II. THE NIGHT BEFORE: MEL AND VIC

Once upon a time, about a third of all the dates Mel ever had with Vic were cancelled at the last minute due to a case he was working on. Another third of their dates ended soon after they began because he got a call he couldn't (or wouldn't) ignore or put off. But now Vic was routinely leaving his cell phone and pager home whenever they spent time together, refusing to be on twenty-four hour cop call, so he could devote all his attention to her. Although she knew it would never last, it made Mel feel very special and gave their long-time on-again/off-again (but mostly off-again) romance yet another chance to reflower.

Their evening together had been wonderful, a well-done dinner/theater showing of one of Mel's all-time favorite musicals, "Cats", followed by several romantic hours of ballroom dancing to a live band at one of the city's more sophisticated, upscale clubs. It wasn't until later, when they'd retired to the living room of her apartment above the Watchfire over steamy cups of French Vanilla desert coffee and a late night assortment of pastries, that Mel realized how antsy Vic was becoming.

They'd been chatting comfortably together all night but now Vic didn't seem to have anything to add to the conversation no matter what the subject. He also couldn't seem to remain seated for more than a few minutes at a time before jumping up, pacing around, then sitting down again. He pulled off and pocketed his tie, he unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt and obsessively fiddled with them, he repeatedly mussed up his hair and then tried to pat it back into place, he tapped first one foot and then the other, and he relentlessly began drumming his fingers on the back of the sofa. Finally, Mel had enough of his antics.

"What's with the jack-in-the-box routine, Vic? What's up?"

"Up? Nothing."

"Okay." Mel sipped her coffee and nibbled on her raspberry-chocolate croissant, waiting patiently. There had to be some reason why he was suddenly behaving as if he had just broken out in a rash, and she knew he'd get to it in his own time.

"I said nothing'!"

"I know you did. And I said okay'. Is that a problem?"

"No. Not a problem. Er ... By the way, where's Cole been? Haven't seen him around lately."

"Europe. A business trip. Great Britain, France, Germany. The Netherlands, too, I think. Why?"

"Oh." Vic started cracking his knuckles.

"Stop that! That's worse than listening to a cat retch up a hairball!"

"There's something strange about that guy, like he's really from another planet or something ... Can't seem to put my finger on it but ..."

"Vic ..."

"Well, what has he got to be living with you for? I don't understand why he ..."

"Oh, please, Vic, do me a favor and give it a rest! I really don't want to hear all this yet again!" Mel tried to cut short his by now tediously familiar rants and pointed grillings over her boarder/handyman' before he got going. "How many times do I have to repeat myself? Cole and I are friends."

"Yeah, I know! We were once just friends', too!"

"You're working yourself up into another insanely jealous snit over nothing. Cole and I are just friends who happen to share a domicile. There's nothing more than that between us."

"Jealous? Me? Jealous? You think I'm jealous?" Vic seemed to be stuck on that word. "What reason could I possibly have to be jealous of someone like Cole?"

Mel wasn't sure if Vic was teasing or not any more. "Well, for starters," she began, ticking off the reasons on her fingers, "Because I see a good deal more of him than I do of you. Because he's probably the handsomest man anybody's ever seen. Because he lives with me," she deliberately left out the words: and you do not'. "Because he ..."

"Don't you mean that you think him the handsomest man you've ever seen? If you think that way about him, then just maybe I do have good cause to be jealous!"

"Of course. Like you've never platonically shared an apartment with a beautiful woman, hmmm? What about that cute, curvy redhead? Susan whatwashername? The two of you lived together for nearly two years, just sharing living expenses. Or so you've always said."

"That was different!" he protested.

"Really?" she challenged, knowing she had him cold. "Mind telling me just how?"

Vic abruptly dropped the subject and reached over to take her hand. "Mel, look. I've been doing a lot of serious thinking lately. It's just that ever since I was nearly killed in that attempted robbery at the Art Museum I've finally managed to get my priorities straight. I want to make sure you'll always be an important part of my life, that we'll always be together. I meant it when I said it then and I still mean it... I love you, Mel. Very much so. I have since the beginning."

Vic's short speech and heartfelt declaration seemed to take all the wind out of his sails and he shyly lowered his head for a few moments to cover his embarrassment before looking up again. His lips twitched, then nervously pressed together as he reached into his jacket pocket to pull out a small, dark blue velvet jeweler's box and place it on the coffee table in front of her. Pasted on top of it was a single romantically hokey pink SweetTart Valentine Candy marked with the words Be Mine'.

Mel was struck dumb. She stared wide-eyed at the box, then at Vic, who met her eyes with a hopeful, pleading look. "I promise you, sweetheart. That isn't another .38 caliber slug. And I sure as hell didn't buy it online. Go on. Open it."

