CHAPTER FOUR: Splintering
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Juliet woke very early, before five a.m. Her head was slightly muzzy but she was coming out of a dream, or a memory, of kissing Carlton, so her mood had a decidedly mellow tinge to it.
Oh, wait… no, it was a memory.
Kissing him right out there on her doorstep.
Mmmm… an extremely nice memory.
She didn't normally get tipsy so fast but two gigantor margaritas on essentially an empty stomach after an upsetting afternoon… yeah, that'd make for poor judgment.
But once again, "unfaithful" moniker aside, she still felt no guilt, because it still didn't feel like cheating.
Mostly it felt like heaven.
But Carlton must think she was awful, leading him on, toying with him—you know, unfaithful.
Hmmm… Juliet smiled. The way he'd kissed her back—God, he was a fantastically good kisser—said he wasn't thinking bad things about her at all, even if he did stop her from going further.
She wasn't even embarrassed about what she said, because she remembered that very well too.
Fully awake now, she got up and peered out the window; as promised, her Beetle was parked out front. She padded into the living room and immediately spotted an envelope on the table by the door. Inside, the car key, and a note: I still had the house key you gave me for emergencies. Let me know if you want Collins to have it now. Hope your head's okay in the morning —Carlton.
Irony. She'd demanded a key back from Shawn, and suddenly she wanted Carlton to keep the one he had.
I wish he'd come further in to the apartment. I wished I'd sensed him here.
She had gone straight to bed, ignoring the phone and its multiple messages from Shawn, and obviously slept through Carlton's quiet arrival and departure; she never even heard the Bug's distinctive motor in the parking lot.
I'm going to have to do something about Shawn.
One idea came to mind immediately. She showered and dressed, went to the nearest all-night store with extensive hardware supplies, and came back to install new locks. There was no way Shawn hadn't made a copy of the key she'd given him last year; she knew it. She knew him, and in her current frame of mind, preventing (or at least slowing down) his access to her space was paramount.
Yeah, he was her boyfriend, but this was… war.
She had an extra key made, and when she got to the station, headed straight for Carlton's desk. He looked up, sea-blue eyes revealing nothing, and she was glad Henry wasn't in yet.
"Hi," he said cautiously. "How are you?"
Juliet gave him a smile. "I'm okay. Thanks. Thanks for the car delivery too—and take this, please."
He took the key she offered, frowning. "What's this for?"
"I changed the locks on my place this morning. You can get rid of the old key."
Carlton blinked, puzzled. "Was there a problem with your locks?"
There was, but she didn't want to say his name. "I was… in a mood. Carried over from yesterday."
"Okay," he said slowly. "You don't want to give this to Collins instead? Or maybe Vick?"
Juliet didn't hesitate: "They wouldn't be the first ones I'd call." She smiled again, noting the hint of a return smile in the deep blue, and left him to his work.
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. . .
Listening to "please hold" music in one ear, Lassiter turned the key over in his hand again and again, trying to balance his current feelings against his original grand plan to separate himself from Juliet.
It had been two months now, and in the last month alone, they'd had spectacular sex, kissed with considerable passion on her doorstep, and she'd just given him a new key to her place, implying she'd changed the locks because of Spencer.
How in the hell did that relate to separating?
"Separation means separate," Victoria had once written in a terse note, leading to a rather satisfying session in the shooting range (despite having to clean up shards of porcelain afterwards).
Juliet was still with Spencer, so far as he knew. Spencer still had the damned ring in his possession, so far as he knew. She might still marry the guy, so far as he knew, and by God, so far as he knew, Lassiter was still going to live the rest of his life without her.
She was going through a phase, he told himself. She was adjusting. That and the margaritas combined to leave him confused—not unhappy per se, but confused.
Last night, he drove back to El Cielo to collect her Beetle, and called for a patrol car to meet him at Juliet's place. The lights were out, but he tapped on the door anyway, and after a minute, figured she'd sensibly gone to bed.
Using the "emergency" key, he went in, and honestly, honestly his sole intention was to deposit the car key and leave again. But once inside, he hesitated.
