Heart Stop

by Radclyffe

  Dell laughed. “You know that makes me hot.”

  Sandy forced her racing heart to slow, ignoring the pulsing need coalescing between her thighs. “I don’t plan on coming until you’re inside me, so don’t think you’re getting off easy.”

  Dell slid one hand over Sandy’s thigh and cupped between her legs, flicking the thin strand of silk aside. She teased a fingertip through the wetness and circled her clit. “Oh, I don’t mind working for it.”

  Sandy gasped at the swift rise of need in her pelvis. Her clit twitched under Dell’s fingers, and her vision dimmed.

  “It looks like I’m gonna have to take what I want, then,” Sandy whispered, her voice sounding strange to her ears, a wire stretched to the breaking point. She snapped the buttons open on Dell’s fly and pushed her hand inside. Finding the smooth, warm length of her, she drew her out, clasped the base of the cock in her palm, and lifted up. “You ready?”

  Dell gritted her teeth, fingers gripping the arch of Sandy’s hips. “Fuck, yes.”

  Sandy worked the head of Dell’s cock to move her panties aside and guided her to her opening. She settled down, taking her all the way in until her clit pressed against the base of Dell’s cock and the cock pressed into Dell’s clit beneath her. When she rocked slowly forward, rising an inch or two and dropping back down, Dell moaned. Making Dell come like this was more exciting than coming herself. “I’m going to take my time, and I’m going to make you come first.”

  “You won’t have to wait very long,” Dell muttered, her neck straining, her back arched off the sofa. “Just watching you on top of me like that is enough to make me come.”

  “Don’t rush me, Rookie. I feel like riding you for a long time.” She meant to go slow, meant to drive Dell crazy, meant to pound Dell’s clit until she came all over herself, but her body disagreed. Every stroke made her clit tingle and the fire spread inside her, down the inside of her thighs, deep in her core. One stroke, another. “Oh God!”

  “Yeah,” Dell cried, and the floodgates opened.

  Sandy fell and Dell caught her, just like she knew she would. When the aftershocks ebbed, she shifted until the cock slipped out and she snuggled closer, her cheek tucked into the curve of Dell’s neck. Somehow they’d ended up mostly stretched out on the sofa, her leg thrown over Dell’s hip.

  “I’m thinking we should try making it to the bedroom,” Dell muttered, “as soon as I can walk.”

  “What’s the matter, wear you out?”

  Dell chuckled, the rumble of her laughter beneath Sandy’s ear a familiar and comforting sound. “Totally. You waste me, baby.”

  Sandy propped her head up on her bent elbow and grinned. “That’s because you’re so easy.” She kissed Dell lightly. “For a stud, you’re kind of a pushover.”

  Dell stroked Sandy’s back and cupped her bare ass. Somehow, her panties had disappeared. “It’s not my fault you’re so hot. You’d make stone melt.”

  “Mmm, smart too.” Sandy sighed and curled up again, one hand stroking Dell’s belly. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, baby.” Dell kissed the top of her head. “Glad I got home in time.”

  “What did Frye want with your meeting? Something breaking?”

  Dell sighed. “Maybe. We finally got something over the wire. Just a little rumble, but if it turns into something, we might be seeing some repercussions on the street.”

  “Zamora and the Salvadorans?”

  “Maybe, it’s a little soon to tell.”

  “I should tell the girls to be careful.”

  “Yeah, I would,” Dell said. “How about you? Anything cooking out there?”

  “No, not so you’d notice.” Sandy chewed her lip. “But it doesn’t feel right, you know? Like maybe there’s something right there we’re not seeing. Just a feeling, like a storm coming.”

  “I know what you mean. Maybe it’s just because it’s been too quiet for a while.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Frye has us back on alert,” Dell said. “Seven o’clock roll call again.”

  “Ouch. That’s rough for you if you’re working the clubs.”

  “Yeah, good thing I’m young and tough.”

  Sandy rolled on top of her, tugged on her T-shirt, and when Dell lifted her arms, stripped it off. She pushed down on the couch, unbuttoned the waistband of Dell’s jeans, and tugged them off along with her briefs and gear. “Let’s see how tough you are.”

