A/N: So, this is the first thing I've posted since August. And I've been writing it since September. I have no freaking clue why it took so long – I mean, I did several drafts, but still.
College apps? Maybe.
Anyway, it was originally going to be a one-shot, but I got really fed up with myself today. I had come to a stopping point and I decided that the second half of it could be a separate chapter. So that'll be coming later. Hopefully soon.
This story is operating on the assumption that the woman we know as Mr. Yang was never really the killer and that it was all her father. I didn't feel any sympathy for her at all until I saw her third episode, and then BOOM. Super-Woobie.
I hope you enjoy it! Please R&R!
He let her remove his ankle weights. It took a year and a half for him to get there. But one weekend, he finally let her. She lay above him on the pile of laundry he called a bed, tasting his kisses and peeling off his undergarments, and although he cringed as she furtively tossed the weights aside with his boxers, he uttered not a squeak of protest. She locked her naked ankles with his as they embraced, and in that moment, she realized just how much he loved her.
He loved every bit of her, every damaged facet: the sharp arch of her back, the ropes of hair that stuck to her bared teeth, the violet bruise under her collarbone that had been there since she was eleven. No one was supposed to love her. But he did. She braced her hands against his chest, but he moved instead to lace his slack fingers between her skinny ones. The heels of their palms burned against each other, but he wouldn't let her fall and he didn't let her fall, not until they dissolved together into agony.
They lay side by side for a short while afterwards. She felt him kiss her gently on the cheek, and she knew that this was not what her father had had in mind when he first told her about this "assignment." This man knows too much, the real Mr. Yang had said, a grainy photograph of an unsmiling, bespectacled young man on the table in front of him. Either you dispose of him correctly or you come up with some other way to shut him up.
"But how do I make a man forget all he's worked for?"
Mr. Yang had then smirked mockingly at his daughter. You know how, Paulie.
The sham romance her father had planned was clever: once a month or so, she would take the train up to Monterey for the weekend, have pity sex with a desperately lonely criminal profiler, and have a good laugh at his expense on the train ride home. It had stopped being a sham, however, the first day they left his apartment to do other things.
They would sit by the beach or in coffee shops and just take turns talking at each other. She loved to make him fluster by keeping his eye contact for too long, and that afternoon he finally got back at her by grabbing her hand from across the table and refusing to let go. Old ladies eyed them in their sappy tug-of-war and began to gossip. If Pauline had been at home in Santa Barbara, she would have cringed. But the things they said in Monterey were something special:
"No wonder we didn't see him in church this morning . . . look at him, holding her hand. He won't even touch the handlebars of his bike with more than his fingertips."
"Bless that boy's soul . . . I'd been starting to think he would turn."
She wasn't neighborhood slut Pauline Rotmensen here. She was the girlfriend, the one who had made poor loner Mary Lightly happy at last. She had been with several men and women in her twenty-odd years of adulthood, but never before had she affected someone this much.
And he told her so. Leaning across the table, he whispered, "You know, something magical happens when you visit. I get more sun in one weekend than I usually do in a month."
She laughed and remarked that she liked him pale. The gracious expression he made when she poked him on the nose made her wonder why she'd ever thought of hurting him, even for the slightest moment.
To think, he didn't even resent her object of obvious obsession! She'd told him that Shawn Spencer was a fascinating character, not to mention a genius and a babe, and she'd supplied him with more than enough Santa Barbara newspaper articles to support the claim. And the thought of jealousy never even crossed his mind – when questioned about whether the little hearts, the hundreds of little black hearts inked around each image of the psychic's sleek and rugged face, bothered him, he simply said, "If you love Spencer, then I love Spencer."
He kept those newspaper articles on the top shelf of his medicine cabinet, alphabetized by the crime committed, so he would have something to remember her by when she was at home. This one would also be going under M for "murder," he decided before walking to the bathroom to put the article away.
When he came back, he sat next to her on the couch and began talking about his own obsession: "I had a revelation about July 1995 this week."
Pauline gulped, knowing full well what he meant. "Oh?"
"One of the lionesses that consumed Denise Taylor's body – previously one of the healthiest creatures in the zoo – passed away a few days later. Poisoned by industrial-strength painkillers. Now, when Taylor's body was found, there was so little visceral material left on her bones that being torn to shreds and eaten was the most logical cause of death, but I think that she was already dead when she was thrown into the lion's cage. I looked into it, and she had no prescriptions to painkillers or any other way to access them. Yang must have poisoned her –" Pauline shuddered. "– and thrown her to the lions for show."
He turned to her and sighed happily, as if he hadn't just described a grisly, unsolved, ten-year-old horror. They were both silent for several moments. He reached over to carefully guide his fingers through her curls, while she watched his mouth for a conclusion that never came. Eventually, she couldn't stand it.
"So?" she snapped, whipping her neck back so suddenly that his fingers got tangled in her hair.
