” The woman on the intercom intrudes on our conversation, and this time, I don’t hold back the laughter. It doesn’t hurt as bad as the first time, but it still feels wrong.
Kace waves me inside the car as the woman takes his order. While I rummage through the glove compartment for a pen, he pulls up to the window to get our things and pay. On the way to the precinct, I log down the sticky reminders—as Nolan called them.
“That’s three,” Kace’s voice cuts through the silence.
“What?” I ask with a scrunched nose.
He balances his cup in his hand as he drives. “For your smile log.”
“Oh, yeah.” Guilt festers in my gut as I write those down in the log, the whole time wondering, How many smiles did the killer steal from Tyler?
“I missed your smile, Elle.” There’s more to his statement, but he holds back for some reason.
Without acknowledging him, I finish logging my homework and check our surroundings. Being in the car with Kace is giving me claustrophobic vibes. My head is congested with too many clashing thoughts, and there are too many people in the small space. There’s not enough room for me and the things in my head.
Short of bolting from a moving car, I contain myself. Kace turns onto a familiar street, parallel with Lehigh Avenue; the precinct is only a couple blocks over. By the time we pull up on the sidewalk and head to the building’s parking lot, I’m unsure of which I’m more terrified of: the car with Kace or the precinct where I had to face everyone after my meltdown.
“You ready for this?” he asks as he parks the car. “It’s been a month since you saw most of these people.” He rests his wrists at the top of the steering wheel while staring at one of the cops, smoking over at the other end of the lot.
“I guess.” After my meltdown, which included smashing my favorite mug through Cap’s window and insulting the whole force, most everyone forgave me. Pity does that.
“Every time I walk inside, I remember the scene and admire you for it.”
“What?” My head whips in his direction. “If I recall correctly, you said to ‘calm down.’” I use air quotes for emphasis.
“Not my smartest moment, I admit.”
It had taken my anger and intensified it ten-fold. Kace was supposed to have my back, and he didn’t. “Sometimes, it feels like the job is more important to you than anything.”
“No!” Kace throws his arm over my headrest, swiveling his body to me in the process. “Why would you think that?”
I agreed to the Pregnancy Center job for him, because it would make his career, and it did. He went from helping in the drug case with the DEA to leading the homicide investigations, but it’s not worth fighting over, especially when I had just as much blame. “Never mind. I’m just nervous.”
“See, that’s what I admire about you … even scared, you fight for what you want, Elle. That’s why I’m terrified you don’t want me anymore.”
I don’t like this conversation.
“I know it’s hard to talk about, but you don’t have to love me right now, I just need you to fight for me sometimes.”
I swallow the saliva in my throat, willing it to turn to acid and corrode the memory of the first time we met and all the other firsts, but it melts my heart instead. I hold the small stack of one hundred reminders in the space between us. “Want to put a sticky note on the building? I have ninety-eight left.”
Evasion seems to be my coping mechanism.
He takes the sticky notes in my hand, touching me—reminding me of how much I loved falling asleep in his arms. No matter what the day had held, or how many horrible deaths we had seen, his arms always wiped the slate clean. They enveloped me in security, turning thoughts off, and allowed peace to lull me to sleep.
Without my personal refresh button, every morning feels weighted and like a burden. Existing takes everything out of me, leaving me deprived of energy.
Then this tiny touch, which isn’t even holding my hand, reminds me he must feel the same. How have I not noticed the dark circles under his eyes and the less-defined smile lines around his perfect lips?
Sorry rolls around my tongue—an apology for being less than he deserves or an attempt to repair the collapsed bridge between our hearts. It takes all I can to hold the words inside until they fade back into my mind.
But he says them, or a version of them. “One Post-it at a time, Elle.”
My breath stills, and he clings to my fingers, gripping them and the sticky notes between them as if our love depends on them.
Maybe it does. I have no idea what he means, but I know he means whatever it is.
“Come on, we’ve got a killer to find.”
Right. A killer I need.
He reluctantly releases my hand and grabs both of our coffees. The three-story building towers over the car, intimidating me and nearly keeping my ass glued to the seat. I get out, shutting the door behind me.
I used to consider this place home. Now I feel like I don’t belong.
Here goes nothing… “You still have the yellow thing on your head, Kace.” I take my coffee from him.
“It doesn’t look good?” he asks, as he holds the door open for me. “It’s like highlighter, right? Doesn’t it make my face look all shiny and pretty?”
Fourth smile of the day. “Yeah, real fuckin’ shiny. It’ll definitely get you noticed.” My eyes linger a smidge too long on that pretty face of his before I pry them off to scan the bottom floor.
No one lingers inside the hallway leading to the locker rooms, probably because of shift change and debriefing. Kace folds the Post-it and slides it into his pocket. Thankfully. Explaining his shiny stamp to Frank and Cap would be super uncomfortable.
“I’m surprised you didn’t ask for a different color.” He keeps up the conversation, distracting me. He knows me. My nerves flutter just under my skin, and I’m anxious to climb up to the first floor.
