TITLE: Black Wishes

AUTHOR: Rain Garcia

RATING: M

SUMMARY: "I'm a slave to Mac Taylor. To my bipolar view of his personality - to my belief that he's BOTH a hunter and a prey at the same time, to the known reality that he isn't all of that because he's the one I sanctify." (Stella POV)

FEEDBACK: Yes, please. Greatly appreciated - good or bad.

DISCLAIMER: Not mine. I'll return them later to JB.

A/N: Part of "The Meaningless Series". A different view of Mac for all of you. Nods to fans of old, classical movies (I am) and to the senator's daughter who favored "Secret Love". You are remembered earnestly and at the same time, greatly missed.

The dustjacket of this story can be found in my website. Thanks to everyone who R&R (either of which) my first two debut stories here.

BLACK WISHES
By: Rain Garcia

If Practicality comes and tells me that he wants to play wrestlingwith my Conscience, in an instant, I will give in. There's no question about that. I'm a slave to my emotions, to my mind, to my body. I straddle their energies and try to taste every single drop to help myself get a hold of who I really am.

Practicality has never visited me, though. I'm still waiting for his arrival.

Right now, I serve to be a slave to my personal atrocities. I have no control over who I garnish myself to be, over the loneliness that keeps ticking at the back of my head, over the meaninglessness of my life as it is.

Then he comes along.

I wish that it's basically romantic, the way we meet every night in my apartment. But it isn't. Smoldering scented candles are replaced with the TV's bright glare, my bed certainly doesn't have expensive Egyptian cotton sheets, and there's also my attire. I never peg myself to be the lingerie type of woman, so I meet and greet him with my office attire - suit and all, with my hair up in a bun because I know that it bothers both of us when we fumble with our clothes.

I also wish that it's logically about passion. That scintillating sweat of ecstasy wafting throughout my whole apartment while we devour each other --- but it rarely is. Oftentimes we strain to converse about things that are not in our line of work but ARE in our basic knowledge … which isn't really a lot, to start with. We second guess each other's thoughts, try to force ourselves in this supposed 'unspoken communication' that people who sleep together are supposed to have. But we don't have it. Surprise, surprise. Usually, in our frustration, one of us kisses the other and that's where it starts. That's also where it ends.

Then, like any girl who has seen too many classic, old movies that speak of much destiny and little practicality, I wish it's about love. I wish that when he holds my succumbing body, he whispers how his life is meaningless without me. I wish that when he strokes the insides of my thighs, he'll be doing it with such adoration that it renders me speechless. I wish that when it's over and done, that I can convince myself that what we did wasn't JUST sex … that it was actually love making.

But in reality, it's all about how we're co- workers and office liaison is deemed immoral in our code of contact --- in this city that was (in part) popularized by a show about sex. It's all about how we're such good friends and one misstep can be too fatal, too much for our fragile values. It's all about how he still love his wife, how I love being single, how we both love none of the other.

I won't lie to myself: It hurts. It hurts like a goddamn machine gun positioned at the back of your head. You feel the coldness, you hear the snap of the trigger, but the bullet doesn't come. The pain is all in your imagination. It'll come later on, but for now, you have no choice but to pray.

I like to think that prayer can solve everything, but I've done that once too many times already, and it barely got me anywhere. He seems to think that it can solve a lot, for he goes to the cathedral every Sunday. But I know that he's not talking to his god. He's talking to his wife.

My head was aching indescribably, and I was popping pills so fast in my mouth this morning that it was worrying my co- worker, Aiden Burn. She struggles to focus on her task, flicking her wavy, long brown hair in the other direction as her piercing eyes scanned me from head to toe.

I grab another ibuprofen (it's the only medicine available in the office) and rethink it over. As I was studying it, I catch Aiden sneak another glance at me. Then when I snap my head to look at her, she casts her eyes down. She tries to appear immersed in her latest assignment – scanning a crumpled phonebook for any minute blood spray, because Mac stressed that every blood spray on the book is critical in our investigation – but come on, I know better.

"What gives, Aiden?" I ask her, straight to the point. I know for a fact that Aiden doesn't appreciate waltzing around with her own discourses.

For a moment, she seems jubilant to be distracted from her work. She quickly turns serious, though.

"I should be asking you that, Stella," she answers, pinning loose hair behind her ear. "You look like you suffered insomnia for three nights in a row, your eyes are puffy, and hey, you'll OD by the end of the day. What gives?" she returns my question, tapping nonchalantly on her magnifying glass. I try to force a smile on my lips, but it's a dry effort. I end up grabbing my glass of water and drinking to cauterize the dryness.