"So . . . so what?" he said a bit breathlessly.
"Exactly. So what, Mary? Do you know how to find him now? Why is this so important?"
"It's not important. Just fascinating," he answered.
"I don't understand," she said quietly as she pushed his hand away. "Why do you spend so much of your time with this psychopath and all of his sick ways? Especially when there are so many beautiful things out there that you could use to occupy your time. Like me."
She straddled his lap and put her hands on the side of his face. He raised an eyebrow in cautious anticipation, because he had heard this speech before – it was the very same thing she'd said to seduce him for the first time a year and a half before.
But Pauline was not finished. "And not just me. You live near a beach, Mary, where you can watch birds, or sunsets, or those airplanes with the cheesy ad banners. And those nice old ladies from your church seem like they'd be more than happy to chat with you over coffee, but you don't take advantage of that at all. No, you spend all day locked in your apartment, obsessing over Mr. Yang." The name angered her so much that her hands instinctively tried to clench into fists. Instead, she dug her fingernails into Mary's scalp. "That bastard doesn't deserve your time."
Mary winced and pushed her away. "Is this jealousy, Paul?" he said. "I know I'm not particularly masculine, but –"
"No, it's just who you are!" Pauline screamed. She backed away from the couch and shook her head feverishly. Through the blur of newborn tears, she could see the studies and case files lined up on his bookshelf. An ugly bile boiled in her stomach – remembrance. She was supposed to be tearing those case files to shreds. "This macabre, encyclopedic knowledge . . . it's a part of you. It's more than encyclopedic. It's like it's etched into your heart. How the hell am I supposed to change you?"
She felt herself choking up. The feeling would pass. It always did; she hadn't really cried since she was eleven. But nonetheless, she was too hysterical to face him. She covered her face and ran to his bathroom. Maybe she would need to vomit later. Now, she just slammed the door behind her and looked at herself in the mirror.
Her father thought she was a whore, a girl who slept around just for recompense. He assumed that she'd done it before and that she could do it again, and how could she possibly get that monster to understand that she couldn't bear to demand payment from this man, who, since he'd met her, had done nothing but give her love and attention? At this rate, I'm the one who owes Mary, she thought.
But she could just hear her father respond: You idiot! You hormonal woman-child! What is this that's holding you back? Love? And with him of all people. You think you love him because you're both scared, lonely little babies, but that similarity is exactly what makes this so inefficient. Two yins cannot complete each other.
Stop trying to make him complete you.
Pauline threw open Mary's medicine cabinet – she could drown out the voice with Xanax. But as she was groping around for the bottle, she knocked a stack of papers to the floor. Suddenly, Shawn Spencer was eyeing her sexily from below. He had a husky voice in her mind as he inquired, I solve murders for a living, Honeypot. What have you done?
Shawn was completely right. At this point in her sorry life, there was almost nothing she could do. But life had given her a gift: a boyfriend who needed her as much as she needed him. She ripped open her blouse and ran out of the bathroom. Mary had wandered over to his bookcase and was staring at his Yang artifacts aimlessly. Sadly. Pauline would have cried for him if she could. She approached, shivering and shaking and begging, "Mary, I love you. I'm absolutely nuts, but I love you nonetheless and you've gotta know that." She grabbed him by the shoulders. "Let me prove it."
He hesitated, as he usually did when faced with sex, but then she kissed him on the neck and he quickly warmed up. Before long, he was making love to her under the light of his television.
Their bare ankles were twisted together so tight that their skin burned. No part of their bodies was not touching; for her, the sex felt so effortless that she barely even needed to focus on the physical. She stared into his eyes and watched the confusion melt right out of his pupils.
Maybe she was a bit of a whore – after all, she did get results. In death, she cradled Mary's head in the crook of her neck, fully aware that as he released his seed inside of her, he was also releasing months of research. But she wasn't going to accept those results. The two of them had barely started cooling down from their orgasms when she grasped his hand and whispered, "Denise Taylor was poisoned before the lions ate her."
"Yes," said Mary in between heaving breaths. "Painkillers. Why?"
She smiled. "That's not important," she said. She reached up and grabbed his glasses, which had been neatly discarded on top of the couch, and she helped slip them back over his nose. "I just needed to make sure you remembered."
They fell asleep in that very spot, propped up against his old, dusty couch with their hands clasped together. The next morning, he was so reluctant to send her home that he actually walked her to the train station and kissed her goodbye long and on the lips. Several passersby who knew him dropped what they were holding out of shock.
She felt a kind of strength in that moment. The minute her train lurched out of the station, that strength would give way to a bottomless empty feeling, as if she knew that that kiss was to be their last. But now, as she wiped tears out of his watery blue eyes and felt his arms looped around her chest, she had only one, empowered thought: Maybe you're right, Daddy. Maybe two yins can't complete each other. But they can sure has Hell make a yang.
A/N: Part 2 will be here soon! Reviews are greatly appreciated. :)