fic: i used to carry the gun (prime suspect)
i used to carry the gun
prime suspect. two weeks out, both augie and jane pack their bags. lou/augie, jane/reg. 3755 words.
notes: lol what is this. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT. idk, the latest episode of prime suspect left me in desperate need for some a) lou/augie being the married couple that they basically are, and b) um, some more resolution to that jane/matt/reg mess lol. (also wow why before this episode did i think lou was divorced??? IDK. I FEEL LIKE WE THOUGHT THIS? but he talks about his wife as though they're still together in that ep? CALL IT ~ARTISTIC LICENSE, but i talk about him as divorced in this. for reasons). so that's what this is? this was thrown together hastily? it's christmas eve? this was supposed to be way more pornographic than it turned out? the end.
1.
A Friday:
Augie packs a suitcase and resists the urge to leave his keys sitting on the decorative table (Veronica bought it) under the pine and holly wreath (Veronica) next to the front door of their apartment (Veronica) and instead jams them into his coat pocket (Veronica) and tells himself to forget about them (it, her, Veronica).
A Friday (the same Friday):
Jane calls and gets quotes from six different moving companies in the area but does not commit to any of them.
It’s cheaper to move yourself, she thinks.
2.
Augie packed the following:
Five freshly laundered shirts he had picked up from the dry cleaner’s the evening before (still wrapped in plastic together and he had not so much as folded them but jammed them into his suitcase, uncharacteristically silent about it);
Two neck ties, one of which was a gift from Lou’s ex-wife one Christmas and Augie is almost ashamed to admit how much he loves that tie (it really sets off his eyes, it’s like she knew that would happen);
A pair of jeans he’s had pretty much since birth;
His shaving kit;
Some boxers, some undershirts, some socks, a pair of running shoes, an old NYPD sweatshirt he is pretty sure was once Lou’s but is his now based on the law of eminent domain (or is it imminent domain? he can never remember) since he’s had that sweatshirt for years now. He doesn’t pack a suit. He’s sure he has two hanging in his locker at the precinct, and that will do.
For now.
3.
When Jane thinks about leaving, when Jane calls moving companies and looks into the rates charged for rented U-Hauls, she thinks about taking:
Nothing.
She thinks about taking nothing with her.
Her guns. She would want her guns. But lately she only keeps her service weapon at their apartment: her shotguns, the hunting rifles her father gave her when she turned eighteen -- they’re all with him now. So the guns aren’t on the table. The guns aren’t something she needs to concern herself with.
She’s not entirely sure what she needs to concern herself with when she calls these people, when she asks about rental rates, when she asks how much they charge by the hour. Because when she thinks about it, most of the shit in that apartment is Matt’s anyway. Matt bought the bed. Matt wanted that bed, so Matt bought the bed. Matt had a certain vision for that whole fucking apartment, and at the time she hadn’t cared or she hadn’t known what that meant or she hadn’t cared that she knew what that would come to mean (he had a vision for the apartment, he had a vision for the both of them) so she let him buy the bed and she let him buy that kitchen table and she let him do a whole lot of things and he let himself read into it.
When Jane thinks about leaving, all Jane can think is how she wouldn’t be doing this, not yet, she wouldn’t be leaving, if it wasn’t for Reg Duffy.
4.
And so, for now:
“You miss her?” Lou asks quietly. His eyes are still glued to the game on the TV but Augie watches his profile. Carefully, he would say, if he was the sort of man who did things carefully. He’s not. It’s how he wound up here in the first place.
“Not really,” Augie says with a shrug, and Lou laughs low in the back of his throat. He turns to face Augie and offers a pointed look before taking a long pull from his beer.
“That make me the bad guy?” Augie asks with a dumb smile.
“The badge indicates otherwise,” Lou drawls, voice thick from the drink and his own repressed amusement. Augie thinks that Lou is secretly enjoying this. That he likes that they’re on the same level here. Two dudes on the doorstep of divorce. Like drinking and fucking, it’s something done better when not alone. Or at least that’s what Augie thinks. It’s why he called Lou up outside of Lou’s apartment building instead of checking into a cheap hotel or crashing with his brother and his new wife and the army of mutts they adopted from the pound.
He had said: I am, like, almost seventy-five percent sure I am allergic to dogs. And Max’s wife. And whatever bill Marriott might saddle me with.
Lou had played the role he liked best, that of the dutiful friend, and told Augie to get his dumb ass upstairs, he just bought a twenty-four pack of Bud and the Lakers were getting their ass handed to them.
