The Art of Endings

  The Art of Endings

  Nia Forrester

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, distributed, stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without express permission of the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for review purposes.

  Copyright © 2012 Nia Forrester

  All rights reserved.

  For the e-chatterbox

  Chapter One

  “Coffee? Breakfast?”

  Darren paused, his hand poised on the doorknob, and turned toward the voice.

  Paige was at the door of her bathroom, wearing only a gossamer-thin tank and the briefest of bikini underwear. Ridiculously—given everything that had gone on the night before—he still felt the obligation to avert his eyes from the toned and shapely length of her legs, the shadow of her dark nipples beneath her top.

  “Don’t tell me you were trying to sneak out of here like I was one of your Good-Time Suzies,” Paige said continuing into the bathroom.

  Darren said nothing, feeling caught.

  “Coffee’s in the cabinet, and there’s plenty of food if you wanted to get started on something for us to eat.”

  It took him a minute, but he eventually made his feet move and started taking stuff out of her well-stocked and impeccably neat kitchen. That was Paige—everything in its place and a place for everything. And for the most part, he was the same way, but last night proved that he too could fall short of following that rule. Paige was supposed to be a friend, and that was her place in his life. Until last night.

  __________

  Darren had been coming off a pretty messed up shift when she called, and was thinking about whether he might stop at the liquor store on the way home. Some cases were like that—they could drive you right into the bottle, and this had been one of them. A thirteen-year old girl who lived with her mother in the Southeast quadrant of the city had blown off her uncle’s head with a 9mm. When Darren responded to the scene, with his partner, Cutty, they found a social worker with a skinny little kid who looked more like a ten-year old, sitting on the tattered couch in the front room, hands clasped between her legs, dressed only in panties and an undershirt, a blanket over her shoulders.

  There were specks of blood on her clothing, and notably on the front of her underwear as well, which meant that she was already partially undressed when the shooting took place. In the kitchen, a couple of uniformed officers were talking to her hysterical mother who was explaining how unsurprised she was that her daughter had done something like this because “ain’t nobody can tell her nuthin’”.

  When Darren and Cutty had gone into the back bedroom to see the deceased, they found him sprawled backward across the bed, also partially undressed, but looking as though someone had tried to drag his pants back up. His head had been blown almost clean off.

  They had looked at each other and shook their heads. A rookie with only one day on the job could’ve figured it out. This dead motherfucker was probably no more that kid’s uncle than Darren was the Man in the Moon. And a physical examination of the skinny, scared little girl in the next room would undoubtedly reveal that she had had intercourse in the recent past. And Mom would turn out to be yet another degenerate druggie who pimped her kid out to various “uncles” over time. But until all of that came out in the course of an investigation—as Darren had no doubt it would—he and Cutty would have to take this kid in like a common criminal and treat her piece-of-shit mother like a “witness”. And so that’s what they did.

  Darren had been walking out of the stationhouse, heading for his truck and trying to get out of his head the expression on the little girl’s face when they put her in the back of the car—the wide-eyed fear when she looked at him, just another big man who would hurt her—when Paige called.

  “Feel like dressing up and coming to a thing with me?” Paige asked as soon as he answered.

  His choices at the moment were limited. Either go over to Trey’s and hang out, crawl into a bottle, or see what ‘thing’ Paige was talking about. Trey’s was always an option because no matter when—day or night—he dropped by, his boy knew to open the door and ask no questions. And even now that he was all loved-up with Shayla, his former tenant turned girlfriend, that hadn’t changed. In fact, Shayla was part of the draw for Darren—funny, happy, all the things he needed right about now.

  The bottle had its benefits too, because then for a few hours of stupor, he would forget that he lived in a world where adults let other adults fuck children for money. But Paige was someone he hadn’t learned how to say ‘no’ to, and being in her company still trumped all else. So he told her he’d meet her in a couple hours and asked her what the dress code was.

  The event she needed an escort to was a reception on Capitol Hill with the Attorney General and a few senators and congressmen. As an attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, Paige often went to things like this. She had her sights set on much bigger things career-wise and never missed an opportunity to meet the people who might help her make it happen. Darren was always more than happy to go with her because the food was good, the drinks free-flowing, and because, hell, Paige was there.

  This time, the reception was in the new Capitol Visitors’ Center, the state-of-the-art addition to the U.S. Capitol that boasted wide expansive rooms, in contrast to the hundreds years old House and Senate building nearby. Darren had gone home for a quick shower and rushed back downtown, parking in Union Station and then walking over to meet Paige outside of the Visitors’ Center entrance. As he approached, she extended a hand to him. Darren took in her face, flushed from the cold, and all the more fetching because of the red cocktail suit she was wearing. Paige smiled at him as she grasped his bare hand in her gloved one.

