Locked Away – Chapter Six
It always happened the same way.
No matter how much she wanted to - she couldn't change the outcome.
The woman came at her with the makeshift knife; it glared brilliantly in the afternoon sun slicing towards her. But Dani was small, quick and light. She used the woman's momentum to pull her past her intended target Dani's chest, during the attempted blow. The crack in the pavement was slight and unnoticed but just enough to trip the woman who tumbled to her doom. The shank ended up buried to the hilt in her chest between her ribs on the left side, opposite the hand she hand the blade in.
The woman looked terrified, surprised and amused all at the same time. She bubbled and gurgled as her lungs filled with blood.
There was so much blood as Dani turned the woman over trying to aid her.
That wasn't what bothered her; as a homicide detective; buckets of blood came with the territory. It was the look of terror and panic in the woman's eyes that she couldn't forget. Fear and the knowledge that death was present in that moment those things stayed with her, after lockup, after the jumpsuit, after the bunked beds, after the anti-septic smell gave way to real food and real sheets – it stayed.
She woke again for the fifth night in a panicked sweat. Her recollection was so real, she could smell the blood, taste the copper in the back of her throat, but she wasn't there anymore, she was here. She told herself that as she climbed from the deep bedding one of Crews' ten guestrooms in his huge empty sounding house.
They hadn't decided she'd stay there. They hadn't even talked about it. He took her home and she stayed with him because it was where they both knew she needed to be. There was consensus without discussion. That meant something, but she didn't know what yet, she thought as he drank in guilty gulps of air in her post nightmare regimen. She then walked to the bathroom, splashed cold water on her face and looked into her own haunted eyes. She looked terrible and felt worse. She was in the cool quiet of a house as silent as a tomb.
Prison was never quiet. There as banging and clanging, scratching and pawing, sibilant whispers and horns and claxons; the eerie keening of pain and crying of poor souls and odder still occasionally singing. But never silence, which she was discovering, was a sound you could actually hear. She remembered all those disjointed comments that Crews made when they were first partnered. At the time they made him seem unhinged or not right, but now they rang completely true for her.
He was here somewhere; perhaps in his room, perhaps on the stone patio where he sat in meditation for hours. He'd never once asked her for a thing. Not a single detail about what happened, not why, not how. He demanded nothing of her. Instead he was her rock, her protector and on dark nights her shepherd sitting by her bedside keeping watch, holding her hand and her heart so gently like either could break.
He offered to take her to see her mother, or to bring her mother to her, but she wasn't ready for that. In fact she wasn't ready for anyone now – except him.
All the time she'd been partnered with Crews he'd made indistinct unprompted comments about prison and they came back to her in snippets of his past – an experience she now shared in some small, truncated way. She knew her short experience inside paled in comparison to his storied past. A past gone, so long ago and so far away it felt like another lifetime.
He was careful not to do that; not to compare his experience to hers. Each experience was unique and yet somehow they were all the same. But it was how he knew what would happen; and that she'd need space and time, but also comfort and security to recover. She wondered who did those things for him. Who provided Charlie Crews with peace, comfort and stability? Was it his lawyer? She was beautiful, statuesque, educated, accomplished and clearly in love with him, but for some reason she sensed an aloofness in him, when in came to Constance Griffiths.
She found the object of her musing standing barefoot, dressed in his pajama bottoms and a navy blue t-shirt in front of a wall of windows in his bedroom examining the moon in the same way he sometimes stared at the sun – as though it held answers, as though it could heal him. But she knew better now, he'd never be healed or whole. He was fractured and the pieces were too disparate to ever fit together properly again. She felt it in herself as well – that tenseness, the coiled fear that lay in her belly that one time when she opened her eyes she'd be back inside, in her bunk, in her cell, in her own personal hell.
He felt her enter the room and pad quietly to stand beside him. She wanted to speak, but didn't know what to say. He reached for her hand and held it gently.
