FIC: Night for Many Miles and Then (Life, Charlie gen)
Before I get eaten by Office mania tonight...
Title: Night for Many Miles and Then
Fandom: Life
Rating: PG
Character: Charlie gen
Length: 3,500 words
Summary: Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make the new street yours.
AN: Spoilers through 1x05. Title and summary from Meanwhile by Richard Siken. Thanks to agate for enabling/betaing.
**
You've never bought a house before, but you know this is the one you want, this one with the view. Ted's behind you, talking about the foundations, or carpenter ant inspections, or something else that sounds very boring, but you're not listening. From the kitchen window you think you can see for miles, the broad expanse of the valley, the sky scraped out pale above it.
"This is the one, Ted," you say.
Ted pulls up short in the middle of a sentence about real estate as investment. "O-Okay, Charlie," he says. "Are you sure? It's a little more than you wanted to...."
"Sure I'm sure," you say. "Hey, do you think we could get some of those floaty raft things for the pool?"
Ted looks at you, his face softening. "You bet," he says. "I'll look into it."
You smile at him and turn your face back into the sunlight streaming through the window. There's a lot of light in this house. That's good.
Ted starts talking again, this time about escrow, which is a word you never really understand. You were only twenty-seven when you went to prison. You and Jen rented a duplex in the Valley, one with the gutters rusting off and flowers dying in the beds along the front walk. Jennifer liked to grow plants, but she wasn't good at it, at least back then.
"Charlie," Ted says. "Are you listening to me? We have some decisions to make."
"I know," you say. "So which room do you want?"
There's a pause, and you turn around to look at him. Ted's blinking. "What?" he says.
"What room do you want?" you say again. "I'm thinking I'm going to take the big one at the end of the hall, with the windows and the closet -- but that leaves, like, six others just upstairs. There's that blue one, and the one with the built-in bookshelves, and...."
"Wait a second," Ted says. He puts his hands on the counter and leans forward on them, hunching his shoulders a little. "You mean, for an office?"
"No, to live in," you say. You don't see what's so hard about the concept.
"In your house," Ted says.
"Well, sure, Ted, in the house," you say. "You didn't think I was going to live here all alone, did you?"
Ted's forehead is creased, and it's becoming increasingly clear that that's exactly what he did think. What, he thought you were just going to leave him in that hellhole he's renting?
"You can't stay where you are, Ted," you say. "I don't know if you've noticed, but that neighborhood isn't very safe." That's a joke. Humorous understatement.
Ted doesn't smile or say anything at all, and about fifty expressions skitter across his face, not one of them that you can read.
"Come on," you say, doing your best jovial voice. "We'll be roomies."
Ted swallows. You can feel the warmth of the sun on the back of your neck.
"Roommates," Ted says. "Like in prison?" He's very neutral now, not giving anything away.
You don't really see what prison has to do with anything, until all of a sudden you realize what he's getting at and think you're pretty stupid for not thinking about it before. Oh. Jesus. You feel your face go hot, and you have to breathe for a second, get your bearings back. "No, Ted," you say finally, and your voice is very, very even. "Not like in prison."
"Oh," Ted says. You thought he'd look relieved, but he doesn't exactly. He looks... well, he looks complicated, and you don't know what he's thinking, not at all. He turns back down to the documents on the counter, and all you can see is the top of his head, the gray hair fading back into dark. "Okay," he says, not looking at you.
"Okay," you say, and think this isn't how you saw this conversation going. You wonder how Ted thinks of you, really, if he still thinks of you as that murderer he met in prison. You'd given up saying you were innocent five years before you met him, after it stopped feeling like an adjective that meant anything.
Then Ted looks up and smiles. "I mean," he says, and now he's being very sincere. "Thanks, Charlie. I don't know what to say."
You put some effort into smiling. "Say what room you want," you say. You'd pat him on the back normally, but now you think better of it and lean back against the counter instead.
He eventually picks the room over the garage, which is about as far away from your room as it's possible to get. It almost hurts your feelings, until that first night after you move in, sleeping alone in your king-sized bed. When you wake up from nightmares about doors clanging shut behind you, you want to go find Ted, and you're so bleary you make it all the way down to the kitchen before you're totally awake, looking for him. If his room were closer... well. It's better that it's not.
