Chapter Forty Eight:

Sunday, November 2, 1997 – Los Angeles, CA

Thompson lived in an apartment that might have been more sophisticated, which is why it could be called a condo, but just as sparse as Enos's place. With only one bedroom, he expected to be sleeping on the couch. He refused to take anything other than OTC for pain. So he had a headache and his nose hurt. A lot. As dragged out weary as Enos was with worry over finding out what happened to Kate sooner rather than later, he didn't care where he tried to sleep as long as it wasn't in the hospital, or away from the investigation. The only reason he agreed to stay with Thompson was to stay as close to it as he could.

"You can take the bedroom. I'll take the couch," Thompson said, pulling a beer for him and a bottle of water for Strate out of the fridge.

"I can't do that. I'll be fine on the couch."

"No, you'll be fine on the bed. De Pina would bludgeon me…"

"Why does everybody keep sayin' that?" Enos was irritable enough without Thompson making it worse. Unfortunately, it was one of the after effects of concussion.

"I knew your head was too hard to do any real damage, but are you really that blind?"

Enos stood up too fast and got dizzy. He felt Thompson's hand under his right arm.

"I'm okay. Don't need any coddlin.'" Enos went rigid to keep from swaying.

Thompson stepped back. "I can see that. But you should try to get some sleep. Lieutenant Adams said the doctor recommended rest as much as possible."

Enos flashed him a look that clearly said 'are you kidding?'

"Look," said Thompson, "You can't do Kate any good if you collapse. Bow to the logic, Strate. Rest might help you remember."

Bowing to that particular logic, he did what Thompson said and he let him carry his go-bag into the bedroom, which was less sparse than the living room. Besides the bed and a dresser, there was a bookshelf filled with books that looked well read, a worktable with model paints and brushes that looked recently used, and on the shelves above that sat several completed models.

"If you say a word," Thompson warned, "You'll be the one with a bruised larynx."

After Thompson left the room, Enos sat down on the bed, looking up at the Starship Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon, and wondered how many other fascinating things he didn't know about Thompson.

Pulling off his jacket to hang over the back of the worktable chair, Enos pulled out the baggie of pearls from his inside coat pocket and sat back down on the edge of the bed. Inez had returned the pearls to him before he left the office. More than anything, except finding Kate, he wanted to be with Soonie tonight.

Wednesday night, she had fallen asleep in his arms, not for the first time. This time, though, he didn't wake her at midnight - the curfew he had set. It was the way he governed himself, kept himself in check.

Might seem silly, moralistic, and even high and mighty to L.A. folks. Why not? His title as the 'oldest virgin in Hazzard County' had eventually reached legendary status. But only those mean of spirit used the title derisively. Most of the time he had been looked upon by the people of Hazzard sympathetically, maybe even pityingly. Heck, there were a few who admired him, although, they would never subscribe to the philosophy themselves. But he also held the title as the only honest police officer in the county. Even though Aunt Judy would say that 'pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall,' he was proud to accept both titles.

But Enos had been celibate by choice, not from lack of opportunity. There had been plenty of opportunity. In the eighth grade, Alice Jean Davenport, among others, had taken a shine to him but by that time he was already smitten with love for one girl. The beginnings of his virginal reputation had been largely due to the sting felt by those of the female persuasion having had their very forward advances summarily rejected. When he was eighteen, a female cadet at the police academy hit on him more than once and she wasn't at all subtle about it. There were others after that, especially in L.A.

By the time he was twenty five, he had perfected the art of avoiding sticky situations or deflecting unwanted and unsolicited advances with a carefully developed strategy of feigning ignorance or naiveté. Sometimes the latter worked, sometimes it backfired and he just had to flat out tell them he wasn't interested. Eventually, he found that jabbering away like an addle-pated magpie worked the best. They eventually got bored, or thought there was something wrong with him, and left him alone.

