Tellings of the Time: Complete series

9. 9

When I enter the office after coming back from the hospital, I am ambushed by Remy. He picks me up, twirls me around and presses his lips against mine. “You did it!” He looks at me with such honest admiration I almost start to blush. I can’t help but grin back at him. Chester is still sitting in his desk chair and salutes me, grinning at me with a beer in his hand. It’s somewhat of a tradition to come here and have some drinks to celebrate after we’ve had a successful mission.

I walk to the fridge and grab some beers. It’s not my usual poison, but I don’t keep any whiskey here.

“I’m on the clock,” Beckett says as I try to hand him a beer. I raise my eyebrow, daring him not to take it. “And I have to drive.”

“Take a cab. Celebrate with us. It’s our tradition. You just helped four kids get home safely. Made those families extremely happy. Drink a beer.”

He gives me a sideward glance with those green eyes of his, combs a hand through his hair and sighs. “I still have to give a statement about the man I shot.”

“My therapist says it’s unhealthy to just work and not play. Will your statement be any different if you have one beer?”

He accepts the bottle, reluctantly. Coming back to my previous statement: pain in my ass.

“You shouldn’t be drinking. You just got shot.”

I scoff. They literally put a bandaid on the scrape on my arm. It didn’t even need stitches. “I’m a big girl, I think I’ll live if I have a beer.”

We finally clink our bottles and he takes a sip. Together, we walk to Chester’s desk, where Remy has sat down on the couch again. Beckett reluctantly sits down on the armrest as he observes us. I sit on the ground, between Remy’s legs. His hands fall on my shoulders, and he starts massaging knots I didn’t even know I had.

“How’s your arm?” he asks.

“Not too bad, just a graze. Beckett made sure it didn’t get any worse than this. He got to that bastard quickly.”

I’m not even faking the compliment, I’m really impressed with how quickly he clocked an assailant none of my men managed to see. I don’t know much about his line of work, but I’m guessing that wasn’t his first time around the block.

He scrapes his throat, obviously not comfortable with the compliment and takes another sip of his beer. He doesn’t make any eye contact and doesn’t take part in the easy-going conversation going on between the rest of us.

“What’s up?” I ask him when our eyes finally meet.

“Why didn’t you let me talk to the kids in the car? Was it the big, scary and covered in blood thing? You let Scott talk to them.”

My eyes look up to the ceiling, thinking of the best way to say this. The ride back had been a little awkward. Both the little girls had joined us in the car, while the boys had tagged along with Dylan and Alex. I’d planted myself in between them in the back seat, keeping a light conversation going with them, while Beckett was trying to get answers out of them.

It was the last thing these two girls needed right now, and I thought I’d been subtle about it, but I guess I was wrong. Or maybe I’m just forgetting that the person I’m talking to is a profiler, and he can see through most things.

“They needed to get out of that place, Beckett. Not just physically, but mentally. Trust me, they’re going to relive those times a lot. First with authorities and later in life in therapy. Like, a lot of therapy.” I just hope they’ll find someone to properly help them process this. And have the money to even pay for intensive therapy like that.

“You, asking them questions? It makes sense from your point of view. Get the information while it’s still fresh, get some clues as to who’s behind all this. But that’s not what they needed. They needed to think about their families and know that it’s a reality that they’re going home. Not just some farfetched wish to be saved, but the reality of them being saved and going home.”

Beckett slowly nods, looks at his beer as he makes the contents of it twirl around.

“Abs is really good with the kids,” Chester praises me. “She always knows what to say.”

I don’t tell him I think it’s because I think my trauma recognizes theirs. I actually think that Chester would be really good at it himself, but he doesn’t go out in the field with us and he doesn’t want to acknowledge his own trauma. I don’t think a person in his life knows about it besides me and Ryan. Kind of ironic, if you think about how FIX Foundation was created.

“What I don’t understand,” Beckett says, “is how you got the photos that led you to this place.”