  “You handsome devil,” she said, leaning in for a brief kiss on the cheek.

  “You look good, too,” Darren said.

  Generally, he tried not to look too closely at Paige, because it was a dangerous path to head down. He knew all too well that he would like what he saw, and want to see more of it.

  Inside, Paige made the rounds among people she knew. Standing next to the bar, Darren watched her discreetly work her way into conversations with a couple of congressmen and the AG himself.

  He smiled as he sipped on his drink, admiring her drive. She’d always been that way for as long as he’d known her. In undergrad, few were the clubs that Paige didn’t want to join, the people she didn’t want to meet, the places she didn’t want to visit. One weekend, she’d dragged Darren to basically every single national monument they could hit in a 48-hour period, just so she could make sure she had squeezed every bit of history and culture out of the nation’s capital before she focused on studying.

  In those days, when he had only just met her, Darren thought she was the most fascinating creature he’d ever encountered. She kind of still was, he’d admitted to himself as he watched her. Then she was turning and looking about the room and finding him, extended a hand, calling him over to her.

  She’d introduced him to the Attorney General of the United States, the senior senator from Maryland, and a congresswoman from Ohio.

  “So are you also one of ours at DOJ?” the AG had asked.

  “No,” Paige had jumped in. “As a matter of fact, Darren rejected his ivory tower work as a civil engineer to protect and serve right here in the District.”

  “Ah,
a cop,” the AG had said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Good, honest work.”

  Darren smiled and gave some canned response, which led to a twenty-minute conversation about technological advances in policing.

  Afterwards, as he and Paige were leaving, he realized that he’d completely forgotten to brood about the thirteen-year old girl the whole time, and he was thankful for that.

  “Dinner?” Paige asked. “I’m buying. I appreciate you coming with me.”

  “You know I’m always up for free drinks and shallow conversation,” Darren said.

  Paige had looked at him, her eyes searching his, as they walked back toward Union Station, bracing against the wind.

  “You always make glib comments like that,” she said shaking her head. “What’s really going on with you? While I definitely appreciate the company at the last minute like this all the time, you sure you don’t have some nice woman somewhere waiting for you?”

  “I wouldn’t have anything to offer a ‘nice woman’, Paige,” Darren said.

  “Darren, that is not true,” she said. She held his hand as they dodged traffic in the circle just in front of the mammoth train station. Completed in 1908 and restored eighty years later, Union Station was an imposing white granite edifice, one of Washington DC’s most impressive landmarks, in a city littered with historical buildings. Inside, in addition to the city’s hub for Amtrak, there was a full shopping mall, dozens and restaurants and an office building.

  They opted to eat dinner at one of the places right there in the station rather than take Darren’s car out and drive around the city aimlessly searching for parking on a Friday night. Sitting across the table from her in the restaurant, Darren admired Paige’s smooth, cinnamon complexion, and the subtle way she’d accentuated her lips. She understood the importance of being attractive without being ostentatious and did it well. She would make a great congressman or senator’s wife, Darren thought ruefully. That was the kind of life, the kind of man, Paige was destined for.

  “You’re far away again,” she said, looking at him over her menu.

  “Thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Destiny.”

  Paige lowered her menu and her eyes searched his.

  “For a guy as funny as you often are, sometimes I think your thoughts—the ones you don’t share—must be very dark.”

  She had no idea.

  With the shit he saw daily, it was tough not to have dark thoughts. His dark thought for the day had come when he looked at the corpse of that child rapist sprawled across the bed. Far from feeling horror at the carnage, or regret at the violent loss of human life, Darren instead thought about how satisfying it would have been if the man could come back to life, just so he could personally blow his head off again.

  But that was not the kind of thing you shared with a pretty woman sitting across from you in an upscale restaurant, no matter how old a friend she was. That was the kind of thing you stuffed deep down inside, or tried to make yourself forget with the help of a bottle of gin.

  “I’m thinking of having the salmon,” Darren said. “How ‘bout you?”

  After dinner, when he drove her home, he found that he couldn’t make himself talk and joke around the way he might normally have done. He was a little drunk, and probably shouldn’t even have been driving, but she didn’t live too far away and frankly, it wouldn’t be the first time he drove with minor impairment. Outside her building, Paige turned in her seat to face him, reaching over to shut off the engine.

  “Come in,” she said. “Let’s talk awhile.”

  Darren shook his head. “Don’t feel like talking,” he said.

  Paige looked at him and smiled. “So you’ll listen then.” And then she’d taken out his key and gotten out of the truck so he had no choice but to follow her.

  Upstairs, she’d changed and washed her face, the entire time talking to him almost non-stop, filling him in about some of the cases she was working on, not prompting him to respond, but just accepting his silence. Somehow she’d intuited that something was going on with him and that he probably shouldn’t be alone.