And his libido was alive and functioning, thank you very much; it was what made him blush like his face was on fire.

It all came down to one thing - Enos Strate had no hankering for casual, let alone recreational, sex. He wanted it all - love, marriage, sex, the whole enchilada in one package with a bow on top and he would be ding-danged if he would ever settle for less. For the longest time, he truly believed that package came in the form of Daisy Duke. Blushing became a persistent personality trait when Daisy was around. One, he loved Daisy. Two, he wanted to marry her. Sex was something he just always thought would naturally follow one and two. The two ingredients he had failed to include in the delicately constructed recipe and the neat little package he had imagined was passion and the kind of unrelenting desire that takes your breath away.

Not that he was bereft of passion. Enos was passionate about being a decent and honest human being. He was passionate about being a good police officer, and eventually a good detective. That passion led him away from Hazzard, and Daisy, to Los Angeles the first time when he followed his dream of being a big city policeman in 1980. He told himself, then, that he was doing it to deserve Daisy and make her proud of him. He thought she held the key to unlocking his dreams.

The second time he came back to L.A., in '87, it was all for himself. Took him a long time to admit that.

He wanted to be something other than the bumbling, loveable-like-a-puppy-dog deputy sheriff that he had allowed himself to become in order to stay honest. He wanted to make a difference in the world. The desire for those things became a passion he couldn't satisfy in Hazzard. Not anymore.

He finally found the keys to his dreams in the form of an ex-pat from South Korea who made him cry with her violin, yelled at him in Korean, made him feel like he could conquer the world, and who, at the moment, was sleeping in his embrace. That's what caused him, lately, to push those self-imposed boundaries to the maximum limit.

Soonie had curled her knees up and rested them on his leg and her arm was around his middle. When her hair fell over her face, he gathered up the strands and placed them behind her ear as gently as he could so as not to wake her. When they were alone, she always wore her hair down. She knew he liked it that way.

She stirred in his arms and then settled her head quietly onto his chest, her hair falling completely over her face. He could feel her heart beating steadily and knew that she was sleeping peacefully. It was already past one. How many nights had he wanted to stay past that self-imposed boundary between wanting her so much it made him ache and loving her so much that he felt like he couldn't breathe?

Curfew and boundaries be damned. He wouldn't leave her alone tonight.

The sandman wouldn't visit as easily for Enos though; too many things on his mind. Taking his spiral bound notebook from his inside jacket pocket he started jotting down notes about the trafficking victims and the evidence haul he wanted to follow up. Wasn't easy one handed. He had to rest the notebook on the arm of the couch and write while it teetered back and forth on the rounded surface.

None of the young girls spoke English and they'd had to wait for in interpreter. They were afraid and even though Kate had tried to reassure them, the interviews had still had not gleaned much information by the end of the day. Enos had interrogated the man in the closet, whose name they still didn't know, and he still refused to say, or sign, anything substantive. The ledgers had been sent to forensic accounting for translation and analysis. That would take a while. He had tried to pin the accountants down on a time frame but they wouldn't budge off 'when we finish, you'll be the first to know.'

He finally started getting sleepy around three when Soonie shifted again. Fluttering her eyes open, she looked up at him and gave him a sleepy smile. "What time is it?"

"Doesn't matter. Go back to sleep."

He bent down and kissed her on the forehead, then watched her for the longest time to be sure she was sleeping peacefully again. Before closing the notebook and putting it aside on the table, he wrote three personal notes at the bottom of the first page. Things he wanted to do soon. Tomorrow, they would have to deal with her brother's plane crash.

Then, he leaned his head back on the sofa cushion and went to sleep.

When he woke, his arms were empty. Soonie was making soft noises in the kitchen and he realized it was morning. He ignored his sore back and stiff muscles. It was well worth it just holding her through the night.

"Hey," he said. "You okay?"