  “I don’t know, baby,” Dell said. “I might be wiped out.”

  Smiling, Sandy settled between her thighs and licked her. Dell groaned.

  “I know,” Sandy murmured.

  Sometime later they stumbled to bed. Dell curled up behind her, an arm around her waist, her face against the back of Sandy’s neck. Sandy found Dell’s hand and drew it between her breasts, their fingers intertwined. She loved sleeping in the curve of Dell’s body, not just because she felt sexy and wanted. She felt safe too.

  *

  Jay opened her eyes in the still-dark room, still naked, and turned on her side. She pulled her watch off the charger and checked the time. Four a.m. Time to get up. She always woke up fast, habituated after years of being on call to be thinking before her feet hit the floor. She didn’t bother with a light, but headed for the bathroom to wash up, and pulled fresh jeans and a V-neck maroon cotton pullover from the dresser that had come in the furnished apartment. Furnished being a generous word, but she didn’t need much. She found her ankle-high boots in the bottom of the closet and grabbed her windbreaker. The day before, Olivia had been dressed in designer pants and shirt, and boots that were admittedly practical looking but also screamed chic and expensive. Jay decided she was going to be herself if this was going to be her job, at least for a while. That meant comfortable and casual. If there was a dress code, she didn’t care about it.

  She checked the refrigerator, found the last lone yogurt, and spooned it up while standing in front of the sink checking her mail on her phone. Five minutes later, she trashed the container and collected her wallet and keys. Altogether, under twenty-five minutes.

  When she reached the street, she was the only one walking on her block, a narrow one-way street that backed up to the vet school. Three- and four-story houses converted to apartments lined each side. When she turned onto Baltimore Avenue, the trolley chugged past and suddenly a few more people appeared. Some of them, maybe a lot of them, were headed for the OR at this hour. Her chest tightened and she thought about what she would have been doing if she was on her way to the hospital and not the morgue. Preparing for Ali to show up at six for walk rounds—checking patients’ vital signs, collecting labs taken during the night, chasing down X-rays, reading the nurses’ reports, getting sign-out from the in-house residents. Moving from bed to bed in the intensive care unit, reviewing respiratory status, pressor levels, wound healing, chest tube drainage. All the things that went into caring for living patients.

  But she didn’t turn left to walk down the pedestrian lane between the medical school and the two-hundred-year-old brick quadrangle, where medical students and undergraduates lived, to the medical complex at the far end. Instead, she continued around the curve of University Avenue, past the Veterans Administration Hospital to the utilitarian building that housed the medical examiner’s office. Her favorite street vendor was there, a lone light casting a bright patch onto the dark sidewalk.

  “What time do you get here?” She stepped up to the little window of the cart. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out here before you.”

  The vendor, a middle-aged Middle Eastern man, grinned. “It is good to be the first, no?”

  “Yeah, it is. A couple cups of coffee. One black, one with cream.” When he turned to pour them, she added, “And two of those apple fritters.”

  He passed her the coffees on a cardboard tray with the bag in the middle, and she handed him ten dollars. “Have a good one.”

  “You too.”

  She was going to be early, but like he’
d said, it was always best to be first. She used the ID swipe card she’d gotten in her truncated orientation the day before and let herself in through the side door. The main hall on her right led to the administration and the public spaces toward the front of the building. She turned left in the direction of the staff offices in the rear of the building. As soon as she turned the corner into the dim corridor, she saw the light shining under Olivia’s door.

  Ten of five. Yep, best to be first.

  Shaking her head, Jay knocked softly.

  “Who is it?” Olivia asked.

  “Jay.”

  “Just a moment.” A second later Olivia opened the door and held it wide. “You’re early.”

  “So are you.”

  “Not really. Come on in.”

