Page 23 of Stutter

Her plump lips parts, her tongue wetting them, but then something crawls over her face, an emotion like agony mixed with resignation and her mouth shuts. Shaking her head with an exhale, she turns… and walks away.

I stand immediately, urging my legs to go to her, to pull her to me, to kiss her so fiercely she knows how I feel. That I love her. That I forgive her. That even though I want to know her past, it won’t hurt our future. Her secrets can be hers. That I want her and what she does outside of us, is none of my concern.

But my legs won’t work and my heart pumps faster, and standing too quickly made the ache in my temples magnify and my vision blurs. I want to call out to her, to come back. That we can fix this but I sit back down, and rub at my temples again because what the fuck is going on?

Whoosh whoosh whoosh

It's as though my body feels her absence in every which way including physically and I need to fix this.

There’s another rapping at my door, louder and stronger and a piece of me believes and hopes it to be Damon so he can urge me to fix this and I can blame it on him when I’m a coward.

Instead I lift my eyes to face a somber, dark-eyed beast in a trench coat and slicked back pompadour hair. “Detective Arlo,” I greet.

Black eyes sweep around my office before they settle on me. “Professor Harrington.” He replies, taking a seat before my desk.

“How can I help you?”

He lifts an ankle and settles it on the knee part of his black trousers, inspecting a nail before meeting my gaze again and it irks me, for no reason other than he looks fucking annoyingly smug. I know him. I used tobehim. Know exactly what he’s wearing under that full length trench coat because I used to wear the same fucking cliché outfit. Pleated trousers with long pockets. Brown belt with a gold or silver buckle. Black turtleneck for the winter but once spring hits, it’s back to polo’s or a nice button down. In fact, one could argue we’re wearing the exact same thing right now.

“You travel a lot, Professor?”

I arch a brow, my migraine thumping along in the vein of my temple, the room seemingly much smaller now as he pulses before me, a dark aura surrounding him.

Whoosh whoosh whoosh

“Some.” I answer.

He nods, not exactly seemingly towards anything, but like he’s contemplating how to properly word his next question. “You travel a lot with your peers?”

I take a note from Raven's playbook and blink slowly at the detective before answering him. “I had Thanksgiving with Dr. Archer, yes.”

Again he does that stupid fucking nodding tactic to see if my anxiety will rise, to see if there will be any changes in the pitch of my voice, my features, if I’ll give some kind of sign I know anything. But I don’t really know anything, do I? In her own way my angel protected me, didn’t she?

“You… travel outside of the US a lot with Archer?”

I clear my throat. “It was… a special occasion of sorts. Am I being followed, Detective?”

He frowns like he’s Robert De Niro, and shrugs like him, too. He moves his fingers, touching each tip to his thumb, a different initial tattooed in Old English font on each knuckle closest to his hand but they don’t spell a word. They must mean a lot to him, these initials. And suddenly I see it. Him. Arlo, as a young kid, growing up in the streets of some overrun, overcrowded neighborhood where you had to do some shotty things for yourself and your siblings, I eye the tattoos on his knuckles again, to get to where you need to be in life. He knows a criminal mind because he'sbeena criminal. A criminal now on the “right side” of the law. An old gang tattoo is probably under all those layers of warm cashmere. Probably gifts from a lover that once told him he was better than that life, and he believed it, making the amends to become better. I respect that.

Which begs the question- what side am I on?

“A special occasion, eh?”

Over the whooshing in my ears I hear the slight Puerto Rican lilt. Bronx. Something he’s done his absolute best to get rid of, that accent, and still, it remains. Subtle. But it’s there. “I was meeting the parents.” A half truth.

“Dr. Archer's parents?”

I nod once. “Damon and I are…partners.” I emphasize with a raised brow. His eyes widen, possibly in embarrassment because it’s none of his fucking business but it’s also a full blown fucking lie and I wonder if he can see through me the same way I see through him. “It’s gotten fairly serious,” a partial lie “over thelast few weeks and so, I met his father and then we flew to Paris to meet his mother. So yes. I travel some. On special occasions.” I reiterate.

“Is HR aware?”

I fight back a grimace because I didn’t even think about that aspect of my lie. I groan inwardly that I now have to properly speak to Damon and just pray he’ll go along with this lie of mine without too many questions. “We have an appointment with the department tomorrow morning since we both have a late start. We didn’t want it to be anyone’s business until we both knew how we felt. Now, if you don’t mind, I have one last class left starting in about seven minutes.”

He rises to his feet, and sticks out his hand for me to shake. I take it. Making sure I grip it so he doesn’t think my sexuality has anything to do with my masculinity. He eyes me up and down and then offers a dimpled smirk. “Be careful of the company you keep.”

Whoosh whoosh whoosh

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

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