Work Text:
“What still doesn't make sense,” said Lisbon, stepping into the killer’s kitchen and pulling on a fresh pair of gloves, “is why he left Maeve Hammon alive.”
“Mm,” said Jane. His hands were, of course, bare. He’d already left prints on the doorway; she estimated less than two minutes before he touched something important. Someday she was going to handcuff him to a desk and make him fill out the incident report for SOP deviation.
“‘Mm,’ as in you know the reason? Or ‘mm,’ as in you want me to think you know the reason, but you’re buying yourself time to look for clues in his house?”
He grinned at her, entirely shameless. “Lisbon. It hurts when you doubt me.”
“I’m sure you’ll manage to get through the pain.”
He was looking at the pantry now, intrigued by the spice rack, and— damn it, there it was, he’d picked up the cinnamon. Another twenty minutes to update the CoC form. “Maeve Hammon,” he said, opening the cap and sniffing it, “did something for Vickers. Something that his first victim refused.”
“And what was that?”
“I’ll tell you in—oh, a couple hours or so. Did Vickers go to culinary school?”
“No,” she said. “Straight through, high school to a PhD. I think he managed the on-campus cafe for a while in college.”
“Hm. All the best chefs are chemists, you know. Salt, fat, acid, heat…it’s all experimentation. How about you, Lisbon? Cooked anything besides noodles recently?”
She ignored this, as he knew she would. It was helpful to be predictable with Jane, because then he was more likely to listen when she wasn’t. “Cho said that Maeve didn’t give anything helpful in her interview.”
“Yes,” Jane said quietly, “which means the shame of telling us was worse than the idea of her abductor going free.”
Her hand went briefly to the cross on her necklace. She would try interviewing Maeve without parents, she thought, when they got back to Sacramento. Just her and Van Pelt in the room. With the full story, they would hopefully be able to give Anna Simon’s parents closure. It had been a tough case: a sophomore at Berkeley found in the trunk of her car, dead by suspected overdose, brutally beaten postmortem. By all accounts a model student; even under Cho’s interrogation, the roommate insisted that Anna would never take drugs. And, strangely enough, the coroner confirmed that the tox screen was inconclusive.
They’d wasted two days on the ex-boyfriend before another girl was kidnapped, at which point the media blew up and Hightower started calling her three times a day for updates. Finally they connected the case with missing materials from the science lab, and Jane made a scene in Anna’s Organic Chemistry lecture which revealed—dramatically, by way of projection screen—the chemistry professor’s obsessive photo collection. He had stalked Anna for months. A thorough search of his lab had revealed 80 grams of synthetic designer drugs, some proprietary mix that the crime lab was still analyzing, which he was presumably selling to pad his income.
Unfortunately, Jane’s setup gave Vickers time to escape. He was the type of obsessive, paranoid perp that Lisbon hated, and one who enjoyed outsmarting the police. Van Pelt couldn't get anything off his laptop, since the files had all self corrupted, and he’d laid a series of false trails that led to various colleagues. The LEOs ran a cursory search of his home, which yielded not the abducted girl but instead a rudimentary surveillance system, configured for remote access.
Unimpressed with the time necessary to track the system’s signal, and unpleasantly antsy about the missing girl, Jane had taken the initiative—without approval, of course— to stage a recorded conversation that he claimed would spook Vickers. Of course he was right. Vickers dumped the second victim at a gas station, miraculously alive, and was sloppy enough to leave a trail as he fled. Finally Rigsby and Van Pelt cornered him at a motel in Antioch, where he followed the profile to a T by running at them with a prop gun: suicide by cop. One girl dead, one girl saved, mandated therapy all around.
Before the case was officially closed, Lisbon had decided to return to the house. Her gut told her the local LEOs had missed relevant evidence—other girls he’d stalked, maybe, or another hidden stash of drugs. In his characteristically enigmatic way, Jane volunteered to accompany her. She regretted agreeing almost immediately, because he spent half the drive learning to perform Who’s on First, verbatim, and the other half forcing her to say Abbott’s lines. There was a reason the team had all invested in noise-cancelling headphones.
So far, she wasn’t sure his help was worth the cost. The house was unremarkable: the sparse, elevated bachelor pad of an intellectual. Fancy cheese in the fridge, fancy espresso machine on the counter. The living room was dominated by wall-to-wall built-ins filled with nonfiction hardcovers, with titles like Memoirs of a Chemical Boyhood and Way Beyond Monochrome. The couch did not display any sign of being routinely used; the TV, once turned on, was set to a news station and did not have cable.
“I heard Rigsby and Van Pelt are taking Valentine’s Day off,” said Jane, kneeling so he could poke his head into the empty fireplace. A fireplace! Californians were so dramatic about their 50 degree winters. “Going somewhere? A little staycation, perhaps?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said primly. “They both happened to request Tuesday off, separately, and I approved their requests.”
“Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing. Well, I wish them a lovely evening, even if they are suckers for falling prey to that marketing scam.”
“I’m glad Rigsby’s trying to do right by her.”
“Yes, she's the type of woman where conventional traditions matter. They’ll go to an expensive Italian place, and he'll bring her roses—not red, that would be too on the nose. Pink. And caramels, not chocolate, thanks to my discerning advice. I’m a romantic at heart.”
She went out the door to the small garden. The plots were clearly labeled and organized: kale, carrots, beets. Clearly Vickers had been meticulous in all areas of his life.
“You, on the other hand…you think Valentine’s Day is frivolous and overblown, but you didn't always. Something— no, someone— turned you off it. Who was it?”
She moved to the bedroom. Nothing here either, which was arguably suspicious. Normal people hid their secrets where they slept.
“He went too big, I bet. Surprised you. Made you feel unknown…unseen. If I was taking you out for Valentine’s Day, I’d bring you those orange dahlias you like, and we’d go see a spy movie at an eat-in movie theater.”
“Are you planning on helping with the search at all?” she asked.
“Whatever matters to Vickers will be in his office,” he said. “But I know you want to follow proper procedure and search the entire house, so I have to amuse myself somehow.”
“Oh, well as long as you’re amused.”
They made their way into Vickers’ office. There were more bookshelves, and a wide stack of filing cabinets, but the desk itself was bare. The south-facing wall had a huge hole where the officers had ripped out the surveillance camera system.
Jane ignored this; he was more interested in the desk drawers, which he jimmied open with a set of lockpicks that she pretended not to see. He removed the drawers and dumped the contents onto the floor. Studied the piles for a while, and hummed in thought. Then, inexplicably, he spun 180 degrees and pulled the Berkeley diploma away from the wall—the undergrad degree, not the PhD. This revealed a key attached to the back of the frame. He held it up and grinned at her in delight. Unbelievable.
“What does it open?” she asked.
“Come on, Lisbon, I can’t do everything myself.”
Usually when he was patronizing it meant he didn’t know the answer. She rolled her eyes and took the opportunity to scour the rest of the room. There was a stack of exams on a filing cabinet, half of them graded. Anna’s was second from the top; she had gotten an A. Lisbon looked at the paper longer than was strictly necessary, then placed it gently on top of the pile and continued her search. The books here were more varied: fiction classics of the 19th and 20th centuries, cookbooks, an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and—interestingly—a number of books on photography techniques.