Once finished, I place the glass down on a nearby table. "It's nothing. Just … noisy neighbors. A stupid rock band or something at the back of my head every damn night. It isn't a pretty way to sleep." I flick my eyes away from her face and try to settle my vision on my shoes. Unintentionally seeing a trace of mud on my good leather (from the early morning crime scene and New York rain), I take tissue from my purse and bend down, wiping it away.

When I resurface, Aiden was still eyeing me dubiously, for crying out loud.

"You know what, Stella? I think you need to go home and get some rest. I'll go and tell Mac just that." She stands up and removes her laboratory gown, hooking it on her chair.

Alarmed by her 'threat', I calmly try to divert her. "I'm fine, I promise. I processed the crime scene a while ago, and I did it efficiently. I need to stay here in the office," I tell her, blocking her path and putting my hands in front of me in a 'stop' position. "I don't need to go home."

She stares at me passively. "You know that when I make up my mind I make up my mind, Stella. Mac IS going to hear about this." She swivels out of my way and toward Mac's office. To my utter dismay.

He reminds me, quite often actually, that I look at him like a prey would to a hunter. As if every time we stare eye-to-eye, I'm begging for my life.

I tell myself that I can't blame anyone else but him for that assumption. Because whenever he looks at me – when we're all alone -, he'll raise his eyebrow, lick his lips, and tap his finger on whatever it can reach. He reminds me of a lion, the king of the jungle, all set to trap his prey. Naturally, I'm as helpless as I can be.

Mac Taylor cocks his head to one side, as if telling me to start pleading for my life. I almost do, but he talks first, "Go home, Stella. You do look like shit." He says this with no stops and it's so perfect, the way he says it, that it annoys the hell out of me.

Being defiant and all, I try my case. "That's bullshit- and you know it! I need rest like anyone here does. Look, I haven't finished my shift, I collected evidence and I didn't falter- not once! I WANT to stay here, Mac."

He eyes me curiously, then stands up from his horrifically huge and official 'head- CSI' chair. "What you know that I know is that I know what's best for you." I try to ignore the emphasis on the I's as he moves closer to me. "Go home, Stella. Don't force me to make it an order."

I grip the arms of my seat hard, until I could see the blue network of veins visibly on my skin. "Tell me why that's so, if you DO know what's good for me." I'm tempted to end it with an 'asshole', but thankfully, I'm able to hold back my tongue.

He places a hand over mine. I jerk back.

When I stare up at him, he seems pained by my reaction. But without fucking it up –he IS Detective Mac Taylor of all things glorious -, he continues, "I know for a fact that you didn't get enough sleep last night. I know for a fact that it isn't because there was a rowdy rock band nearby your apartment. There isn't a rock band practice ANYWHERE near your street. I know for a fact that its because I was a moron and that I should've left when you said good night but I kept on asking you if I could stay." He tries to get me to look at him again, but as his finger touches my chin, I whip my head to the opposite direction. "I said I'm sorry, Stella. It'll never happen again, I promise." His voice drops to an all- time softness. It's barely audible, if it isn't for the silence consuming us. "I won't try again. That'll be the last time."

And like all of he's made – he's incredibly sincere to the point that it can bring tears to my eyes. It's so pathetic and it's so maddening that I can only nod at this.

I'm a slave to Mac Taylor. To my bipolar view of his personality – to my belief that he's BOTH a hunter and a prey at the same time, to the known reality that he isn't all of that because he's the one I sanctify and I know better than labeling him as an 'asshole'. To my belief that he's the only one I can have in this huge city - no, he's the only one I WANT to have because from experience, I concede that he's better than any of them. All of them, combined, can never give him justice.

He places a hand on my shoulder. Warm, comforting, and inviting all at the same time. "Now you go home, Stella. I'll take care of everything here. This time, THAT is an order."

I nod again, standing up and straightening my navy blue suit. I turn around to exit his office when he calls my name out. I stop in my tracks, refusing to face him.

"I'll call you, OK?" he adds, like an afterthought. So casual, so easy.

I don't say anything in return. I walk out of his office casually, easily, thinking if I'm doing this to myself or to him. Who's hurting more, anyway?

I apprehend that I'm not really sure.

As much as I hate to admit it, he's my stamp of control. He comes at the right time, at the right place. Whenever I feel that I'm about to tighten my finger around that gun's trigger that's positioned at the back of my head, he debonairly sweeps me up in his strong arms and rocks me to a steadfast calm. He's perfect that way – perfection is embedded in his DNA, a forty- seventh chromosome strand.