Come on up.
5.
And so: Jane gets drunk. Alone.
Jane gets really, really drunk.
She sits alone in a bar she has never been to before, reveling in the anonymity, and lets herself order first one drink, and then another.
And another after that. Another.
It’s been almost two weeks since she fought with Matt (Matt fought with her?), and she lied when she told the psych that everything was fine at home. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie, because they had agreed that Jane would leave. They agreed she would leave and maybe that’s a new status quo. Maybe that’s a new rendering of the meaning of fine.
He had said to her: you can cut and run any time you want, Janey. Fuck this.
So she’s been working on that for the last two weeks, the last week and a half, however much time has passed. She’s been working on cutting and running.
Fuck this. She has another drink.
6.
Augie has collected too many details of Lou’s life. Little things he knows that most people don’t, or so he assumes. He knows Lou still goes to mass, but on Saturday evenings instead of Sunday mornings. Lou is such a good Catholic (whatever the holy hell that might mean, but then Augie’s family’s idea of religion was praying to the Yankees for salvation) Augie finds it hilarious. He has one of those Virgin Mary prayer cards taped to his fridge, and Augie’s totally glad that’s the only relic of his Catholic Puerto Rican upbringing he can find because he can’t even begin to imagine rolling around in Lou’s bed only to find, like, a porcelain figure of the Christ child watching them from the nightstand or some shit. That’d be fucked up. And everything is already pretty fucked up enough as it is.
He knows that red wine gives Lou a huge-ass headache, and if you get a bottle open with him and get Lou at the very least holding the glass, you’re going to get a lecture about sulfates or grapes or whatever. It’s like he saw Sideways one day on TBS and now considers himself some kind of vineyard master. Or that’s Augie’s theory. Because he knows Lou, right? That’s what he’s saying here. And Lou has this habit of catching a few minutes of movies or weird Discovery Channel specials on TV and then passing off whatever bizarrely misappropriated tidbit he’s gleamed as Serious Fucking Knowledge. But that’s not the point. The point is that Augie doesn’t really like wine either and he likes Lou’s sulfate lectures even less so when he comes by it’s never with a bottle of wine in hand.
He knows that Lou’s ex-wife married him back when they both thought Lou was going to go pro, but that never happened. What did happen was first a daughter and then a divorce, but everyone knows both of those things. Sometimes Augie thinks there is something severely fucked about the homicide squad under Sweeney’s purview, because what the fuck, they are all divorced single misfits or whatever. Well, except Janey. But Janey’s never been married? Janey’s never been married. She just fucks married men or whatever her divisive M.O. is. Reg would know; he keeps tabs the way a jealous boyfriend would, and that is hilarious (hilarious on two counts: a) it’s Reg; and b) it’s Jane). He and Lou have definitely discussed that at length over a night of pool and Bucket of Beer night at O’Grady’s and how awesome it is that they are the most prickly, hateful assholes ever (though at least Reg makes for a good drinking buddy) and therefore both must have sprung from a special mold in hell and brought to earth just to spite each other. So, yeah, Janey’s not a divorcee, but the rest of them are. He’s gonna have to sit down with Evrard and they can start a Freshly Separated Men’s Club or something that meets in the breakroom over stale donuts. It was like Keating was the last of the family men, and well, they all know how that one ended. Augie will totally take a trial separation over a heart attack, okay.
Lou was married when Augie met him. Augie got super hammered with Lou the night he told him that he was getting a divorce.
“Ah, Marcy’s just no good, you know?” That was what Lou had said. He said it like “yeah man, that kung pao chicken is the nuts, but what can you do? I wanted lo mein.” He said it like it had zero consequence for him and like there wasn’t a daughter shared between the two of them. But that was Lou: all bluster and hidden heart.
Augie never really liked Marcy, and Marcy definitely did not like Augie. Lou still has a photo of her that he keeps in the family room, but Augie thinks he keeps it because his daughter is in the photo. Marcy is such a non-element in Lou’s life that it’s sort of mind-blowing at times. It’s mind-blowing, except for how it’s not. Except for how Veronica has sort of gone the way of Marcy too, and wow, Augie should have seen that one coming, right. But Veronica is nothing like Marcy. Veronica would never get her nails done at those cheap Korean places Marcy goes and she would never wear a leopard print jacket even though she’s all Staten Island Chic or whatever, and she would never marry a man because she thought he might be worth something more than he is at present value.