In the dimness, in the quiet, he was overwhelmed by… her.
The idea of being with her. Coming home to her.
His feet carried him quietly to her bedroom door, which stood open. There was still enough early-evening light through the window to illuminate her form in the bed, honey-gold hair across the pillow, one slender leg visible.
She was so beautiful, and he'd have given anything for the right to lie beside her, but he didn't have it. Spencer did.
Lock-changing and slightly drunken doorstep-kissing-incidents aside, he just couldn't see that it wouldn't always be Spencer with that right.
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Juliet went beachside to eat her lunch, her head too full of … everything … to sit inside the station or even go home. She needed the wide blue ocean in front of her to help calm those babbling internal voices.
After savory chicken salad, chopped fresh tomatoes and cucumber, and a tall icy drink (with none of the oomph of yesterday's margaritas), she felt a lot more settled. The voices were still jabbering at her, but they were muted.
Shawn sat down beside her wearing his most resolute doubt-me-not expression. "Here," he said, and handed her a key.
A theme for the day. "The copy you made." Of a key I gave you in good faith, because I trusted you.
"Yeah. I… I just thought it'd be good to have one in case I lost the original, but… yeah, I should have asked first. I'm sorry."
Juliet studied him. He was very good at hiding, well, everything, and it was entirely possible he'd made other copies. But she had a few tricks, too. "So when I go home tonight, I'm not going to see any damage to the new locks from when you tried to get in this morning after I left for work?"
Shawn stared, obviously trying to seem confused rather than surprised. He chose wounded dignity. "That's kind of a hurtful thing to say, Jules."
She nodded. "Yeah. I guess it is. Or it would be, if I didn't have video footage of your attempts."
Her brothers, when they taught her to play poker, had emphasized the importance of a good bluff. Thanks, guys; I owe you.
He was silent, watching her; and she knew damned well she wasn't giving anything away. Finally he sighed. "I was just going to put your CDs back in order the way you wanted them. I figured you were mad enough about the DVDs that I'd better try to make the CDs right. That's all I was going to do, I swear."
"I see. But… was it really about making things right, or was it maybe more about covering your tracks?"
"Jules, come on."
"No, Shawn. Remember me asking you yesterday if you ever listened to me? Remember me telling you I wanted my key and for you not to come over when I'm not there? Remember how angry I was?"
"Yeah, but I was just… look, I'm one of the good guys. Do you remember that?"
Hmm, a touch of defiance there. "Yes, actually, I do. But you're… I don't know, Shawn. There's a little bit of bad guy in you too."
He half-grinned. "I thought women liked bad boys."
"I said bad guy. That means the kind of guy who continually disrespects the wishes of the people he claims to care about."
Now he really was wounded. "It's not a claim, Jules. I care. You know how I feel about you."
"I do." She felt a rush of affection, despite everything, and reached out to clasp his hand. "I don't question your feelings for me."
His voice was low: "But."
"But… I don't think I can do this anymore."
There. Said.
And honestly it had nothing to do with Carlton.
He turned to her at once, taking her other hand. "Jules, wait. Look. Give me a chance. I can do this. I can learn."
Such a profound sigh escaped. "Haven't you made promises like that to Gus and your father for years?"
"Well, yeah," he admitted, "but I never thought I'd have to make that kind of promise to you."
"What? Why?"
"Because I never thought I'd screw up with you the same way I do with them. I thought I'd be better with you. Smarter. Less of an ass."
It was almost amusing. "Shawn…"
"No, I mean it. You have to give me a chance. At least one. I can be trained. I can do anything I set my mind to, you know I can, and I set my mind to you." He squeezed her hands, looking unbelievably earnest and hopeful. "I set my heart on you."
In response, her heart twisted a little.
He went on urgently, "One chance. That's all I ask. We worked too hard to get together, Jules. It shouldn't be so easy to tear us apart."
Seagulls screeched, and the waves rushed to shore, and Juliet's head and heart did battle: common sense against emotion, experience against hope. Reality against optimism.