Because you're not in prison. There are girls out here. Out there. You stand in the kitchen, tile cool on your bare feet, and drink a glass of water at the sink, looking out at the city lights, thinking about girls. Afterwards, you check the doors -- Ted locked them before he went up to bed, it looks like. You flick the bolts open. There's nothing in here worth stealing, anyway.
**
You just go to the bar because you honestly want a drink, but within fifteen minutes, a girl with dark brown hair named Amy wants to come home with you. You don't remember it being this easy when you were younger, but you were poor back then, and probably without what Amy calls an "air of danger." She's pretty drunk.
Or maybe you did have that air back then. After all, even your parents thought that you had....
Perception is a funny thing, you think frantically, cutting that thought off quick as Amy pulls you out of the bar. How much does anyone really know about anyone else -- and that's assuming that anyone else even exists, which Descartes showed pretty convincingly is a big assump --
Amy kisses you up against your car. "Shhh," she says, and you don't blame her. God. Descartes. Sometimes you don't know how you ever managed to get married.
Amy smells nice. She makes your car smell nice as you drive her to your place.
You haven't slept with a woman since Jennifer. Maybe that's why you feel so sad afterwards, because otherwise you can't understand it. Amy passes out with her head on your bare chest and you lie there staring at the ceiling, moonlight spreading across it in window-shaped silhouettes. Too lonely to sleep. Amy shifts against your side. You think about how everyone is interconnected, and then you count sheep, and then you wonder if sheep are interconnected -- of course they are -- and then you count interconnected sheep, and you still can't sleep.
After you've watched an hour tick by on the clock beside your bed, you roll Amy over so she's off your arm, and pull on some sweatpants, your blue ones. Constance took you shopping, helped you pick them out back when you were first acquitted and malls felt impossibly loud and complicated. Two months ago. You try to remember what you've got to eat, rolling through the contents of the fridge in your mind as you go down the stairs.
Ted's sitting at the kitchen counter in a puddle of light, clicking around on his laptop with his forehead furrowed.
"Hey," you say. The fruit bowl is full of pears; Ted must've gone shopping. You grab the top one, that soft feel against your palm that a ripe pear gets.
Ted looks at you over the top of his glasses. "You're up late," he says.
You shrug, bite into the pear. "Couldn't sleep," you say around the mouthful. "Anyway, so're you."
Ted shrugs too, and you sit down across from him, grab the sports page. You read it this morning, but box scores are comforting, all those statistics, everything neat and tidy. You take another bite of pear, read the games you didn't care about enough to read earlier.
"Charlie?" It's a sleepy voice behind you. When you turn around, Amy's blinking in the light, wearing your boxers and her tank top. No bra.
Ted's got his eyebrows raised, and he's gone very still.
"Hey," you say. Amy looks at Ted. "Um. Amy, Ted. Ted, Amy."
"Nice to meet you," Amy says. Ted's still got that non-look on his face, but when you glance over at him, he smiles a little bit. Thank God. It's half good-for-you-Charlie and half sort of amused and half rueful, and okay. Aside from being three halves, that's good. You're cool.
"So," Amy says, looking at you. "You want to come back to bed?"
You do, actually. You go.
**
The night before you go back on the job, Connie comes over, brings you a pomegranate.
"Thank you," you say, and go to get a knife to cut it open. "Did you know that the French word for pomegranate is where we get the English word 'grenade'?"
Constance blinks. "No," she says. "I didn't know that."
"'Cause it kind of looks like one," you say, holding the pomegranate up. It does look like a grenade, which is pretty cool. You like that. You don't know why.
You start scoring the outside of the pomegranate with the knife, and Connie leans against the island. "So," she says. "Tomorrow's the big day."
The pomegranate breaks open and a few seeds spill out onto the counter. "Yep," you say.
Constance looks at you very seriously. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" She didn't want the job part of the settlement -- you had to insist.
You start peeling the rind away from the seeds, and hold one out to her, bright and red. "You want one?"
"Charlie," Constance says.
Guess not. You pop the seed into your mouth, but when she keeps looking at you, you sigh. "I'm sure," you say.
Connie worries about you. She shouldn't, though. You're fine.