“The pictures we found of Anna were digitized,” she mused, “but they didn’t look like they were taken by a digital camera, and Vickers has books on film photography. It fits the profile— attention to detail, control, love of the old-fashioned. So where was he developing the photos?”
Jane tapped his nose. “Astute question. Presumably wherever the key opens.” Intrigued again, he joined her at the bookshelves, ran his fingers slowly over the spines.
“What are you looking for?”
“Vickers kept a diary. I thought so before, but now I’m sure of it. He would’ve hidden it in one of three places: his bedroom, his office, or the secret room we’re searching for. My money’s on the office.”
She left him to his hunch and spent the next ten minutes on a fruitless hunt for a darkroom. Then she heard a shout of triumph.
“I’m a genius! Lisbon, tell me I’m a genius.”
He’d found the journal within a decoy book jacket with a different title. He was already parked in the office’s worn Herman Miller, feet crossed on the desk, flipping through the first few pages.
“How did you find it?”
“Agatha Christie,” he said, with no elaboration. Lisbon looked at the desk again. The floor under it looked like hardwood, but was newer than the floors in the rest of the house, which was one of those classic Craftsman bungalows that dotted the hills of Montclair.
Jane turned another page. “Mm hmm,” he said.
“Anything you'd like to share with the class?”
“Not yet. Interesting, though...very interesting.”
“Any evidence that the murder was premeditated?”
“The opposite, I think. But I was right about the cinnamon.”
The cinnamon! But she’d learned by now that he wouldn’t explain himself, not until he had the whole picture. Much to her—and the team’s—chagrin.
She looked at the floor again, frowning. The police had coordinated with SWAT on a tactical analysis, in case Vickers fled to his home. Her gut said something was off— the lack of debris in the gaps, maybe? The house had been built in the 60s.
“I’ve got something,” she said. Jane should be proud of her, for listening to her intuition. She crouched under the desk and knocked on the floor: nothing. She moved six inches backward and knocked again. There was a distinctly hollow thunk.
Above her, Jane said: “You should come read this. The man was impressively creepy.”
“A little busy, here.” She stood up and dragged the desk back, which didn’t seem to disturb Jane’s reading at all. Then she knelt and stuck her fingers into one of the clean, too-wide gaps between the floorboards. There must be some sort of catch—yes, there it was. Sharp against her fingers. “See? Looks like I didn’t need you after all,” she told him smugly, “just good old-fashioned police work.”
At last he looked up from his reading. It was helpful that his ego was so easy to exploit. His face was creased with concern, which she attributed to whatever perverted ramblings he’d been immersed in. “Hold on a second,” he said.
“There could be a body in here, Jane. There could be another victim.”
“Lisbon,” he said, with rising urgency, slamming the journal shut—he was an absurdly fast reader, he was almost all the way though— “I really would not recommend—”
She slid her finger against the catch and opened the door to the hidden basement.
There was a click as some kind of mechanism triggered; a fan above them turned on. Then a gentle whoosh as a flurry of fine, blush-pink powder flew off the fan blades and began to fall downward.
“...Oh,” said Jane, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”
She coughed, gagging a little. God, the stuff was already in her throat somehow, bitterness filling her nostrils— she stumbled to the kitchen, poured half the salt shaker into a glass of water from the sink. Did emetics work on powder? She didn’t think so.
“That won’t work,” Jane called from the other room. “You’ll just give yourself hypernatremia.” He sounded as relaxed as ever. But then again, he sounded the same way when criminals pointed weapons at him.
She weighed the merits of this advice and compromised by using her finger instead, at which point she promptly threw up in the sink. Almost entirely water: she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. She stared at the mess in dismay, ran the tap until it disappeared down the drain, and then slunk back to the office to rejoin Jane. He hadn’t even taken his feet down.
“We need to start making calls,” she said. Adrenaline was sharpening her senses, her fight-or-flight response kicking in. “My brothers—and the team should hear it from us. I’m sorry, I should’ve listened to you.”
“As much as I love to say I told you so, I feel compelled to tell you that we aren’t dying.”
This evoked a flood of relief, mixed with a healthy dose of skepticism. “It was a trap.”
“Yes, but not necessarily a fatal one. Vickers was paranoid, but he wasn’t one for premeditated murder.”
She regarded him suspiciously. “Tell me what was in the journal, Jane.”
He shrugged. “The man was a scientist; he documented everything. Including some extremely creative, extremely illegal research on the effects of combining stimulants with psychedelics and PDE5 inhibitors.” He opened the journal to a random page and showed her: half of the page was filled with diagrams of molecules she didn’t recognize, and the rest by a convoluted formula. “I’m hoping he acted as his own test subject, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
She winced. “So what did we get dosed with? Hallucinogens?”
“Not exactly.”
He was freaking her out. “Will you just spit it out?”
“From what I can tell,” Jane said, “he managed to develop a kind of…chemical aphrodisiac.”
Against her best intentions, she flushed. “That’s not funny.”
“Well, it’s not a joke.”
“It’s inappropriate! I thought you learned your lesson the last time we were in this situation. Remember that case? When you let me believe I was going to die?”
“Yes, I recognize that I’ve created something of a boy-who-cried-wolf dynamic. But in this case, I promise, the wolf is real.”
“Enough. I’m not doing this again. We need to call headquarters, right now.” She extracted her cell phone from her pocket and flipped it open; Jane snatched it out of her hand before she could react. She made a noise of protest.
“Let’s think about this for a moment.”
“We’ve been exposed to an unknown substance with potentially fatal effects. We need lab techs, we need forensics, we need—”
“In 60 to 90 minutes,” said Jane, “we may both be experiencing symptoms consistent with extreme sexual arousal. I don’t know about you, but I would prefer not to interact with the entire CBI forensic team in that state.”
“What the hell is your game here?”
“Lisbon, would you listen to what I’m telling you?”
He was so damn convincing, and almost always right, which was why he was so dangerous. But he wouldn’t lie if he believed she was really dying. “What you’re saying is ridiculous. Even if you are telling the truth about the journal, Vickers must have been deluded, or made up the whole thing. A chemical aphrodisiac? That doesn’t exist.”
“This is the missing piece of the puzzle. Think about it— Vickers is obsessed with Anna Simon, stalking her. At the same time, he’s smuggling materials from his workplace to develop designer drugs. He creates this—aphrodisiac compound—as a fun little side project and tries to use it on her, but she rejects him. So he kills her. Then he’s so frustrated with his failure, he kidnaps another victim with the same physical appearance and tries again. Anna showed all the signs of a drug overdose, but the standard drug screen was inconclusive. Maeve’s disproportionate shame… It makes sense. Why would Vickers leave his cameras running once he left? He didn’t need them to know we were coming, or to know if police died…he thought he could get footage of the coppers in a compromised position. Whether for leverage or for sport, I’m not sure.”
“You think he dosed Maeve with the drug we just ingested?”
“Yes, I do.” He thought for a moment. “Brave girl.”
Men always said that, when the female victims lived. When men were brave it was because they’d done some heroic deed; when women were brave, it was because they’d been hurt.
She said, with more conviction than she felt: “Jane, either give me my phone back, or I’ll leave without it.”
“Just give me five minutes. Please? Five minutes to show you.” He really did look sincere. He wasn’t displaying any of his usual tells, and there was a kind of edgy, feral expression in his eyes, like a wild animal scenting a predator on the wind.
