Ficathon Entry: Four Quartets [Paula/Tony (Tony/Carol, Paula/Carol), NC-17] Part 2
Headers in Part 1
Four Quartets, Part 2
The sweet fire of coconut, cardamom, chilies, cloves, and cumin floated up as Tony played with the enclosure of his takeaway bag, thinking to himself “She’s a good copper and the case needs attention - nothing to fear.” Nothing at all, apart from the painfully patient way that Alex had explained she needed more to go on than his suspicions before she’d be willing to give up a quiet evening with her son. With a few more threads connected, he knew Alex would grumble but put her considerable skill and resources behind him. However, there remained a sizeable distance between a sketchy image of compulsive precision and the kind of profile that would actually yield suspects and a formal inquiry.
He breathed deeply. “It’s only about the case,” he reminded himself again. He shifted the sac and angled his elbow to press the buzzer.
The battered little talk box emitted a crackle, and Paula’s voice emerged, “Hello? Who’s there?”
Precariously shifting the takeaway atop his pile of boxes to free a hand, he held down the talk button. “It’s Tony,” was that too presumptuous now that the psychological evaluation business had finished? “er - Dr. Hill? Care to engage in an ancient ritual of friendship over a little detective work?”
Silence followed, although not the kind he could read without seeing her face and body. She could be entertaining, or just out of the shower, or simply appalled that he’d tracked her down at home. Quite a lot of police rigidly separated the job from their personal lives - he should have thought, should have asked earlier. But, of course, a friendly invitation at work was much easier to turn down than a man with food and a potentially career-making case on your doorstep. He hoped.
Static came from the little box, then Paula’s voice returned, “You’ve not come to make me your blood brother, have you Tony?” The tone could have been either teasing or dismayed, but he took encouragement from the choice of his first name.
Using his chin to stop the slide of their dinner across the boxes’ surface, he pressed the talk button again, “No, nothing of the sort. Food - well, food and crime. I thought we could eat together, and I’d appreciate another set of eyes on a case I’m trying to establish.” Silence again as he puffed out little clouds of frost and hoped that even if she chucked him out that she would come down to do so. Otherwise, he’d soon have to resort to holding the takeaway bag between his teeth to save it from splattering across her door and likely freezing the keyhole solid - not exactly the impression he’d counted on.
Before disaster struck the door opened on a metallic creak and Paula peaked out, taking in his awkward predicament and wryly asking, “So, what’s for tea, then? I’m not letting you in for less than fish and extra chips.” He managed a strangled “curry” with his face mashed between a container of saag and another of korma, pulling the bag in opposite directions as they slid apart, but she took pity on him, neatly snatching the sac and gesturing him inside. “Curry beats any amount of chips,” she assured him, and led him upstairs into her flat.
Paula brought the bag into the kitchen and began puttering noisily, calling “Red or white?” behind her. “Red,” Tony replied absently, circling the room to take note of the couch, plush chairs, and end tables nearly swallowed by the open space, and then to thumb through a collection of CDs with titles almost entirely foreign to him, and poke at a stack of post which included the Bradfield Times, and several crossword puzzle magazines. He jumped guiltily when she beckoned from the next room.
When he entered she poured him a glass of wine, but stopped short when she saw him and tilted her head in consternation. He looked down, suddenly fearing that stray curry or mud marred his clothes, but seeing nothing he looked up, puzzled and a bit sunken under the weight of her scrutiny. “Are you planning on staying?” Paula asked, and he replayed everything that had happened since he arrived, forehead scrunching in uncertainty. “I thought so?” he answered tentatively, then realization gripped him coldly, “but if it’s about the mail, I apologize. Can’t help myself, really. Post and media collections are the windows to the soul, and I’m in the soul business, or the brain business at any rate. But, still, horribly rude.” He trailed off as she looked first confused, then one corner of her lips lifted in amusement. “Sorry,” he finished lamely.
Shaking her head Paula said, “I’d have snooped myself, given the chance. Coppers aren’t so different from shrinks on that score. It’s just - you’ve still got your coat on as if you’re about to bolt for the door?”
Oh. And for that he’d nearly confessed to mail fraud? But she didn’t look upset, relieved if anything, so as Paula set his wine glass by a place setting and moved to pour for herself he quickly draped the offending outerwear on the rack near the door and took a seat.
Spooning heaps of rapidly cooling curry amidst Paula’s excited “Ooooo papadums,” and the crunching which followed, he surveyed the casual sweatshirt and tiny stud earrings that Paula wore below her artfully feathered hair, not so very different from how she looked at work. Although their clinical relationship dissolved with the filling of his report weeks ago, he had tried to keep track of her during the Masonic case they’d just finished, and now part of him noted the earrings as a positive sign of self-care. She functioned competently on the job and it appeared that she functioned here on her own as well, which was where his interest ended - as a clinician.
“So, the case?” Paula queried, bringing him back to his original purpose, and then she added, “Now that we’ve confirmed you’ve nothing to fear from me.”
Raising his brows in alarm at the possibility of further miscommunication, he had a sinking feeling the he may very well spent the entire night wrong-footed, but then the reference dawned on him. “Ah yes, neither of us vampires. I’ll even be the first to try the garlic naan to seal it.” Mouth full of bread, he savored Paula’s laughter. He told himself, “See? Easy. You can do this,” and shuddered minutely as a hole deep within whose existence he’d barely acknowledged became minutely less gaping. Swallowing around a growing lump in his throat born of private satisfaction, he brought them back to the work. “I’ve been looking through the single homicides, apparent suicides, and missing persons files.”
With wide, startled eyes Paula interrupted, “All of them?”
Recalling the insomniatic hours those files filled, he grimly agreed, “All of them. Especially when an offender crosses jurisdictional boundaries, spaces out offences over several years, or dramatically alters modus operandi, identifying a string of serial offenses can become nearly impossible. In every collection of unsolved crimes the probabilities suggest that some of them will have been committed by a single person. Now, we’re limited to Bradfield, but even so, there’s every reason to believe that at one time or another this station has processed crimes which fresh eyes might identify as the work of one individual, and I think I’ve come across a string of murders which all connect back to one killer.”
Wine glass poised halfway between the table and her mouth, Paula leaned forward and in a rapid burst asked, “All right, what’s the connection.”
“Ah,” he sighed, “that’s the trouble. I’ve not got it entirely pinned down yet. Precision and order - these are important to him, but why? Is he obsessive compulsive? Does he kill out of the same compulsion? Then why kill sloppily one day, and undetectably the next? He’s clearly intelligent to have gone this long without leaving trace evidence, and extremely skilled in chemistry, locks, and stealth, yet also with the capacity for incredible brutality.”
Paula’s wine glass returned to the table and she lifted one finger to stroke and pinch her lower lip. “So- clean, orderly, highly skilled, and changes m.o. frequently. At ease with a body do you think?” she clarified.
He nodded, “I’ve identified at least ten if I’m on the right track and none of them show signs of panic or clumsiness. If his first experience with a body is in our records I haven’t found it yet.”
“Clean, skilled, stealthy, and experienced,” Paula repeated, and while she was lost in thought on the edge of realization, for a moment he saw her with a slightly wider nose, broader mouth, and longer hair. Then he blinked and the phantom evaporated to be replaced by Paula in the flush of discovery. “A professional!” Paula announced. “You’re describing a professional hit man.”
Yes. It melted perfectly upon the figure he’d assembled. “Of course! And it explains why investigators flagged the suicides, even with so little contradictory evidence. Regardless of how convincing a scene the victims presented, they felt constructed, not by the desires of someone desperately depressed, but by someone who knew them better as corpses than as specific individuals - individuals who would have expressed very particular last intentions. Instead, they were generic, almost clichéd.” The discovery surged through him and he noted Paula’s eyes, darkly dilated by this first conquest in their pursuit. The eyes reminded him too of other things, and he sipped at his wine to provide an excuse for his rising blush.