Ted comes wandering through with a book in one hand, probably thinking about sitting in the kitchen to read it.
"Oh," Ted says when he sees you both. "Hi, Connie."
Connie does that tight smile. "Hi, Ted."
They don't like each other. It's sort of interesting. You look between the two of them, and Ted shifts his weight. "Sorry to interrupt," he says. "I'll just -- uh, I'll be upstairs."
You wrestle some more pomegranate seeds out of their rind and pop another one in your mouth. "You sure you don't want any?" you say to Connie.
Ted's out of earshot by now. "I really wish you wouldn't let Ted live here," Connie says. "He's a convicted felon."
Oh, come on. "Happens to the best of us," you say in the most neutral voice you can manage. Good thing you have a lot of practice at summoning up neutrality.
If looks could kill, etc. "Charlie," she says. "You know that's not what I meant."
"Insider trading, Connie, he's not going to murder me in my sleep."
"Oh, and that means he's the smartest choice to handle your money."
You've only had this discussion thirty times. You chew on another pomegranate seed and try not to roll your eyes. Your hands are getting sticky, which is always the exasperating thing about pomegranates. "Look," you say, and think how to explain it. "You ever go on one of those corporate retreat things where you have to do trust falls?"
"What?" Connie says.
On second thought, maybe honesty isn't the way to get her to drop it anyway. "Never mind," you say. "I like Ted. Don't worry about Ted. Or the job. I'm actually looking forward to it."
Constance narrows her eyes at you. She's really a very suspicious person, and you think about telling her that. But instead you eat another seed and smile at her, think how if you did a trust fall, you're seventy percent sure that Ted would catch you. Maybe even seventy-five.
Not bad.
**
The next morning in the LT's office, she sets your new gun and badge on her desk, and you look at them for a second. The morning after Tom got killed, when you got removed from duty, you'd put your badge and gun on a desk just like this, and now is like a mirror image of that, like the film of your life's running backwards. It's disorienting.
Maybe there's no such thing as time. If there's no such thing as time, there's no reason events couldn't run backwards as well as forwards, and for a second you see everything reversing, heading back and back towards the way things used to be, to before prison. You eating toast just this morning, you finding Ted in that apartment building with hypodermic needles in the stairwell, you walking out of prison with just the clothes on your back, you in the interview room when you first met Constance, you in solitary, back and back and you're on the witness stand, cuts still on your hands from that arrest Bobby didn't see, and you're looking around the courtroom to find Jennifer, but she's not there.
Yeah, okay, maybe time running forwards is good enough. You pick up the badge and gun and go to meet your partner.
**
Reese answers her phone in a bored tone, and then rolls her eyes. She holds the receiver out to you, with that look on her face that says, I swear to God, you have annoyed me for the last time.
You try not to smile, take the receiver out of her hand. Constance needs to learn to relax. "I told you to stop calling me here," you say cheerfully.
"Charlie," your father's voice says.
You put the handset back on its base very, very carefully, so the plastic barely clicks. Reese is looking at you and you can see her curiosity warring with her fear that once you start talking you won't stop.
"Who was that?" she says, compromising by asking, but sounding curt.
"My bookie," you say. She looks at you like she's not quite sure if you're joking. You pull back up to your desk, start filling out the paperwork from your first case that you've been putting off for the last two weeks.
"Your friends can't keep calling my phone," she says, but she's looking at you with her eyes narrowed, like she thinks something else is going on, something serious.
"They're not," you say, and think you're going to murder your meddling lawyer.
You fill out forms in black ink, think about waiting for your mother to visit, think about the dull ache of waiting. Reese has to say your name three times before you hear her telling you the LT wants you both in her office.
**
It's your day off, but you can't shake -- Lauren? Or was it Laura? Until almost noon. You make her pancakes and tell her you'll call her, and then delete her number from your phone as soon as she pulls out of the driveway. You're pretty hungover.
You put on your swim trunks and smear sunscreen across your nose and when you go out to the pool, Ted's sitting on a chaise lounge, reading a book by Cormac McCarthy. You slump into the chair next to him.
"How's the book?" you say.
Ted shrugs and says, "Eh."