“Fine,” she said reluctantly. A quarantine protocol would take double that time anyway. And she always wanted to believe that when Jane let his guard down, it meant he was telling the truth. But she'd been fooled before.
They went down into the basement together. Predictably it was small, since it was a California basement that wasn’t meant to exist. The room had been divided into two sections. One had the darkroom setup they’d been looking for, with shallow bins on a long plastic table and several film negatives hanging from clothespins on a string. The other seemed to be a cross between a guestroom and a home lab: a blue sleeper sofa with matching cushions, a pile of thick blankets, a standing desk, and six humming minifridges against the wall. Incongruently, there was also a small, empty cage in one of the corners, the type of thing her niece kept a hamster in.
Jane went directly to the farthest corner, stood on his toes, and ripped out the small camera mounted near the ceiling. The system had been disabled, but she supposed an abundance of caution was appropriate. He came back across the room, picked up one of the blankets, sniffed it a couple times, and laid it over the sofa. Then he pulled the journal from his pocket and handed it to her. There were a few pages with the corners helpfully folded over; she turned to the first one.
Then she turned to the second, and the third.
“Oh,” she said faintly, and sat down, hard. Luckily Jane had placed the blanket exactly where she landed. “Oh, God. This isn’t happening. I fell asleep in the car, this is a dream—”
He pinched her.
“Ow!”
“Just trying to help. I am quite flattered you called it a dream and not a nightmare, by the way.”
“How can you be so calm?”
He considered her. “What did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a child?”
“What? How is that relevant?”
“Indulge me.”
“A cop,” she said.
“Before that.”
“Why do you assume I didn't always want to be a cop?”
“Well, did you?”
“No,” she said. He almost never asked about her childhood, not unless she brought it up first.
“You wanted independence, autonomy…something that rewarded following the rules, but with enough novelty to give you that thrill you secretly liked. A job where people would listen to you, and you could go somewhere else…Pilot? Doctor?”
“Firefighter,” she said.
He tilted his head. “Huh. I guess I’m losing my touch.”
“I was ten, things were…different. And my uncle volunteered at the fire station—my mother’s brother, the one who taught me to play euchre. Why does any of this matter?”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “But now you’re a little calmer, and I know that even as a child you had a cool head in a crisis.”
She gave him a small smile to concede the point. Then she stood, walking over to the other side of the room, looking at the negatives hung to dry. They were landscapes, taken in a grove of redwoods. “What do you think will happen to us?”
“I imagine we’ll feel something like if you gave a middle school boy Viagra and Ecstasy, and then put him in a department store where all the screens were playing porn.”
“Honestly,” she said.
He sighed. “The drug causes intense arousal, but supposedly the whole point is to get the user to…engage. The longer they wait, the more they display symptoms like the beginning of an overdose, or serotonin syndrome. Agitation, fever, increased heart rate and blood pressure. Seizures, in theory. On the other hand, doing the do—” he punctuated this with air quotes— “stabilizes those symptoms, and the body equilibrates. According to the notes the experience is supposed to be extraordinary. In a sick and twisted sort of way, of course.”
“Right,” she said faintly. God. He really was telling the truth; this was really happening. How much longer would they be able to laugh it off? How much longer until the drug threw her caution to the wind and she— flung herself at him, without a care for what it meant. Or he flung himself at her. How many women had he slept with since his wife's death? The psychiatrist, presumably. Talk about abuse of power. Lisbon didn't think he'd gotten there with Kristina Frye. Sometimes he flirted outrageously with witnesses, but as far as she knew he’d never followed through.
She’d rarely seen him really out of control— Red John-related cases, of course, and a couple breakdowns when he’d first joined the CBI. He liked to make people think he was unhinged all the time, but that was theatrics. But the first case they’d worked together where a kid died, after they caught the murderer, she'd found him sitting in his car, wasted out of his mind, and there was a deep crack in the rearview mirror. She could tell his distress was real because he was so quiet, and because he looked her in the face and said, gravely serious: I’m so sorry you had to see me like this.
Jane said, no doubt in response to whatever complicated expression had crossed her face: “Listen to me. Vickers killed Anna, which probably means she rejected him, even after a targeted dose. The two of us are grown adults who indirectly ingested…let’s say 200 milligrams each, maximum.”
“That’s one theory,” she said. “Here’s another: Anna died from the effects of an untested, unregulated drug that eventually overwhelmed her system. Or, the drug wasn’t strong enough to give Vickers what he wanted at first, so he reengineered it before abducting Molly and setting the trap. Or, the effects of the drug killed Anna because she wouldn’t have sex with him.” Coward: if she’d come up with these possibilities, then all of them had occurred to Jane too.
“What I meant is that we can be sensible about this.”
“And that’s always been one of your strengths. Self restraint. Maturity.” She paced the length of the room.
He said, as though demonstrating just how sensible he could be, “Do you think there’s a thermometer anywhere in this place? I’d take a mirror in a pinch.”
There was a thermometer in the bathroom cabinet; she retrieved it for him.
“Good,” he said, and took several deep, even breaths. “Okay. We should take our temperature. Let me check your pupils too.”
She obeyed his directions mechanically. Was the color of his eyes more saturated than usual? His pupils did seem larger, but that could’ve been the light, or Mashburn’s little trick. Sometimes she forgot how handsome he was; holding his gaze for too long made her squirm. He obviously knew that she thought he was attractive. She was trying not to think about just how clear that might become.
“Pupils are dilated, but you're only at 99 point two,” he said, “That’ll do for a baseline. Let’s check your pulse—” and he reached for her wrist.
She felt a surge of desire, followed by a sense of alarm that made her rocket up and away, fast. She put three feet of space in between them. She’d let him inside her head only once: safe at home, stone cold sober, and under threat of life in prison. Did he consider that a standing invitation?
“Lisbon, I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to.”
“I want you to stay out of my head,” she said. She had reached instinctively for the holster on her hip.
“Whoa,” he said, concern leeching into his voice, hands raised in surrender. “Slow down. I’m not trying to hypnotize you, I promise. I wouldn’t. Not unless you asked.”
“Swear on their graves this isn't another trick.”
“I can’t. Please— you’re agitated, remember, you’re not thinking straight—”
“Swear,” she insisted.
“I swear it on your life. Okay? I swear on your life. I think you should put your gun away. Please.”
Slowly, she walked back to the table. Double checked: full clip, safety on. She put the gun down. Her muscles were beginning to experience the weakness that precipitated an adrenaline crash. He was right: she wasn't thinking straight. What was wrong with her? It was the sudden flood of attraction that had thrown her off, her mind defending itself against such a clearly induced sensation. She took a deep breath in time with Jane, then another, and then he opened his arms to her and she fell into them with relief. When he hugged her it felt like they were comrades in arms, about to do battle together. But there was no real enemy for her to fight.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, the sound muffled against his vest. “That's not how science works.”
“I agree. Totally made up.”
“I don’t like this.”
He stroked her hair. “We’ll be okay. We always are. And just think—you could've brought Rigsby along instead.”
She laughed, harder and longer than she meant to. Abruptly she extricated herself from his grasp and pressed her hands to her eyes.
“Listen,” he started, but she put up a hand, looked away. If he said anything that made it seem like he was trying to influence her, she would lock him in this room, and that wouldn’t help either of them.
