The Past

Two weeks later, Jarod was in her bed again, but this time it was mid-afternoon and she’d only been gone for an hour or so. Parker walked into her bedroom with a handful of toiletries from the store, and stopped at the sight of Jarod sprawled on his back on her crisp sheets. He opened his eyes, and frowned.

“You’re home early,” he said, one hand drifting across his chest in a slow scratch. He looked tired, had dark hollows under his eyes.

“It’s Sunday,” she said, dumping the toiletries on her bureau, crossing to the bed.

“Really?” Jarod said, and frowned in confusion. She noticed a pile of his clothes flung over the chair by the bed – a suit and tie, not his usual attire of jeans and leather. He shook his head, dragged a hand over his face, saying, “I lost track of the days.

Miss Parker kicked off her heels and climbed onto the bed to sit beside him. She rubbed her hand up his abdomen. Oh lord, feel that muscle tone. Sculpted abs creating furrows she wanted to map with her tongue, and this was where the sweat would run, wouldn’t it? Jarod tracked the movement with golden eyes, and then looked up at her. She smiled a little, as much as would escape her automatic defence system. She was trying to lower it all, but it was hard to do in daylight. Why come here in daylight?

“I needed somewhere to get some sleep,” Jarod said sheepishly, and she realised she’d said the words aloud. Her fingers dipped into his bellybutton. No, no hotel room for Jarod. He’d wanted to sleep here, thinking he’d be woken late at night when she got home from work. He’d be all rejuvenated and ready for sex.

Too bad, she thought. You’re going to have to be tired and ready for sex.

“On a budget, Wonder Boy?” she asked, but pulling her shirt over her head negated the acidity of her comment. Jarod’s eyes dropped to her bra – black – and stayed there. Oh yeah, she remembered. It was dark last time.

“Sheets, woman. It’s all about the sheets,” he muttered, but his voice was a little thick. He raised his hand, let his forefinger settle between her breasts on the edge of the bra, and trailed it up, following the line of lace across her left breast. Her stomach tightened. She’d just let him call her ‘woman’, too, but that was okay.

Parker wriggled out of her skirt, dislodging his hand, and let it fly somewhere over her shoulder. She settled again, and Jarod drank in her lacy black panties, her stockings and garter. Not even Sundays could get her out of her sleek, professional image anymore. Sunday afternoon sex might. A finger snapping her suspender brought her back to reality. She slapped his hand while he grinned, but did nothing when it trailed up her thigh. Oh yes, she thought, as he played with the edge of her panties, and smiled a catty smile.

She lay down beside him, on top of the covers, and gave a long stretch for his benefit. Jarod’s hand drifted fleetingly across her stomach, he propped himself up on his elbow and explored her hip, and then slid his hand under the lace and thrust a finger inside of her in one smooth motion. Parker gasped and arched, felt her body flush with sudden heat and clench with excitement. Jarod felt it too, and grinned, pushing another finger inside of her and finding her clitoris with his thumb. He shuffled closer awkwardly, and she rolled towards him, towards his heat.

Yes. Damn. He was still under the covers. She lifted her mouth for his kiss and it was hot and deep, his fingers – slick with her moisture – trailing up her belly to squeeze her breast through the bra, to pinch and tug at the nipple roughly. Parker moaned into his invading tongue, widened her mouth and slanted her head. He kissed her like he was trying to chew on her heart and was going in through the throat. Wet kisses that were all about slickness and innuendo, his teeth and tongue and lips consuming hers. She was going to get a hickey on the brain through her tonsils, and it felt sex on a budget.

Jarod’s mouth moved, became a most sucking kiss at her throat, and Parker gasped for air. He started kicking at blankets and she helped, managing to get them somewhere around his knees before he rolled between her thighs, trapping one leg under the covers. Jarod fumbled at her panties, tugged so the material bit into her skin and then managed to rip it. Then the length of his erection was flush against her, and she curled her free leg around his waist.