Even in bed, I plead for him to take control. I masochistically draw him on top of me, so that I can motivate him to thrust first, and then I can follow suit. I always tell myself that I can't orgasm if he doesn't come first, and when I sweep back to my thoughts during the night, I see how much I depend on Mac. I depend on him like I depend on my soul for redemption.

I only draw the line to this dependency when sex is over. I make sure that he leaves and that we don't wake up next to each other. It's my way of validating myself. It's a constant reminder that this is still my life - even if he's trying to own it.

One thing I don't wish for is the need between us. It is always, always there. It overflows our opaque relationship and I wallow in it. I make myself believe that it is the essential machine of our togetherness --- that if we lost it, there will no more be Mac Taylor for Stella Bonasera. There will be nothing to bind us together.

He says that everything is connected; Veneziano's string theory of quantum physics. I say that when it comes to us, this belief stops at one half of its basic fundamentals: Einsten's general theory of relativity, where gravity is the key to everything. Our relationship is continually pulled down, back to where we started, because this is our evolution – just like the universe evolves every single second that our earth spins on its axis.

There's no exact push pin on history for the moment that we started to sleep together, like there is no exact telling when Mac decided that he needed a new warm body in bed. I decided that it was still about need and that when Mac thought that he needed a good fuck, at the same time, I needed somebody in my life. I don't call that connection, I call it coincidence.

And every night, it still feels like the first time. Every night there's discomfiture. Every night there's too much lust and not enough care.

I know that I despise him – in that cosmically disfigured way of despisingsomeone that women do -, and I've fallen into that trap. He's the man that I sleep with, the man I take pleasure from, the man I'm most familiar with. But when I come home in my apartment, I think that its not home anymore, and then I start despising him. Everywhere, there are small signs of his existence: The couch where we slipped and tumbled to the floor after coming, the TV that he keeps turning on during living room sex, the refrigerator that he always stock with milk.

The thoughts come after that. Loud and noisy … blaring in their own voices; whispering to me things that I don't want to remind myself with.

Yes, I AM afraid. I'm afraid that I'm slowly allowing him to own me completely. I'm afraid that I'm going to lose myself to him and then afterward, he'll start to move away from me. And I'm afraid that the gravity will keep holding me down if I try to follow him.

I sleep because the thoughts have stopped and the silence is overwhelming. I wake up, he's there beside me, and I want to smack myself --- I shouldn't have given him that spare key.

Mac sits on his side of the bed, in his wrinkled tailored suit and stiff tie, smiling and cowering over my curled up body. Coyly, like a sheltered school girl, I cover my face with a pillow and turn away from him.

"You're not mad at me anymore, are you?" he opens up, caressing the exposed skin of my waist. "I bought you milk, for some oatmeal tomorrow morning."

I almost laugh at that. He still thinks that I like him bringing milk over every night, like it's a legal substitute for flowers. It's partly my fault too – I don't have the heart to tell him that I can buy milk myself or better yet, not buy milk at all.

I give him my usual reply, my voice muffled by the pillow. "Thanks."

"Stella-" he starts, then stops as if he accidentally shot me with his own gun. He gently resides back in our fake conversation, slowly savoring each word, trying his perfection on me. He most probably knows that I'm a big sucker for it.

"I was calling you but the machine kept picking up, so I thought it would be… appropriate to check up on you."

I don't say anything. I keep my breathing collected, my face still buried in the pillow. I don't want to have to look at him right now.

I think he counted up to five to wait for my answer, and when none came, he continued, "We got a breakthrough in the case. One of our main suspect's friends ratted him out. He gave us a crucial piece of evidence – the murder weapon, which Flack was fond of because it happens to be a pen that doubles as a poisoned knife. The things people come up with these days." He moves a little closer to me, and the pressure of his body on the mattress makes me slide a few more centimeters toward him.

He doesn't stop with these snippets of what he's supposed to tell me. He starts and he never stops, and he thinks that it's better than foreplay – this fake conversation that we're having. He tries and tries to find a common ground between us and tonight it's no exception … other than he used work to stir things up. He's never done that before.

I remove the pillow from my head and open my arms out to him. Before my optic nerve can alert my brain, I close my eyes so that I don't see his expression.

"Kiss me, Mac," I say, and I get tingles at how rundown I sound. I ignore it, because I desperately want to stop him from talking and I'm going to do – or say – anything to get it done.

Without qualms, he leans in and presses his lips against mine. I open my mouth to him, and feel his tongue slip inside. I trap it delicately with my teeth, treating him like porcelain because that's what he deserves.

I keep making wishes about us, about who we are and what we are to each other.

As a little girl, I painted wishes on the sky. I would whisper my desires inside my palm and blow it to heaven, hoping that someone would catch it with her own palm and listen to them. I believed that these wishes created the sunrise and the sunset, for in my head that's what they are. The colorful hope of my girlish fantasies.