“I’m going to take a break,” she told him. “I will be back in ten minutes.”
"You don't have to-"
"Ten minutes,” she repeated, and walked upstairs before he could say anything else. She went to the bathroom, because there was a notable absence of any personal items there. Closed the toilet seat, sat on top of it, and ground her hands into her eyes again; then, despite herself, burst into silent, angry tears. Damn it—damn it. The victims had been teenagers, trapped with a killer, a rapist who had probably watched and waited for them to break. She was a cop, a grown woman. And she was with a friend—someone she would trust with her life. If not her career, if not her heart. But the old familiar sensation hovered: the feeling of waiting for some unknown breaking point, dreading the inevitable conclusion, and just wanting it to be over already, because the anticipation was somehow worse than whatever might happen.
When she returned to the basement, relief flashed over Jane’s face. He was a little scared too, she realized. He covered it better. And he wasn’t like her—he didn’t mind waiting. More time to plan.
"How are you doing?" he asked.
"Fine," she said. There was a comfort in blatantly lying to him, because it was the same as telling the truth without having to hear it. “You?”
“Sometimes I wonder what it would take for you to say you weren’t fine. Nice to know we haven’t reached that point.”
It did not escape her notice that he’d dodged the question. “Maybe a plane crash, or an avalanche.”
“What if we were shipwrecked on a desert island?”
“I’m sure you’d create some kind of complicated smoke signal to attract a rescuer.”
“You’re selling yourself short. You’d build a boat and have us out of there in days.”
There was a moment of quiet, which she might normally appreciate, but in the silence she became conscious of her own thudding pulse. She was forcibly reminded of her first experience smoking pot—17 at a football party, two hits from what she’d thought was a cigarette—during which she'd wedged herself into the corner of a couch and tried to monitor her symptoms. Was the dry mouth a side effect, or was she just nervous? Was it the pot making her hungry, or the fact that she’d skipped dinner?
“When was the first time you got high?” she asked.
He was clearly taken by surprise. “Lisbon! I’m an officer of the law.”
“You’re a consultant. You practically grew up in the circus. You expect me to believe you never tried anything?"
“You better not be wearing a wire. If you are, this is quite the convoluted scheme to get a confession.”
“Oh, please, I have a laundry list of other things I could charge you with.”
“Hm. Well, despite my crime-riddled childhood, I was not a big proponent of drugs. I did ingest LSD when I was twelve—”
“Twelve!”
“It was an accident. You know— one of the tightrope walkers was a big psychedelic fan, I didn't know LSD was a liquid. One thing led to another. Could happen to anyone, honestly.”
She tried to imagine it: twelve-year-old Jane on an acid trip, wandering under the stars of some flyover state. “And how would you rate the experience?”
“Well, I became a great fiddle player,” he said, “and I was convinced I could communicate with one of the lions, who wanted to explore vegetarianism. But ultimately, not an experience I wanted to repeat. I couldn't string two thoughts together.”
That was the thing about Jane: he was honest, frequently, if you knew how to look for it. She cleared her throat and looked at her watch. “It’s been almost an hour since we were dosed,” she said. “We should check our vitals.”
They were both hovering around 100 degrees, pulses in the 130s and climbing. Now that reality was setting in, and she’d had a chance to compartmentalize, she was finding it easier to reason her way through the situation. As Jane had pointed out, she had always—by necessity—been good at keeping her head in an emergency.
“We should set some sort of threshold. When we need to start…weighing our options.”
“You can still call the team,” Jane offered, rather unconvincingly.
“No, you were right. There’s not enough time. What the hell am I going to put in the case report?”
“Mm. That was my main concern as well.” He’d begun to fiddle with his wedding ring, twisting it around and around his finger. Was he thinking about his wife? She was having a hard time looking away from his hands. Imagining what they would feel like on her skin.
“Do you— feel anything yet?” she asked.
He let out a sharp bark of laughter. “I think that's safe to say, yes.”
She looked at the way he was sitting, the pillow he'd pulled onto his lap. Oh. He wasn't immune, as cool as he managed to appear. She knew it was difficult for him to be trapped in a situation he couldn’t talk or think his way out of. Usually it meant he would shut down, escape into his mind palace. Was that his plan now?
“The pony you got me for my birthday,” she said. “Do you know what its name was?”
“Mm-mm.”
“Britney Spears. Apparently the breeder was a big fan.” Silence. “I gave it to a therapeutic program in Elk Grove. I’ve visited a couple times. They even let me ride it because I was under the weight limit. How embarrassing is that?”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “That's how my tricks work.”
He mulled this over for a while, and then said, “I’m surprised your feet could even reach the stirrups.”
She smiled a little, relieved. So they would face this together. “I’m glad it’s you here,” she admitted.
“Really? I’m not.”
This stung, though she did her best to hide it. The dismissal evoked a kind of juvenile insecurity that she preferred to avoid. She’d spent years cultivating a specific persona—that careful, coolly professional balance between mediator and ice queen—which had taken her from a rookie cop to the top of a CBI unit. She wanted the team to see the leader and not the woman. But Jane was—something of an exception. “I mean I trust you,” she said.
“Lisbon, God, I didn't mean it like that. I meant— ah.” He paused, considering. She saw the moment he made his decision. “If given the choice, I would have preferred this experience unfold differently.”
Oh.
Now? He chose now, to drag this unspoken thing into the light? It was so classic Jane, to keep her at arm’s length and then try to make dramatic, exaggerated confessions in a life or death situation.
“Hush,” she said. Her tone was joking, but she put real weight behind it. She knew he'd understand.
“All right. I just want you to know, in case—”
“Vitals again,” she said sharply, and snatched up the thermometer. As she put it in her mouth, he made a stifled noise and looked away.
103.1. Jane was at 102.4. Heart rates 80% of maximum and climbing. Her skin felt hot. She could tell that she was wet, enough to soak through her underwear. She cast around for ideas; she had only ever tried to make herself more turned on, not less. She knew it was different for men.
“What are you thinking about?” she rasped.
“Did you know,” he said, “there’s a type of Buddhist meditation used to help overcome sexual desire, which in English translates to ‘reflections on repulsiveness?’ The goal is to contemplate the individual components of the body—to break it down into what it really is, which is just neutral parts and processes. At least, that’s how the practice was explained to me. The instructor was a con artist from Kentucky running an advance-fee scam, so he might not be the best authority on the subject.”
Even in emergencies, he could never just get to the point. “You’re saying you feel repulsed?”
“Lisbon, do you listen to me when I speak? At all? I’m saying I’m a bit nervous, and I’m thinking very hard about synovial fluid.”
“That’s it?”
He said, miserably, “And I’m wishing you weren't quite so beautiful.”
Her breath caught. She looked him full in the face, then, and her feverish brain admitted the truth: he was beautiful to her, too. She wanted him. Not only because of the drug. She wanted to bite that wicked smile of his; she wanted to hear the noises he made when he lost that cool composure.
“Jane,” she said, unable to articulate the rest.
His eyes locked with hers, piercing. He reached out and traced his thumb over her cheekbone. He said—haltingly, as though out of breath— “You know why I haven't said anything. Losing what we have now would be devastating. And I can’t afford to make a mistake— he's smart, Lisbon, he's so smart. If he even suspects— you saw what he did to Kristina—”
His hands were trembling, his wedding ring glinting in the light. “I’m not Kristina,” she said, “I’m careful, and I'm armed. I can take care of myself.”
