I don't own The Mentalist, and I intend no copyright infringement. Thank you Bruno Heller, for allowing me to play with these characters. It's great fun.
AN: I'm working on the next chapter of Shadow, I promise, but this popped up and I had to write it down. This story is set on the evening Lisbon went out with Ardiles. Jane, lying in bed, thinking of Teresa...
The title is taken from the wonderful Billy Joel song - She's Always a Woman to Me. Hope you like it.
.
.
Patrick Jane lay in his bed at the Houston Courtyard Marriott, looking at the stain on the ceiling and thinking about Teresa Lisbon. She was out there somewhere in the Houston night, being chatted up by Oswaldo Ardiles. A man who wore tasseled loafers, for God's sake. If his private jet hadn't crashed, that is. Too far? he chided himself. Maybe…maybe not.
He had lied to Lisbon and Fischer about painting Houston red tonight – although to be fair, at that point he hadn't been aware that Lisbon would be otherwise occupied. What he'd actually done was take a book to dinner at an outdoor café, eat a perfectly forgettable plate of jambalaya, and then take a long walk back to his room. Alone. He'd channel surfed the fancy motel cable long enough to know it was all boring, and then he'd crawled into bed, a tad apprehensive about what might follow.
Disturbing things had been happening to him lately. Sometimes, while he was in that twilight 'almost asleep' time, he'd been hearing voices. Well, a voice. It was Angela's and she would plead with him, like she used to do when she was trying to convince him to give up his psychic business. Now, however, she was pleading with him just as passionately to forgive himself. She would tell him he needed to move on, and that it was okay for him to love someone else. Yet unlike his conversations with Charlotte during that jewelry heist case, there was no wacky tea in sight to explain the experience.
"Ghost Angela" would go on to point out that if he had been the one killed, and she was still alive, that he would want that for her. Which was absurd, since he couldn't wish anything for her if he was dead. Apparently, the things that voices in your head told you didn't have to make logical sense. Still, it was disconcerting, and strange enough to make him wonder if he was finally going 'round the bend.
Tonight, however, there were no voices. He had a different, more concrete sort of problem this evening. It wasn't that he was embarrassed by his situation. Men had needs - it was a fact of life. (Women did, too, of course.) Hormones, evolution, all that stuff. While he'd been on the long hunt for Red John, his focus had been so intense and his guilt so overwhelming, that those kinds of thoughts and needs simply hadn't been a prominent part of his life.
Since then, however – especially since he'd been back in the US – he'd begun to think about sex more often. Okay, quite a bit. It was almost like being a teenager again. He had fantasies. At first he'd chalked it up to the isolation of that detention suite for three months, but they had continued afterwards as well. To complicate the matter, the fantasies he entertained when he was alone at night in his bed were no longer of Angela. Nope, now they involved a certain Agent Teresa Lisbon. That should have been a whopping big red flag, but as bright as he was, sometimes he could be pretty stupid.
Despite all the clues that should have given him fair warning, his involuntary reaction to the news of Lisbon's date shocked the hell out of him. A spontaneous, visceral emotion had bubbled up from deep inside him, and it could only be described as jealousy. He tried to rationalize that it was simply because he didn't care for Ardiles, and that he wasn't right for Lisbon. It mattered to him because he was her friend and he had a paternalistic tendency to protect her from unworthy suitors.
It was hard to make those explanations fly, though, when he knew it was Lisbon he thought about at night when he felt compelled to meet certain physical needs himself. After all, it was Teresa Lisbon whom he had missed so terribly in exile - who had been his number one demand upon return. It should have come as no surprise that she was the woman who'd made him feel the painful pangs of possessiveness again.
Meanwhile, that very Teresa Lisbon was out with another man this evening, laughing and talking, and doing God knows what else, and that knowledge was driving him crazy.
"Like I couldn't go on a date," she had said. Damn it! The worst part of this whole thing was that she had a point. He had never offered her anything but the opportunity for them to work together again.
Jane pulled his arms from under the covers, looked at his left hand, and gave his wedding ring a twist. He'd given her no concrete indication of his emerging feelings. No promise of something more than friendship. Why shouldn't she look for love elsewhere?
What he needed to do was to man up, take off this ring and ask Lisbon out to dinner himself. Why was that so hard? Why was he such a coward? Because maybe she wouldn't go? Because she didn't want that? That in the course of disappearing for two years, he'd squandered any chance he'd had of winning her heart and her trust? That was a truly frightening possibility for him to contemplate.
He shivered a little and slid his arms back under the covers. The air conditioning in this place was ridiculous. He closed his eyes, only to have a fantasy drift into his mind. One of his favorites. He was relieving Teresa of a little black dress, and feasting his eyes on her near naked body. He lost himself in that lovely image, and set about taking care of his urgent needs that had predictably arisen.
That didn't take long, and afterward he found himself staring at that stain on the ceiling again. Really, Jane thought to himself, you're pathetic. You need a life. Ghost Angela is right. He would start tomorrow, he decided. Test the waters. Pay her a few flirty compliments and see what happened. Baby steps, Patrick, baby steps. But it was moving in the right direction, at least.
She was his partner. She could be more.
Maybe she would...