You smile and close your eyes behind your sunglasses. You're probably going to burn, but it's hard to care. Maybe it'll burn off that poison ivy, which you are doing your best not to scratch. It's good practice at being still under adversity.
"How was your night?" Ted asks.
"Eh," you say.
Ted smiles. "How many women does that make for you since you got out?"
Twenty-eight, but you shrug and say, "You'd have to ask my accountant."
"Your accountant's been pretty busy managing your portfolio," Ted says. He gives you a PowerPoint report on how your money's doing every Thursday, it's pretty cute.
It's a nice day. It's always a nice day in Los Angeles. You don't scratch your poison ivy, and wonder if Lauren -- Laura? -- could've caught it from you. Because the oils can rub off from skin to skin, or... something. You haven't gone camping for thirteen years, so it's hard to remember, but maybe you've had it for long enough the oils are long gone. After all, you shower. But you guess since you're not going to call Laura/en, the final verdict'll have to remain a mystery.
"I think I might be done with this for awhile," you say. There are some leaves floating in the pool -- you should get that little net and fish them out, but your head hurts.
"Done with what?" Ted asks absently, looking at his book.
"Girls," you say. "I might be done." You miss Easley a little bit, think about Reese handcuffing him to the bed. Easley was funny. "For awhile." You're not entirely sure why you think you're done, you're just feeling tired of it.
Ted's eyes are hidden behind his sunglasses. "Bored?" he says.
Bored. Maybe that is why. You are a little bored. "Yeah," you say.
You think Ted might look faintly pleased, but it's hard to tell with the sunglasses in the way.
Your head hurts and you feel kind of gross and grimy all over, even though you took a shower -- with Laura (-en?) -- just two hours ago. Maybe you need a swim.
When you take off your sunglasses, it seems impossibly bright out. You stand on the diving board, squinting and bouncing a little bit with your toes. You wonder if you could splash Ted from here. You bet you could.
The water stings when you belly-flop, a sharp slap all along your front. When you surface, Ted is holding his wet book with two fingers, a weary expression on his dripping face. You grin.
**
After you leave Cudahy in that bathroom, you feel really tired, drive around for a long time. Mostly around Jen's part of town, but you don't see the car of that asshole she married, so it's kind of pointless. Finally you go home and heat up some dinner, leftover takeout from the night before.
You should learn to cook. Maybe you could sign up for a class.
Ted comes in when you're almost finished eating, and are mostly staring into space while you chew.
"Hey Charlie," he says, carrying a mug and heading towards the dishwasher. But then he stops next to you, and stares at your right hand, which is flat against the counter. You follow his look and see a dark bruise spreading out over your knuckles from where they made contact with Cudahy's face. There are two scabs where the skin split on your second and third fingers. Shit. You take your hand off the counter, and shove it into your pocket.
Ted's eyes flick to your face. He looks at you from under his eyebrows for what feels like a very long time, and you think sometimes that things would be easier if he hadn't known you in prison. But eventually Ted just says, very gently, "Bad day?"
You think about Roman saying those things to you, to Reese, about people in dog cages. About Cudahy in the bathroom. About how Connie leaves for New York tomorrow morning.
You feel twitchy and sad, feel like you want to have some meaningless sex.
You shrug. "Long," you say. In the windows, you can see you and Ted reflected dimly, him standing beside you in his blue shirt, your hair a carroty blur.
Ted nods. If you reached out your hand, you could touch him right now, the solid familiar feel of his body. But your hand's bruised and in your pocket, and you're not doing that anymore anyway.
Outside, a coyote howls and Ted spins toward the door. "You hear that?" he says. "Charlie, you hear that?"
It howls again. "I hear it," you say.
"Sounds like a whole pack of them," Ted says. He moves right up to the door and shades his eyes with his hands so he can see out. All you can see is darkness and the ghostly reflection of the room, the hanging light, the fridge.
"I doubt it," you say. You feel very tired, and you take a last bite of green beans. "It's probably just one."
Ted sounds annoyed. "They're pack animals, Charlie. There's never just one. And I wish you'd take this seriously."
"I am taking it seriously," you say. There's probably just one, is all.
The howls sound farther away now. You listen to them fade into the distance, watch the line of Ted's back relax, think about the coyote padding away alone in the dark. In the window's reflection, your eyes are shadowed. Your hand aches.