“Ok,” Paula said, and tore off a piece of naan to scoop up the last of her curry, “lets see those case files.”
Hours later, Paula groaned and stretched. He looked up from yet another tan folder to catch a glimpse of skin revealed by the movement of her shirt, then quickly hidden from view. “I’m fading,” Paula said on a yawn, “so shall we compare notes and pick it up another night?”
He glanced at his watch, counting the long hours yet ahead before his buzzing subconscious would allow sleep, but nodded. “Sure. Have you found anything or am I completely off my nut?”
“Well, I don’t make any claims on the state of your nut,” Paula began, “but I think there’s something here.” She rifled busily between folders until selecting one and withdrawing a crime scene photo. “Take a look at the poster in the background. Have you seen that image before?”
There, behind the body of journalist Helen Boxer where he’d first felt the killer’s presence, hung a picture of a black cat in a white and red background. Stylized script in alternating black, red and white read, “Tournée du Chat Noir Avec Rodolptte Salis.”
Grabbing the nearest folder to hand, he pulled out the crime photos one after another. A missing person case, they showed the victim’s flat and the bus stop where he’d presumably been taken. “There!” he exclaimed, and pointed toward a keychain, barely visible in the jumble of pens, notebooks, and stale cups of coffee which littered a desk. The keychain showed an orange and red background, but the black cat and script it depicted unmistakably duplicated Helen Boxer’s poster.
“That’s it - it’s part of the signature,” he pronounced, then his eyes unfocused and he asked, “but how did you carry an entire framed poster with you and still go unnoticed?”
Paula startled, “So we’re assuming that he plants them? Not that he kills people who already have this image?”
Quite. Are you afraid of that picture? Of the black cat with supernatural powers? Shaking off the thought, he replied, “We should keep it in mind, but I think it’s far more likely that this image says something important to him, something he wants to communicate - to himself, to his victims, to us, or to someone else entirely?”
Paula leaned close, peering over his shoulder at the keychain, “And what does it say?” she asked, wafting alcohol and spices on her warm breath. He inhaled the intoxicating scent of nearness, but just as the presence of another body so achingly close combined with the rush of discovery threatened to take control of his yearning fingers, he stood, dislodging Paula who looked up at him with tight, hurt features. “I don’t know what it says,” he stated, too sharply. Seeing her cringe, he reminded himself that he wanted to be able to come back, to eat curry, review case notes, and drink wine, buoyed by the growing ease between them. Careful again, he softly clarified, “I don’t know yet. That’s a job for another night. Thank you, Paula.”
He watched her tense jaw ease, but noted a sadness that remained, leaving her flattened and tired. Together they tidied up their accumulated mountain of documentation, and he carried his boxes back to the door. “Goodnight, Tony,” Paula said and in the stinging familiarity of the scene he heard a deeper, throatier voice overlaid upon hers. Paula’s hand rose, as if to touch him, and under the spell of that absent voice he might have let her, but it dropped in the thick emptiness between them, so he said goodnight and turned his back on Paula to step out into the darkness.
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The scent of vanilla wrapped Paula in a rich, sugary cloud of contentment, and she hummed along with the Indigo Girls while she chopped slivers of almonds, making a resolution that all her days off from now on should be filled with a little row of tarts. The infusion of sweets would go right to her hips, which made her smile as she imagined herself lush and strong, stuffed full of vanilla scented happiness.
She sprinkled little pieces of almond atop a palm-sized marzipan tart and nodded in satisfaction at the colorful quartet, then bent to find an appropriate box in the depths of her cabinet behind piles of disused pans. She tried to remember the last time she cooked for someone else, much less something other than a fry-up, but came up with nothing other than the soothing, distant image of thick, cinnamon covered fingers molding molasses colored dough.
Placing a jam tart, cream tart, and mince tart, along with the almond flecked marzipan tart, in a little carrying case, she considered yet again the wisdom of a phone call versus a direct attack. Although she could appreciate the tactical bluster involved in appearing without invitation or warning, after the case three weeks past she couldn’t add the burden of an unwelcome imposition. The case’s vicious inflammation of the usual station gossip decrying Tony as incompetent and sexually inadequate, revealing the force’s long-held disdain for psychology and any man disinclined to physical violence, would have been enough to prompt her to pay him a return visit. However, when she and DI Fielding escorted Tony from the hospital after the case concluded, the utter disarray of his appearance, fine tremors in his hands, avoidance of her eyes, and speechless trailing after the DI’s every move convinced her that something dire had transpired. So, she watched for him in the squad room, tracing the doorways he once passed through for any sign of his return, but for three weeks he didn’t come back, so she decided to give him room to recover.
However, as of today, enough was enough, so she gathered her phone and the squad directory, steeling herself for the possibility of a quiet evening in, eating tarts alone. She dialed, and the phone rang and rang until she nearly gave up, but then a click sounded and he answered, “Tony Hill.”
“Hi Tony, it’s Paula. Listen, I’ve been thinking about your black cat assassin and I’d like to push ahead on it, look through the files to pull out everything with that signature and start working out what else ties all the incidents together.” Silence echoed over the line and she mentally counted to ten, pressing the nail of her forefinger into the pad of her thumb with every passing second, then added, “Plus it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you eat and it’s my turn to bring by takeaway.” Silence still, and she might have assumed they’d disconnected if not for the sigh which finally came over the line. “All right,” he said, “come by - but I’m not letting you in for less than extra chips.” She rubbed at her sore thumb, smiling as the pain dissipated. “Extra chips it is,” she agreed and hung up. Thinking about how much easier that had gone than the cajoling she’d prepared for, she gathered her purse and sweets on a flutter of anticipation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When the buzzer sounded Tony gratefully left behind a stack of dreary student papers to answer. He pulled back the door to find Paula holding an intriguing array of sacs and packages, her usually spiky hair wilted by the misty rain. “I hope you have malt vinegar,” she said, extending a sac with a promisingly greasy aura. “Of course,” he replied, inviting her inside. She beamed and followed him up, while he mused that if only someone had explained vinegar’s ability to incite that level of cheerfulness, he’d have been exploiting its properties long ago.
Remembering their last visit, he took her soggy coat at the door, savoring the traces of fruity confectionary which wafted up around her, and pointed her toward clean towels in the bathroom to soak up the remaining damp. Dutifully bringing vinegar to the table, as well as beer, ketchup, and place settings, he unloaded a truly staggering amount of chips with fish and lemon wedges, then set upon the second, more mysterious package. Inside he found four little tarts, and he noted their slightly uneven edges, giving the cream one a surreptitious poke. Liking his finger, the richly buttery consistency coated his tongue and he tasted hints of coconut and vanilla. “Those are for afters,” came a low voice at the edge of the kitchen, but the way Paula gazed upon his finger, still pressed to his lips, looked anything but angry. He observed, “You made these.”
“Day off,” Paula explained, stepping closer. “Don’t usually have the time, but my dad’s baking spoiled me for shop sweets.” Her eyes lingered on his lips and the irrational conviction that he must have smudged them with cream took hold. When his tongue swiped across to capture that remaining drop, Paula’s lips parted.
He coughed and stepped away to settle himself in a chair at the table, “Well, from the little I snitched, they were lovely, but we’ve mounds of chips to get through beforehand.”
“Right,” Paula sighed, and she lingered where he’d left her for a moment, then circled the table to sit near the condiments and shamelessly hog the vinegar.