“I requested black ones to fit my morose mood, but Nolan didn’t have any on hand,” I joke back sarcastically. The urge to tell Kace I’ll wait in the car surfaces, but I have to show him I’m ready to be integrated back into society.
“Be happy they aren’t pink,” he says. “First time I bought you a pink shirt didn’t go well.”
“Do I look like I wear pink?” I grumble, still bitter about the bright, neon pink hoodie he bought me after I fell through the damn ice. “I would’ve chucked the pink paper at Nolan’s nose.”
Kace swings open the door, and the noise hurts my ears. I wince at the influx of simultaneous sound: crackling radios, mixed with the swearing of cuffed criminals, and multiple phones ringing.
“Why is to so damn loud?” Awkwardly, my shoulder rubs against my ear.
“This is nothing.” Kace points to the second floor where the offices and debriefing rooms are. “Most of them are up there.”
I like silence. I prefer the sound of my own thoughts, even if they don’t shut up.
Kace leads me up the stairs to the office he shares with Frank. The pad of notes in my palm gives me a purpose, so I avoid the desk and the couch, and the floor between those two, because they remind me of the long nights we stayed here to work, and spent falling in love instead.
Tyler was probably conceived here. I shake the thought from my head and stick a note on the picture frame I got Kace for our
one-month anniversary. Instead of a picture of us, I framed a picture of Kace’s lips. Because I’d never forget the lies he had to tell me.
“You remember that?” he asks, keeping his distance.
I chew on the inside of my cheek and answer with a quick nod before walking over to the signed hockey puck, tagging it with a sticky note.
“That was, by far, my favorite first.” Kace knew someone who got him into the arena. We liked to find things neither of us had ever done, so we could be each other’s first.
“It was so cold,” I admit and move onto the next thing that catches my eye.
“But we melted the ice, didn’t we, baby?”
The lump forming in my throat gets gulped down while I pick up the bullet casings from our first time shooting together. I had gotten them engraved with the date and stuck them in a jar.
It’s sickening how romantic we used to be. I carelessly toss the casings back on the shelf and sticky it.
This place was a shrine to us—to all our firsts. Being here isn’t easy. I get the gnawing feeling that Nolan gave Kace some homework too. “Are you going to talk to Cap?”
“Yeah.” Kace takes his jacket off and hangs it on the hanger behind his door. “You want to wait here?”
Not really, but I prefer it to facing the whole squad. I hold the stupid reminders in my hand and wiggle them in the air. “I’ll be sticking up your office. Frank might hate the new décor.”
“Nah, just don’t stick up the couch. Frank will probably never sit on it again.”
Fifth fucking smile.
He leaves me alone with all the memories. I take a seat on his desk to find another one in his top drawer. Tears come to my eyes as my trembling fingers wrap around the personalized mug. I empty the paper clips onto the desk and hold the pregnancy announcement I had made for him, thinking back to that day.
Unable to contain the excitement, I had barged in holding two mugs full of coffee. I couldn’t wait until later as I had planned. Frank sat on the couch, going over the case files on the drug doctor, and Kace sat at his desk, watching surveillance footage on his tablet. For three days, I had been holding in the news because I was waiting on the rush delivery of our funny matching mugs.
Mine had cuffs and said: I lock people up.
His had a gun with a sonogram banner hanging from the barrel that said: I knock cops up.
He read mine first and laughed. When he read his, he cried.
It had been the happiest day of our lives.
I want to crush the ceramic between my fingers and bleed memories out of me, but I don’t dare to take this from him too. So, I stick a note on the inside, and add the paper clips back in, one by one.
The next morning, I wake up to Kace standing over me with two cups of coffee in his hand and wholly dressed, showered, and smelling too clean for someone who spent the whole night awake, going over the case with me.
“What time is it?” I grumble and wipe the sleep from my eyes.
“Eight.” He shoves the steaming mug in my face. “Necromancer mojo.” That’s precisely what it said on the cup
The waft of freshly brewed coffee infiltrates my nostrils, luring me up from the depths of sleep. The covers are tossed aside, so I can stretch my muscles. Lately, sleeping on the couch tenses me up.
“Tired?” Kace casts his eyes downward, looking into the dark pool of liquid.
Before reaching for my favorite drink in the world, I ask, “Did a fly fall in there?” I check myself before taking a sip.
Usually, Kace made dark, super-strong coffee, but today he made it toxic.
“Whoa,” I say, smacking my lips together at the bitterness. “You can really wake the dead up with this stuff. What did you do? Poor the whole container of grains into the filter?”
“Something like that. You’re going to need it. We’re in for a full day.”
“What do you mean?” Files litter our living room floor, so I tiptoe over them on my way to the kitchen for some extra sugar and food.
He follows me through the open floor plan to the kitchen island and plops himself down on one of the stools. “We’ve got a body. Aaron Borshin. We have to go in like five minutes.”