**
END
Title: Night for Many Miles and Then
Fandom: Life
Rating: PG
Character: Charlie gen
Length: 3,500 words
Summary: Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make the new street yours.
AN: Spoilers through 1x05. Title and summary from Meanwhile by Richard Siken. Thanks to agate for enabling/betaing.
**
You've never bought a house before, but you know this is the one you want, this one with the view. Ted's behind you, talking about the foundations, or carpenter ant inspections, or something else that sounds very boring, but you're not listening. From the kitchen window you think you can see for miles, the broad expanse of the valley, the sky scraped out pale above it.
"This is the one, Ted," you say.
Ted pulls up short in the middle of a sentence about real estate as investment. "O-Okay, Charlie," he says. "Are you sure? It's a little more than you wanted to...."
"Sure I'm sure," you say. "Hey, do you think we could get some of those floaty raft things for the pool?"
Ted looks at you, his face softening. "You bet," he says. "I'll look into it."
You smile at him and turn your face back into the sunlight streaming through the window. There's a lot of light in this house. That's good.
Ted starts talking again, this time about escrow, which is a word you never really understand. You were only twenty-seven when you went to prison. You and Jen rented a duplex in the Valley, one with the gutters rusting off and flowers dying in the beds along the front walk. Jennifer liked to grow plants, but she wasn't good at it, at least back then.
"Charlie," Ted says. "Are you listening to me? We have some decisions to make."
"I know," you say. "So which room do you want?"
There's a pause, and you turn around to look at him. Ted's blinking. "What?" he says.
"What room do you want?" you say again. "I'm thinking I'm going to take the big one at the end of the hall, with the windows and the closet -- but that leaves, like, six others just upstairs. There's that blue one, and the one with the built-in bookshelves, and...."
"Wait a second," Ted says. He puts his hands on the counter and leans forward on them, hunching his shoulders a little. "You mean, for an office?"
"No, to live in," you say. You don't see what's so hard about the concept.
"In your house," Ted says.
"Well, sure, Ted, in the house," you say. "You didn't think I was going to live here all alone, did you?"
Ted's forehead is creased, and it's becoming increasingly clear that that's exactly what he did think. What, he thought you were just going to leave him in that hellhole he's renting?
"You can't stay where you are, Ted," you say. "I don't know if you've noticed, but that neighborhood isn't very safe." That's a joke. Humorous understatement.
Ted doesn't smile or say anything at all, and about fifty expressions skitter across his face, not one of them that you can read.
"Come on," you say, doing your best jovial voice. "We'll be roomies."
Ted swallows. You can feel the warmth of the sun on the back of your neck.
"Roommates," Ted says. "Like in prison?" He's very neutral now, not giving anything away.
You don't really see what prison has to do with anything, until all of a sudden you realize what he's getting at and think you're pretty stupid for not thinking about it before. Oh. Jesus. You feel your face go hot, and you have to breathe for a second, get your bearings back. "No, Ted," you say finally, and your voice is very, very even. "Not like in prison."
"Oh," Ted says. You thought he'd look relieved, but he doesn't exactly. He looks... well, he looks complicated, and you don't know what he's thinking, not at all. He turns back down to the documents on the counter, and all you can see is the top of his head, the gray hair fading back into dark. "Okay," he says, not looking at you.
"Okay," you say, and think this isn't how you saw this conversation going. You wonder how Ted thinks of you, really, if he still thinks of you as that murderer he met in prison. You'd given up saying you were innocent five years before you met him, after it stopped feeling like an adjective that meant anything.
Then Ted looks up and smiles. "I mean," he says, and now he's being very sincere. "Thanks, Charlie. I don't know what to say."
You put some effort into smiling. "Say what room you want," you say. You'd pat him on the back normally, but now you think better of it and lean back against the counter instead.
He eventually picks the room over the garage, which is about as far away from your room as it's possible to get. It almost hurts your feelings, until that first night after you move in, sleeping alone in your king-sized bed. When you wake up from nightmares about doors clanging shut behind you, you want to go find Ted, and you're so bleary you make it all the way down to the kitchen before you're totally awake, looking for him. If his room were closer... well. It's better that it's not.
