London After Midnight

MANY THANKS: Thank you Auron and HShuler for your compliments. I can't believe how many other J&N shippers I'm meeting all of a sudden. The truth is out there, lol.

Chapter Six

"A Purple Dress"

Jordan

Two days pass.

I sleep on the couch in my office both nights, if you could call it sleep. Naps are more like it. Refuge. I close my eyes and meditate for hours before unconsciousness finally comes and snatches away all rational thought, and even then it's only for a short while before I awaken with a start, my mind racing with all the things that need to be done.

I don't go to see Dad and he doesn't come to see me, either, but he does call, once, to let me know he's made funeral arrangements for James, and he asks if the coffin should be open or closed. I don't really know the answer to that, so I ask Nigel and he says open, that once the body is embalmed and dressed no one will notice it has been mildly autopsied.

As far as that goes, Nigel performs it as requested and tells me everything I need to know. James's stomach contents were nearly nonexistent; he likely hadn't eaten for days before his death. There were no illegal narcotics in his system but he was probably taking some kind of medication for anxiety, Zoloft or a less expensive substitute, maybe. He had never been tattooed or anything - his body was surprisingly clean except for the long vertical scars curving from his wrists nearly to his elbows. He had tried to kill himself before. He had tried and he had failed, and knowing that made me so incredibly depressed that I went to James's neatly sewn-up body and I bowed my head against his shoulder and I cried for an hour, maybe more. His skin smelled like tepid water and morgue and tragic death, so different from the fresh, soapy boyish scent that filled my apartment the night he came to ask if he could stay. I should have talked to him more than I did that night. I shouldn't have seen him as an immediate threat, I should have realized he was just a really fucked-up person with problems, just like me. I should have been a better sister.

I wish I could have been a better brother.

That's what he told me. That's what he said, right before he fell. I wanted to reach out and grab him back in, hold him against me and tell him it was okay, that I never even knew I had a brother so no matter what he did, he was a pleasant surprise and I loved him. Even if not all of that was fully true, I should have said it. I did love him, it was a part of me so new and untried. I was only starting to realize it and now it's all gone and I spent so much of our time together in fear of him that I never even really got to know him. I didn't know he was so rooted in sadness, I didn't know he was the type to slit his wrists or starve himself, I didn't know he had panic attacks. I didn't know anything, I never knew anything. I didn't know he loved me.

But he did. I see now that he did. In his twisted, beautiful way, James loved me. That's why he took me up on that elevator, that's why he showed me the rubble and the ruin of his childhood, that's why he jumped. That's why he asked me to jump. He loved me and he thought that I was like him, that we were cut from the same cloth. In a way, we were. But not closely enough. Not enough for me to want to end my life for him, with him.

And then comes James Horton's funeral, and I am standing in the center of a room in the mortuary that often sends its people to come pick up bodies from us at the morgue. It's a small room and there aren't many people in it, because apparently not many people knew James Horton, or at least they didn't know him by that name. Dad is here, and Garret. Lily and Bug and Peter and Devan, even the honorable Renee Walcott put in an appearance a little earlier in the day. Woody is loitering around, maybe to show his condolences, maybe hunting for an apology. I want to give him one. I do. I was a bitch to him the other day in my office and I know that what happened to James was not his fault. He showed his gun because he was afraid, but he didn't pull the trigger and for that I am incredibly grateful. In a few days when we go to work on a case together I will make a joke in that casual way of mine and slip an apology in after the punchline to take the pressure off. I just can't do it now, not today. Right now I can barely mutter Thank you when someone tells me they're sorry, right now it is taking all the will power I have at my immediate disposal not to walk out that door, go across the street to the gas station, and purchase a pack of Marlboro Lights 100's. If I did I'd stand outside and smoke the whole pack, one right after the other, and I'd probably never be able to quit again for the rest of my life.

The day goes on and Nigel arrives in time for the service and sits behind me in the rows of wooden folding chairs, leaning forward to place his hand on my shoulder and whisper his apologies for being late, but he was trying to get a cab because he didn't think it right to drive his motorcycle to a funeral. Something about that strikes me as funny, I don't know why, but I laugh, just once, briefly but too loudly. It's hysterical laughter, I guess, nervous, hysterical laughter. What a person does when there is no other conceivable thing to do. I'm a mess. I turn my head against my father's chest and remain that way for the entirety of the service, forgiving him everything and sitting very quietly tucked in his arms like a sleepy little girl at Sunday morning mass.

When it's all over I go home and I sleep. I sleep for a very long time, fifteen or sixteen hours straight. Blissful, exhausted, dreamless sleep, and I don't make it to work the next day. The next day which is today. Dad calls me in the afternoon to make sure I'm okay, and I call Garret to apologize for not coming in, and he tells me to take all the time I need. All the time I need. So I do, I stay in bed until my cell phone rings at nine-thirty at night and I reach over to answer it.