“If he hurts you, I don't know if there will be anything good left in me to salvage,” he said.
Her chest ached. Some part of him, she thought, was constantly reliving the worst night of his life. A bloody smile, painted against the back of his eyelids. He was so convinced he deserved punishment. But how could you argue against someone committed to a self-fulfilling prophecy?
“You can't think about hypotheticals like that. You have to live your life. Otherwise you’ll fall apart, and that’s what he wants.”
He laughed, incredulous. “Lisbon, all I think about are hypotheticals. A thousand permutations of how things might play out. I have nightmares about you in that bomb vest where I answer the phone and you explode into bloody bits. Every time you show up to rescue me from some armed suspect, I get a flash of what would happen if they shot you instead of surrendering. Last year when you went to your cousin’s wedding, you came back on Monday with red nail polish, and Minelli put me on sick leave because he caught me throwing up in the bathroom.”
“Jane,” she said again, helplessly. She had never heard him talk like this. She was afraid he would go off the rails and she wouldn’t know how to pull him back. “You are not responsible for my safety. Just because you have a gift for prediction doesn't mean everything that happens is your fault.”
“If I let someone get too close to me, knowing that makes them a target? Yes, that is my fault.”
“If he wanted to target the unit, he could have done it by now. We’re already close. There’s no point drawing some arbitrary line in the sand—you're my friend. You can't make me stop caring about you, and you don’t actually want me to.”
He shook his head like he was trying to dislodge some particularly distressing thought. “No, I don’t,” he said, raw.
“We’re a team,” she told him. “Helping each other out of a tight spot, same as we would otherwise.”
For a moment she was tempted to add some kind of heartfelt confession like I can’t imagine going back to life without you. Did that mean the drug was taking over? Her pituitary gland was probably working overtime, flooding her system with oxytocin. She tried to shift away from Jane, but that only had the unfortunate effect of moving the seam of her pants to press against a more sensitive spot. She gasped, and then clapped her hand to her mouth in horror.
“Okay,” said Jane, a muscle in his jaw clenching. “Okay, maybe we should take some time apart. Theoretically the effects are supposed to stabilize after each—Lisbon, I can’t say the word orgasm when you’re looking at me like that, and otherwise I’ll have to use some horrendous euphemism like self care—”
She was barely listening. There was a haze descending on her: some kind of release of culpability as they reached the tipping point. It was simply too unbelievable for her mind to process. Insane. What, was she just going to be so overcome that she would walk into a murderer’s living room and stick a hand down her pants while Jane was here— touching himself—
“Good idea,” she said mechanically.
She did walk into the living room, though she couldn’t bring herself to approach the couch. Instead she lay on the rug—the most bearable in a sea of unbearable options—and unbuttoned her slacks. Apart from her potent physical symptoms, she didn’t feel any particular excitement. Only a kind of raging disbelief, like she’d agreed to a dare as a joke and was now being forced to follow through. There was a clinical disconnect between her thoughts and actions. She confirmed the time was 3:17 PM, 83 minutes after substance inhalation—she slid her hand into her underwear—she wondered about the chemical composition of the drug— she pressed the pad of her middle finger against herself and almost came off the floor in shock. She rarely masturbated, and on the occasions she did it certainly never felt like this. Her nerve endings were electrically sensitive. She felt like she'd been tased with pleasure, or some other nonsensical analogy, and she was pretty sure her toes had actually curled, which was a TV trope that had no business happening in real life. She bit her fist and rocked against her own fingers, breathing hard, and an embarrassingly high pitched noise escaped from her throat.
Recalling Jane’s meditation advice, she tried to make her mind blank; when that didn't work, she allowed herself to think of one of the last nights she'd spent with her ex, which involved a necktie and some mildly strenuous acrobatics. She pressed one finger inside herself, made another muffled noise. She really was shockingly wet.
Then she heard a faint groan from the other room and felt herself clench. Jane was down there, uncontrolled enough to make noise. What was he thinking about— had he heard her? And if he had, would he come to check on her, would he say, with merrily dancing eyes, something I can help you with? And she would say—
Her orgasm hit out of nowhere, lifting her hips off the ground, muscles locking up. It was appallingly, disturbingly good. Coursing through her. Pleasure settling all the way down to her bones. She could think again; her fever had dissipated. The hum of the fan reestablished itself.
She desperately needed to see Jane.
When she came back down the stairs he was facing away from her. He’d taken his jacket off, though not his vest. One arm pressed against the wall, body bent into itself, other arm moving in an unmistakable motion. He went very still upon hearing the creak of the stairs.
“How—” she cleared her throat. “How are you?”
“Better. Much better, for my sins.”
His voice was strange; she wished she could see his face. He winced as he zipped his pants back up. Apparently, the drug had been helpfully designed to avoid long refractory periods.
“That wasn’t so bad,” she said.
He smiled then, and shook his head in disbelief. “Only you would describe that experience as not so bad.”
A thought occurred to her. “When we make it out of here, you won’t discuss the details with anybody, right?”
He blinked at her.
“Except a therapist,” she amended.
“Lisbon. I would never.”
“I wouldn’t want to lose the team’s respect. Or yours.”
“I think it would be almost impossible for you to lose my respect.”
Heat rose to her cheeks. “Well, good. The CBI would have to get you a new minder, and there aren’t any classes on how to work with reformed psychics."
“We're both lucky you're a natural,” he said, smiling a little wildly. His fists were clenched, knuckles white. She was suddenly preoccupied by a vivid fantasy of him lifting her clear off the ground with her legs around his waist.
"Come over here,” she said.
“You should probably leave.”
“I can’t.” This was the truth: it seemed impossible to be alone now that she'd seen the contracting muscles of his shoulder, the exposed back of his neck. She approached him like a skittish deer. When she tried to touch his shoulder, he flinched.
“Oh, bad idea. Very bad idea.”
His skin was so warm. She wanted to melt against him. “It's okay, Jane.”
“It's not. I thought I understood what it would feel like…this is worse. Well, better. You know what I mean.”
“Worse than being kidnapped by a crazy eco terrorist? Worse than being blinded by a car bomb?”
“At least then I could think. Right now I can’t concentrate on anything. Except you, of course. You’re alarmingly easy to concentrate on.”
She appraised him, the tense, frustrated want written in the slope of his body. He was so internal, that was the problem. She simply couldn't imagine what it was like to exist in his brain. "Have you considered how offensive it is, to say that being kidnapped would be better than sleeping with me?”
He spun with the beginnings of a heartfelt apology on his lips, which fell away when he saw her smirk. "Oh, you are good.”
“I learned from the best.” She raised her eyebrows in challenge. Tried not to show how desperately she needed him to be touching her—somewhere, anywhere.
He took a harsh breath. He was clearly waging some vicious psychological battle with himself, unable to concede. Fine: she was the pragmatist, she was the boss. Her call. She steeled herself, took two steps forward, and took his wrist. His rabbit-quick pulse beat against her fingers. You’re lying, he would tell a suspect, your body betrays you. I know what you're thinking.