Because you're not in prison. There are girls out here. Out there. You stand in the kitchen, tile cool on your bare feet, and drink a glass of water at the sink, looking out at the city lights, thinking about girls. Afterwards, you check the doors -- Ted locked them before he went up to bed, it looks like. You flick the bolts open. There's nothing in here worth stealing, anyway.
**
You just go to the bar because you honestly want a drink, but within fifteen minutes, a girl with dark brown hair named Amy wants to come home with you. You don't remember it being this easy when you were younger, but you were poor back then, and probably without what Amy calls an "air of danger." She's pretty drunk.
Or maybe you did have that air back then. After all, even your parents thought that you had....
Perception is a funny thing, you think frantically, cutting that thought off quick as Amy pulls you out of the bar. How much does anyone really know about anyone else -- and that's assuming that anyone else even exists, which Descartes showed pretty convincingly is a big assump --
Amy kisses you up against your car. "Shhh," she says, and you don't blame her. God. Descartes. Sometimes you don't know how you ever managed to get married.
Amy smells nice. She makes your car smell nice as you drive her to your place.
You haven't slept with a woman since Jennifer. Maybe that's why you feel so sad afterwards, because otherwise you can't understand it. Amy passes out with her head on your bare chest and you lie there staring at the ceiling, moonlight spreading across it in window-shaped silhouettes. Too lonely to sleep. Amy shifts against your side. You think about how everyone is interconnected, and then you count sheep, and then you wonder if sheep are interconnected -- of course they are -- and then you count interconnected sheep, and you still can't sleep.
After you've watched an hour tick by on the clock beside your bed, you roll Amy over so she's off your arm, and pull on some sweatpants, your blue ones. Constance took you shopping, helped you pick them out back when you were first acquitted and malls felt impossibly loud and complicated. Two months ago. You try to remember what you've got to eat, rolling through the contents of the fridge in your mind as you go down the stairs.
Ted's sitting at the kitchen counter in a puddle of light, clicking around on his laptop with his forehead furrowed.
"Hey," you say. The fruit bowl is full of pears; Ted must've gone shopping. You grab the top one, that soft feel against your palm that a ripe pear gets.
Ted looks at you over the top of his glasses. "You're up late," he says.
You shrug, bite into the pear. "Couldn't sleep," you say around the mouthful. "Anyway, so're you."
Ted shrugs too, and you sit down across from him, grab the sports page. You read it this morning, but box scores are comforting, all those statistics, everything neat and tidy. You take another bite of pear, read the games you didn't care about enough to read earlier.
"Charlie?" It's a sleepy voice behind you. When you turn around, Amy's blinking in the light, wearing your boxers and her tank top. No bra.
Ted's got his eyebrows raised, and he's gone very still.
"Hey," you say. Amy looks at Ted. "Um. Amy, Ted. Ted, Amy."
"Nice to meet you," Amy says. Ted's still got that non-look on his face, but when you glance over at him, he smiles a little bit. Thank God. It's half good-for-you-Charlie and half sort of amused and half rueful, and okay. Aside from being three halves, that's good. You're cool.
"So," Amy says, looking at you. "You want to come back to bed?"
You do, actually. You go.
**
The night before you go back on the job, Connie comes over, brings you a pomegranate.
"Thank you," you say, and go to get a knife to cut it open. "Did you know that the French word for pomegranate is where we get the English word 'grenade'?"
Constance blinks. "No," she says. "I didn't know that."
"'Cause it kind of looks like one," you say, holding the pomegranate up. It does look like a grenade, which is pretty cool. You like that. You don't know why.
You start scoring the outside of the pomegranate with the knife, and Connie leans against the island. "So," she says. "Tomorrow's the big day."
The pomegranate breaks open and a few seeds spill out onto the counter. "Yep," you say.
Constance looks at you very seriously. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" She didn't want the job part of the settlement -- you had to insist.
You start peeling the rind away from the seeds, and hold one out to her, bright and red. "You want one?"
"Charlie," Constance says.
Guess not. You pop the seed into your mouth, but when she keeps looking at you, you sigh. "I'm sure," you say.
Connie worries about you. She shouldn't, though. You're fine.
Ted comes wandering through with a book in one hand, probably thinking about sitting in the kitchen to read it.
