Today is better than two tomorrows. ~~ Buddhist Tenet
He sighed in exasperation and threw his head against the headrest of their unmarked police car. He looked at his watch again, for the fifth time in the last hour. His expression of frustration was only partially mock protest. He was making light of their circumstance, for her, his partner – she of the dark looks who lived her life in angry red strokes.
He wanted so much more for her, particularly on this night.
In his vision of reality, Dani Reese would have been dressed to kill, smiling at her date, in a room filled with music, laughter, light, love and maybe even balloons and confetti. She'd be kissing some lucky young man at midnight instead of sipping stale coffee with him in a police car on New Year's Eve. Thinking about her preoccupied him to the extent he didn't give a thought to his own lean social plans.
Sure he could have a date if he wanted to. After all he was "The Charlie Crews" and women wanted to be around him for fifty million little reasons or their fifteen minutes of fame. He wasn't foolish enough to think he was that attractive, although he was handsome enough. There were even some dark groupies who secretly hoped he had killed that family and wanted to taste that darkness on his lips. While Charlie had not killed his friends, he did dabble in death on occasion. Those were not moments he shared with anyone, but Reese knew.
Reese didn't care about his money or his faux fame. She knew him, not the person he pretended to be, but the man he really was. The man who knew fear, who knew hatred and who killed because some times he had to and because some people just needed killing. She didn't judge him, but she did count on him, rely on him and more importantly she trusted him. It had been a long time since Charlie Crews had someone in his orbit that wasn't afraid of him or inspired by greed.
Some days, truth be known, it was a toss up if Reese even liked him at all. She steadfastly pretended not to. She professed on more than one occasion her intent to shoot him, throwing him from a moving car, run him over or leave him stranded in a bad part of town. He thought however that she just might like him - a little; but she was hard to read some times. Like now…he couldn't tell if she was pissed off that she wasn't going to spend New Year's with someone; that they were on the lovely surveillance gig (a parting gift from her ex-boyfriend, Captain Tidwell) or that he'd come with her - since she'd offered to do it alone; but one thing for sure – she was mad.
"Reese," he began meekly.
"Don't," she warned. "Don't talk to me."
Again his heavy sigh filled the car. The dark grey cloud of his frustration and the blackness of her anger hung over them both. Though the sky was clear and the moon bright, it seemed an inch away from rain from where he sat.
"You know I can't not talk," he complained. She glared.
"And you're the only one here to talk to," he continued tempting fate.
"I – don't – want – to talk," she snapped the words off like broken little twigs drying from the heat of her anger.
"That's the beauty of it," he grinned, "you don't have to." He thought his attempt at humor might lessen some of her tenseness.
Her phone rang in her pocket for the third time in less than thirty minutes. She pulled the foreign buzzing item from her pocket, looked at the caller ID and hit ignore – again.
"Tidwell?" he asked innocently.
"See this," she gestured at the phone and them held it up, "is why we don't talk. Not your business."
"He wants to make up?" Charlie guessed.
"Stop talking Crews," she gritted from clenched teeth.
"It's normal really," he continued anyway, just as she knew he would. "Anyone would want to," he explained. "Make-up, be together at the start of a New Year, have someone to kiss at midnight…"
"I swear to God, Crews," she barked. Her anger was white hot and hovered around nuclear meltdown. If he listened carefully, there were alarms echoing in the distance. "If you don't shut the hell up – I am going to shoot you."
"Have you ever done it?"
She had no response to this – even anger failed her. She didn't know if he meant shoot him, make-up with Tidwell or have sex, which is what she would have meant had she been bold enough to pose such a question. His audacity often shocked her. But even Crews knew boundaries, albeit few…but some. This was pushing, even for him. In the early days when his mouth had no filter and every thought that entered his brain came dripping from his lips cloaked in a smile, she'd wanted to choke him. Truth be known some days she still wanted to choke him.
"Have you?" He wondered again smiling that insipid grin she hated.
He knew she and Tidwell had sex so he couldn't be asking what she thought he was. His audacity apparently knew no bounds, but she sought to confirm it anyway. "Have I what?"