Veronica married him, for Christ’s sake.
And Marcy chose Lou.
In a way, it’s like Augie has the most in common with Marcy out of the four of them.
And that’s just no good, you know?
7.
Jane returns to the station after the bar (she left her phone, she left a file, in the end, the pretext will have little bearing on the outcome) and she finds Reg there. She finds Reg in the locker room.
And they fight. Of course -- they fight.
“You that lonely you have to force yourself into everyone else’s lives and fuck that up for them too?” It’s then, it’s when she says it, that the fight gets personal. It crosses over into something uglier. Something more difficult to reconcile.
“Who’s saying I’m lonely?” It’s a weak parry and they both can recognize it as such. Jane narrows her eyes at him all the same.
“Anyone who has ever met you. Jesus,” she says and then she laughs humorlessly. “I actually feel sorry for you. You miserable fuck,” she laughs again.
That harsh thin mouth of his twists that much more. “I got your pity, huh?”
“Yes,” and god, she is drunk. She is too drunk for this. Her mouth is dry and she feels tired, so tired, she can feel it behind her eyes. But she’s also angry. She has been, for days now. She’s angry at Matt, she’s angry at Costello, she’s angry at herself. But most of all, above all, she’s angry at Reg. “And that’s all you get,” she says to him with a smug smile. “From me,” she adds, as though clarification was needed. She wants to lean against the lockers at her back, but instead she folds her arms over her chest.
“You think I want anything from you?” The question makes something tight coil in her stomach. Jane likes to think she’s the one holding the cards here. She likes to think she’s the one with the high ground. She’s the one who will always know that he is wrong. He was wrong. He is wrong. He always will be wrong.
Everything about him is wrong.
“I think you want more than pity,” she says, but the venom has left her voice. She’s deflated that much; exhaustion, the alcohol, whatever. She gives in and leans back against the cool metal of the locker behind her, her arms still folded, and he takes a step toward her.
“Yeah?” he asks, but the amusement to his face is mean. “You think that highly of yourself, that it?” He takes another step and she has to crane her neck a little to maintain eye contact.
“You seem to think so.” Her voice sounds sludgy to her ears, run thick with something she is choosing to think of as whiskey and whiskey alone.
Reg’s face slips into something almost kind. “I didn’t mean to . . . you know,” he says, and she’s guessing that’s his rendition of an apology.
Jane laughs and shakes her head. “God,” she says. “Fuck you. Fuck you. You think that’s what I want from you?”
His eyes go dark, his face flat, and that tight twist low in her gut is back. That thrill of adrenaline is there; she can feel it in her fingertips, and she wants to laugh again. She’s been thirsting for a fight for ages. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s Reg who’s going to give it to her.
He takes another step closer and their bodies are almost touching. Her breathing sounds too loud to her, too visible in the way her chest expands and then collapses. His eyes are burning too bright, his own mouth parted, and she likes it (she fears it) that his breathing is just as labored as her own.
He leans in and her eyes flutter closed and then open.
“Is this what you wanted? This it?” he asks, but he asks the question almost into her mouth, his lips bumping wetly against hers, and she arches her neck into it without meaning to. He asks it low and dirty, and not for the first time, she sees him as not just angry but dangerous. She sees him with his sidearm raised in her direction, the body bleeding out at her feet.
“It’s what you wanted,” she says, breathes the words, right back into his mouth. His fingers tighten in her hair and pull, answering her even though she did not think she posed a question.
He finally makes good on the longstanding unspoken threat between the both of them:
He kisses her.
8.
In the kitchen, Augie hovers around Lou as Lou loads the dishwasher, a patient order to the way he arranges his dirty dishes that strikes Augie as equal parts anal-retentive and annoyingly endearing.
“I just feel, like,” Augie whines, waves his mostly empty beer bottle by the neck as he speaks. “Man. I am too fucking old to get started again, you know? Like, I gotta start chasing tail in bars again? Come on!”
Lou rolls his eyes and shoots Augie a look that all but screams, you do that already, asshole. Augie shrugs.
“You gonna stand there, hand me those plates,” Lou says and gestures with a nod of his head toward the stack of dirty plates on the counter behind Augie.
Augie obliges with a mock salute and watches Lou assess the situation that is his mostly full dishwasher. Augie smiles, his eyes crinkled and his lips spreading wide over his teeth.
