Amanda's Blue Marine (31 page)

“I’m not much on group groping,” he said bluntly. “I’d rather do it alone. But then again, my ideas usually don’t work out very well. My plan for our first time together seemed great in my mind. Once the Cameron thing was over I was going to take you out for a nice dinner, bring you flowers, tell you how I felt and hope you would listen to me. Very romantic. And what did you actually get for our first time? The Kelly Arms with its hospital charm, Dr. Karen the cop critic and me with the flu, shaking like a chihuahua.”

“I loved it,” she said.

He held her off to look down into her face. “You loved it?” he asked, half laughing.

“Yes. I knew where you were and I didn’t have to worry about you getting shot or taken hostage or cracking up a squad car during a chase. Every day while you’re working I think about what could be happening to you and I just have to put my mind somewhere else because if I didn’t I would go crazy. I know you were sick when we were at your apartment, but once Karen said it was just the flu I knew you would get better and I could enjoy having you with me. All the time. In the same place, in the same bed. I could see you and hear you and touch you and not care what the bad guys were doing. Yes, I loved it.”

He said nothing for a long pause as he drew her down into his lap. She lay her head on his shoulder as he lifted her hair off her nape and kissed the back of her neck tenderly.

“You really do love me,” he murmured, as if the idea were still incredible to him.

“Yes, I do.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t think about what you must be feeling about the job. I’ve always been alone in it and it’s such a change to consider somebody else.”

“I know. And I also know you like doing it and you’re very good at it. But I would be lying if I said the risks in it didn’t haunt me.”

“On a daily basis it’s not a big deal, actually. Most of the cases are routine and even boring. Chasing down Cameron was the chanciest thing I’ve done in a long time. And under normal circumstances I would have had backup and that would have been a lot less tricky.”

“Tricky?”

“Well, dangerous.”

“You made it more dangerous because you did it alone, Kelly. Look, let’s not talk about it, okay? I don’t like to remember it. The only thing I want to remember about that whole episode is that it brought us together.” She looked up at him in the dark, trying to make out his features in the faint light coming through the window from the living room.

He took a last drag on his cigarette and then crushed it out with finality.

“I never expected you when Lieutenant Manning told me I would be working with a detective,” Mandy said, reaching up to touch his cheek, which was growing rough with stubble.

“Whatever gave you the idea that I have a personality?” he said teasingly. Then he saw that she was looking up at him lovingly and he bent to kiss her.

“Let’s go back to the bedroom,” he murmured. “Being here reminds me of the time you got the last note from Cameron. I gave you that drink and you slept all night on the couch. It wasn’t the best time I’ve ever had.”

“Why?”

“I spent the entire night half awake, fighting to keep myself from taking you into the bedroom.” He helped her to her feet and then stood up after her, taking her hand in his.

“You could have fooled me. I was trying hard to seduce you, to no effect.”

“You were drunk, Amanda.”

“I wasn’t that drunk. I was trying to seduce you and you wouldn’t go for it because of your police ethics. You’re such a Boy Scout.”

“On my honor, I will try,” he said softly, lifting her hand to his mouth.

“Try what?”

“Try to keep Amanda Redfield from seducing me,” he said. She could barely see him in the dark but the flash of his white teeth told her he was smiling.

“Certainly not. You had no time for cooking lessons between law school and studying for the bar and then putting the bad guys in jail. I love pizza and chow mein and tabu-whatever that stuff was.”

He rolled off her and put his arm across his eyes. “Okay, I’ll bite,” he said. “What are pheromones, professor? I’ve heard the word but don’t know the details.”

“Animal attraction. It’s a scientifically proven fact that certain people find certain other people magnetic because of their scent. It’s predetermined and you can’t fight it.”

“I do not intend to fight it.”

“Nature designed your very essence to be irresistible to me.”

“As long as you like it, Red,” he said simply. “I will never ask another thing of God or fate or whatever is running this universe if you stay as in love with me forever as you are right now.”

Mandy felt her throat close and the prick of tears behind her eyes. How could she not love him when he said the most endearing things when she least expected to hear them?

She had never thought it would be so easy to love anybody, but it was.