"Okay," she sighed. "One more chance."
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. . .
The instant the words flew out of her mouth, she wanted to yank them back.
But Shawn's face had lit up like it was Christmas morning and he swooped in to kiss her, then jumped up and started victory-dancing, and it was impossible, beyond impossible, to tell him wait no I changed my mind, because it doesn't matter how hard you try, it doesn't even matter if you succeed: you're just not Carlton.
She couldn't say that to him.
No one with a heart could say that.
Which is why she sat in her rocking chair well past midnight, brushing tears off her face, regretting a situation she had created all by herself simply by saying "okay."
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You have to stop thinking in numeric terms.
End of Week Twelve.
Lassiter and Grimaldi were prowling around an empty warehouse, looking for evidence left behind by a small drug-dealing operation. Other officers were carefully swarming the place as well, and he was glad, because this was certainly not his best attention-to-detail day.
It had been a month since The Margarita Incident. He and Juliet hadn't talked at length again, and there were no "I need a favor" calls. They had coffee a few times, either standing by the bar discussing nothing, or meeting up by chance at the Starbucks closest to the station and taking a few minutes to discuss… nothing.
At work, but only when Henry wasn't there, he watched her from afar. She seemed… quiet. Almost like she were waiting. It was an odd sensation, yet that's how it seemed: she was biding her time. For what?
Spencer was around regularly with Guster, but he only messed with Lassiter when Henry called them over to his desk, or when he was exceptionally bored. But since Lassiter had perfected the get-away-from-him-ASAP move, they didn't interact much.
He'd educated Grimaldi about them. Guster was okay, he explained, basically a good guy who generally wanted to do the right thing, but he was easily led by Spencer down far too many rabbit holes. Spencer, for his part, was smart but lazy, loved attention and food to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, and Grimaldi would do well to change his passwords regularly to forestall Spencer's inevitable snooping and "pranks."
Grimaldi had said, "That's illegal. We can arrest him."
Lassiter had responded wearily, "You try."
This morning, striding down the hall toward Interrogation carrying a cup of coffee, he'd been T-boned by Juliet coming around the corner rapidly; her head was down and her attention clearly elsewhere, and that's how he ended up with coffee all over his shirt, but the stain—not to mention the considerable sting from the heat of it through the fabric—fell into sensory background once she began anxiously trying to clean him up.
She yanked him into the ladies' room, which thank God was empty, and started blotting at him with wet paper towels. He kept telling her it was all right and never mind and he had a fresh shirt in the car but the words fell away along with the rest of it when she looked up at him, her hands on his chest… her hands on his chest… her palms flat against him and somehow hotter than the coffee, and she could surely feel his heart racing.
Her eyes were wide—dark blue pools of something utterly irresistible—and she sighed, her lips parted slightly, and he lost it. He kissed her.
He grasped her arms and pulled her close and kissed her, and there was no doubt in his addled brain about her response: immediately reciprocated desire.
He'd been wrong about a few things in his life and wrong about a lot of things where women were concerned, but as a man he knew full well that this woman wanted him.
Maybe it was only right this minute, but she wanted him and accepted that he wanted her.
Tugging her tighter against his body was easy because she was already pressed to him; her arms were around his neck and she was pulling him closer, kissing him harder and more deeply, as if both their lives depended on this most intense kiss ever in the history of kisses.
Doomed kisses, even.
Lassiter could hardly breathe, and her gasps against his mouth—not that she was pulling back—showed him she was in the same state.
He couldn't help but pull her hair free from its restraints, couldn't help but stroke her golden peach-scented hair as it tumbled down to her shoulders. Damn, he wanted her. Never before had he wanted any woman—or even any thing—as much as he wanted her.
Right now… and forever.
Outside the door, voices; a conversation between two women, one of whom was about to come in.
They jerked apart, fast and far. Juliet didn't bother with her hair; she knew enough to resume the blotting of coffee from his shirt as if nothing else had been going on, and when DiNardi from Fingerprinting came in, all there was to see was perfectly innocent.