Lou’s body is right there, and maybe this is everything Augie has had in his head since he started packing that suitcase earlier in the evening, when he thought about leaving the keys, when he left Lou drunk in the bathroom at that fucking party (his come still sticky on his hands when he left) two weeks before.
When he first met him.
Maybe Lou is something Augie always has in his head and the sheer amount of beer he has consumed in the last hour alone is enough to crystalize that thought into some undeniably vital fact about his life. It’s the sort of revelation he thinks he’s going to forget come morning and come sobriety, but in this moment, in this space of time, in Lou’s kitchen with the yellow tile floor and the Virgin Mary on the refrigerator and Lou grumbling under his breath as he rearranges dirty cereal bowls to make room for his dirty coffee mugs in his dishwasher, it’s the most obvious and the most important, most urgent realization ever.
So he kisses him.
He grabs him by the jaw and pulls him to him and Lou is still holding a dirty coffee mug with the NYPD logo on its side and he holds the mug in both hands as Augie kisses him. Lou kisses him back before he sets the coffee mug down by the side of the sink, before he frees his hands, hands that grab at Augie’s shoulders, that dig in to that bulk of muscle and flesh and bone.
And Jesus, they both need to shave. The stubble grown in along Lou’s jaw scrapes against Augie’s skin, and Augie can only imagine what his own face feels like, guesses it’s somewhere along the same if only based on the way Lou grunts, sounding like some bizarre hybrid of lustful irritation or something.
“This a booty call from the start?” Lou murmurs against Augie’s mouth and Augie laughs, the sound barely audible, all air, all expelled breath against Lou’s face. He can feel Lou hard against his leg and that’s enough to make him want to laugh again or moan or something
“Like you’re complaining,” Augie says, but his voice is too loud to him. His voice is loud, but not as loud as Lou’s belt buckle clicking against Augie’s. His hands are hot under Augie’s shirt and spread against his back.
9.
His hands are hot and cruel under her shirt, spreading against her back (his hand can almost fill the entire span of her lower back; it is a detail that should not matter, it is a detail she should not like). Jane presses the heel of her palm firmly against his collarbone. She is not pushing him away, but she also is not holding him to her. His shirt still feels freshly starched to her, even when wrinkled under her hands, even though she can smell skin and the bourbon he drank and what she wants to call cordite but she does not think that is it. It’s right that he should smell of cordite though. It’s right that she should want him when she pictures a gun in his hand.
But Reg didn’t fire a gun that day. She knows that. She hates that she knows that. She hates that she knows where he was and who he was with, that she has started keeping tabs on him in a way that has nothing to do with wanting to be where he is but rather wanting to know where he is to preempt whatever damage he might wreak.
His mouth is open over hers like a trap, all teeth, closing down around her. She has him by the neck, but he has her by the neck, too. She doesn’t think this is what she wanted. She doesn’t think this is anything she would have wanted for herself:
That the locker rattles behind her, their shared weight threatening it, a warning metallic clang each time their bodies rock back against it, shudder against each other, the slats digging into her spine, the skin (her skin) he has exposed there;
That he breathes her name, begrudgingly, even here, even inside of her, he says her name like he means to mock;
That she wanted this to hurt more, this, the thing she never wanted for herself, she wants it to hurt, hurt more
but then his hand is at her ass and he’s lifting her that much higher, he’s that much bigger than she is, he’s in that deep, she’s that wet for it that she can hear it, feel it each time he moves inside of her (god, so fucking deep she feels like she could choke on it, choke on him) and she thinks that she’s wrong (does that make him right?), she’s wrong and she wanted this, she wants this.
She comes before he does, her entire body shaking with it, and she can hear herself, hear the sounds she is making even though her mouth is muffled against the skin just under the hinge of his jaw. She bites down and he jerks against her.
She wants to tell him that this changes nothing. That nothing is going to change between the two of them. That this isn’t forgiveness and this isn’t pity and she has no idea what this is, but she finds that when she opens her mouth she is afraid of the sound she might make, so she bites him again.
She is afraid, so she bares her teeth and bites.
10.
A Monday:
Augie drops a cup of coffee on Lou’s desk and then perches on the side. They shoot the shit until Sweeney calls them into his office and sends them on their way down to the Hudson where a body is waiting in the water for them and everything is normal.
A Monday (the same Monday):
Jane is late to work and Reg does not so much as look up from his computer screen when she walks past his desk. She does not look at him. They both lie and do not look at each other.