A week’s worth of sodium and saturated fat later, they sprawled in the living room, discarding those cases which showed no trace of the cat picture. Knowing what to look for speeded their progress considerably, leaving them with a chillingly thick stack of 15 folders which they passed between them, searching for hidden commonalities. At first he held himself in check, as from the last time they’d worked together he knew that Paula read in near absolute stillness. Time and again a figure rose from the pages in front of him and he resisted the tingling awareness that urged him to follow. Finally, with three scene of crime photos spread out before him, he left the buzzing impression of Paula’s presence behind. He entered an alleyway awash in blood, and stepped over the body of John Archer, part-time security guard, left curled around an enormous set of keys which included the black cat keychain on its orange background. Archer’s throat had been slashed, and Tony peered down at the stain spreading across his crisp uniform shirt, and the spatter of red on his clean shaven cheek. Red there, but not blood.
The background shifted, and he watched the gloved hands affix a magnet to an industrial freezer door. Arvind Chaudhry sat propped inside, sedated and slowly freezing to death. Tony slipped within the freezer while the killer slipped out of the restaurant kitchen, pausing to empty its safe and leave every other rice sac and spice jar overturned. Turning his back to the sleek, retreating form he focused on the stilling body before him, wedged between tubs of sliced onions and a tall stack of deboned chicken, a vat of sauce leaking down from above lending one final indignity. He followed the progress of the streaming tomato pulp as it coursed over vacant eyes and slack jowls to almost entirely obscure a smudge near Chaudhry’s ear, right at the jaw-line.
Again everything changed, and he walked on quiet, soft-soled shoes, following a well-dressed woman through the labyrinthine sublevel of an industrial warehouse. She progressed sedately, and her ignorance of the peril lurking just out of sight sent blood pumping furiously through his veins. From the pocket of his tailored black jacket he withdrew a length of sturdy twine, tied to smooth wooden posts at either end. Everywhere weak lights tilted ominously across crumbling whitewashed walls, and he knew this would be a beautiful place to leave a body as breathtaking as hers. The contrast, after all, would be remarkable. And then with a burst of motion he was upon her, their bodies pressed feverishly close, and his leather encased hands gripped about those little wooden posts, squeezing the life from her. She writhed in desperation and his body surged obscenely, but before it had even begun she sagged in his grasp, and he let her fall to the floor. Leaning over her, still basking in the fierce swell of accomplishment but much calmer now, he opened the clasp of her purse and placed there a little bag containing a pair of earrings depicting black cats on a red and white backgrounds. Part of him moved to stand, ritual complete, but a stronger sense extended his hand once more in a final compulsion.
Looking at her lovely face perpetually locked in shock, he basked in the perfection of his skill which made the two of them one for a brief moment, then he reached forward and ran a gloved thumb across her lips, leaving a smudge at the corner of her mouth.
The present crashed back over him like a wave, washing away the shadow presence, and he registered the street lights blinking on outside, his rigid grasp on the edge of his coffee table, and Paula’s concerned face, lined in worry. But as he blinked back the images her face cleared and she eagerly questioned, “Did you get it?”
“It’s a kiss,” he rapidly imparted. Her lined eyes, already huge in the low light, widened. He continued, “When we identified him as a professional I worried that he might be beyond me. Hit men kill for money rather than the fulfillment of a psychological need. Although only a certain kind of person becomes a gun for hire, they don’t often exhibit the same psychological compulsions which manifest in a traceable pattern. I catch serial killers by understanding who they are and what kind of person they need to target. You catch a hit man with painstaking organized crime and narcotics legwork. But this - this is special, Paula. A paid killer who buries his own passion for murder within his work. The m.o. changes every time because it’s literally fit to order. But the cats, the kiss, those are personal. Not sure what the cat means yet, though I’d guess a calling card, a bit like an advert within professional assassins’ circles. But the kiss, that’s about intimacy. He perceives a relationship with his victims, or at least with their bodies, which he relates to better than he relates to any living person.”
He leaned forward, caught in the momentum of his profile. He lifted a hand to Paula’s cheek and drew her nearer. Looking into her eyes he intoned, “I’ve made you beautiful through my art. We’ve become one being and I know you more deeply than anyone ever will. You are my perfect creation, and I seal our union,” he drew his thumb across Paula’s lips, slipping it stickily across her lipstick, “with the only kiss we can share.”
Awareness of what he had done filtered slowly through the fog of discovery, but Paula remained before him, entranced. Her voice rumbled, “And he’ll just go on like that forever, only wanting people who can’t love him back?”
The question bites, and he leaned closer still, insisting in a rumble, “My desires destroy,” but Paula only pressed her face more firmly into his palm and parted her lips just enough for her breath to moisten his thumb. He completed the profile reluctantly, “because in the end, I’m inadequate and can only possess what I want by theft and stealth, by watching and hiding.”
“I don’t want to believe that,” Paula whispered, then she closed her eyes and blurted, “I’m a lesbian,” and his suddenly leaden hand dropped, “or I was. Until recently,” and she looked up again, not giving an inch.
He dearly wished for the ease of slipping into a damaged mind as disjointed images of Paula flickered through his thoughts. Paula, always a watchful presence in the squad room, Paula slightly guarded with DI Fielding as she’d never been before, Paula suddenly appearing from nowhere as he sketched the early details of this case while wishing he could talk with Carol. Carol.
“You were in love with Carol?” he concluded, and it was a statement in the form of a question.
“And so were you,” Paula answered without a trace of doubt to cloud her voice. He remembered that he should have added Paula’s skill in the interrogation room to his mental list of her attributes. Paula, the reader and observer of people.
“I don’t understand,” he protested weakly, the pieces of Paula tumbling through his thoughts, out of order - Paula the ex-lesbian bisexual, Paula in love with Carol, Paula here on the trail of a killer and her own career, Paula opening to his thumb as it skimmed the seam of her lips.
Paula tilted her head, considering. Hyper-aware of her every breath, every twitch, he felt a growing heat follow her gaze from his lined brow to his sharp nose, on to his compressed lips and coming to rest on the crease of his rolled-up shirt sleeve. He examined the dark hair which marked his forearm as part of a man’s body, and wondered what it must look like to Paula. Paula straightened again, and she placed her hand over his, saying, “We both loved Carol, and in that we’re not so different, you and I. Then, somehow, as I looked at you through Carol, she started fading around the edges until she disappeared completely, and I was left just watching you.”
He shivered. A thousand times with Carol he could have crossed this threshold, tilted an innuendo just slightly further, strained only slightly closer, but always a nauseating grip constrained him, holding him back from the edge. He watched time and again as she bedded men who were wealthy and stable, who wielded a casually potent sexuality, and were clearly infatuated with her, all the while knowing that they were disposable, and she waited for him. But the thought of it, of her appalled disappointment, ran ice through his lungs whenever the final moment of commitment loomed. It choked him now, souring the smooth glide of satisfaction that had swept him seamlessly from the signature’s discovery to Paula’s wondrously yielding lips. Nearly stuttering in mortification, he managed to whisper, “Paula, sexually I’m - I can’t always - I don’t -”
But Paula’s hand smoothed the words away from his lips and came to rest along his cheek, in a mirror of his own gesture. She hadn’t twitched at his admission, and she assured softly, “Can’t what, Tony? Can’t always come? Can’t always last? Can’t always get it up?” Paula shook her head, scattering those doubts. “I’ve been a girl’s girl for a long time, Tony. I don’t need those things from you.”
Frantic in the face of his own crumbling resolve, he grasped the nearest impediment to hand, “But your lovely tarts?” It sounded ridiculous the moment he’d said it, but Paula just smiled and pulled him to his feet as she stood. “Eat them with me for breakfast,” she suggested, and she led him toward the back rooms of his flat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the bedroom they stumbled in the dark and Paula giggled through the tension, searching out a small bedside lamp to cast a soft glow across his neat covers. She ripped the blankets back and swept them to the side. Recrossing the room to take in his heaving chest, she ran her fingers across Tony’s lips and exhaled heavily when his tongue met her and caressed each fingertip. His hand came up to stroke the lines of her palm, kneading the fleshy space between her thumb and forefinger in a gesture that tightened her nipples and spread warmth through her belly. She replaced her hand with her mouth, tasting his surprise. As he groaned she crushed him against her body while his hands came to tentatively rest on her shoulders. At her hip she felt the stirring of his cock and grinned into their kiss, checking off one less thing to keep him from embracing the experience, and thinking back more than ten years past to the last time she’d touched one of those.
