Chapter 14: Love Hurts
Love hurts, love scars,
Love wounds, and marks,
Any heart, not tough,
Or strong, enough
To take a lot of pain…
Danny woke up with a headache. Which was weird, he thought, seeing as he hadn't even finished his beer last night, pouring it down the sink after Flack had left. He'd thought about it; crawling into a bottle usually had a sort of appeal to it when life was just too complicated.
However, Danny had also spent most of his life around people who sort of forgot to climb back out of that bottle, and he had no intention of joining them. So, he'd watched TV, had drunk too much coffee, and then, shamefacedly, had booted up his computer and googled Lindsay Monroe.
He'd been honestly shocked when Flack had made the suggestion, had protested self-righteously that it was wrong to do that, a simple abuse of Lindsay's trust.
"She'd tell me if she could, Flack. I have to believe that. Even if she doesn't … feel about me the way I feel about her," Danny had to swallow bile when he said that out loud, "she wouldn't keep something really important from me unless she had to."
Flack looked up at him seriously; Danny was still standing by the window, his face in shadow, but Flack had heard the shaking in his voice. For the first time, Flack felt a sharp slice of anger at Lindsay. Dammit, couldn't she have just left him alone? The last thing Messer needed right now was more turmoil. Then he thought of Lindsay's open face, and he, like Danny, had to believe that she had not meant for any of this to happen.
"Look, man, you're fading out here. You better get home and sleep."
"Yeah, I'm on shift in the morning, and I have an appointment before that," Flack grinned a little at the thought. "But listen, Messer, anything. You need to talk, or drink, or just hang out, let me know, okay? None of us are going away."
He didn't know what else to say. He thought he'd done pretty good at this talking thing so far tonight, first with Stella and then with Danny.
He grinned as he thought of the moment in the car as he dropped Stella off at Lindsay's for The Ambush: Part Two. When he had leaned over to open the door for her, Stella had turned to him, and placed her hands on either side of his face.
"You are a good friend, Don Flack. Thanks." Then she had kissed his cheek before sliding out the door and running up the stairs.
Danny looked at him a bit strangely; Flack had phased out there for a moment, and Danny was trying to resign himself to making up the couch when Flack stood up, and grabbed his jacket.
"Be careful going home, Flack."
"Yeah, yeah, Mom. Do you want me to call you when I get in?" The customary to-and-fro had both men sighing with relief. With any luck this whole weird evening would just not be mentioned again.
Still, after Danny had locked the door behind Flack, he had to admit that he didn't feel quite as miserable as he had earlier that day. He also, with a sigh, had to admit that he was completely unable to contemplate sleep, so had begun his night of coffee, TV and, eventually, the guilty foray into searching out information on Lindsay Monroe.
Now it was morning, and he was going to have to deal with what he had found. It wasn't easy. He felt like slime for researching her anyway, and what he had found made him profoundly uncomfortable. He didn't know what to do next, or how to deal with it. He felt that Lindsay should have a chance to explain, but then she would know he had been checking.
He wanted to talk to Mac and see what he knew, but just the thought of Mac's reaction to Danny's prying made him feel sick to his stomach. The term "straight arrow" had been coined to refer to men like Mac, men who would not even think of stepping over that invisible line of what could be done and what could never be done. Danny had spent time on the other side of Mac's line; he never wanted to be there again.
As he showered and changed for work, Danny kept struggling. He had done something unethical, if not precisely immoral. After all, people googled others all the time. It shouldn't be a big deal; it wasn't as if he'd even used his undoubted computer skills to do a deep search. All he had done was the bare minimum. So why did he feel so sick at the thought of facing Lindsay, of spending a day with her with those questions burning in his brain?
"I guess Father Fitz was right," he said out loud to his reflection in the mirror, "Sometimes sin is its own punishment."
Then he looked at a picture he had on his wall, a casual snapshot which had been taken in the lab just after Lindsay had joined the team. There she was, standing between Hawkes and Stella, smiling that wide, open "got-nothing-to-hide" smile that had first captured his imagination.
"Not true, though, is it Linds? You're hiding something. Otherwise, why would there be absolutely no information about you until after 2003?"
Because that's what he had found in his search: nothing. No matter how he changed up the search parameters, Lindsay Monroe virtually did not exist until she showed up in the tiger cage at the New York Zoo.