  Jay deposited the container with the black coffee on Olivia’s side of the desk and sat down opposite her, balancing her own cup on her knee. Today Olivia wore a dark green shirt and tailored pants the color of the interior of oyster shells, not exactly gray, not green, but something in between. Her only jewelry was a large, round stone—an opal, it looked like—set in a wide gold band on her right hand. Jay wondered if she was involved and couldn’t figure out a way to ask. Of course, there wasn’t any reason she really needed to know. Idle curiosity, that’s all. She opened the bag and held it out. “Apple fritter?”

  Olivia’s brow arched. “Those things are evil.”

  “True.” Jay continued to hold out the bag.

  Olivia laughed, took it from her, and dug out one of the fritters. She pulled a napkin out after it and set the fritter in the center of it on her desk. “Thank you for both.”

  “My pleasure.” Jay sipped her coffee and glanced at the game board in the corner. “Who are you playing with?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The game. Who do you play with?”

  “How do you know I’m playing with anyone? It might just be a decoration.”

  “True. But you changed the stones.”

  Olivia sat back in her chair, her coffee balanced on the arm, studying Jay the way she had studied the crime scene the day before, calm and focused, analyzing her. Jay fought not to blush under the scrutiny. She didn’t mind being looked at by a beautiful woman, and she never really worried too much about what kind of impression she was making. Right now, she cared.

  “How do you know that?” Olivia asked.

  “I noticed yesterday. It’s interesting—the three-dimensional thing. I’ve seen that with chess boards before.”

  “How do you know I’ve moved a stone? Two, in fact.”

  “Oh—that red one on the top by the edge wasn’t there yesterday.”

  “You can remember that?”

  “I have a good memory for physical spatial things, but actually, I noticed the color.” Jay shrugged. “My math is lousy, but I can remember the order of books on the shelves if I’ve seen them once, or the position of pieces on a board. Not a really useful skill.”

  “So do you play?” Olivia asked. “Chess or Go?”

  “You’d think so, but I don’t. I used to play chess with my older sister, but she always beat me and it frustrated the hell out of me. I’m too impatient. Well, not really impatient, but I have a plan and I tend to be a little inflexible, at least according to Vic.” She laughed to herself and sipped her coffee. “I probably shouldn’t be admitting that.”

  Olivia shook her head. “No, sometimes our faults are also our greatest strengths. As long as you are aware that you sometimes develop tunnel vision, and correct for it consciously, it’s a good trait. You need to be focused for the kind of work we do.”

  The work we do. When had it become we? Funny, but Jay liked the sound of that. “Well obviously, you’re a pretty serious player.” She frowned. “Greenly?”

  Olivia laughed, hearing the disbelief in Jay’s voice. “No. No one here. In fact, no one I know. He…or she…is anonymous. We play on the internet.”

  “Seriously. And you don’t know each other?”

  “Oh,” Olivia said softly, “we know each other very well. We’ve just never met.”

  “Right,” Jay said, fascinated by the faraway look in Olivia’s eyes that was quickly extinguished. She wondered where Olivia went on those mental journeys and what Olivia would do with someone who wanted to play face-to-face.

  “Well,” Olivia said, retreating after revealing more than she had intended. She hadn’t told anyone about the game, and certainly not about how she played. Somehow, Jay managed to engage her, made her forget to be cautious. Interesting. And something to be wary of. “Let’s go over your fieldwork from yesterday, and then we’ll go see to her.”

  “Right,” Jay said. “Absolutely.”

  The moment of connection, of two people getting to know each other, was over. Jay felt the distance widen between them, and she didn’t like it.

  *

  An insistent beeping pulled Sandy awake.

  “Fuck,” she muttered and glanced at the clock. Six a.m. She’d forgotten to set the alarm, so what…? Her phone was going off. Dell snored lightly behind her. Dell swore she didn’t snore, and every time Sandy teased her about it, she blushed.

  Easing from beneath Dell’s grasp, Sandy stumbled into the living room and dug around in her bag. The text was from dispatch. Fuck. She called the number and it was picked up after a half dozen rings.

  “Sullivan,” she said, coughing the sleep from her voice.

  “Got a message for you,” the dispatcher said laconically, as if it were noon instead of the ass-crack of dawn.

  “What, we catch a case?”