She began to unbutton his shirt, but paused, startled, when she encountered the thick hair across his chest. She broke the kiss to look down and a second’s apprehension sliced through her. This didn’t look anything like a woman, but when she looked up again his face mirrored the hunger which radiated from every lover she’d ever had and it renewed the burn gathering inside of her. She leaned forward by inches and he met her half-way to nibble and nuzzle and taste again, while she went back to his buttons.
Shirt discarded, she attacked his taut nipples until a particularly vehement squeeze finally shattered the paralysis holding him immobile. On a gasp Tony’s hands ran down her back to encircle her hips, drawing her more firmly against him. Then, he slipped them back to cup the round curves of her ass, and she couldn’t suppress a squeak as he grasped her firmly by the thighs and carried her the few shuffled steps to the bed. Much stronger than she anticipated, she charted the rise and fall of his biceps, imagining being a spectator at the arm wrestling match that station lore said kicked off Tony’s friendship with Carol, shivering at the thought of both their arms straining in tandem.
Squeezing her thighs together against the growing pressure, she pushed them both to their sides, insinuating one thigh between his to press into the heat of his straining cock and grind herself against the point of his hip. And then his hand was there, right there, and he’d hardly even touched her yet, but she bucked into that broad hand through layers of fabric and moaned into Tony’s mouth, scaling the precipice of tension all too quickly. He separated from their kiss and looked directly into her pleasure wracked face while he opened the front of her jeans and slid a hand inside, sinking fingers smoothly through her wetness. She reeled at the feeling of his skin against hers, pressing firmly against her clit and drawing shock waves through the lips of her sex, until everything erupted, snapping her eyes shut to block the intensity of his stare and sending hot lassitude through every inch of her burning body.
Tony’s hand retreated, and she moaned long and low as she stretched, then slipped her sticky jeans and panties down her legs, yanked her stifling sweater over her head, and returned to pull away Tony’s pants and boxers. She rolled on top of him and his hands skimmed her lower back just as before, but his eyes suddenly seemed shuttered by an emotion she couldn’t quite diagnose, although it looked a lot like apprehension. Straddling one of his thighs she sat back slightly and traced a path from the crown of his head, over his temples, down his chin, across sturdy shoulders and back to his nipples, where she leaned close to nip and tongue. Tony’s head snapped back and his hips quivered in little abortive thrusts while Paula pushed her thumbs up and down his torso as she continued to lick. Finding his naval, she dipped one thumb into its curve, and startled slightly at the intensity of Tony’s moan.
Breathing hotly against his abdomen, she rasped, “Do you know what I think, Tony?” Her hands circled closer to his cock and he managed only a plaintive sound in reply. Grasping him firmly Paula stroked once, then twice, then abandoned his cock, despite his choked whine, to walk her fingers further back. As she cupped his balls, stroking and squeezing their weight, she continued, “I think that somewhere in you,” then she released those too and inched her fingers further back still to push and rub at the stretch of skin right behind. Tony gasped and shuddered, squeezing his hands rhythmically where they rested against the swell of her hips. Her whisper gone gravely and low, she finished, “you’re just a little bit of a girl’s girl as well,” and with that she pressed in tighter circles and brought her other hand to Tony’s straining cock, pressing herself slickly against his thigh while he writhed beneath her, as he came in long trembling pulses.
She stilled, body alight with triumph as Tony’s breathing evened and his eyes snapped open again. His own pleasure achieved, all the anxiety drained from his frame, leaving his gaze sharp and snapping with purpose. He rolled and loomed above her then moved to nuzzle behind her ear and trail sloppy, sucking kisses down her breast bone and over the peaks of her nipples. Descending to her quivering belly Tony paused and looked up again. “Can you come again Paula? Can you come over and over?” he asked darkly, and the words snapped her hips upward while his flickering tongue laved her naval, then he moved further downward to settle between her legs.
The remembered throb of her last orgasm and the rush of pushing Tony beyond his tightly sealed boundaries still sang through her body, magnifying every touch a hundred fold. His breath against her pulsing flesh sent her into a fit of little spasms, and the touch of his tongue roared through her, as she wound impossibly tighter. She tried to relax her probably painful grip on his hair, but the smooth pressure undid her completely and she tugged and twisted under him. Two fingers teased along the juncture of her thigh and hip until she forced the guttural sounds escaping her constricted throat to form the word “inside” and Tony slid them into her, long and slow, then crooked them forward, drawing the pleasure into a single point of light. With one last stroke of his lips she shattered, bowing her back upwards to crash back against the bed, panting and exhausted.
Vaguely, Paula heard Tony gathering blankets and settling in beside her, but the warm darkness beckoned and she sunk into dreamless slumber.
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Tony awoke to find one of his feet dangling off the side of the mattress and the hot press of a naked body against his own. Fuzzily, he rubbed his eyes, half expecting the smooth expanse of back in front of him to disappear once they adjusted to the light. Taking in every detail of the mused hair and the smell of musk, fruity shampoo, and spiced sugar that rose from her, Tony held himself still, prolonging the moment until daylight reclaimed them. But too soon she stirred, rolling toward him to blink sleepy eyes which lit up on a tentative smile. Her voice rough with morning disuse, Paula softly said, “Good morning,” and asked “You don’t look like this is what you expected to wake up to?”
Tucking the covers more firmly around them he assured, “It’s wonderful, waking up to you.” Paula’s smile widened, and she leaned forward to kiss him, delicately caressing lips still puffy from sleep. He felt light and fragile, as the memory of her knowing little hands freeing his every fearful want rose through his mind to stain his cheeks.
He broke away to glance at the bedside clock and Paula followed suit. Yet just as he charted a leisurely morning before his afternoon class, Paula sat up, saying, “We should go. The DI will open an inquiry once we’ve presented our evidence.” She winked at him, and then practically bolted out to the bathroom. As he heard the spray of the shower, he considered the halls of the station, full now of harsh innuendo, banked hostility, and millions of opportunities to fatally influence the balance of troubled, impressionable psyches. But then, he considered a thick stack of black cat postcards waiting to be sent, and saw himself piecing together the threads of desire which linked one man to a string of unchampioned victims, and Paula a steady presence at his side knotting those threads tight. He sat up and found his boxers, then shuffled into the kitchen to brew the alertness they would both need for the long day ahead. Paula burst out of the shower wrapped in a checkered towel, and snatched him from the kitchen to back him into a corner of the hall and tug playfully at his bottom lip with her teeth, before disappearing onto the bedroom. He showered and dressed in a daze, expectation buzzing in his ears.
Paula met him at the table with tea and pastry. “I’ll have to stop by my place on the way in,” she said, pushing the plate of tarts toward him. He reached out to touch her, but even through the sweeping haze of contentment, long chains of habit jerked him back. Paula stared quizzically, and took a long sip of tea. He tensed as the cup hit the saucer and she spoke, but she said, “You can touch me, Tony. Not just in bed, not just for sex - Anytime.” So he reached up and drew promises over the curve of her ear, the line of her nose, and the tickling tips of her eyelashes. Paula hummed low, and glowed beneath his hand.
He sat back, and cut a thin slice of Paula’s satiny homemade marzipan. Looking across at her inviting, steady gaze, the tart tasted of hope, comfort, and the welcome of an open door.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes: Images of Theophile Alexandre’s famous Tournée du Chat Noir Avec Rodolptte Salis poster can be found here in white and here in orange.