We all fall silent. There’s an excellent reason he doesn’t know this yet. It’s because we all deliberately did not tell him about the second package the killer sent us. We should have called authorities the moment we realized we received a new package, but we didn’t. We didn’t call them and we figured it out by ourselves.

“Well…” I start, but Chester takes over, looking way too happy to tell Beckett this. This is going to be bad. I just know it. I try to hide myself in my beer bottle, looking anywhere but at the FBI agent.

“Listen Becky, the same person that sent us the photos of your serial killer victims sent Abby another package, with hints on where to find the kids. So we took the hints and ran with it.”

The smirk he has going is so wide, it’s embarrassing me. I wasn’t knowingly working against Beckett, I just thought that saving the kids was more important than notifying the FBI. Beckett jumps up and looks at all of us as if we’ve betrayed him. Remy has the decency to look away in shame and I try to look at Beckett earnestly.

“I don’t get you,” he says after silently observing me for a moment. “You demand a list of names, so you can avenge those victims, but when you receive something that could mean a possible lead to catch the one responsible for the names on that list, you don’t. Which is it? Do you really want to avenge them, or is it all just an act?”

Wow, that fucking hurts. I won’t be showing him that.

“No act, Special Agent Sanders,” I answer, my voice hoarse and using his title to distance myself from him again. “I just chose the possibility of saving the living over the possibility of avenging the dead.”

His brow furrows and he just stands there, observing me, until finally he turns around, ready to leave.

“I don’t trust you,” he says, before walking to the exit.

“Right back at you, asshole!” Chester yells to his back and then goes right back to being happy and smug. Me? I’m lost in thought as I peel the label of my beer bottle, leaving the tiny snippets all over the floor.

My knees are touching my nose as I sit up with my legs pulled up on a bench in the basement of our house the morning after. Chester is swimming laps as I sit with him and just ponder. My mind is like a beehive of thoughts at the moment and I’m trying to arrange everything that’s going through it.

“What do you think?” Chester says as his head pops out of the water on the side I’m sitting. He swims laps every morning, his way of keeping fit. Well, that, and Wii Sports. It’s unusual for me to tag along when he swims, I fucking hate water. Showers? Baths? All fine. Large bodies of water? I’d rather take a bullet to the knee. Ever since my parents drowned, I avoid water like the plague. Rationally, I know the water has nothing to do with it, but I just can’t seem to make myself truly understand. And since I have no real reason to deal with it, I just don’t. Which is ironic, because we live on a castle on the side of a cliff that looks out over a large body of water. I feel safe inside, so it doesn’t really bother me that much.

“I don’t know, Ches. Why the hell would someone who kills women help us find some missing children?” He turns around, pushes himself away from the side of the pool and does another lap. He swims to the other side in an easy front crawl, pushes himself off under water and swims back, popping up right in front of me again.

“Maybe we should ask Becky what he thinks.”

Thinking about Beckett, Special Agent Sanders, is making my inside twist. We should’ve involved the FBI the moment we got a new package, but I’m not even a little bit sorry we got those kids home safely.

The mouthy girl, Vicky, is already out of the hospital and back with her family. I just hope they’ll let her have a moment before she gets sucked into an investigation that’ll lead nowhere. We know that the organization that takes these kids will be hard to catch, we’ve been after them for two years.

Then again, Beckett, ugh, Special Agent Sanders, shot one of them this time and perhaps that’ll result in some new leads.

Chester does another lap as I’m lost in thought again and my phone pings. It’s a text from Remy.

Remy: What are you up to tonight?

Me: Watching Forged in Fire reruns. Why? Got any other plans?

Remy: Forged in Fire? So hostile. Come dance with me.

Me: I can’t dance.

Remy: Good thing I’m a teacher.

A huge smile forms on my face. Getting out and moving my butt will be good for me. Better than sulking at home and thinking about what’s going on with the killer.

