My soul felt weak and failing in my chest and I wondered if murderers killed their goodness right along with their victim.
“’Cause you don’t distract me with those pretty blues, I’m going to murder that piece of shit all over again for whatever he did that made you feel the need to stick a blade in his neck.”
Emotion rumbled under the ruins of my spirit and threatened to bubble up my throat.
Danner read the question in my eyes and his stern face softened from severe creases into smooth, rumpled silk.
“You didn’t murder him in cold blood, Rosie. I don’t need you to give me those words for me to know the truth of this.”
“You haven’t even seen me in years,” I whispered through the tears that were sudden and insistent at the backs of my eyes. “How could you know that?”
He moved his other hand around the back of my neck and wove it into the sweat damped hair there then tugged it back firmly, just enough to make me hiss in surprise. The action was oddly calming and without conscious thought, I found myself tilting my head to expose my neck to him. Taking my cue, the hand on my chin slid down my jaw and wrapped around my throat, his fingers and thumb pressing gently at my pulse points on either side of my neck.
“You think I don’t know that under all that thorny sass you got a heart as tender as a budded rose, you can think again,” he said in that flat, sure tone.
Like he was reading someone his or her Miranda rights or reciting a code from the police academy. Like what he was saying was an irrefutable, absolute fact.
In a way he was, if there had ever been a chance of me not loving Officer Lionel Danner, it was obliterated by that moment and those words. My heart was imprisoned by his, regardless of his lack of interest.
“I still gotta call it in,” he told me, stern but gentle, a contradiction he’d mastered. “If you thought I was gonna let this slide because you’re you to me, you were wrong. You didn’t call your daddy, you called me, and I’ll get it sorted just like he’d get it sorted for you but my way will be a fuckuva lot different and more legal than his, yeah?”
When I nodded, shadows passed over the grass green of his eyes like clouds overhead. His jaw ticked as he stared at me like that for a long minute before standing up and sticking out a hand to me. It was a deeply tanned hand attached to a strong wrist threaded with thick veins that ran up and over his corded forearms. A strong hand at the end of a strong arm on the body of the strongest man outside of the club that I’d ever known.
Reeling from everything, including the powerful resurgence of my childhood adoration, I mutely took his offered hand and let him peel me off the tacky blood spill. My core throbbed dully, painfully and my skin felt tender all over like the flesh of an overripe peach dropped to the floor. Still, I sat in one of my slightly wonky wooden chairs and watched him as he pulled out his phone and called in the accident.
I didn’t listen to the words he said as he talked to the operator at the station. Instead, I watched the way his firm, beautifully formed mouth worked over the words, watched his pink tongue click against his square, white teeth. It was a disturbing situation to find myself so physically drawn to another man when my old one was barely even cold on the ground, but I’d always been irrevocably drawn to Danner and observing him in his element, Good Cop In Action, centered me.
Again, it felt that I blinked and there were people there, flooding through the doors of my apartment with equipment and cameras, in blue uniforms with squawking walkie-talkies. I jumped when three of them tried to corner me while Danner was busy talking to two people studying the body. I couldn’t seem to hear their voices properly. The volume was there, but the words were fuzzy like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.
Wah wah wah, wah-wah.
“Back off, Sterling,” Danner ordered, suddenly pulling me half behind him so he could face my interrogators.
The huge black man named Sterling rolled his eyes. “Just doing my damn job, Danner. You clearly got personal ties to this one. I think it’s me who should be telling ya to back off, eh?”
Danner crossed his arms over his chest and stared down the man in response.
Sterling lasted all of thirty seconds before he awkwardly scratched the back of his head and muttered, “Damn, Danner, I’m just trying to do my job.”