“It’s okay,” she said again, and drew him toward the couch. She was trying to ignore the throbbing reality of her own continued arousal, but it was no use; the need must have shown on her face. Jane followed her limply, hands slack at his sides. She felt a wave of pity, which, instead of blunting her attraction, provided her with a vivid image of gripping his chin to maintain eye contact while she sank onto him. Maybe she was in a little over her head.
Too late now. She steeled herself, and straddled him. His muscles were so tense with self-restraint that she could feel them twitching. It was good to know he was just as desperate as she was. Her orgasm upstairs was a small, distant concept; she felt like she’d pulled two all-nighters in a row and then taken a ten minute nap.
“Be here with me,” she told him. His expression flickered. “That's an order.”
The barest hint of a smile. “When have I ever listened to your orders?”
“There’s a first time for everything.” She touched the thin trail of sweat at his temple, and he shuddered. His hands came to her hips. She was losing the trail of her thoughts, reduced to some base need. Achingly empty. Then finally, gloriously, he surrendered—crumpled somehow, and raised his face to hers—she saw her need reflected in him—he let her see it—
"Lisbon," he said raggedly, and then: "Teresa—”
And suddenly all bets were off; she was unbuttoning his vest with clumsy fingers, practically tearing it open; he had her shirt off in seconds and unhooked her bra one-handed. Show off. Not that she needed any reminder of his dexterity. She shivered in the cool air, nipples hardening, and felt him hard against her thigh. Who cared if this need was artificial? It was all so right, the way his arms felt under her hands, the stretch of her legs across his lap. He smelled so absurdly good.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her, which was very nice but ultimately a distraction from what she really wanted, which was his shirt off. Of course this took her twice as long as it had taken him. In the meantime he solved another problem—whether she should kiss him on the mouth, which seemed too openly intimate—by kissing a path from under her jaw to the curve of her shoulder. Sucking at her pressure points, just the way she liked it. She was in trouble. He'd always been able to read her too well, far better than she could read him.
Finally she had his shirt off and could look at his chest. His three-piece suits were another piece of artifice, really, an eccentric misdirection that made people forget the physicality underneath. But here he was, under her hands, layers stripped away. This man. She had made a mistake; she had overestimated her ability to maintain any sort of professional distance. Why had she thought that was necessary, again?
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she admitted, a little breathless. He moved his hand to her breast, grazing her nipple, and she gasped, twisting as she batted his arm away. "Wait—” she said “too much—" He snatched his hands away like he'd been burned.
“If you stop touching me right now, I will punch you in the throat," she snapped. “I meant go slow.” She punctuated the statement with a deliberate roll of her hips; his hands reflexively came back to her waist. Success.
“Just so you know,” he said, voice strangled, “it’s been..a while, and I am under the rather significant influence of a mad scientist's aphrodisiac, so I'm not operating at peak performance here.”
“What's your point?”
“I’m not going to last very long if you keep moving like that.”
“I don’t care,” she said, “I don't care, just take your damn pants off—” and they both began the awkward sequence of wriggling and twisting required for two people to take their pants off at the same time. She started laughing, couldn't help it, and he joined her, and she was warm all over. It felt so good to laugh. Perfect. Back onto his lap with both of them down to their underwear, giggling like she was twenty years younger. Of course she stopped laughing when she saw the outline of him in his briefs—briefs, not boxers, and that was one office bet answered, though obviously she hadn't taken part and would not be sharing this with anyone who had. Her mouth went dry. It had been a while for her, too. His hands moved to her inner thighs, gripping, scraping his nails gently over her skin. He was driving her crazy and he knew it, the smug bastard. And to think she'd told him to slow down. “Come on,” she said.
Wickedly: “Say please.”
Oh, what a line. But she was a little disconcerted, enough to lean away. It was too smooth. She didn't want him to say whatever he thought someone else wanted to hear. “Hey,” she said, “it’s me. It’s you and me.”
He opened his eyes, then, mildly stunned, and then looked at her with an expression she had never seen before. “Yes, it is,” he said, as though realizing, and then: “Hi.”
He was so ridiculously endearing. His smile, and the way his face creased up, and his almost childlike wonder. It didn’t matter if you knew how the trick worked: everyone fell for it anyway. She gave him a helpless smile. Didn’t he always say normal people mimicked body language? Or was it that mirroring was a sign of romantic interest?
“Hi.” She leaned back in and kissed his forehead. Then, struck by inspiration, she murmured: “Maybe you should say please.”
With that she had him—he gasped inarticulately, clutching at her, moving his hands toward where she desperately needed them. “Please,” he said, like the words were being ripped out of him.
“Yes, yes, now—”
Shucking off her underwear. His clever fingers finally where she wanted, gentle at first, harder as she adjusted to the intensity of her own pleasure, as he learned the meaning of her reactions. It was good—she'd known it would be—but not that it would be this much better than her own fingers, not that she'd be driven so mindless. Gradually she became aware that he was experimenting: reacting to the feedback loop of her body, in the way of someone improvising on a musical instrument. It was dizzying. His mind, usually flying in a thousand directions, all focused on her. It couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, and already she was on the edge of—
And from a distance she heard Jane make an entirely different noise, low and almost pained. Had he—was it possible that he'd—
She came hard and silent, nails digging into his back, head thrown back. He was present enough—and polite enough—to try to draw aftershocks out of her, but that was overwhelming; she grabbed his arm and shook her head, and he withdrew. They were both winded, and the buzz of the drug in her mind was noticeably quieter, as though she’d stepped into a cold shower drunk and come out only tipsy. She was floating on a current of endorphins and relief.
“Did you, um." She trailed off.
“Yes. You're very...affecting.”
She blushed, which she could see delighted him. She'd always been this way, unprudish during sex and then puritanically modest afterward. Her college boyfriend had found it sweet, her subsequent boyfriend less so. Probably it was the subconscious guilt of engaging in premarital sexual activity. Years of Catholic school could do that to a person.
In some complicated series of motions he spun them around, reclined, pulled her against him, and covered them both with a blanket to preserve her rediscovered modesty. She was bothered by the dampness of his underwear against her lower back, but didn't want to interrupt the moment. Once Jane began reckoning with the reality of what they’d done, she had no idea how he’d react. He swept her sweat-soaked bangs out of her eyes, and she took his hand and brought it to her chest, over her heart. Was cuddling out of bounds? Where was the guidebook for how to navigate postcoital intimacy with an emotionally damaged colleague, with whom you’d been determinedly avoiding coitus for years?
She very much did not want to move. She liked the feeling of him holding her too much.
“We should check our vitals again,” she murmured, without conviction. And she should go to the bathroom, and he should find a towel. An essential side effect of drugs seemed to be that you didn’t notice how sticky everything was.
In response he put the back of his hand on her forehead. It might have felt paternal, if she could remember her father ever checking her temperature as a child. “I'm better than a thermometer. You are sitting at...a cool 99 point eight.”
“You willing to bet on that?”
“You really are not one for basking in the afterglow, are you? Okay—if I’m accurate to within half a degree, you have to play along next time I invent covers for us. I’m thinking magician and magician’s assistant.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“I am never wrong, but if I am, I will do...one piece of paperwork, of your choosing.”
“One!”
“All right, three. You drive a hard bargain.”
Her temperature was 99.6; she would undoubtedly regret that wager later. But it was good to confirm they’d been right about the drug’s effects. She still felt intensely turned on, but at least she was in control of herself. And the banter felt so normal, even though the emotions under it were so out of wack. Like they were actors reading from a script.