“Who’s making you smile like that?” Chester asks as he gets out of the water. Drops fall from his lean and muscular body while he walks over and grabs a towel to dry himself off. Sometimes I forget that he’s absolutely ripped, only seeing him in his usual baggy jeans and band tees.

I get distracted when the lights of the pool make his nipple piercing twinkle. Every time I see it, I wonder how much that hurt when he had it done.

“Remy,” I answer, trying to figure out how Chester has got a body like that. It must be more than just the swimming, right? His whole body’s covered in a black and white tattoo of a bald eagle with spread wings, covering his back and shoulders. Beneath it are Japanese-style waves, with both a Koi and a dragon going down his legs. It’s a humongous contrast to his almost glow-in-the-dark like skin. He doesn’t get out that much. “He wants me to go dancing with him tonight.”

He dries off his face, quickly wiping the rest of himself dry. “You’re smiling around him a lot.” That is true. He does make me smile. He makes me forget the dark side of the world and just lets me be in the moment with him. For some reason, I don’t completely comprehend, he makes living feel effortless when I’m with him. I can’t explain how he got behind my defenses like that, but here we are. Chester doesn’t look pleased with it.

“What’s going on?”

He turns his back to me, continuing to rub himself down, keeping his shoulders hunched. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

I catch myself frowning at him. Something really is up, but I can’t figure out what it is. Chester is just acting like my normal friend most of the time, but right now? Something in my belly tells me there’s something wrong. “Treasure?”

He shakes his head. “No, not even treasure will work today.”

I raise my eyebrows, cock my head. I’ve never had Chester back out of a treasure conversation before. It was after we’d decided to talk to each other after saying treasure and bury whatever it is that was said that he told me he was into boys. It was after treasure that he told me what had happened to him when he grew up, making him resent his parents. It was after treasure he told me he contemplated killing himself before he met me. It was after treasure that he told me all about the broken pieces of him, allowing himself to start healing again in the process. So him not wanting to talk to me after I’ve declared treasure is troubling. I don’t think there’s anything I wouldn’t tell him about myself, especially not in the sanctimony of treasure.

“Do I need to call Ryan for you?” I ask him, wondering if I should just do it without even talking to him about it.

“No, Abs,” he says while he walks over and gives me a one-armed semi-wet hug. “No worries, promise. Just go dance with Remy. Let him make you laugh.”

He leaves the basement to go change, while he leaves me sitting on the bench in confusion, wondering what the hell is going on with my best friend.

I pull up to Remy’s dance studio and park my car right in front of it. The street seems deserted, which I’m not complaining about. I changed into black yoga pants and one of Chester’s wide band tees. If we’re going to dance, we’re going to properly dance.

There’s no music coming out of the dance room this time around. It’s dark, and the room is lit by actual candles in the corners of the room. Remy stands there, looking like a perfect gentleman in pressed light-gray pants and a white button-up. He’s got the sleeves rolled up, making his forearms look like something that came straight out of my dreams. I chuckle.

“Seems like we had completely opposite ideas on how to dress,” I say.

His blue eyes smile back at me, little crow’s feet appearing on his face. “Well, last time I felt a little underdressed. This time around I wanted to dress for the occasion.”

“I thought you were going to teach me how to dance?”

“I thought this was a date where I was going to teach you how to dance.” He makes his way across the room, combing a hand through his brown hair, making sure none of the strands fall in his face. When I look up to meet his eyes, we seem to get pulled together. I stand on my tiptoes to press a gentle peck to his cheek. He watches me from the corner of his eyes, one side of his mouth curling up.

“You look bendy today.”

“Bendy?”

“Yeah, I think it must be the yoga pants. You a secret yoga girl?” He watches my ass over my shoulder, and it makes me want to giggle. That’s what I like about being around Remy. He makes me feel like there’s no need to be a badass. I can be soft around him.