"Yes, I am okay. Thank you for staying…"

He kissed the last of it away and looked at his watch. "Not sure if I have time to go by my apartment to change before I go to work."

"Your jacket is wrinkled."

"Guess it is. Don't have time to worry about that either."

"Take it off. I will steam it for you while you clean up."

She helped him off with his jacket, folded it in half, and draped it over her arm.

When he came out of the bathroom, she had not only steamed the jacket, but had poured him a cup of coffee and doctored it with just the right amount of cream and sugar.

"You'll call me if you hear anything about your brother?"

"I will."

"Call my desk extension. I won't get another mobile 'til Monday."

She nodded and pulled her hair out of the way, exposing the marks on her neck left by the pearls she was still wearing. They looked embedded in her skin. He had completely missed that when he let her go to sleep with them on.

"Oh, Soonie. That looks painful."

"It is not. Really. But I tried to take them off and the clasp is stuck in my hair. Could you unclasp it?"

He reached behind her neck to feel for the clasp, barely touching it, when the pearls started dropping onto the floor. They had not been knotted between each pearl and once the ancient silk thread gave way and the first one fell, the rest cascaded onto the carpet.

"Soonie, I'm sorry."

Before she knew it, Enos was on his knees, trying to gather them up. She dropped down and tried to tell him it was alright, that he would be late for work and not to worry about it but he was focused on making sure he got every single one. She cupped his face in her hands.

"But I broke you mama's pearls," he said.

"Not the pearls, just the necklace. It was old. I should not have kept them on when I got home from work. It is not your fault. They are just things. You are more important to me than things. Enos. I love you."

And that was all it took. Before he could stop himself, his mouth was over hers and his hands where all over places they shouldn't be.

She was offering no resistance whatsoever to help him stay in control. He could feel her body pressing into his. When he realized, almost too late, that he had laid her on the carpet and was moving his hand from her knee up to her thigh it triggered his alarm and he pulled himself off her like he'd been jerked back by some intervening hand from the edge of a cliff.

Throwing himself back against the kitchen island, he swallowed hard and tried to catch his breath. Pulling his knees up with his hands, he bent his head between them, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. Then, he felt Soonie's hand on his arm.

When he looked up at her, expecting to see revulsion, he saw only sweet, gentle understanding mixed with a tinge of disappointment.

"I'm sorry." His voice was hoarse, still trying to recover, not from what he had almost done but from the effort it took to stop himself. "I don't want you to think that's the only…"

"Why would I think that?"

"Cause I wasn't sure for the first couple'a months." He cleared his throat.

"But now you are?" She squeezed her hand a little tighter on his forearm.

He nodded. "Since that first kiss. Everything got real clear."

"Enos," she whispered, "I fell in love with you the night we met and I have been trying to seduce you ever since."

Enos swallowed hard, bent his head back, and closed his eyes. There were tears streaming from the corners. After what seemed like forever, he pulled his head back down to face her.

"I want it to be right between us," he said. "Not like this. Not while you're worryin' about your brother," he closed his eyes to focus. He wanted to say the right words. "And not while I'm still engaged to Daisy."

Soonie pulled back, her body stiffened and her face disbelieving.

"She broke your engagement when she..."

"But I promised to wait...until she was ready, until she grew up."

"So you are going to throw away," her voice broke up and she had to swallow the lump in her throat that was threatening to choke her, "what we could have..."

"Lord in Heaven, no. Soonie. I'm not an idiot. But I can't just call her. I need to go back to Hazzard and tell her in person, face to face. I know it probly doesn't make sense but it's the only way I can make any promises to you."

Soonie thought about it for a moment and realized what he meant.

"Then, I suppose it is a good thing that at least one of us has a safety switch."

When Soonie came into his hospital room, what he had said to her Thursday morning about still being committed to Daisy, what he had thought he was honor bound to do, went right out the window. He loved her more than all the words in the English language could describe, certainly more than he knew. He hoped that would be enough for now.