Oh look a new story. Something I began but never finished or posted. Not actually sure how it ends as I've not written that part so feel free to direct from the comments..!
It all started with a cup of coffee.
Though, that's not entirely truthful. It could have been the scotch on the rocks and her long long legs with that tiny excuse of a dress. Maybe that was the start?
James Dempsey had seen this freight train coming from down the track. Weeks before it was due to arrive, several months before it was a thought. He knew in the back of his mind that his growing attachment to Harriet Makepeace would eventually turn his life upside down.
When she never thought to kick him out after his confession about Joey at her bed, his fondness and respect for her became a matter of devotion. A rough, hidden sort of affection that had, on several occasions almost lost him his life or her career. He already knew when Spikings first pointed out 'our man' in that East End bar, that his attraction to her would evolve into a feeling that he could neither act on nor contain.
It became a matter of not if, but when. And a matter of how.
He questioned himself one Wednesday when he look at the price of tickets to New York and was unable to book them. He was poised over the paper and had the phone in his hand. He felt sick. Before he could make a dick of himself at Heathrow for the second time in six months, he hung up.
He tried again later and wondered if it was the food he'd eaten but last night he dined with Chas and his other half who doesn't seem to want to kill him. Chas looks well enough for a morose Scotsman.
He felt the same during those six weeks as Lupino. Any blonde bob could've been her and when they were not, he felt ill. He put it down to lack of sleep and the general lively enthusiasm of Butch whose capacity for food and booze far exceeded his own.
He's not sick. At least, in the conventional sense.
It happens on the following day, a regular Thursday in March, at eight thirty in the morning as the rain fell. His world had turned when he first met her. On this morning it skewed by a further 180 degrees as Detective Sergeant Harriet Makepeace sat opposite him at her desk, idly looking at some paper. She knocks over a hot coffee cup whilst reaching for a pen.
"Ouch!" She mutters and shakes her hand, hoping to sooth the burn.
Dempsey is slouching over his own stack of stuff with his feet on the desk. He looks up and promptly falls in love.
It is like a firework exploding and all the debris falling to ground.
The sensation rolling through his body reminds him of a rickety old rollercoaster that had no business in carrying passengers. The fearful knowledge of what goes up must come down. There is a euphoric of rise and drop down the other side, a vortex of giddiness twisting in his stomach. This is love, he knows even though he's never felt it before.
So he sits, closer to forty than thirty, in an office within a concrete block in South London working as armed officer in front of a disaster of a desk. He is barely three feet from the most beautiful, loyal and terrifyingly unattainable woman he's ever met.
And he loves her.
He rushes to his feet, giddy from his heady explosion holding his drinking glass, "Water, you need cool water… honey."
She's too distracted by the process of dabbing it onto her hand to notice his slip. "I'll run it under the tap."
Dempsey waits impatiently for her come back from the bathroom. In the meantime, he considers his options, and his reputation for impulsiveness. It proves somewhat difficult.
"Dempsey?" Harry asks, sitting down in her chair. "You look different."
"I skipped breakfast." Dempsey lies and wonders at just how changed he is.
"Oh?" Harry looks up from rubbing something on her hand.
"I overslept. Alone." He details, worried that she might think it was for other reasons. "They ran out of bacon rolls downstairs. Is your hand okay?"
"The water helped, thank you." She looks at her perfectly lovely fingers. "We can get something to eat over the road when you've found the receipts."
Dempsey dreams of taking a bite out of her as he continues to look through his notes and the detritus of their visit to Harrods when he was a different man.
He's completely, head first in love with Makepeace. And he has no idea what to do about it.
Falling in love is very inconvenient, he concludes. Dempsey has overlooked his growing feelings in much the same way he'd ignored the prelude to the stalker, Simone's affection for vodka and the hole in his favourite boots which are currently being fixed on Harry's recommendation. He spins lazily in his chair, one eye on the love of his life who is talking to her father on the phone. He sighs and makes a list on his notepad.
He scrawls out this:
1. He could do nothing. Nurse the ache. Cultivate his black book and get laid. Sleep alone in his bed in his dotage and never say a word because she deserves better than him.
2. No lay is better than Harry. He knows her. Her principles, even her politics and that ghost of a look that passes over her faces when she sees a mother and daughter. The one he feels when he sees a happy father and his son.
He decides on point two.
Then it strikes him, kicks him right in the balls. He's been trying to get to point 2 since he met her and suddenly realises he's doing it all wrong. He concludes that this leads to… doing something right.
And this is where Dempsey falters. He's never courted or wooed a woman. Lately it's a bit of flirting, a few drinks and sex.
He doesn't really know if Harry wants him. Jeez, it seems impossible for anyone to want another person this much, but here he is, chewing on an HB pencil ready to throw his life into chaos in the hope she might feel something.
Somehow he's got to seduce his partner and he has no idea how.