It’s not a trait I miss in myself all that often. I’ve taught myself to be this kick-ass woman who can handle everything and then some. And I like that. But he’s showing me that’s it’s okay to not always be. To let my guard down sometimes. He probably didn’t mean to, but he showed me a side of myself I didn’t know I had. And now that I found this version of myself, I wonder how I’ve not missed her all along.

“No secret yoga girl. Easily influenced though. This is supposed to make my ass look great according to several influencers.”

“Well,” he says as he lets one of his hands glide to my ass cheek, “they’re absolutely right. Although it’s debatable whether it’s got anything to do with the pants or if all the credits should go to your ass.”

I grab one of his butt cheeks myself. “Yours seem pretty great too, and you’re not wearing yoga pants. So it must be our asses, I think.”

“These are tailored pants. Maybe I asked them to make it seem like I have a good ass.”

I squeeze a little. “Nope, all you.”

When we both give each other heated looks, we deliberately take a step back. Remy scrapes his throat and walks to the musical installation, starting Fake Empire from The National. He holds out his hand, and when I grab it he pulls me to him and pins me against him. He starts leading me through steps and I marvel at how easy it is to dance with him.

“This is you leading me,” I state, “this is not you teaching me.”

Those vivid blue eyes lock with mine, and I almost drown in the waters they seem to hold. “You’re already a good dancer. If you wouldn’t be, this wouldn’t work out like this. Yes, I’m a good dancer and a good leader, but without you at least intuitively knowing what to do, this’d be a hopeless disaster. You must’ve had some practice.”

I stop noticing what he’s doing to my body and just give in to it. Sucking in a deep breath of air. “When my parents died, my aunt Vivian got custody. She was my mom’s baby sister, a lot younger. She’d just married the love of her life, and Peter’s pretty rich. Not your or Chester’s kind of rich, but still rich. She had no clue what to do with a twelve year old, so she made sure I got into the best boarding school there was. All the other students had been primed for life as people of money, proper etiquette, ballroom dancing, the whole shebang. There were school dances which you were expected to attend. So I had to learn fast. I still don’t understand most of the dances, but I learned how to follow when I’m being led. This is very counterintuitive because I’m used to being in charge.”

Without warning Remy dips me. Maybe the pants are making me bendy?

“That’s where you met Chester?”

I hum. The instrumental part of the music reaches a crescendo and before I know it, I’m being twirled all around the room, my surroundings disappearing and my whole world consists of this dark-haired beauty, who doesn’t take his blue eyes off of me for even a second.

“Chester and I both were the outcasts, the weirdos, the creeps, so we found each other. I think the hurt part of my soul recognized his, and we sort of gravitated to one another. In our second year we were so close and Chester had told me he was into boys, that we pulled some strings and became roommates. And that’s how it’s always been since then.”

The song ends, and I remember we’re in a dance studio again. Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri starts and Remy starts taking me through the motions again. I don’t know if it’s the endorphins from exercising, or being in a candlelit room with an absolutely stunning specimen of a human being, but I feel like I’m floating.

“Why were you hurt?”

Blinking, I force myself to break eye contact. I just… can’t.

“My parents were murdered.”

I swallow hard and he pulls me closer to him. I don’t want to think about the particulars; they are still too raw after all these years and I feel my throat tightening up. Trying to blink the prickling tears in my eyes away, I look over Remy’s shoulder, anywhere but at him. My voice returns when I take a deep breath for four, hold for four, breathe out for four and hold for four again.

“The hardest thing is that they were mistaken for other people. They died for fucking nothing. Not that I think other murder victims deserve to get murdered, but this? Being mistaken for someone else and getting murdered? Such a waste.”

My voice is hoarse when I’m done talking. He lays the side of his head on my head. He doesn’t react to my story, which might be for the best.

“And Ches?”