Everything is normal.
fin.
prime suspect. two weeks out, both augie and jane pack their bags. lou/augie, jane/reg. 3755 words.
notes: lol what is this. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT. idk, the latest episode of prime suspect left me in desperate need for some a) lou/augie being the married couple that they basically are, and b) um, some more resolution to that jane/matt/reg mess lol. (also wow why before this episode did i think lou was divorced??? IDK. I FEEL LIKE WE THOUGHT THIS? but he talks about his wife as though they're still together in that ep? CALL IT ~ARTISTIC LICENSE, but i talk about him as divorced in this. for reasons). so that's what this is? this was thrown together hastily? it's christmas eve? this was supposed to be way more pornographic than it turned out? the end.
1.
A Friday:
Augie packs a suitcase and resists the urge to leave his keys sitting on the decorative table (Veronica bought it) under the pine and holly wreath (Veronica) next to the front door of their apartment (Veronica) and instead jams them into his coat pocket (Veronica) and tells himself to forget about them (it, her, Veronica).
A Friday (the same Friday):
Jane calls and gets quotes from six different moving companies in the area but does not commit to any of them.
It’s cheaper to move yourself, she thinks.
2.
Augie packed the following:
Five freshly laundered shirts he had picked up from the dry cleaner’s the evening before (still wrapped in plastic together and he had not so much as folded them but jammed them into his suitcase, uncharacteristically silent about it);
Two neck ties, one of which was a gift from Lou’s ex-wife one Christmas and Augie is almost ashamed to admit how much he loves that tie (it really sets off his eyes, it’s like she knew that would happen);
A pair of jeans he’s had pretty much since birth;
His shaving kit;
Some boxers, some undershirts, some socks, a pair of running shoes, an old NYPD sweatshirt he is pretty sure was once Lou’s but is his now based on the law of eminent domain (or is it imminent domain? he can never remember) since he’s had that sweatshirt for years now. He doesn’t pack a suit. He’s sure he has two hanging in his locker at the precinct, and that will do.
For now.
3.
When Jane thinks about leaving, when Jane calls moving companies and looks into the rates charged for rented U-Hauls, she thinks about taking:
Nothing.
She thinks about taking nothing with her.
Her guns. She would want her guns. But lately she only keeps her service weapon at their apartment: her shotguns, the hunting rifles her father gave her when she turned eighteen -- they’re all with him now. So the guns aren’t on the table. The guns aren’t something she needs to concern herself with.
She’s not entirely sure what she needs to concern herself with when she calls these people, when she asks about rental rates, when she asks how much they charge by the hour. Because when she thinks about it, most of the shit in that apartment is Matt’s anyway. Matt bought the bed. Matt wanted that bed, so Matt bought the bed. Matt had a certain vision for that whole fucking apartment, and at the time she hadn’t cared or she hadn’t known what that meant or she hadn’t cared that she knew what that would come to mean (he had a vision for the apartment, he had a vision for the both of them) so she let him buy the bed and she let him buy that kitchen table and she let him do a whole lot of things and he let himself read into it.
When Jane thinks about leaving, all Jane can think is how she wouldn’t be doing this, not yet, she wouldn’t be leaving, if it wasn’t for Reg Duffy.
4.
And so, for now:
“You miss her?” Lou asks quietly. His eyes are still glued to the game on the TV but Augie watches his profile. Carefully, he would say, if he was the sort of man who did things carefully. He’s not. It’s how he wound up here in the first place.
“Not really,” Augie says with a shrug, and Lou laughs low in the back of his throat. He turns to face Augie and offers a pointed look before taking a long pull from his beer.
“That make me the bad guy?” Augie asks with a dumb smile.
“The badge indicates otherwise,” Lou drawls, voice thick from the drink and his own repressed amusement. Augie thinks that Lou is secretly enjoying this. That he likes that they’re on the same level here. Two dudes on the doorstep of divorce. Like drinking and fucking, it’s something done better when not alone. Or at least that’s what Augie thinks. It’s why he called Lou up outside of Lou’s apartment building instead of checking into a cheap hotel or crashing with his brother and his new wife and the army of mutts they adopted from the pound.
He had said: I am, like, almost seventy-five percent sure I am allergic to dogs. And Max’s wife. And whatever bill Marriott might saddle me with.
Lou had played the role he liked best, that of the dutiful friend, and told Augie to get his dumb ass upstairs, he just bought a twenty-four pack of Bud and the Lakers were getting their ass handed to them.
