Bad Habit: Bad thoughts beget bad behaviour.
She glared at the glowing, stubby stick of ash resting between her index and middle finger, her eyes eventually tracing the trail of smoke emanating from its end. She touched her thumb to her pinky and ring finger rhythmically while she watched strangers file down the street. When she first started smoking, she hated cigarettes. Hated the smell they left in her car, the old taste that permeated the phlegm in the back of her throat, the way the nicotine quickened her already fast beating heart. This habit started in the worst of ways; she hated cigarettes, and for most of her life had hated herself. A smoky solution, two negative integers are supposed to make a positive. She laughed at the ridiculous thought. She felt the carousel of self-hatred spinning a circle in her mind. A daughter not good enough to keep her mother around, a vagabond foster child, a distant girlfriend, an absentee mother. Bad thoughts beget bad behaviour, she mused, pulling in another long drag. Her lowest points had her clawing at all sorts of poison, searching for relief or punishment. Maybe to her they were the same thing.
Perhaps that's why she found herself outside of his apartment.
She sucked another drag of the cigarette, disappointed when she was met with nothing. She dug in the centre console for another. The click of the wheel on her lighter followed by the quiet hiss of burning tobacco was unusually loud in the small space of her car, even with the window cracked. Behind the shield of her hand, the door of his apartment building opens as another occupant leaves, white puffs of air exhaling in the cold night.
When he rounds the block he sees her car immediately, a shadow on the street, smoke escaping through the slit in the driver's window. He taps her window and it hums, sliding down to reveal her tired eyes and frizzy hair.
"You're in the wrong part of town if you're looking for cheap tricks, Linden. A night with me is gonna cost ya." He smirked, punctuating his last sentence by swinging the plastic shopping bag in his hand toward her car.
She huffed a laugh, taking another drag of her cigarette. It looked to him like he may have struck a chord with some sort of joke she was having with herself. He tried to catch her eyes, make her fill him in, but her gaze moved down to make out the shape of a pint of ice cream and two square cigarette packages sagging in the bag he held.
A palpable silence filled the space between them, punctuated by sounds of traffic at a nearby intersection.
He knew she wasn't here on business because he would have gotten a call if it were about the case.
He watched as she picked at her thumbnail with her opposite index, flakes of ash escaping from the lit end of the cigarette, landing in the space where her window had disappeared.
He smirked, tried to duck his head to hide it for her sake. "You gonna come upstairs or what?"