With hesitant, trembling hands Mel picked up the box and opened the lid, revealing a not at all modest and very beautifully cut blue-white solitaire engagement diamond twinkling at her in the lamplight. Knowing Vic, his sister Anna had likely helped him pick it out and it was probably a flawless stone. There was no doubt in her mind that he'd gone deeply into debt to purchase it.

Vic dropped to one knee beside her. "Please, Mel. Will you marry me?"

"Um, Vic, I ... um," she stammered. "I I really don't know what to say."

"I think yes' would be the perfect answer," he said, trying to project a little encouraging humor.

Telling Vic that she couldn't marry him had been one of the hardest things Mel had ever done in her life. The fact that he simply refused to believe she was actually turning him down only made it worse, and the argument-that-wasn't-quite-an-argument dragged on into the wee hours, wearing her out. Some rational part of her mind found it had to agree with Vic, that this proposal was the obvious direction her relationship with him should go, that she couldn't wait for the alien Tracker to finish his job and hope there'd then be more of a relationship waiting for her at the end. And if she wasn't going to wait for Cole then she couldn't forever sit on the fence, at one and the same time being afraid of the risks of commitment while simultaneously being afraid of loneliness, of always being alone.

Yet in her heart, which Mel had always listened to first and foremost – all too often to her own despair – she knew she could not marry him. But she honestly didn't know whether to be sad or angry or frightened that she was making such a life-determining decision on the basis of nothing other than a neurotically ill-defined sense of wrongness that she once couldn't even articulate, the lifelong empty feeling of never really belonging. And now knowing why.

And then the argument-that-wasn't-quite-an-argument came around full circle.

"It's because you and Cole are sleeping together, isn't it?"

Vic's dogged directness was so annoyingly typical of him. Once he had a notion he was as unrelenting as a pitbull. Still, the angrily blurted bluntness of those words in the late night quiet of her living room weighed heavily upon her. Mel rose from the sofa and walked to the far side of the room, pulling the drapes aside and leaning her forehead against the cool window glass, gazing unseeingly across the street. "For the last time, Vic: No. Cole and I are not and never have been lovers."

Silence seemed to stretch long between them. Then Vic's voice, holding more than a trace of bitter sarcasm, "I do believe you sound very disappointed about that."

Wearily, Mel turned back to him. How was it possible, she wondered, to have known someone for so many years, to have become so intimate with their body, yet still remain so distant and disconnected from their soul? "And what if I am?" she questioned mildly, knowing it was the truth. More than that, knowing that very disappointed' couldn't even begin to cover how she felt about it. Vic's eyes narrowed suspiciously and Mel just gave up. "Think whatever you want to, Vic. You will anyway. No matter what I say, no matter how I try to say it, you're pig-headedly determined to believe the opposite. And we're both very well aware of how much you hate to be wrong about anything."

With a quickness that startled her, Vic was suddenly directly in front of her, and she gasped in shock when his hands locked around her upper arms and hauled her hard up against him. "Here's something I haven't been wrong about yet," he growled, and claimed her mouth with his with punishing force.

Mel didn't bother offering even token resistance. The simple fact of the matter was she welcomed the hard surge of his body against hers. All the numbing major and minor fears, horrors, doubts, worries, angers, hurts, insecurities, sorrows, rejections, frustrations and feelings of utter helplessness and hopelessness she'd been steadily amassing in a strangling, tightly wound bundle since she'd encountered that ungainly, incoherent, near-naked and seemingly half-mad alien – and been drawn into the otherworldly horrors and nightmares of his life only to discover it was her life as well – served to hone her need for mindless release. And the adrenaline that fueled her unacknowledged rage at Cole and, most of all, at herself, at her life, at the out of control, incomprehensible world that was now her reality, was spilling well above the high water mark. She tunneled her fingers into Vic's hair and held him to her, returning as much ferocity as she was given.

Throughout their flip-flopping friends/lovers relationship, she had never ceased to thrill to Vic's touch. And this time was no exception. She knew his sudden lust was little more than the primal male reaction to conquer, an angry response to her perceived actions, a balm for his hurt ego, an attempt to leave his mark on her and stamp her as his possession. But at that moment she wanted it. Not that she needed to feel that she was his reason for being, only that she desperately needed to free herself from the crushing weight of all her self-enforced inhibitions and feel.

Never relinquishing her mouth, Vic picked her up in his arms and carried her to her bedroom, laying her on the bed and following her down. This was not gentle seduction or teasing foreplay. Mel's skirt was quickly bunched up around her hips as his hands slid possessively up to claim her thighs, shredding her thin silk panties away in one vicious motion. Vic dispatched with his slacks with the same efficiency and then, with only a moment's pause to grab a condom from the nightstand, he was upon her, greedily and rampantly pistoning into her. She cried out from the sheer the force of his entry, but within moments her body began to liquefy around him. She clung to him, twinning her legs around his waist, urging him on with a demanding, wordless challenge.