"Oh," Ted says when he sees you both. "Hi, Connie."
Connie does that tight smile. "Hi, Ted."
They don't like each other. It's sort of interesting. You look between the two of them, and Ted shifts his weight. "Sorry to interrupt," he says. "I'll just -- uh, I'll be upstairs."
You wrestle some more pomegranate seeds out of their rind and pop another one in your mouth. "You sure you don't want any?" you say to Connie.
Ted's out of earshot by now. "I really wish you wouldn't let Ted live here," Connie says. "He's a convicted felon."
Oh, come on. "Happens to the best of us," you say in the most neutral voice you can manage. Good thing you have a lot of practice at summoning up neutrality.
If looks could kill, etc. "Charlie," she says. "You know that's not what I meant."
"Insider trading, Connie, he's not going to murder me in my sleep."
"Oh, and that means he's the smartest choice to handle your money."
You've only had this discussion thirty times. You chew on another pomegranate seed and try not to roll your eyes. Your hands are getting sticky, which is always the exasperating thing about pomegranates. "Look," you say, and think how to explain it. "You ever go on one of those corporate retreat things where you have to do trust falls?"
"What?" Connie says.
On second thought, maybe honesty isn't the way to get her to drop it anyway. "Never mind," you say. "I like Ted. Don't worry about Ted. Or the job. I'm actually looking forward to it."
Constance narrows her eyes at you. She's really a very suspicious person, and you think about telling her that. But instead you eat another seed and smile at her, think how if you did a trust fall, you're seventy percent sure that Ted would catch you. Maybe even seventy-five.
Not bad.
**
The next morning in the LT's office, she sets your new gun and badge on her desk, and you look at them for a second. The morning after Tom got killed, when you got removed from duty, you'd put your badge and gun on a desk just like this, and now is like a mirror image of that, like the film of your life's running backwards. It's disorienting.
Maybe there's no such thing as time. If there's no such thing as time, there's no reason events couldn't run backwards as well as forwards, and for a second you see everything reversing, heading back and back towards the way things used to be, to before prison. You eating toast just this morning, you finding Ted in that apartment building with hypodermic needles in the stairwell, you walking out of prison with just the clothes on your back, you in the interview room when you first met Constance, you in solitary, back and back and you're on the witness stand, cuts still on your hands from that arrest Bobby didn't see, and you're looking around the courtroom to find Jennifer, but she's not there.
Yeah, okay, maybe time running forwards is good enough. You pick up the badge and gun and go to meet your partner.
**
Reese answers her phone in a bored tone, and then rolls her eyes. She holds the receiver out to you, with that look on her face that says, I swear to God, you have annoyed me for the last time.
You try not to smile, take the receiver out of her hand. Constance needs to learn to relax. "I told you to stop calling me here," you say cheerfully.
"Charlie," your father's voice says.
You put the handset back on its base very, very carefully, so the plastic barely clicks. Reese is looking at you and you can see her curiosity warring with her fear that once you start talking you won't stop.
"Who was that?" she says, compromising by asking, but sounding curt.
"My bookie," you say. She looks at you like she's not quite sure if you're joking. You pull back up to your desk, start filling out the paperwork from your first case that you've been putting off for the last two weeks.
"Your friends can't keep calling my phone," she says, but she's looking at you with her eyes narrowed, like she thinks something else is going on, something serious.
"They're not," you say, and think you're going to murder your meddling lawyer.
You fill out forms in black ink, think about waiting for your mother to visit, think about the dull ache of waiting. Reese has to say your name three times before you hear her telling you the LT wants you both in her office.
**
It's your day off, but you can't shake -- Lauren? Or was it Laura? Until almost noon. You make her pancakes and tell her you'll call her, and then delete her number from your phone as soon as she pulls out of the driveway. You're pretty hungover.
You put on your swim trunks and smear sunscreen across your nose and when you go out to the pool, Ted's sitting on a chaise lounge, reading a book by Cormac McCarthy. You slump into the chair next to him.
"How's the book?" you say.
Ted shrugs and says, "Eh."
You smile and close your eyes behind your sunglasses. You're probably going to burn, but it's hard to care. Maybe it'll burn off that poison ivy, which you are doing your best not to scratch. It's good practice at being still under adversity.