"It'll get better. It takes time," he confirmed softly. "It took months before I could sleep through the night," he explained in a quiet tone as though the silence might break.
"Am I gonna stay her? With you as my own personal….whatever…until then?"
"I am your own personal…whatever," he smiled slyly repeating her description, "for as long as you need one."
"What if I never get past this?" she whispered hoarsely emotion thick in her voice.
"You will," he squeezed her hand and pulled it to his chest holding it against his heart. His strong heart beat a solid steady rhythm against the back of her hand. It soothed her, just as the intake of his breath in measured spaces did.
"I did," he explained without her having to ask.
She turned and faced him in the moonlight, as she had each of the previous four nights prepared to ask to stay with him, again.
"You don't have to ask," he ran his fingers through her hair brushing it back from her face. "I like sleeping with you, Reese," he reminded her. He kept things light by joking, "It's kinda like surveillance…only you don't drool on me."
"Once," she warned through gritted teeth, "that happened once. Are you ever gonna let that go?" There was a single strand of mirth in her voice; it was the first time he'd heard that instrument in her orchestra in weeks.
"Hey, that was a very nice suit you drooled on," he kidded prolonging the moment.
She started to laugh and stopped herself. It felt wrong to feel joy.
"It's okay," he coached. "You can laugh," he looked down at her smiling in the moonlight. "It won't change what happened. That's in the past and some day you'll be happy again. Don't feel guilty for laughing Reese. You have a beautiful laugh."
Many men had complimented Dani Reese, the descriptor "beautiful" was even employed, but it always about her body, eyes or hair sometimes even her smile; never about her laugh.
Crews was so very different than other men she'd known. She wondered if the novelty of him would wear off as it did for her with most men. He had gone from annoying to familiar to comfortable, but for right now was just what she needed.
"So surveillance except for the screaming and thrashing part," she joked darkly.
"Except for the screaming and thrashing and drooling," he confirmed with a gentle smile.
His smile in unguarded moments did things to her; things neither of them were ready for, but things she felt deep in her soul.
"Come' on, let's get you back to bed," he offered leading her by the hand to his bed.
She climbed in first from his side and scooted across under the thick duvet. Even though it was LA, Crews kept his house cold and the sun woke them in the morning as it sliced through open windows heating the house and the people in it.
As he slid in beside her, she turned and curled against his side, draping an arm across his stomach. Her hand rested out of habit above the scar he'd shown her. Even if she couldn't see it, she knew it was there. Crews' fading battle scar was evidence that even the deepest wounds healed in time. So too would hers.
He slid an arm under her pillow and her head rested on his shoulder. At first, it had been awkward, but now it felt like coming home – sleeping in Charlie Crews' embrace. He'd never once attempted anything remotely sexual. Nothing beyond a chaste kiss on her forehead if she rose from sleep mumbling something unintelligible, but it was there all the time – the fact that he loved her; they both knew it. She fell fast asleep wrapped securely in his arms and in the knowledge that this man loved her and he always would.
During the day, Dani lounged by the pool as her many bruises, scrapes and scars healed. Sometimes she read, often she listened to music on her iPod. Crews brought a number of things from her house for her: clothes, toiletries, her iPod, the books she was using to study for the Lieutenant's exam – almost anything she could want.
She didn't ask how he got into her apartment; she didn't want to know.
Crews, for his part, stayed in his own space, tinkering on the computer, practicing, meditative poses, running long hours in the canyons surrounding his home or cooking, which he appeared fairly good at. Evenings, Crew made simple dinners for them, which they ate quietly at his rather large dining room table, until it became too odd. Afterwards, they took their meals at the island in his kitchen. Some nights they talked, some they didn't, but it was comfortable and safe. They both came to enjoy their time together in the waning light of each day.