"Cavanaugh." My voice is rough and gritty but still professional.

"Hello, love," comes the unmistakable English accent from the other end of the line. I know who it is automatically, but still he feels the need to add, "It's Nigel." As if every single one of my close friends just stepped off a flight from Heathrow Airport.

"I know," I say, feeling the corners of my mouth start to lift in a smile, my first of the day. "Are you in need of my professional opinion or something, Nige?"

A brief silence answers me and for a minute I wonder if I said something wrong, but as quickly as that fear possessed me, it's gone again when he speaks. "Actually, no," he replies with a sigh, and then his voice goes playfully mysterious, his range dipping down low in his best Boris Karloff impression. "I wondered if I might abduct you for the evening."

"Abduct me?" I echo, successfully amused. My smile widens even though I know he can't see it. "Is that so?"

"Ah so, Jordan-san." I bet if we were standing face to face he would steeple his palms together and bow. He probably does it anyway, just because he's Nigel. "Methinks you need a little adventure to take your mind off things, and personally I can't think of anything I'd rather do than escort you."

"Well, fancy that," I say, imitating his accent and his downright Shakesperean tone. "I can't think of anything I'd rather do than be escorted. So what shall we do with our stolen time, my good sir?"

"We shall frolic as two creatures of the night, my dear lady," he replies, without missing a beat. "And cast glamours upon whomever threatens our good fortune."

My laugh is grounded and brief; it breaks up the joke. "Do you have your bike?"

"Indeed I do, and an extra helmet for m'lady. Shall I pick you up? You always did enjoy a night ride."

And he's right, I did. I do; sometimes I let Nigel drive me home after work just because I love the way it feels on the back of that bike, the wind on my face and in my hair, the freedom of hurtling into space at high speeds, the warmth of the metal against my jeans. Most of all, the security of Nigel's body and how unafraid I am to ride behind him, how fun he makes it.

"I'll wait faithfully and answer the door for no one but you." I accept his offer in that blithe Victorian vernacular again, kicking the covers away from my body and standing from the bed. "What is our destination, my lord?"

"That, my dear girl, is a surprise. Dress accordingly."

"And just how does one dress for a surprise?" I inquire, smirking as I make my way to my closet.

"One wears the same jeans and t-shirt that one always wears, no matter what the time, date, or occasion," he retorts, and interrupts me before I can argue. "Oh, and bring me down some eyeliner, will you, love? I don't feel like stopping home first."

"Eyeliner?" I repeat him to make sure I heard right, but a dial tone answers me and I realize he hung up. I toss the phone on my bed with an absent shake of my head and a lopsided smirk. Crazy limey. Sometimes I think he says things just to drive me up the wall with frustration.

I look to my closed closet door and the full length-mirror embedded in it. Eyeliner. Without a doubt that's Nigel's way of letting me know we're headed to one of his crack-in-the-wall Goth clubs, and a little tremor of excitement runs through me at the prospect. A lot of people wouldn't know it now, just by looking at me and my casual, even bummy appearance - the Calvin Klein model jeans and the skinny-heeled boots, the flat-ironed mouse brown hair. But when I was a teenager I went to Nigel's kind of clubs all the time. It was the late '80s and alternative was new, and Goth was new, and punk was refined to a fucking art form, for Christ's sake, not like the teeny bopper brand of punk that's popular now. I had my blue hair first, and then it was cherry red, and then it was black. I wore the leather and the lace and the combat boots with buckles and ties, the plaid skirts and the dog collars and the corsets. I powdered my face stark white and listened to the Cure and danced like Cyndi Lauper and wrote bad poetry and tried every kind of nasty drug going. My favorite was ecstasy. It was new and hot and everyone was doing it. It made the slightest inkling of human contact feel sexual; something as simple as an accidental brush against the shoulder or fingertips touching each other as a beer bottle passed between two people. And it made the music flow through me as naturally as blood, and once it got into me I could dance all night. God, it seems like so long ago. But really, it wasn't. It wasn't so long ago that I can't remember there was a time when I was cool.

I've never really told anyone about all that. I know it, and Dad regrettably knows it. No one else. But Nigel, for some reason... he seems to know it, too. Probably because we both grew up in atmospheres like that, the urban club scene of the '80s, and even though we were each on opposite sides of the ocean it couldn't have been that much of a difference. A club is a club no matter where you go. But I don't know how exactly he seems to know about that part of me. Maybe he can see it in my face when he tells me about his weekend on Monday mornings at work, maybe he just looks at me and knows I miss it. But he's never invited me out with him before. Tonight is a first.

