“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 into the filter?”
“Something like that. You’re going to need it. We’re in for a full day.”
“What do you mean?” Files loiter 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, 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. “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 the 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 it 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 onto 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.
His hands lower over my hips, gliding over the thin straps of my panties to stop right below my butt cheeks.
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. 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. “I think you need new waffles.”
“We need a new toaster.” I chuckle as I unplug the toaster.
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 can’t let Kace back in.
That may be harder to do than I think.
He 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.
“Did you just Post-It my ass?”
He laughs and hands me the pad. “Seventy-nine to go, and only two more days to do it.”
If twenty had me in his arms, I’m afraid of what will happen when I have no more sticky notes left.
4
First Session
Dr. Nolan Mills
“Take. These. Back!” She throws the nearly full pad of numbered sticky notes on the coffee table in front of us.
“Were you having trouble?” I ask, glancing at the yellow paper with seventy-nine written on it.
She crosses her arms and leans back, adding as much space between us as possible. “It’s trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Kace is getting the wrong impression.”
“What impression is that?”
She glances up at me, finally staring at something other than the glass of the coffee table. “He kissed me.”
“Did you not mention wanting to patch things up in the last session?”
“Yes, but that’s because I wanted to…” She trails off and focuses on the glass again. “It’s going to hurt Kace more if things don’t work out, is all I’m trying to say.”
“Why wouldn’t they work out?”
She ignores me completely. I don’t blame her, trust is something most patients need time to build. Talking about grief is one thing, because it can be seen on the surface, talking about anything that lies just underneath is another story altogether.
In our last session, she briefly spoke about being a human lie detector. Grief clouds her perceptive abilities immensely. I test it out before getting into the nitty-gritty of our session—my scorecard.
“Last night, I went to Rizzo’s and ordered a pepperoni pizza.” I scratch my nose and lick my lips before elaborating on the absurd lie, “I got the one with fish sticks on it. It was delicious.” My nose scrunches in disgust. “You should try it.”
“That’s great,” she admits sarcastically, rather than picking up on my lie. Had she been reading my body language and micro-expressions, she would know my alibi was off and follow up with something else, but she couldn’t see beyond her own problems.
In truth, I spent my evening in the shed, engraving the bullet for Coralee Mitchell. After Borshin was killed in broad daylight in the middle of the street, in front of his wife, the statewide killer hit national news. Reporters and Feds flocked into the city. If they looked deep enough, the Feds would have reason to get involved.
I had crossed state lines, and the tri-state area has received some of my bullet messages, but only four people.
And one of them took her own life with the same poison she gave her dead boyfriend’s best friend. The other three have done nothing, and it’s been years. Most of my test subjects had been previously failed by the police, and they see my bullet has a heroic act—closure the police could not give them.
After a while of silence, Eleanor sprawls out on the leather couch and stares up at the ceiling, mewing over her thoughts.
“What are you thinking?” To make Eleanor Devero the next member of the Bullet Club, I need to start filling out her information.
“What makes someone a psychopath?” she asks the so-called killer everyone is searching for.
Slightly amused, I smile at the situation and grab my yellow ledger. “What do you mean?”
She rubs her eyes and rests her hand over the womb she no longer has. I jot down her given mannerisms in my notes. “Touching loss. Constant reminder of her trauma by running her fingers over her stomach.” This, notably, is quite characteristic of someone who loses a child in utero.
Not many people are aggressors toward pregnant women. Criminals, who I’ve helped through situations, have moral codes on pregnancy. Even they don’t escape the influence of society. We, as a group of people, are womb-obsessed, and at a certain age, everything becomes about the baby-bump.
She rotates her neck to glance at me.
I gauge her reaction as I draw a tree onto the corner of my ledger. Most people usually ask what I’m writing, but she seems utterly unfazed by it.
“Who kills a baby?”
