Chapter 40

We are into the last week – the last three chapters!

Bruce receives a business proposal – but not for him

Another funeral

He learns a life lesson

He makes an unexpected statement

Wednesday afternoon

He waited among the crowd outside the church. In his inside pocket, and he was not sure yet if he was going to show her, was a copy of Kai's proposal for the online development of Batgirl.

That morning he had taken himself to visit Kai. After they had been rescued on Monday night, Kai had been carted off to ER and kept in overnight for observation. Kai was fizzing, but not with anger – more like excitement, which Bruce found puzzling. Had Kai actually enjoyed their desperate situation? An adrenaline junkie?

'But you know him, right? The Batman?' Kai asked.

'Well – no – '

'So how did he find me? Must have been through you, man.'

'Well – it sort of involved my father, so the police have been speaking to me.'

'I don't care, just wanna know if you can put me in touch with him.'

'I can ask, if you like.'

'That video – did you see it? Pretty amateur. That girl – do you think he knows her?'

'I . . . know her. She's my girlfriend.'

Kai's eyes were out on stalks.

'I need to talk to her, man. She could be big. They could be big. He needs good publicity, right? Got a real bad rep at the mo. Get her on the 'gram – who knows where it could go?'

'She's a police officer – '

'Wow, kudos to her. I can really work with that.'

'She might not want it. She won't be able to do her job if she's all over Instagram.'

'She might not have to. I can make her rich as well as famous. She could be an influencer. Way, way more famous than you. You'll be known as Batgirl's boyfriend.'

He laughed in anticipation, turning to his printer to collect some sheets.

'Give her these, yeah? My proposal for how to go forward. This is her moment.' He looked at Bruce intently. 'If you don't mind me sayin' – ain't your decision, man. It's hers. Don't deny her.'

Don't deny her. But she hated Batgirl. She hated the attention. Sounded like Kai intended Batgirl and the Batman to be some sort of double act, which he would hate. He had no idea how Kai was thinking of representing them. Videos of some sort? If it was tight leather and high heels for her, that would be her worst nightmare. And these ideas had a way of escaping out on to the internet anyway. He sighed.

It was not long before the procession appeared. Matty's coffin, draped in the flag, was carried on the shoulders of colleagues a short distance along the road. Behind it came Maria and the kids, his parents, her mother. His heart tightened at the sight. He bit the inside of his lip. Commissioner Gordon walked with them. The rest of the Matty's shift, and what looked like half the precinct and many other officers, most of them in uniform, were behind. The church was going to be full.

His best chance of sitting with Georgia was to wait for the procession to pass. She walked with her detective colleagues in her best blues, as she had called them. The dark navy shirt and pants, the badge bright and high on the left hand side of the shirt, white gloves. It took him a while to pick her out; the peak of her cap pulled down close to her eyes. She appeared to be looking straight ahead with a fixed stare, her lips pressed tightly together. Not red today: a much more muted, browny colour.

As they all filed in, he found her waiting for him, just inside the space, out of the flow of people. They slid into the nearest row. Gloves off now, her fingers sought his, but she didn't look at him.

It was, as he had expected, an emotional funeral. He couldn't listen fully to most of it, doing mental arithmetic to distract his mind. When he became aware of her crying quietly, he put his arm round her shoulders.

Commissioner Gordon spoke; the captain of the precinct spoke; Matty's brother attempted the eulogy, but it was difficult to hear him (not that Bruce was listening) – his grief made it difficult for him to read what he wanted to say, which was sad. When he broke down as he tried to speak directly to Matty, Bruce realised his own eyes were damp.

It was, as usual, a relief to get outside into the air, but the grief and emotion spilled out after them. The funeral cars had come up. Georgia left him to be part of the guard of honor that flanked the coffin as it was carried out. He could see the emotion in most of their eyes: the last thing they could do for a fallen colleague; one of their own. He had to take a breath.

Once the coffin was safely in the hearse, she was busy embracing and crying with colleagues. One or two of the guys he had gone out drinking with approached him and shook hands. Matty's family disappeared inside cars, to go to a private burial. The officers who were the pallbearers got into a car behind, with the commissioner and other high-ranking officers in the rest of the cortege. His job today was just to follow Georgia, wait, and pick her up at the end of it.