Tidwell, as promised did not call and did not visit. His absence was welcome respite for Reese. She wasn't ready to deal with the drama that came from Crews and Tidwell in the same space. She thought she'd miss him more than she did, but that was just another reason why when she did see him again it would be the last time that she saw him – outside of work.
Constance Griffiths however had made no such promises and she was still stinging from Crews' use of her several days prior. So it wasn't surprising when she drove her sleek Mercedes coupe into the drive one afternoon. Charlie met her in the driveway.
"So, we're not even going in the house?" she questioned caustically as Dani listen from an open upstairs window.
"Reese needs peace, Constance," he said patiently, "and you're angry with me."
"No! Charlie, I'm pissed at you," she snapped with tears in her eyes. "Is everything about her now? What happened to us Charlie?"
"There never was an 'us', Connie," he stated calmly but firmly. Then he tried to explain, but being Crews he did it obliquely through the use of questions. "Why did you fight so hard for me? To get me out?"
"Because you were innocent," she protested.
"Maybe…. when I was when I went in…but not by the time we met," it was brutally honest and absolutely true.
She pouted, but that's not a real response so again he pushed, "Really tell me why fight so hard for someone you barely know? Why invest so much?"
"I thought you needed someone to believe in you," she confessed. "You'd given up on life, your life, yourself."
"But that's not the only reason why is it?" he challenged again. "Part of it was because you were a little in love with me, with the idea of me being innocent, or the idea of saving me, right?"
"You know I loved you, Charlie," she sobbed helplessly, "I still love you."
"And I told you I couldn't do that, Constance," he repeated. "I can't be that for you." He repeated his objection to any further romantic contact even though he knew she wanted it. "You're married."
"I know," she told him, "but…"
"You thought there'd be some other way?" he offered.
She nodded and the tears stopped.
"There isn't, Constance," he said plainly.
"What saved me wasn't you," he told her something he'd never told anyone. "Not that I don't appreciate being out of prison," he smiled one of his low wattage grins that were most women's weakness.
Then he told her the rest. "It wasn't getting out of prison that freed me," as serious and as honest as he'd ever been with anyone. "What saved me, what freed me…was surprisingly enough…Ted. Well, helping Ted. It made me realize that I could still do good, still do right, still help others and that is what saved me – it saved my mind and my soul. You rescued me from prison, for which I will always be grateful, but what saved me was letting go of my hate and forgetting about the self, MY self."
"That's Zen isn't it?" Constance asked, but Dani had just mouthed the exact same question from her perch above. The synchronicity made Dani frown.
Charlie nodded in response and stepped closer to Connie. "Just as devoted as you were to getting me out, that's how determined I was to get Reese out of that place, no difference. But I can't save her, she has to do that for herself."
"Does that mean you're a little in love with her too?" Constance pushed a sore point. She was jealous of the dark haired diminutive detective.
"I'm completely in love with her," he confessed. "But I am all wrong for her and she doesn't feel that way about me." He chuckled adding, "it seems we are all destined to love the wrong person."
"She's a very lucky girl," Connie commented sadly.
"She may not think so," he laughed running a hand through his short red hair. "To tell you the truth, I don't think she likes me much."
He paused a then ran his hands down both the lawyer's arms ending at her wrists and holding her hands and her eyes. "I'm sorry I hurt you Connie, but you must know that there's nothing I won't do for her, no rule I won't break, no sacrifice I won't make."
"I do," she admitted, "better than most people."
He kissed her on the forehead, she climbed in her car and left. Dani leaned against the wall near the window where she'd eavesdropped stunned beyond belief. She didn't understand why he'd value her more that Constance Griffiths, but then as Tidwell was fond of saying "the heart wants what the heart wants."
She wondered if she'd ever understand Crews. He's just passed up a brilliant, attractive, successful woman who loved him - for her. Although she'd never shown him any indication of reciprocal interest or affection, the idea was beginning to germinate in the dark recesses of her mind that she could love this broken and scarred man. And perhaps only she could.