“He’s dead. He can wait until I put some pants on.” After adding a heaping spoonful of sugar, I realize what Kace just said. “Cap said I wasn’t allowed on active crime scenes, only interviews.”
“He said nothing about you waiting in the car while I check it out.”
“Okay.” I grab some frozen waffles from the freezer and pop one into the broken toaster that always overheats.
He mutters something incoherent.
I’m not used to peopling in the morning. Most days post-Tyler, I slept through Kace leaving and arriving. Making sure he ate wasn’t high on my priority list—hell, most days I forgot to eat.
“Want some?” I hold the box out, catching his eyes on my bare legs.
He grunts and hangs his hand on his neck, the material around his shirt straining against his muscles. He’s about to say something dirty, I can tell. He’s licking his lips and hungrily eyeing me.
“Waffles!” I clarify with a shout. “For breakfast.” My voice cracks as he stares up at me with a heated gaze. I clear the fire from my throat and open the freezer, letting the frigid air cool my blazing cheeks, preferring the absence of him and solitude of me. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” he asks from right behind me.
Too close! My brain screams.
His body presses against mine, trapping me between the cold breeze and the radiating heat of his perfectly sculpted torso. Before I think, his breath falls on the skin between my neck and shoulder, where the stretched-out T-shirt doesn’t reach, and trickles down my spine.
I hang my head, clutching the cold cardboard box to my chest, and use the fridge to hold me up with my other hand. Despite the heat pooling in my center, I’m frozen in place. I’m not ready to feel his arms around me or to remember what it’s like to be his, but my body is.
It’s crying—pleading for human contact—to break the bubble of isolation my sadness has thrust upon me. During the day, his absence arms me with the ability to reduce the impact of his touch. Time apart helps us stay apart.
But he’s right behind me, and time is against me.
Without words, there’s no way to force him back with my mind. My tongue lacks its sharpness; my thoughts are silenced by the pounding drum of my heart, and my body trembles, shaking with intensity.
He flips me around gently, commandeering gravity and tilting the earth to bring us closer without actually moving. His hand cups my burning cheek while the fingers of his other hand massage the nape of my neck, before threading themselves through my tangled hair. I shiver as his wordless moans hum over my lips, and I shut my eyes, recognizing the familiar tune of love.
Reduction—inches to micrometers. So close to colliding after eliminating months of distance in less than a minute. All I have to do is tremble, and we’d touch like we hadn’t touched since Tyler.
I moan shamelessly, willing my brain to override my heart, constantly telling the erratically pulsing muscle that Kace can’t fill the emptiness. His kisses won’t heal me; they’ll bruise me so deeply, I’ll feel it in my bones.
Then why can’t I pull away? Why can’t I open my eyes or push him back?
And how does he suck the air out of my lungs, the room—the atmosphere—and make it so his mouth is an oxygen mask? Like I’m suffocating, and he’s the only source of air left for me to breathe. The only way to get it is to latch on to those perfect lips.
The draw to live is much too strong for someone who just yesterday didn’t care for a future.
When our lips touch, they aren’t wild or attempting to recover lost time. The kiss is sweet and gentle, only slightly urgent. Restraint is his ally, and my foe.
The more our lips glide over one another, the more life he breathes back into me, returning my stolen breaths a little at a time.
I sigh into him, melding our rapidly beating hearts together as if clothes do not exist.
Or skin. Or flesh. Or bone.
The burning smell of… “Waffles,” I mumble against his lips, but it’s lost somewhere between his grunts and the increasingly fervent kisses.
His tongue slips through my lips, summoning mine. They briefly meet for too short a time, barely say hello before the smoke detector goes off, interrupting us.
We hang in the moment, memorizing it until the noise gets too loud to ignore.
He tears himself away first. “It’s not the first time our kissing set the smoke detector off,” he says, as he grabs an old magazine from the island and waves it around while I glance at the gray vapors exiting the heated slots of the appliance. “I think you need new waffles.”
“We need a new toaster.” I chuckle as I unplug it and slice through the smoke clouds with the wave of my hand.
He smiles wide. “What number is that?”
One too many smiles. I pluck the charcoal waffles out of the toaster and place them on a plate, just outside the back door, feeling guilty as all fuck and desperate to repeat the kiss again.
Nolan Mills is screwing with my head, I think as I hold the door open, refreshing the kitchen with new air. I can’t let Kace back in. Releasing the door, I swivel around to find perfection in the center of a dirty kitchen. Seeking refuge at the sink, I turn the faucet on over the pile of dishes. The sound of water blocks out the gentle hum in my chest, but not the pronoun. We need a new toaster, I repeat back to myself. So much promise in a two-letter word—promises, I’m not in a position to place. “I’m going to get dressed.” The announcement comes on the urge to flee his presence before the moths in my heart turn to butterflies, carrying hope on wings.
Kace grins and smacks my butt as I pass by him. Shocked, I turn around to glare at him, unsure of whether to leap into his arms again or ream him out for slapping my ass. It takes me a while to realize he’s holding the sticky notes in his hands.