They'd bedded many times in the past and there were few facets of normal sexuality they hadn't explored together, but this was little more than consentual rape, a brutal rutting, each of them selfishly taking what they wanted and caring little if anything might be given back in return. Mel grappled with the wool worsted fabric of Vic's jacket, pulled at his shirt until the seams tore and the buttons popped, until his heated flesh was laid bare to her and she was free to sink her teeth into his shoulders and claw her nails across his chest and down the length of his back. The uncharacteristic wantonness of her savagery only served to amplify and spur his own. His hands roughly clutched, grasped and fondled her, tearing her blouse away, shoving her bra up around her neck to allow his mouth full access to her breasts, his punishing teeth eliciting groans and whimpers. They swiftly and almost simultaneously reached climax, the waves repeatedly crashing over them, both unwilling to swim back to the surface for air. Finally Vic collapsed on top of her. They lay in torn and tangled clothing, bathed in heated sweat and raw emotion. A degree of tenderness took root between them and grew to flowering as Mel stroked his hair. He nestled his head in the crook of her neck as their breathing returned to normal and both their bodies recovered.

Vic raised his head and gazed at her and Mel read the anguished apology written there. She cupped his face in her hands in answer, drawing him down to her. They kissed again, this time sweetly. With infinite gentleness he held her, smoothing her riotously tangled curls away from her face, one finger softly tracing the outline of her mouth that was so bruised and swollen from his initial assault. "I really do love you, Mel," he whispered huskily, his voice full of hope and determination. "Whatever's wrong between us, whatever the problem may be, we can work it out. I know we can. We belong together."

Vic moved his weight off and lay down beside her. She turned onto her side and he enveloped her in his arms, spooning around her back, snugly fitting the contours of his body to hers. Mel felt herself slowly sinking into his embrace. His cheek pressed softly against hers, caressingly. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, feeling distanced from all her pains and sorrows, and allowed herself to fully relax into him. He felt the subtle yielding change and splayed his hand over her stomach, drawing her closer to him, pressing against her until there could be no question of his continued desires.

Mel didn't attempt to resist or pull away. She honestly didn't want to.

"Do I even have to tell you," Vic murmured, "how wonderful these last few weeks have been for me? Seeing you again, the two of us spending all this time as a couple again?" He stroked his hand through her tangled hair, trailing it up and down her arm before moving to cup her breast. He has eyes only for me, she thought, I've known that for a long time now.

"For me, too," Mel had to admit, but her own eyes glistened with unshed tears. She knew she was about to make a choice, a totally and completely selfish one, but the truth was that she didn't care. She'd been celibate for too long, had been yearning for too long, had put so many of her own wants, needs, hopes, dreams and desires on indefinite hold for far too long, and wanted for once to be selfish, wanted to indulge herself this one last night of utter, mindless abandon with a more than willing partner.

"Promise me you won't say no yet. Promise me it's a maybe. Promise me you'll at least think about it."

"Vic, you don't understand. I ... I ..."

"Promise me this, sweetheart. Please."

"Vic ..."

"Just think about it," he insisted, his breath hot and enticing against her ear, his fingers expertly teasing her nipple to arousal. "Think about it. Please, sweetheart? Please?"

Mel closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Vic simply refused to listen. Yes, she did love him. They both knew she did. But was that enough? Did she love him enough to be his wife? Maybe if he'd asked her even a few months ago, asked her before ... No! She couldn't allow her thoughts to stray anywhere near all that endless morass of pain. She was so confused, so exhausted from arguing with him. But if she didn't at least say what he wanted to hear, Vic would only become more insistent, more demanding. And he really was a terrific lover, especially once he really got warmed up. She turned in his arms and smiled, deliberately allowing her smile to reach her eyes and turn softly seductive. "Alright, Vic. I surrender. You win. A maybe' it is. I promise to at least think about it," she purred.

"Oh, Mel..."

She shushed him and placed two fingers on his lips. "No more words, Vic. Just kiss me and for tonight, just for tonight, we'll let our bodies do all our talking." He was kissing her before she'd finished speaking, pulling her flush against him, the heat of his body sinking into her as he stroked his tongue deep into her mouth. Though welcome, she found it an oddly strange sensation, so very familiar yet somehow foreign. But however foreign, she thought, Vic was here for her. He was with her. He truly wanted her. And if she would allow it, if she could allow it, he wanted to give her all those wonderful happily-ever-after human fantasies she had all but abandoned and that had returned with a vengeance to bitterly haunt the lonely corridors of her neglected soul.