Chapter 2
1596 Words
At the moment she is living the horrible cliché of being a cop! She looks around her apartment. Her diet consists of coffee and bad take-out! Her cupboard looks as if it burst open and threw all her clothes all over the place. At least her mom won’t complain about stacked up dishes, she scans her kitchen, rolling her eyes when the only thing that is clean and neat is her basin in the kitchen.
Deciding to grab the clothes in the living room and dump them in the washer.
There, now you can see the colour of her couches… Damn! You can see the colour of her second-hand couches! Her eyes grow wide. It’s not as she doesn’t have the money to buy better, she doesn’t have time… Or the energy after a day like today.
She flops down on the ugly avocado green fake leather couch with the puffy arms and starts channel surfing. At least they are comfortable. She pours herself another drink before putting her feet up on her little coffee table.
She knows she shouldn’t, but she can’t put them up on the couch, her neck would feel strained to look at the television side-ways, and she just…
“Crack…Crack…CRACK…” Her little old wooden table gives way under the weight of her legs and splits right down the middle, making her bottle of whiskey fly through the air, spilling all over the green carpet in the living room as little shards of wood go flying.
She tries to jump up and catch whatever she can before it hits the floor but pours the rest of her drink, together with the ice out all over her shirt, making her yell at the feeling of the ice against her skin.
Standing in the middle of the room, she looks at the mess… Now she smells worse than she did before!
***
After cleaning up the mess so that her place won’t smell like a stale distillery, and taking a shower, she feels a lot better. She checks her phone to see if she missed any calls and breathes a sigh of relief to see that all is quiet.
The files are glaring at her from her dining room table, and she huffs before turning around to get dressed.
Once she’s made some coffee, she sits at the table, pulling her one leg up on the chair, and starts to read through the files. There has to be something…
A knock on her door makes her look up and sit there staring at it for a moment before a second knock pulls her back to reality.
“Coming!” She shouts before opening the door.
When she checks the peephole, there is nobody, and at the same time, her phone starts to ring. Tired and slightly confused, she grabs her phone to answer it before opening her door.
“Gemma, you need to start eating properly. Burgers for dinner are not food. I hope you like what I ordered for you. Have a good night. Sleep well.”
The line dies, and when she looks at the passage in front of her, there is a brown paper bag on the floor with a slip stapled to it. It’s from a pretty uptown restaurant with the kind of food she would never be able to afford!
That was him on the phone! Oh, God, he knows where she lives! She rushes back inside slamming the door shut behind her and starts to look around for anything that could seem out of place or missing, calling Bulldog in the process.
She tries to explain what happened, but she is so shaken up that everything feels foggy for a couple of moments before he tells her to calm down, take a deep breath, and focus.
“Don’t you…”
“Paterson! Just do as I say! Tank will be at your place in ten minutes. Now take a deep breath and start from the beginning and skip the part about your dirty underwear and breaking your table.”
She can’t stop the bright blush creeping over her cheeks when she realizes how she rambled on and how incompetent she must have sounded!
Bulldog talked to her until she heard the knock on the door, and when she told him it was Tank, he hung up. Tank walks in with two officers behind her and her take-out in his hand.
“Your food was outside.”
She feels like bursting into tears! Then she starts to explain that it’s the food he had delivered. Tank suddenly looks at the bag differently, and the CSI officers that are there with him take it from him.
“Come on, let's get you some water.” He walks to her kitchen, grabs a glass, and pours some water for her to drink.
After taking a couple of sips, she follows him into the living room to explain what happened, this time leaving out the parts about her clothes being everywhere and the table that broke. She knows that her place must look terrible, but considering the current circumstances, she doesn’t care.
The crime scene investigators start combing her place over from top to bottom, asking if anyone else ever came to visit her. Except for Tank, Bulldog, and Cappie who sometimes came around, nobody else even knew where she lived. Then she starts to wonder what other people will think about her superior officers coming around to her place… She’s single and semi-hot!
Dammit! Gemma, focus! She reprimands herself and starts to walk through her place as if she was investigating her apartment. She notices that the empty perfume bottles she got from her grandmother have been moved out of place on her dresser. She never touches them. They have been in the same spots since the day she moved in.
She has always been very careful with them, as they are antique and have great sentimental value, but one is out of line. She feels her heart racing as the officer takes it into his hand and carefully dusts it for prints.
Nothing else is out of place anywhere else except for one thing… Her dustbin in the kitchen with all her take-out boxes is gone. That’s how he must have figured out what she eats.
Tank refuses that she stay, and she refuses to leave.
“This is my house, and I’m not going to let him scare me out of it!”
“FINE! Then I’m staying here with you.” He glares down at her, his amber eyes burning brightly.
She’s always felt a tingle run down her spine when he’s around, but she thinks it’s because he is one of the few people she trusts. Especially now.
Her phone rings and half expecting it to be Cappie telling her she should listen to Tank, she answers without looking at the caller ID.
“Gemma, you are a very naughty girl making me call you twice in one night. Don’t forget to eat your dinner.” The line dies, and she finally bursts into tears.
The damn standby for the past two weeks, and now this has all gotten too much to deal with! Tank rushes over to her side and puts his arms around her telling her that he’s got her. She is safe now. Then when she tells him about the call, they realize that he is watching her somehow, and his team immediately starts to sweep her place for any hidden cameras or bugs of any kind that he might be using.
This time when he insists that she not stay in her apartment, she doesn’t fight him on it. She simply packs a couple of things in a bag and follows Tank out the door while the last of the officers wrap up the scene.
Some of the neighbours are standing in their doorways in the passage trying to find out what is going on, and she can hear their murmurs. One thing is for certain, she will need to get a new place after this. Not just because he invaded her space, and it would be safer, she just doesn’t want to deal with nosey neighbours.
***
They walk into Tank’s apartment, and he shows her around. It’s nothing as she expected. Perfectly polished wooden floors. A living room suite with an antique leather couch. The coffee table can’t be less than seventy years old or something.
Everything in his kitchen seems to be antique, but it’s all high technology stuff with an antique twist. His bathroom, however, is clean cut. He has two black towels hanging from the rack, folded perfectly.
His bedroom is the same black broken with some blue pillows on the bed. The one thing she did expect. The man has a huge bed! Well, he is tall, so it makes sense.
“Your place is great. Thank you for letting me stay here.” She walks back to the living room, but he drops her bag in his bedroom.
“I’ll take the couch.” He walks to a cupboard in the passage and pulls out a set of blue towels, handing it to her.
“Here are some clean towels. Why don’t you go and take a shower, and I will fix us something to eat? You probably haven’t eaten, have you?”
She shakes her head and walks over to the bathroom, turning around to look at him again.
“Thank you.” She softly closes the door behind her and leans against it.
- Writer