And it was a long day. There was the official wake, huge, with all the officers, in a hotel not far from the church. The wake took over the function room, the lobby and the bar area. Bruce learned that there was a representative of every precinct there. A band of brothers and sisters. Maria had phases of not coping, but she got stronger as the event went on. Georgia took him with her when she went over to speak to her.

At one point, he found himself next to the brother. They had a brief chat about Matty, but all Bruce could really do was pat the guy on the shoulder in sympathy. Gordon and the senior officers were present for an hour or so, then disappeared without fanfare or fuss.

Finding a quiet corner, Bruce checked his emails on his cell. Nothing to deal with. Yesterday had been his first day back at work after Rachel's funeral. Amy had been clearing Rachel's desk, right outside his office, so it was difficult to get past her without speaking. She had been a bit stiff with him, and he had had to think back as to why that might be. It had come to him – the abrupt parting, the dragging away of Georgia, no goodbye for Amy. So he had apologised, gone into charm mode and talked her round. By the end, she was complimenting him on the eulogy and on his girlfriend.

The guys in the office had not been quite so complimentary about Georgia. When he had gone to the restroom, he had walked in on three of them guffawing about Batgirl. They had shut up and had the grace to look embarrassed, but they hadn't said anything to him. They would have known who she was. He knew he could take them, and it would have given him great pleasure to teach them a lesson, but Lucius had warned him about this: the need to control his anger in the workplace.

'If you give in, even once, Wayne Enterprises will have no employees at all in a very short space of time,' Lucius had said. 'They will make comments about you, they will joke about you, but you have just got to roll with it. Don't even give them backchat. Give them no ammunition at all.'

So he had just sighed and shaken his head.

Office life was difficult sometimes. And Kai was planning to make it even more so. The boyfriend of Batgirl. His credibility would be completely shot.

After the official wake, the officers from Matty's precinct had retired to their favorite bar. It was early evening by now. Any regular punters were intimidated by the presence of so many cops, and quietly melted away. Bruce found himself a corner to sit down in. Because he was not an officer, because he hadn't really known Matty, he was not included in the conversation, but he was okay with that.

A couple of guys had noticed his car, and came over to talk about the Stingray, only slightly envious, mostly curious about how it handled, where he got it maintained; inclining their heads, impressed, when he said he did a lot of it himself, when he had the time.

'Motorhead, huh?' one of them said.

It got noisier as the evening wore on. Georgia had let her hair down. Her smile was brittle and her eyes shone a lot. He made a note to remind her about her cap, wherever that was.

Toasts were made, shots were downed, they smashed the glasses, they roared. To the living – grace; to the dead – rest. On several occasions Georgia had tears in her eyes. Someone would always put an arm round her shoulders at those times, but she never got as close to them as she did to him when she cried.

There was some food, but not a lot. He slipped out at one point to grab himself a sandwich from a nearby bodega, confident Georgia would not miss him. He chose one for her as well, just in case she felt like eating. Just before he got to the till, he grabbed some waste basket liner bags. The last thing he wanted was for her to throw up in the Stingray.

When he re-entered the bar, she noticed him. She gestured for him to come over, and she lifted his arm round her shoulders. He did think his arm round her waist might be more useful. They were all quite excitable by this stage, smiling a lot and laughing a little too loudly. He remembered her admonishment after Rachel's wake, and kept quiet about whether it was time for them to leave.

But then it started to break up. People began to head out into the late evening.

'Your car's ready if you are, Miss Madison,' he murmured in her ear.

'Bruce, you are such a lightweight. Who knew?'

'Go home, Madison,' Elleray said. 'If you don't take him home, I will.'

Elleray hugged him and kissed his cheek. She held on to his arm and looked at Georgia.

'Hey!' Georgia exclaimed.

'Well.' Elleray shrugged. 'Gotta be firm with her, Bruce. She needs to know who's boss.'

'That's her, isn't it?' he said, smiling.

'That's what she wants you to think. When you get tired of her, honey, come see me.' She patted his arm and started towards the door. 'See you, Batgirl.'