Come on up.
5.
And so: Jane gets drunk. Alone.
Jane gets really, really drunk.
She sits alone in a bar she has never been to before, reveling in the anonymity, and lets herself order first one drink, and then another.
And another after that. Another.
It’s been almost two weeks since she fought with Matt (Matt fought with her?), and she lied when she told the psych that everything was fine at home. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie, because they had agreed that Jane would leave. They agreed she would leave and maybe that’s a new status quo. Maybe that’s a new rendering of the meaning of fine.
He had said to her: you can cut and run any time you want, Janey. Fuck this.
So she’s been working on that for the last two weeks, the last week and a half, however much time has passed. She’s been working on cutting and running.
Fuck this. She has another drink.
6.
Augie has collected too many details of Lou’s life. Little things he knows that most people don’t, or so he assumes. He knows Lou still goes to mass, but on Saturday evenings instead of Sunday mornings. Lou is such a good Catholic (whatever the holy hell that might mean, but then Augie’s family’s idea of religion was praying to the Yankees for salvation) Augie finds it hilarious. He has one of those Virgin Mary prayer cards taped to his fridge, and Augie’s totally glad that’s the only relic of his Catholic Puerto Rican upbringing he can find because he can’t even begin to imagine rolling around in Lou’s bed only to find, like, a porcelain figure of the Christ child watching them from the nightstand or some shit. That’d be fucked up. And everything is already pretty fucked up enough as it is.
He knows that red wine gives Lou a huge-ass headache, and if you get a bottle open with him and get Lou at the very least holding the glass, you’re going to get a lecture about sulfates or grapes or whatever. It’s like he saw Sideways one day on TBS and now considers himself some kind of vineyard master. Or that’s Augie’s theory. Because he knows Lou, right? That’s what he’s saying here. And Lou has this habit of catching a few minutes of movies or weird Discovery Channel specials on TV and then passing off whatever bizarrely misappropriated tidbit he’s gleamed as Serious Fucking Knowledge. But that’s not the point. The point is that Augie doesn’t really like wine either and he likes Lou’s sulfate lectures even less so when he comes by it’s never with a bottle of wine in hand.
He knows that Lou’s ex-wife married him back when they both thought Lou was going to go pro, but that never happened. What did happen was first a daughter and then a divorce, but everyone knows both of those things. Sometimes Augie thinks there is something severely fucked about the homicide squad under Sweeney’s purview, because what the fuck, they are all divorced single misfits or whatever. Well, except Janey. But Janey’s never been married? Janey’s never been married. She just fucks married men or whatever her divisive M.O. is. Reg would know; he keeps tabs the way a jealous boyfriend would, and that is hilarious (hilarious on two counts: a) it’s Reg; and b) it’s Jane). He and Lou have definitely discussed that at length over a night of pool and Bucket of Beer night at O’Grady’s and how awesome it is that they are the most prickly, hateful assholes ever (though at least Reg makes for a good drinking buddy) and therefore both must have sprung from a special mold in hell and brought to earth just to spite each other. So, yeah, Janey’s not a divorcee, but the rest of them are. He’s gonna have to sit down with Evrard and they can start a Freshly Separated Men’s Club or something that meets in the breakroom over stale donuts. It was like Keating was the last of the family men, and well, they all know how that one ended. Augie will totally take a trial separation over a heart attack, okay.
Lou was married when Augie met him. Augie got super hammered with Lou the night he told him that he was getting a divorce.
“Ah, Marcy’s just no good, you know?” That was what Lou had said. He said it like “yeah man, that kung pao chicken is the nuts, but what can you do? I wanted lo mein.” He said it like it had zero consequence for him and like there wasn’t a daughter shared between the two of them. But that was Lou: all bluster and hidden heart.
Augie never really liked Marcy, and Marcy definitely did not like Augie. Lou still has a photo of her that he keeps in the family room, but Augie thinks he keeps it because his daughter is in the photo. Marcy is such a non-element in Lou’s life that it’s sort of mind-blowing at times. It’s mind-blowing, except for how it’s not. Except for how Veronica has sort of gone the way of Marcy too, and wow, Augie should have seen that one coming, right. But Veronica is nothing like Marcy. Veronica would never get her nails done at those cheap Korean places Marcy goes and she would never wear a leopard print jacket even though she’s all Staten Island Chic or whatever, and she would never marry a man because she thought he might be worth something more than he is at present value.