She pressed a few buttons on her watch. “Counting down the hours?” asked Jane.
“Starting a timer,” she said, “in case…”
“Two times isn’t the charm?”
“Hopefully, we’ve got a handle on it.”
“Your optimism is a beautiful thing, Lisbon.”
It wasn't necessarily optimistic to think they wouldn't get to repeat the experience, she thought but didn't say. He nudged her thigh with his foot. “I’m serious,” he said. “To have seen and been through everything that you have, and still have hope in the world. It’s admirable. It almost makes me believe in cosmic balance.”
“Well,” she said, thoroughly embarrassed. Sometimes she preferred when he was glib; she had no defense against his earnestness.
“I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
“No, I— I wish we could talk like this more. If I knew all it took was to drug you, I could've done that ages ago.”
“You wouldn’t have. You despise abuse of power, and you want things to be challenging, because it makes you feel like achieving them is worthwhile. When I stop being an enigma you'll be much less interested in me. Anyway, historically it hasn't gone well when I've ingested substances that make me tell the truth. People really don't like the truth. They think they want to hear it, but they don’t.”
“You'll never stop being an enigma to me,” she told him.
“Oh, good. That’s a relief.”
She lay back on his chest and listened to the reassuring thud of his heartbeat. Drifted. She knew she was being stupid indulging like this and that she would regret it later. It seemed clear now they were out of danger. Instead they had entered some sort of permissive limbo, allowing themselves reckless indulgence after years of restraint. She'd had a brief stint with an eating disorder in high school, and she understood that she was falling into the same pattern now: wanting everything she’d deprived herself of before she returned to following the rules. Even more than the physical intimacy, the novelty of Jane’s emotions bared to her was impossible to resist.
-
Half an hour later, her appreciation of their skin-to-skin contact regained some acute quality, and she came to the realization that she was getting high again. Not a particularly long recovery period.
“You were right,” she said.
Jane had assumed his classic CBI couch position: eyes closed, arms folded, mouth twitching as if reacting to external stimuli. Meditating? He’d taken off his wedding ring, she realized, and was halfway to panicking before she understood that he was holding it instead. “Once more with feeling,” he said vaguely.
She tapped the knuckles of his closed hand. He paused, then opened his palm to her. Up close the ring was a warm, burnished gold, and it was inscribed; she’d never noticed that before.
“What does it say?” she asked. Then she caught herself. “Jane, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to take advantage. I shouldn't have asked.”
“It’s not a secret. Just the date.”
She considered him. “Are you okay?”
“Even on uppers, I’m not very good at this feeling. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know.” He closed his fist again; when he opened it, the ring had magically moved back to his finger. Then he took her hand, tracing her palm: her life line, maybe, or her love line. She never could remember which was which. And what did he mean, this feeling? Guilt?
“We could try separating again,” she offered.
“I think we’ve scientifically established that solution is useless. And anyway, I don’t want to. My impulse control is nonexistent, remember? I just need a second to adjust.”
“What if we—”
“There,” he said. “I’ve adjusted.”
“What does that mean?”
Instead of responding he grabbed her waist and rolled them over—she squeaked—he was hovering above her. She was grateful he’d made the first move this time. She couldn’t keep up. His pupils were enormous; she could see her reflection in them. Hair mussed, lips swollen. She hadn’t once felt self-conscious. She wasn’t sure if that was the drug or simply the level of comfort she felt with him. And she couldn't believe how easy this felt somehow, how physically fluid. How unexpected it was, that their familiarity would translate here.
The anticipation was becoming intolerable; she tugged at his waistband insistently. He hesitated—shyness? From Patrick Jane? — and then obeyed, and then they were both naked. He was almost painfully hard. She reached down and touched him, and he made a sound like he’d been punched. He kissed her delicately on her collarbone, her sternum, the underside of her breast. She understood his intention. The consummate gentleman. But she was too wound up; she felt as though she might float away without something to ground her. She grabbed a fistful of his hair, pulling up at the roots, and he groaned.
“Stay,” she said. Her core ached. She wanted him so badly.
“I want to, let me—”
“Jane, I’m so—I need you—”
He went still, understanding. Looked at her like he was trying to work out an especially difficult puzzle. “Are you sure? I need you to be sure.”
She paused. “Are you?”
“I asked you first.”
The divot between his eyebrows was charming; she leaned up and kissed it. Sweetly she said: “You know if you do anything I don’t want, I can just shoot you.”
“Ah, true. Good point.” There was honest relief in his eyes. This ridiculous man. She supposed that was her job, however futile it was: trying to keep him on the right path. The true north of his moral compass. But at the end of the day, she was human too. Human flaws, human weaknesses.
“I’m on the pill,” she said, “and tested, last time it was relevant. You?”
“Yes.”
She waited, until she couldn’t anymore. “Well?”
"Yes, I'm sure. You have no idea the effect you have, do you? Heartbreaker…"
“Stop thinking so much.”
“I will, in a minute,” he said. He pressed against her, and her entire body lit up. She dug her nails into his back, scraped them down a little.
“Lisbon,” he got out, “if you want this to last longer than three minutes, you should stop. I only know so many baseball statistics.”
“Some women like that,” she told him. “It’s flattering.” But she relented—leaned back—let him tease her open. She closed her eyes and took a steady breath.
“Mm,” she heard, musingly, from somewhere above her: the voice Jane used when he’d figured out a clue but wouldn’t tell her the answer yet. And then he flipped them over, so she was on top, and he was looking up at her, and all right, yes, this was better. He'd figured her out. She took hold of him, stroking, watching his responses. She was an investigator too, damn it. And then she met his eyes, and sank onto him slowly.
He swore, head thunking back onto the pillow. Was that the first time she’d heard him swear, when he wasn’t playing a character? She could feel herself stretching around him, taking him deeper. Hands pressed against his chest for leverage. They both moaned at the same time, which made her snort in a distinctly unsexy way and hide her face in her shoulder for a moment, but he only gave her a dreamy kind of smile and waited for her to continue. She'd thought—during the rare times she'd allowed herself to even consider it—that Jane would be as talkative inside the bedroom as outside. Apparently she'd been incorrect.
She rocked against him, revelling in the strain of her muscles, the slick heat where their bodies came together. She didn't care that he wasn't going to last long, because she wasn't either—he was touching her everywhere, cradling her like some precious thing, and she was going to shatter. She lost all semblance of control and nearly fell against his chest. The angle was ferociously good. Pressure building inside her, against her.
“There?” he asked.
“Yes—”
His expression was utter concentration. He squeezed his hand between them, touched her, and she let out something that was almost a scream. She was ruined for anyone else, she thought. He was changing some fundamental piece of knowledge, that sex could be like this, that her body could be given this gift.
"Lisbon," he said urgently—she was grateful he'd kept his head, even now he was using her last name— “I’m close, do you want me to—”
Of course she didn’t want him to pull out. But even out of her mind she knew the numbers. “Okay,” she said, “hold on,” and lifted herself off him, straddling his thigh. Touched herself, and watched him do the same, clumsy and uncoordinated. God. And it didn’t matter, none of it mattered, because they were falling apart together, reckless, entirely abandoned.
When they pulled apart, she discovered that her cheeks were wet. Jane said, panicked, “are you crying?” And then his expression shifted as he realized what he was seeing.