There were a few minutes of banter about Batgirl before he could get Georgia out of the door and into the car. She needed to lean on him – she wasn't walking very steadily, despite being in small, sturdy heels.

'You okay?' he asked as he stretched across to strap her in.

She was leaning back, eyes closed, but she nodded. 'Take me to mine.'

'Sure?'

'Sure.'

'What about your roommate?'

'She's in Europe. Or somewhere. Long haul.'

She wasn't sick in the car, fortunately. She was asleep almost as soon as he started the engine. He had to support her to walk into her building, and fish in her purse to find her door key. As soon as they were inside the apartment, she made a beeline for the bathroom. He held her hair out of the way while she threw up.

'Come on,' he said. 'If you're done, you should maybe go to bed.'

For the second time in a short while, he undressed her – or attempted to. He had never tried to get a police officer out of her uniform before. The pants were not so much of a problem. Flopped back on the bed, arms over her face, she let him roll her side to side to lift her hips, so he could slip them off. The tie detached, no problem. Police ties are clip-on, for obvious reasons, when he thought about it.

The shirt, though, was a whole other story. As he struggled with the buttons, she kept putting her arms round his neck and trying to kiss him, pulling him down on top of her, laughing.

'It's not funny,' he kept protesting.

'Sure, it is.'

'Let me just do this, will you?'

Giving in with a sigh and a yawn, closing her eyes, she let him finish the task then, get her into her night things, and into bed. She put a hand on his face.

'I love you, Bruce Wayne.'

'I love you, too, Georgia Madison.'

He kissed her cheek. Would she remember him saying that when she woke in the morning? Not the most romantic of occasions, but then he had never imagined himself ever saying it to anyone. She might even have been asleep already. But he had said it, and the words had come surprisingly easily to him. Love was a word that had dropped out of his vocabulary quite a few years ago.

Did he love her? Sitting on the couch with some passable wine he had found in the fridge, he thought about it.

Those words had come from Monday night. He didn't know how close he had actually come to death, but it had felt close enough that he had become desperate to cling on to life, because he had not spent enough time with her; because he couldn't bear the thought of being separated from her for all eternity. Even now, as he remembered, his heart was starting to race and his breathing was getting shallow and shaky. She was right – life was here, it was now. And he needed to live it. With her.

She brought noise, colour, complication into his life. She also brought pleasure, of the most intense kind. He liked almost nothing better than for as much as possible of his skin to be in contact with hers; the rush was indescribable.

Tell me it isn't only fucking

On reflection, he didn't think it was, anymore. They were happy to be with each other in silence. He had wanted her beside him at Rachel's funeral. She gave him strength and steered him through those tricky interactions that he didn't really want to deal with. He could do the same for her with other things, like the online stuff. He shut Kai and his ideas out of his mind for now. They thought the same about law and order, even if her views had worried him after Matty's death. She ran towards danger, which he admired.

Embrace it, Emma had said. Yin and yang, pleasure and pain. Hopefully more pleasure than pain. The desire to jump, to take that risk, was stronger now than the desire to avoid it.

Finishing his wine, he took himself to her bedroom, shed most of his clothes and slid into bed with her. If he couldn't be in contact with her skin, to be warm under the duvet with her was the next best thing. And maybe, in the morning, she would seek out his skin. He could but hope.

In the morning, when she had surfaced, feeling and looking better than she had a right to after the previous day, he caught her looking at him thoughtfully. He knew what she was wondering, but he had decided he wasn't going to repeat his statement – not yet, anyway. Quite when, he didn't know, but he wanted the occasion to be a bit more special than a hurried breakfast in her shared apartment, when she was thinking ahead to work.

She had decided to go in, to face Matty's empty desk, his absence from her side, to start to come to terms with the new shape of her working life.

'Life goes on,' she said. 'It's what Matty would want. It's what he would have done, if it had been me. Yolo, we always used to say.'

He drove her, dropped her at the precinct with a kiss, then took himself home. He also needed to go to the office, to face Rachel's empty desk, to face down the young men and their disrespect. This was life: he needed to get used to it.