Veronica married him, for Christ’s sake.
And Marcy chose Lou.
In a way, it’s like Augie has the most in common with Marcy out of the four of them.
And that’s just no good, you know?
7.
Jane returns to the station after the bar (she left her phone, she left a file, in the end, the pretext will have little bearing on the outcome) and she finds Reg there. She finds Reg in the locker room.
And they fight. Of course -- they fight.
“You that lonely you have to force yourself into everyone else’s lives and fuck that up for them too?” It’s then, it’s when she says it, that the fight gets personal. It crosses over into something uglier. Something more difficult to reconcile.
“Who’s saying I’m lonely?” It’s a weak parry and they both can recognize it as such. Jane narrows her eyes at him all the same.
“Anyone who has ever met you. Jesus,” she says and then she laughs humorlessly. “I actually feel sorry for you. You miserable fuck,” she laughs again.
That harsh thin mouth of his twists that much more. “I got your pity, huh?”
“Yes,” and god, she is drunk. She is too drunk for this. Her mouth is dry and she feels tired, so tired, she can feel it behind her eyes. But she’s also angry. She has been, for days now. She’s angry at Matt, she’s angry at Costello, she’s angry at herself. But most of all, above all, she’s angry at Reg. “And that’s all you get,” she says to him with a smug smile. “From me,” she adds, as though clarification was needed. She wants to lean against the lockers at her back, but instead she folds her arms over her chest.
“You think I want anything from you?” The question makes something tight coil in her stomach. Jane likes to think she’s the one holding the cards here. She likes to think she’s the one with the high ground. She’s the one who will always know that he is wrong. He was wrong. He is wrong. He always will be wrong.
Everything about him is wrong.
“I think you want more than pity,” she says, but the venom has left her voice. She’s deflated that much; exhaustion, the alcohol, whatever. She gives in and leans back against the cool metal of the locker behind her, her arms still folded, and he takes a step toward her.
“Yeah?” he asks, but the amusement to his face is mean. “You think that highly of yourself, that it?” He takes another step and she has to crane her neck a little to maintain eye contact.
“You seem to think so.” Her voice sounds sludgy to her ears, run thick with something she is choosing to think of as whiskey and whiskey alone.
Reg’s face slips into something almost kind. “I didn’t mean to . . . you know,” he says, and she’s guessing that’s his rendition of an apology.
Jane laughs and shakes her head. “God,” she says. “Fuck you. Fuck you. You think that’s what I want from you?”
His eyes go dark, his face flat, and that tight twist low in her gut is back. That thrill of adrenaline is there; she can feel it in her fingertips, and she wants to laugh again. She’s been thirsting for a fight for ages. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s Reg who’s going to give it to her.
He takes another step closer and their bodies are almost touching. Her breathing sounds too loud to her, too visible in the way her chest expands and then collapses. His eyes are burning too bright, his own mouth parted, and she likes it (she fears it) that his breathing is just as labored as her own.
He leans in and her eyes flutter closed and then open.
“Is this what you wanted? This it?” he asks, but he asks the question almost into her mouth, his lips bumping wetly against hers, and she arches her neck into it without meaning to. He asks it low and dirty, and not for the first time, she sees him as not just angry but dangerous. She sees him with his sidearm raised in her direction, the body bleeding out at her feet.
“It’s what you wanted,” she says, breathes the words, right back into his mouth. His fingers tighten in her hair and pull, answering her even though she did not think she posed a question.
He finally makes good on the longstanding unspoken threat between the both of them:
He kisses her.
8.
In the kitchen, Augie hovers around Lou as Lou loads the dishwasher, a patient order to the way he arranges his dirty dishes that strikes Augie as equal parts anal-retentive and annoyingly endearing.
“I just feel, like,” Augie whines, waves his mostly empty beer bottle by the neck as he speaks. “Man. I am too fucking old to get started again, you know? Like, I gotta start chasing tail in bars again? Come on!”
Lou rolls his eyes and shoots Augie a look that all but screams, you do that already, asshole. Augie shrugs.
“You gonna stand there, hand me those plates,” Lou says and gestures with a nod of his head toward the stack of dirty plates on the counter behind Augie.
Augie obliges with a mock salute and watches Lou assess the situation that is his mostly full dishwasher. Augie smiles, his eyes crinkled and his lips spreading wide over his teeth.