For the next two months Mandy was with Kelly every chance that she got, and they did everything together. She discovered some things about him that she hadn’t known: he sent all of his clothes for the detective squad out to be laundered and pressed, which was why he always looked like he stepped out of a bandbox on the job. Aside from his plainclothes for police work, he had uniforms for those occasions which called for them and then an assortment of castoff athletic wear and jeans for every day. She had seen him wearing T shirts and sweatshirts from various teams and organizations but never knew that the man didn’t own a cardigan sweater, for example, or a polo shirt or a pair of casual pants. When she saw him wearing a team shirt with a date on it and learned that it was from his eighth grade soccer team she realized that he never threw anything away. He also washed everything together when he had to do laundry, and waited until he had nothing left to wear before he did that, like a college freshman coming home for Christmas. He did whatever was quick and efficient, and it often seemed to her that he was living like an orphaned bear cub in a cave. She undertook to civilize him, and was only partially successful. There was a part of him that would always be wild, no matter how many loads of white laundry he set aside to be bleached, as she instructed. With that in mind she overlooked the dozens of voice messages from women still left on his machine; she was satisfied when no new ones were added. He eventually erased the originals and thereafter only reminder messages and solicitations could be heard. It took her a few days to realize that from the start he had given her the cell number he used for his family and his job; the previous females had gotten the number for the message machine, so he could filter the calls. Slick, she thought, and then thought, but I knew what he was like before he met me. She had seen enough evidence, provided by everyone. She could live with it, as she did with the other remnants of his past.

For example, he had the most bizarre eating habits she had ever seen. She often wondered why he was still alive, rather than dead of starvation or ptomaine. He ate anything that happened to be handy and didn’t seem to care what it was or how it tasted. Health considerations and nutritional value were foreign concepts to him. He hated supermarkets and avoided them, so if all he had in his apartment was beer and cocoa puffs, he had beer and cocoa puffs for breakfast. And so did she. After several mornings of this questionable fare she dragged him to the grocery store and they had a tutorial about the express lane and coupons and how to avoid the little old lady writing a check for $7.36 getting in front of you. He couldn’t be bothered with any of it and told her that was why he was always in restaurants, and it didn’t matter anyway because hamburgers with ketchup, also pizza with sausage, covered all the food groups. He groaned and rolled his eyes at her advice but he indulged her and listened, and she was amused at the end of a month to find him comparing prices in a supermarket flyer and then laughing at himself for doing it. He teased her about someone of her privileged background clipping coupons and rating detergents, and she replied that boarding schools taught you very quickly how to shop for food and sort laundry. Their clothes became intermingled in both apartments and they commuted between Mandy’s condo and Kelly’s monastic cell as if they lived in both. They were so into each other that they avoided everybody else and that was fine, since they needed no one else.

Mandy learned that Kelly’s self deprecating sense of humor was one of his most charming traits. His sly, understated wit came through more often now that the barriers were down and he trusted her enough to tell her what he really felt and thought. She wanted to be with him all the time, and she was. Like teenagers, they went everywhere and did everything together. She took him to a concert( he fell asleep) and he took her bowling (also not a success; he collapsed laughing as the ball dragged her down the alley). They went to the movies and to baseball games and to malls. It didn’t seem to matter what they were doing as long as they were together. They arranged their schedules to coincide and Kelly switched shifts to accommodate her commitments to the DA’s office. The unlikely duo, born of a stalking incident, raised eyebrows and caused comment at first; neither one of them cared and when the gossip got no response it died down and then vanished. Tom Henderson was royally pissed but silent; showing a reaction to his ex’s new beau would mean that he cared and he didn’t want anyone to think that he did. Mandy’s parents were also silent, her father out of tolerance and her mother in the hope that the relationship’s white heat would cause it to burn out quickly like a flash fire. So the onlookers waited, while Mandy basked in the glow of the first fulfilling affair she had ever had.

She was hungry for Kelly all the time and always seemed to be undressing him, a circumstance which embarrassed her but which he encouraged as much as possible. Mandy loved him, loved him, loved him. And he relaxed and loved her back, confident finally that his trust was not misplaced.

It was seven weeks after Kelly’s spectacular flu when he awoke one Sunday morning to find Mandy planting a long line of kisses down the length of his spine. He opened one eye and said, mumbling face down into the pillow, “Don’t waste ‘em, sweetheart.”

He turned over and pulled her into his arms, which resulted in a forty minute delay in beginning the day’s assignment: attacking the pile of dishes which was growing out of the sink and onto the counters in the kitchen of his apartment.

He sat up and felt around for his clothes, which were on the floor. “I told you we should be using paper plates,” he said reasonably.

“We should be wearing paper clothes too,” Mandy said. “The laundry is a more pressing problem than the dishes, haven’t you noticed?”

“There are only three bags of laundry in the hall,” he said.

“Only three?”

“The rule is we don’t start washing clothes until the only thing I have left to wear is that pair of shorts that says ‘Welcome to Coney Island’ across the butt. Then I know it’s time.”