There’s quite a bit left to say about the black cat killer, but that’s a story for another day.
Four Quartets, Part 2
The sweet fire of coconut, cardamom, chilies, cloves, and cumin floated up as Tony played with the enclosure of his takeaway bag, thinking to himself “She’s a good copper and the case needs attention - nothing to fear.” Nothing at all, apart from the painfully patient way that Alex had explained she needed more to go on than his suspicions before she’d be willing to give up a quiet evening with her son. With a few more threads connected, he knew Alex would grumble but put her considerable skill and resources behind him. However, there remained a sizeable distance between a sketchy image of compulsive precision and the kind of profile that would actually yield suspects and a formal inquiry.
He breathed deeply. “It’s only about the case,” he reminded himself again. He shifted the sac and angled his elbow to press the buzzer.
The battered little talk box emitted a crackle, and Paula’s voice emerged, “Hello? Who’s there?”
Precariously shifting the takeaway atop his pile of boxes to free a hand, he held down the talk button. “It’s Tony,” was that too presumptuous now that the psychological evaluation business had finished? “er - Dr. Hill? Care to engage in an ancient ritual of friendship over a little detective work?”
Silence followed, although not the kind he could read without seeing her face and body. She could be entertaining, or just out of the shower, or simply appalled that he’d tracked her down at home. Quite a lot of police rigidly separated the job from their personal lives - he should have thought, should have asked earlier. But, of course, a friendly invitation at work was much easier to turn down than a man with food and a potentially career-making case on your doorstep. He hoped.
Static came from the little box, then Paula’s voice returned, “You’ve not come to make me your blood brother, have you Tony?” The tone could have been either teasing or dismayed, but he took encouragement from the choice of his first name.
Using his chin to stop the slide of their dinner across the boxes’ surface, he pressed the talk button again, “No, nothing of the sort. Food - well, food and crime. I thought we could eat together, and I’d appreciate another set of eyes on a case I’m trying to establish.” Silence again as he puffed out little clouds of frost and hoped that even if she chucked him out that she would come down to do so. Otherwise, he’d soon have to resort to holding the takeaway bag between his teeth to save it from splattering across her door and likely freezing the keyhole solid - not exactly the impression he’d counted on.
Before disaster struck the door opened on a metallic creak and Paula peaked out, taking in his awkward predicament and wryly asking, “So, what’s for tea, then? I’m not letting you in for less than fish and extra chips.” He managed a strangled “curry” with his face mashed between a container of saag and another of korma, pulling the bag in opposite directions as they slid apart, but she took pity on him, neatly snatching the sac and gesturing him inside. “Curry beats any amount of chips,” she assured him, and led him upstairs into her flat.
Paula brought the bag into the kitchen and began puttering noisily, calling “Red or white?” behind her. “Red,” Tony replied absently, circling the room to take note of the couch, plush chairs, and end tables nearly swallowed by the open space, and then to thumb through a collection of CDs with titles almost entirely foreign to him, and poke at a stack of post which included the Bradfield Times, and several crossword puzzle magazines. He jumped guiltily when she beckoned from the next room.
When he entered she poured him a glass of wine, but stopped short when she saw him and tilted her head in consternation. He looked down, suddenly fearing that stray curry or mud marred his clothes, but seeing nothing he looked up, puzzled and a bit sunken under the weight of her scrutiny. “Are you planning on staying?” Paula asked, and he replayed everything that had happened since he arrived, forehead scrunching in uncertainty. “I thought so?” he answered tentatively, then realization gripped him coldly, “but if it’s about the mail, I apologize. Can’t help myself, really. Post and media collections are the windows to the soul, and I’m in the soul business, or the brain business at any rate. But, still, horribly rude.” He trailed off as she looked first confused, then one corner of her lips lifted in amusement. “Sorry,” he finished lamely.
Shaking her head Paula said, “I’d have snooped myself, given the chance. Coppers aren’t so different from shrinks on that score. It’s just - you’ve still got your coat on as if you’re about to bolt for the door?”
Oh. And for that he’d nearly confessed to mail fraud? But she didn’t look upset, relieved if anything, so as Paula set his wine glass by a place setting and moved to pour for herself he quickly draped the offending outerwear on the rack near the door and took a seat.
Spooning heaps of rapidly cooling curry amidst Paula’s excited “Ooooo papadums,” and the crunching which followed, he surveyed the casual sweatshirt and tiny stud earrings that Paula wore below her artfully feathered hair, not so very different from how she looked at work. Although their clinical relationship dissolved with the filling of his report weeks ago, he had tried to keep track of her during the Masonic case they’d just finished, and now part of him noted the earrings as a positive sign of self-care. She functioned competently on the job and it appeared that she functioned here on her own as well, which was where his interest ended - as a clinician.
“So, the case?” Paula queried, bringing him back to his original purpose, and then she added, “Now that we’ve confirmed you’ve nothing to fear from me.”
Raising his brows in alarm at the possibility of further miscommunication, he had a sinking feeling the he may very well spent the entire night wrong-footed, but then the reference dawned on him. “Ah yes, neither of us vampires. I’ll even be the first to try the garlic naan to seal it.” Mouth full of bread, he savored Paula’s laughter. He told himself, “See? Easy. You can do this,” and shuddered minutely as a hole deep within whose existence he’d barely acknowledged became minutely less gaping. Swallowing around a growing lump in his throat born of private satisfaction, he brought them back to the work. “I’ve been looking through the single homicides, apparent suicides, and missing persons files.”
With wide, startled eyes Paula interrupted, “All of them?”
Recalling the insomniatic hours those files filled, he grimly agreed, “All of them. Especially when an offender crosses jurisdictional boundaries, spaces out offences over several years, or dramatically alters modus operandi, identifying a string of serial offenses can become nearly impossible. In every collection of unsolved crimes the probabilities suggest that some of them will have been committed by a single person. Now, we’re limited to Bradfield, but even so, there’s every reason to believe that at one time or another this station has processed crimes which fresh eyes might identify as the work of one individual, and I think I’ve come across a string of murders which all connect back to one killer.”
Wine glass poised halfway between the table and her mouth, Paula leaned forward and in a rapid burst asked, “All right, what’s the connection.”
“Ah,” he sighed, “that’s the trouble. I’ve not got it entirely pinned down yet. Precision and order - these are important to him, but why? Is he obsessive compulsive? Does he kill out of the same compulsion? Then why kill sloppily one day, and undetectably the next? He’s clearly intelligent to have gone this long without leaving trace evidence, and extremely skilled in chemistry, locks, and stealth, yet also with the capacity for incredible brutality.”
Paula’s wine glass returned to the table and she lifted one finger to stroke and pinch her lower lip. “So- clean, orderly, highly skilled, and changes m.o. frequently. At ease with a body do you think?” she clarified.
He nodded, “I’ve identified at least ten if I’m on the right track and none of them show signs of panic or clumsiness. If his first experience with a body is in our records I haven’t found it yet.”
“Clean, skilled, stealthy, and experienced,” Paula repeated, and while she was lost in thought on the edge of realization, for a moment he saw her with a slightly wider nose, broader mouth, and longer hair. Then he blinked and the phantom evaporated to be replaced by Paula in the flush of discovery. “A professional!” Paula announced. “You’re describing a professional hit man.”
Yes. It melted perfectly upon the figure he’d assembled. “Of course! And it explains why investigators flagged the suicides, even with so little contradictory evidence. Regardless of how convincing a scene the victims presented, they felt constructed, not by the desires of someone desperately depressed, but by someone who knew them better as corpses than as specific individuals - individuals who would have expressed very particular last intentions. Instead, they were generic, almost clichéd.” The discovery surged through him and he noted Paula’s eyes, darkly dilated by this first conquest in their pursuit. The eyes reminded him too of other things, and he sipped at his wine to provide an excuse for his rising blush.