“That’s really his story to tell. I’d never betray him like that. There’s literally only a handful of people who know his story, and most of those have betrayed him. I’ll not become one of those people. Perhaps if you really want to know, and I mean genuinely, because you want to be there for him and not just because you want to know the drama, ask him and he’ll tell.”

I doubt it, but then it’ll be Chester’s choice, not mine.

We twirl around so quickly I almost get dizzy, and when we come to a standstill, I have to hold on to Remy to stay standing up straight. Of course he notices.

“Focus your eyes on one point, it’ll make it easier.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You might know when we’re spinning, but I’m just going through the motions.”

He laughs out loud. “Fair point.”

He leads me to the other side of the room with long glides as the song comes to an end. In the silence between songs, he takes his head off of my head and looks me in the eye.

“I’d never ask you to betray Chester. Believe it or not, it might just have been a hookup for him, but I take everyone I share a piece of my life with seriously, no matter how short that period might be. I’ll talk to him about it, he seems like he can use another person in his corner.”

It’s the exact moment I feel myself fall in love with Remington Ashburn.

Pure Shores by All Saints starts, and I squint my eyes because I feel like it’s a weird song to be dancing to, but when Remy starts leading me I start to understand. Remy is exquisite. He’s grace incarnate, and if he would be on a stage full of dancers, I’m certain my eyes would stay glued to him the whole time. It’s like some deity looked at him and said ‘yes, you can be my vessel for dance’. My heart is racing and I don’t think it has anything to do with the dancing.

“Why are you no longer dancing professionally?” I ask him with a mouth that’s dryer than it should be.

“Because I’m ancient, mon petit Feu.”

I snort. “My little fire, really? That’s the best you could come up with?” Fancy boarding school meant fancy French lessons. Seeing I only enrolled at twelve and had not had a fancy education ever since I was two meant that I was horribly behind in every single subject, but some of the French stuck.

“Thought it would be more fitting than calling you my little dove.”

I have to admit he has a point, but I’m not telling him that. I will not encourage such foul behavior. “You’re not ancient.”

He lifts me up, his hands pressing in my ribs, just below my breasts and the movement reverses the way we look at each other. I’m looking down on him now, while his eyes lift up to meet mine. “It’s like dog years when you’re a dancer. I’m thirty-four, I’m ancient. Maybe I could’ve kept going for a couple of years. Keep getting smaller and smaller parts and watching from the wings as the next generation shines in the spotlight.”

He very slowly lets me glide back down again. The song changes to Pearl Jam’s Alive, but we’ve stopped dancing.

“That’s not me. I would’ve withered. It’s all or nothing, so I stopped at my peak and now it’s nothing. Now, I make sure that the future-future generation at least has a chance to stand in the spotlight. Especially those unfortunate enough to not have the money for the lessons, but have enough talent to make it big and ensure they’ll never not have money for anything again.”

I slowly shake my head. “That’s not nothing. That’s amazing.”

He huffs. “What’s amazing was dancing on stage at Cedar Lake, floating through the air and being one with the music.”

I lay a hand on his cheek. “Just accept the fucking compliment, Remy. You’re doing something good. And you’re allowed to mourn your life as a professional dancer.”

He looks down, his eyes sad as he forces a crooked grin on his face. Leaning forward, I kiss him on the fake smile he’s plastered on.

“Don’t. Don’t pretend with me.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how to do that without breaking down.”

“Dance with me, make me feel. Give me some of your burden.”

He just stands there for a moment and for this tiny slither of time I think he’s going to deny me. Then he pushes his right leg forward, making me step back with my left leg. His hands hold me and make me spin through the room as if there’s no more to life than music and going through the motions. One of my hands is on his chest, and I can feel his heart pounding. It could be from the dancing, it could be from heartbreak, it could be because he’s breaking down. Whatever it is, I hold on for dear life and let him dance with me as if my life depends on it.

I don’t know what time it is when I finally leave the studio, but it’s dark outside. We danced the entire time and somehow I feel lighter than when I arrived.