Adulthood murdered these wishes, and reality settled in. One minute I'm staring up at heaven and the next minute I'm on my knees, eyes stuck on the ground. The wishes became black as the night, ominous and ubiquitous, and they stopped fuelling my fantasies. I stopped believing that they dare to offer hope.

Mac rolls off of me and I push him away all the same, swallowing hard as the tears threaten to eat me up alive. Sex, this time, came too close to the surface. My bottled up emotions are awakened by the desperation in both of us, and I'm afraid that with one more touch I'm going to disappear into a pile of ash.

What are we trying to prove, anyway? That there is more than need? That there's actually truth in what we're doing? I don't need to keep on hoping, just as he doesn't need to keep on begging me to let him stay. I'm a big girl, I can handle a superficial relationship. I can handle meaningless sex.

I wrap my arms around myself and lie down on my side, facing the opposite direction, away from him. A tear frees itself from my eye and crashes down on my pillow. I make no move to flick it away.

I hear Mac sit up and think. That's what he always does after sex. His thoughts are so loud that when I close my eyes, I can hear them whirring in successive tempos.

Please don't ask, please don't ask, I repeat over and over again in my head. My fingernails dig into the back of my arms.

He clears his throat unsteadily. "Uhh … Stella …"

Please don't ask, please don't ask to stay.

"… Before I go, can I borrow this?"

I'm momentarily startled by this change of script that it takes me time to recover from my mantra. I quickly gather sheets around my chest and face him. His back is turned to me, but his hand is waving something in the meager moonlight that is seeping into my room. I squint my eyes to see what it is.

When I read the label, I burst out laughing. As the sound of my laughter fills the room, I feel the rigid mood slowly disintegrate.

Mac strains his head to look at me, a silly smile spreading on his face, one I haven't seen before. "Wh- What?" he stutters.

Still laughing, I snatch the DVD from his hand.

"An Affair to Remember? Mac, please! You DON'T watch this," I emphasize, tapping the infamous picture of Carey Grant and Deborah Kerr on the cover. "This is a woman's movie. You don't want to mess with a woman's movie."

"It's not chick flick, Stella," he says, returning on the bed. He sits Indian style beside me. "It's a classic. There's a huge difference. I have an appreciation for classics: Singing in the Rain, Calamity Jane, A cat on a hot tin roof, Gone with the wind …"

"Or," I use the DVD to point at my collection near my bed. "You have been reading the labels of my library."

"Of course not. If I was, I would've borrowed that a long, long time ago." He takes the DVD back from me. "This was my Mom's favorite movie. Next to Calamity Jane. We used to spend Sundays watching these kinds of movies … and man, did I hate them back then. She, she always sang the song in Calamity Jane while cooking … uhh, how does it go?"

The melodies come easily to me, for I'm a personal fan of Doris Day: "Once I had a secret love …" I sing shyly, off- key and terribly, but it lights up Mac's face and it burns something inside of me, and it suddenly makes singing off- key in front of this man not a big deal.

"… that lived within the heart of me," he finishes the line, shaking his head. Of course, it's just as I expected it to be: His singing can start a revolution – or another hundred years war.

Then, within that second, it felt like hope. It's as if someone is painting Mac and I with such vibrant colors that it blinds the eyes. For the first time ever since we started to sleep together, it isn't awkward or painful. It feels right. It feels good.

"Mac," I utter, putting a hand on his bicep. He immediately stares at me, and in those eyes, I believe, are the wishes that I painted the sky with when I was a little girl.

I smile at him. "Do you want to stay and watch? I can hook up the DVD in a sec … and I make a mean frapuccino with chocolate syrup."

He appears as if he wants to lean in and kiss me as his thanks, but he doesn't. Not now, not too fast. One step at a time. We both recognize that this is mutely overwhelming and yes, I'll be thinking of the consequences later on … however, right now we need each other beyond the need that we have always known.

Mac nods his head, shrugging. "Sure. I've got nothing to do anyway."

This is the first time I allow him to stay.

As Carey Grant slow danced with Deborah Kerr on- screen, Mac places an arm around my waist and holds me tightly against his hip. I rest my head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat accelerate as our intimacy pushes pass our borders.

It isn't perfect and it probably will never be, and honestly, I have no idea where we go from here. Maybe it's a misstep, maybe it's a night that will end our relationship for good … but I'm willing to try for something better. We definitely can do better.

He brushes his lips on my forehead, and I make one last wish. In my mind, I whisper it into my palm and waft it to the dark night.

And that, I believe, is our hope.

THE END