“Ok,” Paula said, and tore off a piece of naan to scoop up the last of her curry, “lets see those case files.”
Hours later, Paula groaned and stretched. He looked up from yet another tan folder to catch a glimpse of skin revealed by the movement of her shirt, then quickly hidden from view. “I’m fading,” Paula said on a yawn, “so shall we compare notes and pick it up another night?”
He glanced at his watch, counting the long hours yet ahead before his buzzing subconscious would allow sleep, but nodded. “Sure. Have you found anything or am I completely off my nut?”
“Well, I don’t make any claims on the state of your nut,” Paula began, “but I think there’s something here.” She rifled busily between folders until selecting one and withdrawing a crime scene photo. “Take a look at the poster in the background. Have you seen that image before?”
There, behind the body of journalist Helen Boxer where he’d first felt the killer’s presence, hung a picture of a black cat in a white and red background. Stylized script in alternating black, red and white read, “Tournée du Chat Noir Avec Rodolptte Salis.”
Grabbing the nearest folder to hand, he pulled out the crime photos one after another. A missing person case, they showed the victim’s flat and the bus stop where he’d presumably been taken. “There!” he exclaimed, and pointed toward a keychain, barely visible in the jumble of pens, notebooks, and stale cups of coffee which littered a desk. The keychain showed an orange and red background, but the black cat and script it depicted unmistakably duplicated Helen Boxer’s poster.
“That’s it - it’s part of the signature,” he pronounced, then his eyes unfocused and he asked, “but how did you carry an entire framed poster with you and still go unnoticed?”
Paula startled, “So we’re assuming that he plants them? Not that he kills people who already have this image?”
Quite. Are you afraid of that picture? Of the black cat with supernatural powers? Shaking off the thought, he replied, “We should keep it in mind, but I think it’s far more likely that this image says something important to him, something he wants to communicate - to himself, to his victims, to us, or to someone else entirely?”
Paula leaned close, peering over his shoulder at the keychain, “And what does it say?” she asked, wafting alcohol and spices on her warm breath. He inhaled the intoxicating scent of nearness, but just as the presence of another body so achingly close combined with the rush of discovery threatened to take control of his yearning fingers, he stood, dislodging Paula who looked up at him with tight, hurt features. “I don’t know what it says,” he stated, too sharply. Seeing her cringe, he reminded himself that he wanted to be able to come back, to eat curry, review case notes, and drink wine, buoyed by the growing ease between them. Careful again, he softly clarified, “I don’t know yet. That’s a job for another night. Thank you, Paula.”
He watched her tense jaw ease, but noted a sadness that remained, leaving her flattened and tired. Together they tidied up their accumulated mountain of documentation, and he carried his boxes back to the door. “Goodnight, Tony,” Paula said and in the stinging familiarity of the scene he heard a deeper, throatier voice overlaid upon hers. Paula’s hand rose, as if to touch him, and under the spell of that absent voice he might have let her, but it dropped in the thick emptiness between them, so he said goodnight and turned his back on Paula to step out into the darkness.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The scent of vanilla wrapped Paula in a rich, sugary cloud of contentment, and she hummed along with the Indigo Girls while she chopped slivers of almonds, making a resolution that all her days off from now on should be filled with a little row of tarts. The infusion of sweets would go right to her hips, which made her smile as she imagined herself lush and strong, stuffed full of vanilla scented happiness.
She sprinkled little pieces of almond atop a palm-sized marzipan tart and nodded in satisfaction at the colorful quartet, then bent to find an appropriate box in the depths of her cabinet behind piles of disused pans. She tried to remember the last time she cooked for someone else, much less something other than a fry-up, but came up with nothing other than the soothing, distant image of thick, cinnamon covered fingers molding molasses colored dough.
Placing a jam tart, cream tart, and mince tart, along with the almond flecked marzipan tart, in a little carrying case, she considered yet again the wisdom of a phone call versus a direct attack. Although she could appreciate the tactical bluster involved in appearing without invitation or warning, after the case three weeks past she couldn’t add the burden of an unwelcome imposition. The case’s vicious inflammation of the usual station gossip decrying Tony as incompetent and sexually inadequate, revealing the force’s long-held disdain for psychology and any man disinclined to physical violence, would have been enough to prompt her to pay him a return visit. However, when she and DI Fielding escorted Tony from the hospital after the case concluded, the utter disarray of his appearance, fine tremors in his hands, avoidance of her eyes, and speechless trailing after the DI’s every move convinced her that something dire had transpired. So, she watched for him in the squad room, tracing the doorways he once passed through for any sign of his return, but for three weeks he didn’t come back, so she decided to give him room to recover.
However, as of today, enough was enough, so she gathered her phone and the squad directory, steeling herself for the possibility of a quiet evening in, eating tarts alone. She dialed, and the phone rang and rang until she nearly gave up, but then a click sounded and he answered, “Tony Hill.”
“Hi Tony, it’s Paula. Listen, I’ve been thinking about your black cat assassin and I’d like to push ahead on it, look through the files to pull out everything with that signature and start working out what else ties all the incidents together.” Silence echoed over the line and she mentally counted to ten, pressing the nail of her forefinger into the pad of her thumb with every passing second, then added, “Plus it’s been awhile since I’ve seen you eat and it’s my turn to bring by takeaway.” Silence still, and she might have assumed they’d disconnected if not for the sigh which finally came over the line. “All right,” he said, “come by - but I’m not letting you in for less than extra chips.” She rubbed at her sore thumb, smiling as the pain dissipated. “Extra chips it is,” she agreed and hung up. Thinking about how much easier that had gone than the cajoling she’d prepared for, she gathered her purse and sweets on a flutter of anticipation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When the buzzer sounded Tony gratefully left behind a stack of dreary student papers to answer. He pulled back the door to find Paula holding an intriguing array of sacs and packages, her usually spiky hair wilted by the misty rain. “I hope you have malt vinegar,” she said, extending a sac with a promisingly greasy aura. “Of course,” he replied, inviting her inside. She beamed and followed him up, while he mused that if only someone had explained vinegar’s ability to incite that level of cheerfulness, he’d have been exploiting its properties long ago.
Remembering their last visit, he took her soggy coat at the door, savoring the traces of fruity confectionary which wafted up around her, and pointed her toward clean towels in the bathroom to soak up the remaining damp. Dutifully bringing vinegar to the table, as well as beer, ketchup, and place settings, he unloaded a truly staggering amount of chips with fish and lemon wedges, then set upon the second, more mysterious package. Inside he found four little tarts, and he noted their slightly uneven edges, giving the cream one a surreptitious poke. Liking his finger, the richly buttery consistency coated his tongue and he tasted hints of coconut and vanilla. “Those are for afters,” came a low voice at the edge of the kitchen, but the way Paula gazed upon his finger, still pressed to his lips, looked anything but angry. He observed, “You made these.”
“Day off,” Paula explained, stepping closer. “Don’t usually have the time, but my dad’s baking spoiled me for shop sweets.” Her eyes lingered on his lips and the irrational conviction that he must have smudged them with cream took hold. When his tongue swiped across to capture that remaining drop, Paula’s lips parted.
He coughed and stepped away to settle himself in a chair at the table, “Well, from the little I snitched, they were lovely, but we’ve mounds of chips to get through beforehand.”
“Right,” Paula sighed, and she lingered where he’d left her for a moment, then circled the table to sit near the condiments and shamelessly hog the vinegar.