"How was your night?" Ted asks.
"Eh," you say.
Ted smiles. "How many women does that make for you since you got out?"
Twenty-eight, but you shrug and say, "You'd have to ask my accountant."
"Your accountant's been pretty busy managing your portfolio," Ted says. He gives you a PowerPoint report on how your money's doing every Thursday, it's pretty cute.
It's a nice day. It's always a nice day in Los Angeles. You don't scratch your poison ivy, and wonder if Lauren -- Laura? -- could've caught it from you. Because the oils can rub off from skin to skin, or... something. You haven't gone camping for thirteen years, so it's hard to remember, but maybe you've had it for long enough the oils are long gone. After all, you shower. But you guess since you're not going to call Laura/en, the final verdict'll have to remain a mystery.
"I think I might be done with this for awhile," you say. There are some leaves floating in the pool -- you should get that little net and fish them out, but your head hurts.
"Done with what?" Ted asks absently, looking at his book.
"Girls," you say. "I might be done." You miss Easley a little bit, think about Reese handcuffing him to the bed. Easley was funny. "For awhile." You're not entirely sure why you think you're done, you're just feeling tired of it.
Ted's eyes are hidden behind his sunglasses. "Bored?" he says.
Bored. Maybe that is why. You are a little bored. "Yeah," you say.
You think Ted might look faintly pleased, but it's hard to tell with the sunglasses in the way.
Your head hurts and you feel kind of gross and grimy all over, even though you took a shower -- with Laura (-en?) -- just two hours ago. Maybe you need a swim.
When you take off your sunglasses, it seems impossibly bright out. You stand on the diving board, squinting and bouncing a little bit with your toes. You wonder if you could splash Ted from here. You bet you could.
The water stings when you belly-flop, a sharp slap all along your front. When you surface, Ted is holding his wet book with two fingers, a weary expression on his dripping face. You grin.
**
After you leave Cudahy in that bathroom, you feel really tired, drive around for a long time. Mostly around Jen's part of town, but you don't see the car of that asshole she married, so it's kind of pointless. Finally you go home and heat up some dinner, leftover takeout from the night before.
You should learn to cook. Maybe you could sign up for a class.
Ted comes in when you're almost finished eating, and are mostly staring into space while you chew.
"Hey Charlie," he says, carrying a mug and heading towards the dishwasher. But then he stops next to you, and stares at your right hand, which is flat against the counter. You follow his look and see a dark bruise spreading out over your knuckles from where they made contact with Cudahy's face. There are two scabs where the skin split on your second and third fingers. Shit. You take your hand off the counter, and shove it into your pocket.
Ted's eyes flick to your face. He looks at you from under his eyebrows for what feels like a very long time, and you think sometimes that things would be easier if he hadn't known you in prison. But eventually Ted just says, very gently, "Bad day?"
You think about Roman saying those things to you, to Reese, about people in dog cages. About Cudahy in the bathroom. About how Connie leaves for New York tomorrow morning.
You feel twitchy and sad, feel like you want to have some meaningless sex.
You shrug. "Long," you say. In the windows, you can see you and Ted reflected dimly, him standing beside you in his blue shirt, your hair a carroty blur.
Ted nods. If you reached out your hand, you could touch him right now, the solid familiar feel of his body. But your hand's bruised and in your pocket, and you're not doing that anymore anyway.
Outside, a coyote howls and Ted spins toward the door. "You hear that?" he says. "Charlie, you hear that?"
It howls again. "I hear it," you say.
"Sounds like a whole pack of them," Ted says. He moves right up to the door and shades his eyes with his hands so he can see out. All you can see is darkness and the ghostly reflection of the room, the hanging light, the fridge.
"I doubt it," you say. You feel very tired, and you take a last bite of green beans. "It's probably just one."
Ted sounds annoyed. "They're pack animals, Charlie. There's never just one. And I wish you'd take this seriously."
"I am taking it seriously," you say. There's probably just one, is all.
The howls sound farther away now. You listen to them fade into the distance, watch the line of Ted's back relax, think about the coyote padding away alone in the dark. In the window's reflection, your eyes are shadowed. Your hand aches.
**
END