  “If it is, it’s the easiest one you’re gonna have today. Somebody…hold on a minute…a Dr. Price called, said you wanted to be notified about an autopsy.”

  “Who?” Sandy’s brain finally engaged. “Yeah, right. So when?”

  The dispatcher chuckled. “Seven thirty.”

  “Fuck.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Is this from Hasim’s truck?” Olivia asked as she attacked the apple fritter with the enthusiasm worthy of a surgeon who’d just finished an all-night case.

  “The one right at the corner?” Jay mainlined the first hit of caffeine of the day as quickly as the temperature allowed.

  Olivia nodded. “That’s the one. I wish I knew where he got his beans. Tastes like real Colombian, but that’s hard to come by when they haven’t been adulterated with chemicals or roasted beyond recognition.”

  “Coffee aficionado?”

  “Snob is probably more accurate.” Olivia smiled, a faint blush highlighting her angled cheekbones. “I grew up drinking coffee in South America right off the trees. The beans the locals use are so fresh they could jump-start a mummy.”

  Jay grinned, mesmerized by the playful note in Olivia’s voice. Aware of her heart racing, she enjoyed the nearly forgotten sensation of her body responding to a beautiful woman. Not just garden-variety beautiful either. Olivia was a spectacular combination of physical attractiveness and fascinating temperament—a cool exterior hiding a multitude of deeper layers. “What was your favorite part of growing up like that?”

  “The flowers,” Olivia said instantly.

  “Uh—?”

  Olivia laughed. “Have you ever been to the rain forest, Jay?”

  Jay’s throat tightened. How dumb was that, getting a rush just because Olivia used her name. She shook her head.

  “The most gorgeous, sensual, unforgettable plants you could imagine, everywhere—hanging from the tree limbs, climbing the trunks, tangled among the vines. Each more exquisite than the next.”

  “So do you grow things like that now?” Jay tried to picture Olivia in a greenhouse, tending captive plants, and couldn’t quite make it work. Olivia carried a hint of the untamed, of unfettered nature, subtle and rich and free. Jay had the sudden, inexplicable urge to immerse herself in that earthy freedom. What kind of magic did Olivia possess to turn her into someone she barely recognized? She didn’t know, but she sure as hell wan
ted to find out.

  “No, I’m no horticulturalist,” Olivia said. “Somehow I think their essence is lost when we take them from the wild.”

  “Like the animals?”

  “Exactly.” Olivia smiled at her, a little chagrined. How had their conversation strayed so far from the professional? And when was the last time she’d shared coffee and conversation with a colleague in her office? Exactly never. And she hardly knew Jay—she shouldn’t be so comfortable with her, or so easily disarmed. Striving for lightness, she added, “Seems a little mystical, I suppose.”

  “No, it doesn’t. A little surprising at first, but then it shouldn’t be.”

  Olivia’s gaze narrowed, that focus again. Not critical, not angry, just appraising. “How so?”

  “You. You’re surprising. First the secret Go opponent, now the scientist with the heart of an artist.”

  “Flowers as art?”

  “Sure, why not? Don’t you think of the human body as an art form?”

  “Oh,” Olivia said softly, “I certainly do.” She smiled. “And it appears I’m not the only one who’s surprising.”

  Jay tried not to blush and failed. Jeez, you’d think she’d never flirted with a woman before. She caught herself before she could suck in a breath. Flirting with Olivia—bad idea, but she couldn’t remember why. Of all the moments she’d spent with women she admired, or desired, these came most naturally. Olivia turned the key to a place somewhere deep inside she hadn’t known she harbored—a place of barely restrained anticipation, waiting for the storm to be unleashed. Olivia excited her on some fundamental level that needed no explaining. “You’re not wearing a wedding ring.”

  Olivia stared at her. The silence grew. Jay would have cursed her stupidity if she’d been rational, but she didn’t care about reason. Instincts drove her now, and her instincts demanded she know everything about the woman sitting across from her.

  “I’m divorced,” Olivia said.

  A surge of jealousy blazed across Jay’s brain. “Should I say I’m sorry?”