He raised his head to look at her, dark eyes glittering. Her mouth opened soundlessly at the first push of penetration. Two weeks was time enough for memories to dull, but lord, he felt good, and in one sure stroke had settled inside her. Parker speared her hands up his chest, explored the long planes of his collarbones with her fingers. He felt like the missing half of her sexual identity, and if she could climb inside his chest and prise open his heart then she would find a part of herself, beating quietly away in there.

It was hot, and fast, and she managed to free her other leg and twine herself around him like a vine, pulling his head down for a kiss, the pounding rhythm of his body never slowing. She was sure she could meld their skin if she just got close enough, and they bathed each other in the clean scent of their sweat and arousal.

Jarod came first, but sustained his erection long enough to press long and hard into her and against her pelvis and push her carefully up to the edge of a precipe and let her tumble down the other side. Only then he did he collapse on top of her, and they lay together as a shuddering, shaking tangle of limbs and panting breath.

Parker stroked his back, kissing the side of his neck but struggling to breathe under his weight. She concentrated on the rise and fall of her chest pushing against his, and shifted slightly. Jarod caught the hint, rolling them into a reverse of positions and groping for the blanket, slipping out of her. Miss Parker lay half across his chest, but propped herself up to help his battle with the covers.

“Sleep now,” Jarod mumbled when they were both covered, and blinked his way into the land of Nod in record-breaking time. Parker stroked his hair away from his face, and laid her head on his chest as her body settled, listening to his heartbeat.

He slept like the dead. She lay with him until her own heartbeat had slowed, and then slithered out of his clinging grasp. She shucked off her ruined stockings and panties with a wry smile, and removed her bra and garter belt to stand naked in the late afternoon sunlight. Jarod slept on. She showered and wrapped herself in a silk kimono, put away the last of her groceries and made herself a snack. At twilight, she stood over the bed. He was still sleeping.

His clothes smelled of his cologne and sweat. And under them she found a leather attaché case, and she didn’t even pause before opening it. Inside she found two files, one that was labelled ‘Maria Walker’ and the other one was labelled ‘Sarah Robertson’. She reached for Maria Walker.

“Why don’t you just ask me?” came a sleepy voice from the bed. Parker jumped, but turned to him calmly.

“You were sleeping,” she said. She climbed onto the bed beside him, and yelped in surprise when he pulled her across his chest. He nuzzled her neck, rumbling with pleasure.

“A case. That’s what the files are. Something I’m working on. You don’t need to worry about it,” he murmured against her skin.

“So you’re not cheating on me with Maria or Sarah,” she asked. He tensed, for just a second, a hardening of his vertebrae. And then his body went into fluid motion, his hand sliding inside of her kimono, cupping her bare breast, other arm wrapping around her waist.

“I’m fairly sure that if I touched another woman you’d have her head and my balls on a plate, Miss Parker,” he said. They kissed, mouths melding, and it felt like her heart was on fire. She let him roll her, complacent, underneath him, and let out a slow breath as he began to kiss his way down her body.

“I guess it’s just you and me from here on in,” she said, and closed her eyes.


The Future


He wanted her clavicle. Put his finger along its line; felt the slight bumps on its surface. A certain craziness was edging into his consciousness; he wanted to do a boil, whittle all the flesh away from that bone and have it as a keepsake.

My lover died and all I got was this lazy clavicle.

The door banged, and Avery bustled in, a file open in his hands and his tie flipped over his shoulder. “I got the coroner to put a rush on the report-” he said, and stopped walking and talking abruptly, staring at Jarod. Whose lip was split and eye was black and whose hand – red raw from punches – was still inappropriately touching a corpse.

Jarod moved his hand away slowly, resting it instead on cold metal. Avery kept walking, eyeing him warily, and came to stand on the other side of the drawer. Jarod stared the other man down.

“Anyway,” Avery resumed, “He finished it this morning. Nothing on tox, no sexual assault, no other signs of violence. One surprise though-”

“What?” Jarod asked sharply. No surprises, no more surprises.