Lou’s body is right there, and maybe this is everything Augie has had in his head since he started packing that suitcase earlier in the evening, when he thought about leaving the keys, when he left Lou drunk in the bathroom at that fucking party (his come still sticky on his hands when he left) two weeks before.
When he first met him.
Maybe Lou is something Augie always has in his head and the sheer amount of beer he has consumed in the last hour alone is enough to crystalize that thought into some undeniably vital fact about his life. It’s the sort of revelation he thinks he’s going to forget come morning and come sobriety, but in this moment, in this space of time, in Lou’s kitchen with the yellow tile floor and the Virgin Mary on the refrigerator and Lou grumbling under his breath as he rearranges dirty cereal bowls to make room for his dirty coffee mugs in his dishwasher, it’s the most obvious and the most important, most urgent realization ever.
So he kisses him.
He grabs him by the jaw and pulls him to him and Lou is still holding a dirty coffee mug with the NYPD logo on its side and he holds the mug in both hands as Augie kisses him. Lou kisses him back before he sets the coffee mug down by the side of the sink, before he frees his hands, hands that grab at Augie’s shoulders, that dig in to that bulk of muscle and flesh and bone.
And Jesus, they both need to shave. The stubble grown in along Lou’s jaw scrapes against Augie’s skin, and Augie can only imagine what his own face feels like, guesses it’s somewhere along the same if only based on the way Lou grunts, sounding like some bizarre hybrid of lustful irritation or something.
“This a booty call from the start?” Lou murmurs against Augie’s mouth and Augie laughs, the sound barely audible, all air, all expelled breath against Lou’s face. He can feel Lou hard against his leg and that’s enough to make him want to laugh again or moan or something
“Like you’re complaining,” Augie says, but his voice is too loud to him. His voice is loud, but not as loud as Lou’s belt buckle clicking against Augie’s. His hands are hot under Augie’s shirt and spread against his back.
9.
His hands are hot and cruel under her shirt, spreading against her back (his hand can almost fill the entire span of her lower back; it is a detail that should not matter, it is a detail she should not like). Jane presses the heel of her palm firmly against his collarbone. She is not pushing him away, but she also is not holding him to her. His shirt still feels freshly starched to her, even when wrinkled under her hands, even though she can smell skin and the bourbon he drank and what she wants to call cordite but she does not think that is it. It’s right that he should smell of cordite though. It’s right that she should want him when she pictures a gun in his hand.
But Reg didn’t fire a gun that day. She knows that. She hates that she knows that. She hates that she knows where he was and who he was with, that she has started keeping tabs on him in a way that has nothing to do with wanting to be where he is but rather wanting to know where he is to preempt whatever damage he might wreak.
His mouth is open over hers like a trap, all teeth, closing down around her. She has him by the neck, but he has her by the neck, too. She doesn’t think this is what she wanted. She doesn’t think this is anything she would have wanted for herself:
That the locker rattles behind her, their shared weight threatening it, a warning metallic clang each time their bodies rock back against it, shudder against each other, the slats digging into her spine, the skin (her skin) he has exposed there;
That he breathes her name, begrudgingly, even here, even inside of her, he says her name like he means to mock;
That she wanted this to hurt more, this, the thing she never wanted for herself, she wants it to hurt, hurt more
but then his hand is at her ass and he’s lifting her that much higher, he’s that much bigger than she is, he’s in that deep, she’s that wet for it that she can hear it, feel it each time he moves inside of her (god, so fucking deep she feels like she could choke on it, choke on him) and she thinks that she’s wrong (does that make him right?), she’s wrong and she wanted this, she wants this.
She comes before he does, her entire body shaking with it, and she can hear herself, hear the sounds she is making even though her mouth is muffled against the skin just under the hinge of his jaw. She bites down and he jerks against her.
She wants to tell him that this changes nothing. That nothing is going to change between the two of them. That this isn’t forgiveness and this isn’t pity and she has no idea what this is, but she finds that when she opens her mouth she is afraid of the sound she might make, so she bites him again.
She is afraid, so she bares her teeth and bites.
10.
A Monday:
Augie drops a cup of coffee on Lou’s desk and then perches on the side. They shoot the shit until Sweeney calls them into his office and sends them on their way down to the Hudson where a body is waiting in the water for them and everything is normal.
A Monday (the same Monday):
Jane is late to work and Reg does not so much as look up from his computer screen when she walks past his desk. She does not look at him. They both lie and do not look at each other.
Everything is normal.
fin.