"Kissed anyone at midnight?" he asked lightly. "For New Year's, you know?"
The tightness in her chest eased. "Oh…" she exhaled relaxing. She wasn't quite sure why she had the reaction she did, but she gave him what he wanted and almost laughed in telling him, "uh…no. No I haven't ever kissed anyone on New Year's."
"Hmph," he seemed perplexed by her answer. She could see him thinking. His head cocked to the side and he seemed to mull his next comment carefully, but he asked anyway," Why not?"
She shrugged and turned away. To most people this would have been a sign the conversation was over – to most people, but not to Crews.
"I'm sorry," he began. There incredulity and a teasing tone in his voice despite knowing where he was headed risked rekindling her anger. He knew that while her fearsome ire lay dormant now; it was simply banked, storing the deep heat and would flare again with the slightest provocation. "I can't believe that."
"Why would I lie?" she turned and faced him. He had the most annoying way of getting her to talk about areas that were strictly and explicitly off limits. And yet still he grinned; he was such a dolt sometimes.
"Have you?" she countered. Not an answer, but her own question.
"No," he drew out his reply, "but you're…"
"What?" she eyed his suspiciously and offered options, colorful ways to describe her past behavior, which was no secret. "Loose? Wanton? Libertine?"
"Beautiful," he interrupted. His voice broke a full octave lower and he looked away when he said it. The imperturbable Charlie Crews was embarrassed; that he thought she was beautiful.
She wanted to laugh, but she found herself touched deeply at his innocence. There was still a place deep within the jaded, cynical, stone cold killer hiding behind a deep thick layer of cold Zen – where he was just a man who was shy about thinking a girl he knew was pretty.
Silence consumed all the air in the small car. They both looked in their laps, out the window, anywhere but at each other. No one spoke for a long time.
Surprisingly, it was her that broke the silence, "I never liked New Year's. All that noise and all the celebration; for what? Tomorrow we'll wake up and the world will be exactly the same. What's the point of celebrating a world that never changes?"
"Everything is changing, all the time," he gave her his packaged Zen answer. His walls were slipping back into place, protecting that part of him that remained innocent.
"Hmmm, Zen…" she remarked. "You're hiding again," she commented. It was unusual for her to be the one who pushed the edges of their very neat envelope.
"You're the one who said you didn't want to talk," he offered in comment.
"Yeah, but you made me," the way she spoke made him look at her.
Blue eyes met brown and they remained pinned in that moment.
"You never let me hide from life," she told him plainly. "Yes, Tidwell keeps calling, but it's over. It's over tonight and it'll still be over tomorrow." It was a painful and yet a complete truth. She'd already told him that part of her life was none of his business, but she let him in anyway.
In return he gave her a reciprocal truth. "I never got to kiss anyone at midnight because I always volunteered to work the holidays when Jen and I were married," he seemed to lose his way and didn't finish. The pain seeped in, even after all these years.
"Then she left you," Dani finished for him.
"Yeah," he exhaled and looked at the headliner of their car finding something very interesting in the dull grey there. His thumbnail flicked a bit of microscopic lint from it. "I thought we'd have time," his forlorn tone made her sad and impulsive simultaneously.
She looked at her watch. "Well," she looked up and out through the windshield. "Doesn't look like Rayborn will be going anywhere tonight," she offered. "There's still time."
"I don't want to be with a stripper or a prostitute or one of those badge bunnies that keep calling. I wanted it to be with someone…." He glanced at her. "Someone I would always remember," he sounded sad. He too looked at his watch.
"Well, that leaves me out," she joked.
"Does it?" he dared and his brow held both a question and a challenge. He was serious.
She stared at him for what seemed minutes as things from their past flashed in her mind. "Oh, what the hell," she decided for them both. "Get out of the car," she ordered. She was always pushy, demanding. He knew this would be no different. "Sit," she directed, shoving him roughly against the trunk of their car.
He landed against it with a thud; both his hands braced against the trunk to keep from sliding either way. His legs stuck out in front of him and she walked straight up to him and straddled his legs. His position took away his near foot of height advantage and put him on the same level of his fierce little partner. His brow arched in surprise.