“She was four weeks pregnant. Abortion without consent; seems as the supreme court doesn’t consider it a life. She probably didn’t even know…”

Avery kept talking, in the background, far away and out of focus and lost in the harsh buzzing in Jarod’s ears. His heart was exploding and all the blood was shooting away from it, thundering through his veins hard enough to rupture them. Parker was dead, carrying their child and both were brutally murdered, and when Jarod found the son of a bitch that had taken his future from him, he was going to peel away his skin in layers and strip his muscles away thread by thread.

“…They’ll hold her for another couple of weeks, but it looks like this one’s headed for Potter’s Farm,” Avery blared on, and waited for Jarod to answer.

“Pity. About the baby,” he whispered. Four weeks wasn’t enough time to know, was it? Her baby was a secret even from her. Fire ants eating his eyeballs would have hurt less.

“Yeah… you okay, Agent?” Avery asked. Jarod put his hand out; the knuckles scabbed.

“The report. I’ll catch up with you later,” he said tersely.

Avery took the hint, backing away, leaving Jarod with the report in his hands. It dropped to the ground. He yanked the drawer out all the way, so Parker’s pale body floated in mid air on a metal platter. She was all stitched up, the Y-incision running under her breasts and down her abdomen, knit, ridged edges.

He’d done autopsies before. Stripped the innards away in blocs and weighed them and sliced, and once even seen a little tiny foetus clinging to a dead woman’s uterus. And when it was all done he’d piled the organs back into the body as stuffing, slick, sloppy piles of human remains, and their only purpose then was to hold the body in shape, to make it look full and rounded for a burial. Put the ribs back on top and stitch it all together. The body was drained, disinfected, stuffed and embalmed. Painted like a doll for the final public appearance, the jaw wired shut so it wouldn’t gape inappropriately, and then put in the ground for all eternity. Treated bodies in enclosed spaces didn’t even decay properly; they became preserved in hardened lumps of waxy adipocere. Fossil fuel, in it’s beginning stages. The American dream.

His child had been poured back into the lifeless shell that had been his lover. She was nobody, another corpse on the road to hell paved with nameless faces. If she were lucky, she’d go to Potter’s Farm, and be a digit on a plaque. If she were luckier, she’d be sent to a body farm to decay gracefully. You my lover and you my child, and I spent so much time looking for the wrong family after all.

Sydney didn’t answer his cell phone, and when he rang Sydney’s office Lyle answered. Jarod took the phone away from his ear to hang up, but heard the indistinct, tinny sound of Lyle’s voice garbling desperately. Jarod put the phone back to his ear.

“…you son of a bitch, I swear I’ll kill you with my bare hands…” Lyle was saying, and Jarod’s mouth dropped open.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, and Lyle growled.

“Listen, you sick fuck, I know you were obsessed with her and I intend to see you suffer for a very, very long time for this…” he said.

“I never touched her,” Jarod said.

Except with my hands and my mouth and my love, except with my mind and my heart and my soul, and her breath will never brush against me again, her-

“We found your email. And your DNA,” Lyle hissed.

An email. So she’d been waiting for him, sleeping in that grimy apartment, for him to come for her… and his DNA was probably smeared all over her house and sheets and skin and uterus. And the Centre blamed him. Lyle, minion of hell, was blaming him.

“Did you kill her, Lyle?” Jarod asked, thinking of all those women, all those petite, brunette women…

“We know it was you,” Lyle said. Jarod shook his head, trying to clear it. This wasn’t happening – it was too surreal.

“Your obsession with her was unhealthy.”

“So was yours,” Lyle shot back.

“I loved her.”

“So did I.”

Silence hung between them. No, Lyle didn’t kill her. She would have had signs of sexual abuse if he had. But loved her? Lyle, loved her? “She was your sister,” Jarod whispered. The world was caving in on him.

“I loved her,” Lyle said fiercely, and Jarod believed him. The twisted bastard had loved her as much as he was capable of loving anything. Had loved the reflection of himself in her. The brittle edges, the eerie resolve. But you didn’t know what she was, Lyle. You couldn’t. And maybe I didn’t either.

“I will- I will find who did this,” Jarod choked out, but he was talking to a dial tone.

I will find who did this and I will murder them.

*