Holding my pen in the air, I make eye contact. Her brown eyes focus on me, desperately wanting an answer, so I give her one. “There’s a lot that goes into criminology and victimology, Eleanor.” I bypass genetic talk on MAO-A, size of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex damage, and simply say, “Not all killers are psychopaths. Some are just murderers… and not all psychopaths commit murder.”
She furrows her brow and nods her head, processing the information and letting it sink in. “I’m asking you like I don’t already know all of this.”
“I would assume you’ve learned a few things.”
She sighs and releases the air from her lungs, slowly. “I’m a behaviorist, but ever since the shooting, I can’t focus.” She waves her hand in my direction. “Can’t be a human lie detector if I can’t detect shit. No wonder they don’t want me back at the precinct.”
I flip back to the pages with the reason for her leave and broach the subject. “It says here you were running background checks on people without due cause, and you showed symptoms of instability.”
“Instability?” She echoes back and sits up, resting her elbows on her thighs. “How the hell am I supposed to be stable when my whole life just got turned upside down? It’s been three months. I wasn’t just shot, I was housing a human being who got shot!”
The elevated tone of her voice reveals her anger. There’s so much, and it’s so good.
“I threw a fucking mug at the bullet-proof window, and they called it a post-traumatic episode. I was mad because they were putting my son’s case on the backburner.”
I flip to a new page with my test subject scorecard. “Would you say you’ve had vengeful tendencies in the past?”
She appears taken back by the question but leans forward. “No, not really.”
If you had to quantify it? On a scale of one to five, zero being no tendency for revenge and five being a constant tendency for revenge, where would you find yourself?”
“This is a stupid question. Revenge can be defined in a lot of different ways.”
“Like?”
“Like reacting by bettering yourself and showing them you’re not inferior, or even better, becoming superior to them. But if you mean physical violence, then before the shooting, I’ve never had the urge. So, zero.”
Her answer hints at one of my other questions. “Have you ever been bullied?”
She pauses for a second and cocks her head to the side. “I want to change my previous answer to one.”
I nod curtly and wait a beat for her to explain.
“When I was in grammar school, the girls always used to pick on me. I was a little heavier set, and they enjoyed rubbing the extra pounds in my face.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Like shit. It lasted for years, but it wasn’t physical. Mostly verbal bullying and emotional.”
“Don’t underestimate verbal abuse. Words hurt. Sometimes, even more than a punch. Words dig into our psych
e and create wounds that fester every time we remember them. Sometimes it’s harder to heal from psychological injuries than physical ones.”
“That’s true.” She smacks her hands together and sighs. “Girls are vicious.”
“Did you ever confront your bullies?”
“Like a fight?” She shakes her head. “It never got to that. One time, one of them wanted to start a fight so she could up her new-girl status, and I ran away because I was scared.”
“Were you scared for yourself, or were you afraid of getting in trouble for fighting?”
“Both.” She chuckles and points to her smile. She reaches for the journal on the table and jots the occurrence in her smile log. I had suggested it because smiling involves neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, which can help elevate the mood. Mood-boosting can alter the group she’s classified under in my study if she qualifies, but I care about my subjects.
I see a lot of myself in them. When my mother died, I entered the system and retreated inwardly. My trauma stifled my mind, and I was so scared. The assailant was in every man who crossed my path, which made foster care challenging. I was petrified, just like she is.
She’s scared to see what’s right in front of her.
My ears tune into her voice, missing some of her confession.
“I used to be super sensitive. I picked up on people’s moods easily. I guess I hated seeing people upset. But I wished the girls could feel what it was like to have to listen to their mean words all the time. My mom always told me they were jealous, or they had problems of their own and were lashing out because I was stronger than them.”
“Did you believe her?”
She shrugs. “Honestly, every time I came home, I was surrounded with so much love, it didn’t matter. It was hard at school sometimes, though.”
“Being an outcast can be traumatic.”
“I had friends.”
“Did it make you want to treat someone else the same way they treated you?”
Leave Me Breathless: The Black Rose Collection Page 135