"Sorry," Juliet said brightly. "I dragged him in here against his will." She gestured to his stained shirt. "Tried to run him down."
"Friendly fire," he managed. "I think we can give up on this. Um, excuse me." He snatched up the empty cup and brushed past the still-uncertain DiNardi, and in the hours since had not once felt that his heart had gotten back to a normal rhythm.
Stupid.
You were doing so well.
Okay, you still suck at this getting-over-Juliet thing.
But now you're back to the earlier, higher levels of suckage.
Because you suck.
And she's not yours. NOT YOURS.
BECAUSE YOU SUCK.
The inner haranguing only stopped when Grimaldi called him over to look at some smudges near a light switch inside a closet, and he almost wanted to shake the rookie's hand for the unintended favor.
With grim determination, he made himself concentrate on his job, and training Grimaldi, and the voice left him alone for now.
He held out zero hope that it would stay quiet.
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Oh my God.
Oh my God.
Juliet was in her car, trembling.
Never in her life, ever, ever, had she experienced anything like that.
They might as well have been naked and making love, not fully dressed and standing in the ladies' room. The sheer intensity of the kiss shocked her even now, hours later, when she was supposed to be picking up lunch for herself and Collins.
She'd volunteered to go because she couldn't stay at her desk one more minute without some kind of breakdown, and here, in her Beetle, within sight of the ocean, she was breaking down.
But she felt entitled: the past month had been very unsettling.
Her promise to give Shawn a chance meant she'd had to force herself to stop thinking about Carlton, a promise she was two-thirds good at keeping when she was awake and an utter failure at keeping when she was asleep, because he persistently invaded her dreams.
Shawn had been making a valiant effort to try not to be… Shawn. He usually asked her what she wanted to do, for one thing, instead of assuming she always agreed with his preference. They even watched a few movies of her choice, and dined in places she wanted to try.
(However, she would not go to El Cielo with him. That was a memory she didn't want sullied.)
Like most men, however, he wanted accolades for these efforts, not understanding (like most men) that accolades shouldn't have to be given for the normal actions of mature adults in a supposedly committed relationship.
The truth was, she was tired of the trying, and she knew he was tiring, too—and it had only been a month.
He still hadn't quit making remarks about Carlton. It was too ingrained in him. It was as if, not being able to get a rise out of Collins at crime scenes, he fell back to an old target, even when the target wasn't there. Most other crime scene personnel knew Carlton at least by reputation, so Shawn could be assured of a laugh or even a grin in reaction to whatever needless snark he made in his absence.
Juliet asked him numerous times to stop, and he would… that day. At that crime scene. But at the next crime scene, he'd rev it up again.
She didn't want to truly confront him on the issue, though. She was desperately afraid that if she started yelling at him about Carlton, she would say too much. He'd see the truth. He'd see her feelings for Carlton went beyond partner and friend.
Her balance on the highwire of her emotions was already precarious. She had to get a grip.
She'd foolishly hoped that grip was strengthening—or at least not weakening further—until this morning.
Her hands flat on his chest. His heart pounding under her touch. His expressive eyes the most mesmerizing shade of ocean blue. When he kissed her, she was immediately—immediately—sucked into a whirlpool of desire from which escape was not only impossible but also a completely ridiculous idea: why would she want to leave his embrace? Why?
He was all fire. Searing heat between them. White hot.
Even now she wanted him… needed him. Loved him.
Juliet rested her head against the cool window of the Beetle.
You stupid woman. You're supposed to love your boyfriend.
But I… do. I guess I do. I must.
Not like you should.
No. Not like I should. Not anymore.
What do you mean, anymore? When did you ever love him the way you love Carlton? When did you ever love any man the way you love Carlton?
I have no response to that.
Yeah. Stupid woman. Whatever your good intentions and fondest hopes, things changed. Eyes opened. Now what?
You're the one slinging insults; you tell me.
End it with Shawn, and throw yourself at Carlton's feet.
I have no response to that, either.
Stupid—
Yeah, yeah, I know. Stupid woman.
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