A week’s worth of sodium and saturated fat later, they sprawled in the living room, discarding those cases which showed no trace of the cat picture. Knowing what to look for speeded their progress considerably, leaving them with a chillingly thick stack of 15 folders which they passed between them, searching for hidden commonalities. At first he held himself in check, as from the last time they’d worked together he knew that Paula read in near absolute stillness. Time and again a figure rose from the pages in front of him and he resisted the tingling awareness that urged him to follow. Finally, with three scene of crime photos spread out before him, he left the buzzing impression of Paula’s presence behind. He entered an alleyway awash in blood, and stepped over the body of John Archer, part-time security guard, left curled around an enormous set of keys which included the black cat keychain on its orange background. Archer’s throat had been slashed, and Tony peered down at the stain spreading across his crisp uniform shirt, and the spatter of red on his clean shaven cheek. Red there, but not blood.
The background shifted, and he watched the gloved hands affix a magnet to an industrial freezer door. Arvind Chaudhry sat propped inside, sedated and slowly freezing to death. Tony slipped within the freezer while the killer slipped out of the restaurant kitchen, pausing to empty its safe and leave every other rice sac and spice jar overturned. Turning his back to the sleek, retreating form he focused on the stilling body before him, wedged between tubs of sliced onions and a tall stack of deboned chicken, a vat of sauce leaking down from above lending one final indignity. He followed the progress of the streaming tomato pulp as it coursed over vacant eyes and slack jowls to almost entirely obscure a smudge near Chaudhry’s ear, right at the jaw-line.
Again everything changed, and he walked on quiet, soft-soled shoes, following a well-dressed woman through the labyrinthine sublevel of an industrial warehouse. She progressed sedately, and her ignorance of the peril lurking just out of sight sent blood pumping furiously through his veins. From the pocket of his tailored black jacket he withdrew a length of sturdy twine, tied to smooth wooden posts at either end. Everywhere weak lights tilted ominously across crumbling whitewashed walls, and he knew this would be a beautiful place to leave a body as breathtaking as hers. The contrast, after all, would be remarkable. And then with a burst of motion he was upon her, their bodies pressed feverishly close, and his leather encased hands gripped about those little wooden posts, squeezing the life from her. She writhed in desperation and his body surged obscenely, but before it had even begun she sagged in his grasp, and he let her fall to the floor. Leaning over her, still basking in the fierce swell of accomplishment but much calmer now, he opened the clasp of her purse and placed there a little bag containing a pair of earrings depicting black cats on a red and white backgrounds. Part of him moved to stand, ritual complete, but a stronger sense extended his hand once more in a final compulsion.
Looking at her lovely face perpetually locked in shock, he basked in the perfection of his skill which made the two of them one for a brief moment, then he reached forward and ran a gloved thumb across her lips, leaving a smudge at the corner of her mouth.
The present crashed back over him like a wave, washing away the shadow presence, and he registered the street lights blinking on outside, his rigid grasp on the edge of his coffee table, and Paula’s concerned face, lined in worry. But as he blinked back the images her face cleared and she eagerly questioned, “Did you get it?”
“It’s a kiss,” he rapidly imparted. Her lined eyes, already huge in the low light, widened. He continued, “When we identified him as a professional I worried that he might be beyond me. Hit men kill for money rather than the fulfillment of a psychological need. Although only a certain kind of person becomes a gun for hire, they don’t often exhibit the same psychological compulsions which manifest in a traceable pattern. I catch serial killers by understanding who they are and what kind of person they need to target. You catch a hit man with painstaking organized crime and narcotics legwork. But this - this is special, Paula. A paid killer who buries his own passion for murder within his work. The m.o. changes every time because it’s literally fit to order. But the cats, the kiss, those are personal. Not sure what the cat means yet, though I’d guess a calling card, a bit like an advert within professional assassins’ circles. But the kiss, that’s about intimacy. He perceives a relationship with his victims, or at least with their bodies, which he relates to better than he relates to any living person.”
He leaned forward, caught in the momentum of his profile. He lifted a hand to Paula’s cheek and drew her nearer. Looking into her eyes he intoned, “I’ve made you beautiful through my art. We’ve become one being and I know you more deeply than anyone ever will. You are my perfect creation, and I seal our union,” he drew his thumb across Paula’s lips, slipping it stickily across her lipstick, “with the only kiss we can share.”
Awareness of what he had done filtered slowly through the fog of discovery, but Paula remained before him, entranced. Her voice rumbled, “And he’ll just go on like that forever, only wanting people who can’t love him back?”
The question bites, and he leaned closer still, insisting in a rumble, “My desires destroy,” but Paula only pressed her face more firmly into his palm and parted her lips just enough for her breath to moisten his thumb. He completed the profile reluctantly, “because in the end, I’m inadequate and can only possess what I want by theft and stealth, by watching and hiding.”
“I don’t want to believe that,” Paula whispered, then she closed her eyes and blurted, “I’m a lesbian,” and his suddenly leaden hand dropped, “or I was. Until recently,” and she looked up again, not giving an inch.
He dearly wished for the ease of slipping into a damaged mind as disjointed images of Paula flickered through his thoughts. Paula, always a watchful presence in the squad room, Paula slightly guarded with DI Fielding as she’d never been before, Paula suddenly appearing from nowhere as he sketched the early details of this case while wishing he could talk with Carol. Carol.
“You were in love with Carol?” he concluded, and it was a statement in the form of a question.
“And so were you,” Paula answered without a trace of doubt to cloud her voice. He remembered that he should have added Paula’s skill in the interrogation room to his mental list of her attributes. Paula, the reader and observer of people.
“I don’t understand,” he protested weakly, the pieces of Paula tumbling through his thoughts, out of order - Paula the ex-lesbian bisexual, Paula in love with Carol, Paula here on the trail of a killer and her own career, Paula opening to his thumb as it skimmed the seam of her lips.
Paula tilted her head, considering. Hyper-aware of her every breath, every twitch, he felt a growing heat follow her gaze from his lined brow to his sharp nose, on to his compressed lips and coming to rest on the crease of his rolled-up shirt sleeve. He examined the dark hair which marked his forearm as part of a man’s body, and wondered what it must look like to Paula. Paula straightened again, and she placed her hand over his, saying, “We both loved Carol, and in that we’re not so different, you and I. Then, somehow, as I looked at you through Carol, she started fading around the edges until she disappeared completely, and I was left just watching you.”
He shivered. A thousand times with Carol he could have crossed this threshold, tilted an innuendo just slightly further, strained only slightly closer, but always a nauseating grip constrained him, holding him back from the edge. He watched time and again as she bedded men who were wealthy and stable, who wielded a casually potent sexuality, and were clearly infatuated with her, all the while knowing that they were disposable, and she waited for him. But the thought of it, of her appalled disappointment, ran ice through his lungs whenever the final moment of commitment loomed. It choked him now, souring the smooth glide of satisfaction that had swept him seamlessly from the signature’s discovery to Paula’s wondrously yielding lips. Nearly stuttering in mortification, he managed to whisper, “Paula, sexually I’m - I can’t always - I don’t -”
But Paula’s hand smoothed the words away from his lips and came to rest along his cheek, in a mirror of his own gesture. She hadn’t twitched at his admission, and she assured softly, “Can’t what, Tony? Can’t always come? Can’t always last? Can’t always get it up?” Paula shook her head, scattering those doubts. “I’ve been a girl’s girl for a long time, Tony. I don’t need those things from you.”
Frantic in the face of his own crumbling resolve, he grasped the nearest impediment to hand, “But your lovely tarts?” It sounded ridiculous the moment he’d said it, but Paula just smiled and pulled him to his feet as she stood. “Eat them with me for breakfast,” she suggested, and she led him toward the back rooms of his flat.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In the bedroom they stumbled in the dark and Paula giggled through the tension, searching out a small bedside lamp to cast a soft glow across his neat covers. She ripped the blankets back and swept them to the side. Recrossing the room to take in his heaving chest, she ran her fingers across Tony’s lips and exhaled heavily when his tongue met her and caressed each fingertip. His hand came up to stroke the lines of her palm, kneading the fleshy space between her thumb and forefinger in a gesture that tightened her nipples and spread warmth through her belly. She replaced her hand with her mouth, tasting his surprise. As he groaned she crushed him against her body while his hands came to tentatively rest on her shoulders. At her hip she felt the stirring of his cock and grinned into their kiss, checking off one less thing to keep him from embracing the experience, and thinking back more than ten years past to the last time she’d touched one of those.