She was embarrassed. “It’s a normal physical response.”
“To good sex,” he said, with marked satisfaction. “You can say it. I’m motivated by positive reinforcement.”
“Fine! It was good. You happy?”
“Good? Just good? Unbelievable. I expect a five-star review at the end of all this.”
After that she thought the drug must have peaked, because she lost track of chronology. Events blurred together. She remembered having sex again, on the floor this time, and then again with him on top. Then another period of clarity, straight into another crest; this time she was sore, and Jane finally got his way. I haven’t showered, she murmured, or shaved, and what about you, and he looked at her like she’d said the most absurd thing in the world and said are you serious? This is for me.
They eventually got around to drinking water, complete with some lemon-lime electrolytes she scrounged up. Jane made tea; they both ate peanut butter straight from the jar. To keep our energy up, he said with a theatrical raise of his eyebrow. She flicked the spoon at his nose.
By the time the next wave hit, she was really wishing they had something to substitute for lube, but their search was unsuccessful. Jane was gracious enough not to ask her to use her mouth, which even then she would have refused. Instead she said Will you let me try something, I think it’ll help, can I put my fingers inside you, and he jolted like he’d been electrocuted. Jesus, he said, eyes as wide as she’d ever seen them, and just to confirm, you are Teresa Lisbon, yes? Midwestern, Catholic Teresa Lisbon? And, because she was starting to get the measure of him, she said: Midwesterners are nice, don’t you want me to be nice to you, and he went speechless, and she was extremely satisfied with herself. That time he cried, so they were even.
Most vivid in her memory was the moment he said, a little too earnestly, you are a marvel to me, do you know that? And she shushed him, and took him apart.
-
When the come down finally arrived, it was immediate and helpfully simultaneous. He was spooning her on the pull-out bed, sliding into her gentle and shallow, and all of a sudden there was pain. She became conscious of just how much sweat had dried on her skin, just how tight her jaw was clenched. She made an unhappy noise, and Jane pulled away. There was a long silence.
She stood up, with some difficulty. Exhaustion had taken over her body, along with a freezing sort of emptiness. Her skin felt raw. It was inconceivable, how radiantly happy she’d been an hour ago. She realized now that what she’d thought were moments of sobriety had only been lulls in the drug’s effects, because reality was hitting like a hailstorm. Oh, God. Flashes of his hands on her, inside her. You know why I haven’t said anything. The inscription on his wedding ring. The sounds she’d made.
How the hell were they supposed to move on from this?
Still silent, they got dressed. Went upstairs, as if that would erase all that had taken place in the basement. The tension was becoming oppressive. Jane’s expression was distant and still, which scared her, because it was the same one he wore sometimes when being interrogated. He had disappeared somewhere inside.
“Can we talk?” she asked.
“About what?”
“Jane.”
“You know,” he said, “a side effect of being a mentalist is that it’s almost impossible to be hypnotized yourself. But after everything happened, after my family was killed, I asked a friend if he’d try. I didn’t want to forget, really—I wanted to stay angry—but I hadn’t slept for 72 hours. I was hallucinating. It didn’t work, of course. He gave me a triple dose of Trazodone instead. That gave me sleep paralysis, but at least it was better than psychosis.”
“Jane—”
“As it turns out, all I needed was some magic sex dust that hadn’t been invented yet. Funny, right?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, which seemed like the most salient point to communicate.
“Of course I did. I let myself forget the one thing that matters. The one thing.”
She was struggling to translate her feelings into words. “I know it’s…complicated. But this meant something.”
“You think that,” he said, “because you only have sex with men you have an emotional connection with. You’re afraid of intimacy, because it gives someone the power to hurt you, like your father hurt you. But you’re drawn to people who are suffering. That’s why you liked me so much when you met me. Being a caretaker is familiar…it gives you the power instead.”
“Stop,” she said. Her chest was tight.
“Anyway, we were high,” he said, not looking at her. “Not thinking straight. Whoops.”
“You think I can’t tell what you’re doing? Please, let’s just talk about this.”
“Lisbon, if you think your little crush is a factor here, I’m sorry to tell you you’re mistaken. You want a hypnotist to erase the memory? I’m your man. Otherwise, I can’t help you.”
She reared back. She couldn’t catch her breath, or stop the tears springing to her eyes. He’d never hurt her this badly before. This was what Jane did to suspects: found their fault lines and split them open.
“Screw you,” she said. In response he raised his eyebrows, cocked his chin, and she heard the unspoken words. Yes, you did.
The urge to slap him was so strong that her torso actually rotated around for the wind-up. She dug her nails into her palms. “Fine,” she spat. “You get your way, as usual. Isolate yourself, punish yourself, I don’t care. I’m done.”
Funny that Jane had called her a heartbreaker, when everyone else knew it was the opposite. He was always going to be the one to break her heart.
-
She’d been home for four hours by the time the knock came at her door. Unable to sleep, unable to do anything much besides sit and breathe. The pounding of her head was too intense even to listen to music. With some effort, she had restrained herself from drinking Scotch: who knew what side effects that interaction could produce. Mostly she was grateful that she couldn’t think too hard. Better than her mind replaying that final conversation with Jane in technicolor torture.
She knew who was knocking; the list of possibilities wasn’t particularly long. But it didn’t matter much, because she wasn’t going to answer.
The knocking intensified. “Lisbon!”
She ignored it.
“Lisbon, come on. Open up.”
She would not.
“Teresa,” said the voice outside. “Please. I’m sorry.”
She rose, and opened the door.
Jane stood on her doorstep. His clothes were crumpled; his face was abject misery. He had come to beg her forgiveness, and she would not give it to him. There was nothing he could say that would undo the damage. She could barely access her anger anymore, let alone her own capacity for mercy.
He cradled her face in both hands, stepped closer, and kissed her.
In the utter shock that followed, she felt her numbness melt away. The feeling of his lips on hers pierced through. Her senses returned. She could smell that he hadn’t showered; some possessive instinct reared its head. She took a step back, pulling him with her, and he followed, still kissing her, like they were dancing. Her head spun.
“I’m sorry,” he got out between kisses, “Teresa, I’m sorry. I lied. I’m a liar. All I want to do is tell you the truth.” He pressed her against the wall, hand cradling the back of her head. Protecting her. She so badly wanted to give herself over to him. The force of his attention was addictive.
“I had to know,” he said, “I needed you to know—just once. How it could be.”
Just once, he’d said.
With some effort, she pushed him away. Her body was protesting, wishing her mind was a little less stingy. But he’d hurt her. And just like the men she’d grown up around, he was only going to let her down again.
She said: “When you catch Red John, what are you going to do to him?”
He sagged, understanding. “You know the answer to that.”
“You’re going to break the law.”
“I’m going to do what’s right.”
Here it was: the truth, just like he’d promised. He wanted her, but not enough. Even now he couldn’t fully understand. They were both bound too tightly to their own versions of justice.
She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, less than an inch from the corner of his mouth. “Good night, Jane,” she said. Then she turned away so that she wouldn’t have to watch him leave. She was always watching him leave.
And really, after all, nothing had changed. Tomorrow, she thought, he would be lying on the couch at headquarters, and she would sit at her desk, and answer the phone. They would walk through a crime scene together; he would drink tea. And they would close another case.