Now that he'd started this, he was beginning to have second thoughts. Not about kissing Reese, he'd thought about that, looked forward to it for a long time now – since that orange grove a year ago when she'd rushed into his arms after they'd escaped death by the thinnest of margins. He'd wanted to kiss her then; she'd have let him, but he didn't. At the back of his mind lurked the specter of doubt, the fear that he'd disappoint or worse yet – hurt her. Now all those doubts came rushing back.
"Reese," he cautioned as she wet her lips. The din on Rayborne's boat foretold the coming peril. Numbers dwindled, time fled. "I don't think…" he tried to walk back from this fool's errand.
"No," she said breathlessly, "you don't. You never do Charlie." She seized his tie and placed one hand on his chest over his heart.
In that moment, he had an epiphany. She wanted to kiss him. Perhaps for as long as he'd wanted to kiss her. They both recognized it as a monumentally bad idea and wisely avoided it. But for this night…. one in which he'd walked them both to the brink of something tantalizingly close. The problem with playing chicken with your heart is that Dani Reese didn't blink.
She looked into him, through him and just before the bells went off, sirens blared in the harbor from the other boats, he surrendered.
He relaxed and let it come. He dropped all his walls and let her see his want, his desire, his longing, even the love he bore her. His smile was soft and genuine.
Her lips twisted, she wanted to smile back but she was afraid. His hands left the car and gravitated to her hips. He tugged her against him. Her head ducked and he leaned down to whisper to her.
She could feel the deep rumble of his voice as he lightly chastised her, "no more hiding." She looked up from under that layer of dark lashes and he saw her – really saw her; the tenderness, the vulnerability that lay under the tough talk and two inch heels.
"If you hurt me," she warned.
"I won't," he interrupted. "I would never hurt you," he vowed.
"That's what scares me," she confessed against his lips. He breathed deeply and touched just the tip of his lips to the peak of her top lip.
"Happy New Year, Dani," he said quietly as he rested his forehead against hers. The din from the dock seemed miles away. His heart hammered wildly, his pulse raced and his skin burned. He could feel every breath she took it and felt each one he did. This moment couldn't last forever and he wanted to remember every instant of it.
What he failed to remember was that of the two of them, she was the braver. She licked her lips and dove in. "Thought you said you wanted to be kissed on New Year's Eve," she murmured as she twisted under him to capture his bottom lip.
Impulse took over and instinct overrode any thought he had of modulating his response. His fingers dug into the dungaree of her jeans until he could feel every fiber in the fabric, the bones of her hips and her insistent rocking against him. His hands slid up her hips until they slipped under her shirt and rested on the bare skin of her waist. He gasped at the softness there and on her lush full lips.
She deepened their kiss, swallowing his breath as her tongue flicked across his mouth. He pulled her closer as their sweet, simple kiss blazed out of control like a meteor streaking across the blackness. It was as silent as space and all he could hear was his own blood rushing in his ears. He wanted to pull her atop him and let her control him completely, but this wasn't the place for that.
He still kissed her deeply for long enough they both ran out of breath.
But as their kiss ended, but they didn't awkwardly push away. This was an event that had been long in coming and one that foretold their future, one that had yet to be written, one they would author in concert. She kept her hands on him and his hands stroked her back under her shirt. Skin on skin; the fire he felt there had nothing to do with her earlier anger. He kissed her on the forehead and they untangled themselves to return to their duty.
But just before she stepped away to return to the car, he pulled her back to drink deeply from her lips once more. There was no New Year's shield, no mistletoe, no convenient excuse, just his unmasked desire for this woman. She did not resist.
"So…" he mumbled against her ear as he released her from his grasp, "what time do you get off?"
"What's make you think I haven't already gotten off?" she teased.
He groaned in desperation instead of frustration this time.
"So it's a New Year," he offered, "has anything changed this time?"
She smiled slyly at him, "you know I think it might have."
Author's Note: I haven't given up on my longer fics, but tis the holidays so lighter fare and shorter stories bring us all a brief respite. Happy New Year and may 2013 bring each of you peace, love, wonder, joy and happiness.