She began to unbutton his shirt, but paused, startled, when she encountered the thick hair across his chest. She broke the kiss to look down and a second’s apprehension sliced through her. This didn’t look anything like a woman, but when she looked up again his face mirrored the hunger which radiated from every lover she’d ever had and it renewed the burn gathering inside of her. She leaned forward by inches and he met her half-way to nibble and nuzzle and taste again, while she went back to his buttons.
Shirt discarded, she attacked his taut nipples until a particularly vehement squeeze finally shattered the paralysis holding him immobile. On a gasp Tony’s hands ran down her back to encircle her hips, drawing her more firmly against him. Then, he slipped them back to cup the round curves of her ass, and she couldn’t suppress a squeak as he grasped her firmly by the thighs and carried her the few shuffled steps to the bed. Much stronger than she anticipated, she charted the rise and fall of his biceps, imagining being a spectator at the arm wrestling match that station lore said kicked off Tony’s friendship with Carol, shivering at the thought of both their arms straining in tandem.
Squeezing her thighs together against the growing pressure, she pushed them both to their sides, insinuating one thigh between his to press into the heat of his straining cock and grind herself against the point of his hip. And then his hand was there, right there, and he’d hardly even touched her yet, but she bucked into that broad hand through layers of fabric and moaned into Tony’s mouth, scaling the precipice of tension all too quickly. He separated from their kiss and looked directly into her pleasure wracked face while he opened the front of her jeans and slid a hand inside, sinking fingers smoothly through her wetness. She reeled at the feeling of his skin against hers, pressing firmly against her clit and drawing shock waves through the lips of her sex, until everything erupted, snapping her eyes shut to block the intensity of his stare and sending hot lassitude through every inch of her burning body.
Tony’s hand retreated, and she moaned long and low as she stretched, then slipped her sticky jeans and panties down her legs, yanked her stifling sweater over her head, and returned to pull away Tony’s pants and boxers. She rolled on top of him and his hands skimmed her lower back just as before, but his eyes suddenly seemed shuttered by an emotion she couldn’t quite diagnose, although it looked a lot like apprehension. Straddling one of his thighs she sat back slightly and traced a path from the crown of his head, over his temples, down his chin, across sturdy shoulders and back to his nipples, where she leaned close to nip and tongue. Tony’s head snapped back and his hips quivered in little abortive thrusts while Paula pushed her thumbs up and down his torso as she continued to lick. Finding his naval, she dipped one thumb into its curve, and startled slightly at the intensity of Tony’s moan.
Breathing hotly against his abdomen, she rasped, “Do you know what I think, Tony?” Her hands circled closer to his cock and he managed only a plaintive sound in reply. Grasping him firmly Paula stroked once, then twice, then abandoned his cock, despite his choked whine, to walk her fingers further back. As she cupped his balls, stroking and squeezing their weight, she continued, “I think that somewhere in you,” then she released those too and inched her fingers further back still to push and rub at the stretch of skin right behind. Tony gasped and shuddered, squeezing his hands rhythmically where they rested against the swell of her hips. Her whisper gone gravely and low, she finished, “you’re just a little bit of a girl’s girl as well,” and with that she pressed in tighter circles and brought her other hand to Tony’s straining cock, pressing herself slickly against his thigh while he writhed beneath her, as he came in long trembling pulses.
She stilled, body alight with triumph as Tony’s breathing evened and his eyes snapped open again. His own pleasure achieved, all the anxiety drained from his frame, leaving his gaze sharp and snapping with purpose. He rolled and loomed above her then moved to nuzzle behind her ear and trail sloppy, sucking kisses down her breast bone and over the peaks of her nipples. Descending to her quivering belly Tony paused and looked up again. “Can you come again Paula? Can you come over and over?” he asked darkly, and the words snapped her hips upward while his flickering tongue laved her naval, then he moved further downward to settle between her legs.
The remembered throb of her last orgasm and the rush of pushing Tony beyond his tightly sealed boundaries still sang through her body, magnifying every touch a hundred fold. His breath against her pulsing flesh sent her into a fit of little spasms, and the touch of his tongue roared through her, as she wound impossibly tighter. She tried to relax her probably painful grip on his hair, but the smooth pressure undid her completely and she tugged and twisted under him. Two fingers teased along the juncture of her thigh and hip until she forced the guttural sounds escaping her constricted throat to form the word “inside” and Tony slid them into her, long and slow, then crooked them forward, drawing the pleasure into a single point of light. With one last stroke of his lips she shattered, bowing her back upwards to crash back against the bed, panting and exhausted.
Vaguely, Paula heard Tony gathering blankets and settling in beside her, but the warm darkness beckoned and she sunk into dreamless slumber.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tony awoke to find one of his feet dangling off the side of the mattress and the hot press of a naked body against his own. Fuzzily, he rubbed his eyes, half expecting the smooth expanse of back in front of him to disappear once they adjusted to the light. Taking in every detail of the mused hair and the smell of musk, fruity shampoo, and spiced sugar that rose from her, Tony held himself still, prolonging the moment until daylight reclaimed them. But too soon she stirred, rolling toward him to blink sleepy eyes which lit up on a tentative smile. Her voice rough with morning disuse, Paula softly said, “Good morning,” and asked “You don’t look like this is what you expected to wake up to?”
Tucking the covers more firmly around them he assured, “It’s wonderful, waking up to you.” Paula’s smile widened, and she leaned forward to kiss him, delicately caressing lips still puffy from sleep. He felt light and fragile, as the memory of her knowing little hands freeing his every fearful want rose through his mind to stain his cheeks.
He broke away to glance at the bedside clock and Paula followed suit. Yet just as he charted a leisurely morning before his afternoon class, Paula sat up, saying, “We should go. The DI will open an inquiry once we’ve presented our evidence.” She winked at him, and then practically bolted out to the bathroom. As he heard the spray of the shower, he considered the halls of the station, full now of harsh innuendo, banked hostility, and millions of opportunities to fatally influence the balance of troubled, impressionable psyches. But then, he considered a thick stack of black cat postcards waiting to be sent, and saw himself piecing together the threads of desire which linked one man to a string of unchampioned victims, and Paula a steady presence at his side knotting those threads tight. He sat up and found his boxers, then shuffled into the kitchen to brew the alertness they would both need for the long day ahead. Paula burst out of the shower wrapped in a checkered towel, and snatched him from the kitchen to back him into a corner of the hall and tug playfully at his bottom lip with her teeth, before disappearing onto the bedroom. He showered and dressed in a daze, expectation buzzing in his ears.
Paula met him at the table with tea and pastry. “I’ll have to stop by my place on the way in,” she said, pushing the plate of tarts toward him. He reached out to touch her, but even through the sweeping haze of contentment, long chains of habit jerked him back. Paula stared quizzically, and took a long sip of tea. He tensed as the cup hit the saucer and she spoke, but she said, “You can touch me, Tony. Not just in bed, not just for sex - Anytime.” So he reached up and drew promises over the curve of her ear, the line of her nose, and the tickling tips of her eyelashes. Paula hummed low, and glowed beneath his hand.
He sat back, and cut a thin slice of Paula’s satiny homemade marzipan. Looking across at her inviting, steady gaze, the tart tasted of hope, comfort, and the welcome of an open door.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes: Images of Theophile Alexandre’s famous Tournée du Chat Noir Avec Rodolptte Salis poster can be found here in white and here in orange.
There’s quite a bit left to say about the black cat killer, but that’s a story for another day.