I gaze at my reflection with complete staid stoicism. There isn't much I can do to make myself look the part. Nigel has it easy, he's naturally gothic. He doesn't need a costume or even my borrowed eyeliner to fit in. He's... beautiful, in his way. Sometimes I look at him and see a man posed in an antique Victorian photograph, grayscale and full of romance and poetry and quiet, controlled authority. Something about him makes it easy for me to look at him for long intervals of time every now and then, just stare at him like I would stare at a gothic painting in a museum, or the most pristine, flawless white corpse laid out in front of me on a table just before I cut inside. Beautiful. Peaceful. There's something even timeless about Nigel Townsend.

That realization paralyzes me and for whole entire minutes I just stand staring at my own reflection but not seeing it, just seeing Nigel in my mind's eye, Nigel at his computer or Nigel in the crypt or Nigel in my office doorway, afraid to come inside unless I ask him to.

Finally I open my closet door and I begin to rummage through the wreckage, but even as I do I still can't stop thinking about Nigel being timeless, and Nigel being beautiful, and it's like there's this sudden, powerful need overtaking me to make myself kind of timeless tonight, too. I don't have a whole lot in my closet that would pass for alternative these days. I don't have buckles or corsets or lace anymore, and I threw all my plaid skirts away when I started med school. But what I do find, stashed away on a bent wire hanger at the very back of the closet, is a dress.

It's not a very extravagant dress. It doesn't have many layers, or lots of different kinds of fabric, and it isn't formal at all, not in the least. It's basically a tank dress, a sundress. I purchased it on the boardwalk in San Francisco when Tyler and I spent a summer there in a rented beach house a few years back. It wasn't the kind of dress I'd normally buy - the truth is I hadn't bought a dress in a decade and the last one had bondage straps on it - but there was something so incredibly beautiful about it that I was instantly filled with the clandestine urge to own it. I purchased it without Tyler knowing and I haven't worn it once, ever. I never even tried it on until tonight. Now I strip quickly, leaving my clothes strewn on the floor where I stand, and without even giving it a second thought, I unzip the back of the dress and step into it.

It's purple. My favourite color. A medieval dark eggplant, like pinot noir wine; the deepest, most intense purple I've ever seen. The material is nothing more than thinly spun rayon, made in India or Pakistan most likely. The ink on the tag faded away so I don't know for sure. The bodice has subtle embroidery and tiny fabric-covered buttons sewn in a neat line down the middle, and the skirt is drawn in at the waist but free at the hips, loose and flowing down past my knees. It looks all right, I think. It's kind of strange, in a way, like I'm not wearing the dress, but the dress is wearing me. I don't look like any kind of Jordan Cavanaugh that I'm used to. But maybe that's the idea. Maybe after all that's happened, I'm ready for something a little different.

On the closet floor, again towards the back, I stoop to retrieve a pair of short black Doc Martens that I wore a lot throughout the '90s and never could bring myself to throw out. They may not go exactly with the dress, but there's no way I'm going to walk into a goth club wearing flip-flop sandals. I close the closet door and study my reflection again. My hair is losing its straightness and beginning to curl, especially at the ends, but somehow it fits, so I leave it. If I was seventeen years old again I'd break out my Caboodles box and start caking on the makeup, but I'm not seventeen, and this is not 1986. So what I do is I go to my dresser and remove the requested liquid eyeliner from the tray in my top right hand drawer. I line the top eyelid on each side of my face like I always do and cap the tube, but I only have to hesitate for a moment before uncapping it again and lining the bottom lids as well, and then connecting both bottom and top with a tail, not as long as I would have made them twenty years ago, but definitely longer than I ever have since then.

Now my reflection offers me a kind of mish-mosh jigsaw puzzle Jordan. Pieces of the past and pieces of the present, pieces of the never-were and pieces of the yet-to-come. I take a moment to smile at it, and when this new Jordan smiles back at me, somehow it all comes together and I know that everything will be all right.

In a few minutes time, my cell phone rings again, and simultaneously I hear the weak, braying horn of a motorcycle honking outside my window. I turn away from my reflection to pick up the phone from the bed.

"Is that you?" I ask it, already beginning to exit the room.

"Aye, it's me, love," the English voice replies. "Have you got your dancing shoes on, then?"

"Sort of," I reply, my eyes darting down to the broken-in Docs. "Sit tight, Nige, and keep your motor running. I'll be out in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

Without waiting to hear his reaction to that, I flip the phone closed, staring at it and the tube of eyeliner in my other palm. It's definitely not necessary to carry around so much shit with me all night long, and so with a quick decision made, I abandon the phone to the counter in my kitchenette. Whether it's Dad with his secrets or Woody with his complications or Garret with a dead body waiting for me at a crime scene, I don't know anyone who would call me tonight with anything other than bad news.

I cross the main room to the front door and take my leather jacket from the hook. I only check to make sure my keys are in one of the pockets before I'm gone, vanished, off to paint the town red in a purple dress.