  Soon she was turning out the lights, so the only one on was the lamp in her living room on the coffee table. As she spoke, Paige sat on the floor, between Darren’s legs which were spread wide as he sat on the sofa. Without thinking about it, he reached down and massaged her shoulders, his eyes on her long, brown legs stretched in front of her.

  “You know what next week is?” she asked suddenly.

  “Yeah,” Darren said right away.

  The second anniversary of Clint’s death. Her fiancée, his best friend, killed by a landmine in Afghanistan at the far-too-young age of twenty-seven.

  “I keep telling myself that it’s nothing to be apprehensive about,” she said. “But as it gets closer . . .” She stopped and shook her head.

  Darren said nothing.

  “I know it must seem silly to you,” she said. “You see death so up close and personal in your work. So for me to actually dread the memory of a death. And one I didn’t even have to see firsthand.”

  “It’s not silly, Paige. I dread it too.”

  “Do you?” She turned so she was looking at him. “I mean, I know you loved him. But you seem to take everything square, right between the eyes. Absorbing every blow and just keep on going.”

  “Like the Terminator?” Darren grinned.

  Paige didn’t smile. Instead she shook her head. “Darren, don’t,” she said.

  And he knew she was asking him not to cheapen the moment by making a joke out of it. Darren opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure what, when she’d unexpectedly gotten up on her knees and kissed him.

  He tried to pull away, but she pulled him toward her with a hand on his neck and pressed even closer, her lips and tongue insistent. And he couldn’t, didn’t want to, resist anymore. It felt like a dam had broken inside. Years of restraint fractured, broken beyond repair.

  After that, Paige was undressing him, shoving his jacket over his shoulders, her fingers nimbly tackling the buttons on his shirt, his belt, his pants. The entire time, her lips barely left his, and for the first time in his life, Darren felt like he wasn’t the one in total control of the direction of a sexual encounter. But that was only in the beginning.

  Soon he was pushing her back against the carpet, lowering himself over her and moving down so his lips covered a nipple, pulling it into his mouth, through the thin fabric of her top. Paige gasped and arched her hips upward, so Darren reached between them, impatiently shoving her panties aside, stroking her. She rolled her hips against him, making breathy little noises, both her hands grasping his head, pressing it harder against her chest. Darren used his free hand to raise her top so it was finally tongue against skin. Paige cried out at the contact.

  That sound, of Paige being pleasured by him was what broke down the last remnants of his self-control. Darren only got his pants part of the way down his hips before he was pushing into her. Paige pulled her knees back and both her hands went down, her nails digging into his buttocks as she strained upward to meet him.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes . . .”

  And each time she said the word, Darren pushed harder, further, deeper.

  Paige threw her head back and he kissed her neck, her chin and behind her ears until she turned so he would take her mouth once again. She held him tight, her palms on either side of his face, forcing him to look at her.

  Darren could hear himself panting, and blowing through his nostrils, hard breaths like a racehorse rearing to go. His heart was racing, his mind reeling, and Paige, she looked the way he felt— thoroughly undone.

  In almost no time at all, he was dangerously close but held back until she clamped her thighs even tighter about him, pressing her mouth to his and stifling her scream of release. Only then did Darren let go, and it was as though he was turned inside out, for a moment absenting himself from his physical body.

  Moments later t
hough, he was back down to earth and facing the realization that he was half-naked, braced on his knees, still on top of and buried inside his best friend’s fiancée.

  Paige felt the change in him immediately and as her breathing slowed, she put a hand at the side of his face, kissed the corner of his mouth and pulled him down to her.

  “Darren,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  He allowed himself to relax then, and they even made it into her bedroom eventually, where later, twice more, he gave in to the overwhelming need to get close—as close as humanly possible—to her. And then, he slept.

  __________

  Much later, they were sitting across from each other eating eggs and sausage with toast as though the earth hadn’t shifted off its axis, as though everything remained unchanged. When the silence became too much, Darren collected himself sufficiently to look directly at her.

  “Good-Time Suzies?” he said, dryly. They were the first words he’d spoken since she caught him trying to sneak out.

  Paige laughed.

  Darren liked making people laugh, anyone at all; but with Paige it had always been a special kind of pleasure. She was so serious, so driven, almost businesslike that he was always on the look-out for ways to penetrate that façade. Last night he’d done a little too much . . . penetrating. And now here he was.

  “It’s a phrase my grandmother uses whenever a woman is a little too . . . ‘fancified’. If I wore too much make-up or something a little too revealing when I was a teenager she’d tell me I didn’t want boys thinking I was a Good-Time Suzy,” Paige explained.

  Darren shook his head, but said nothing more. His usual verbal prowess seemed to have taken leave of him for the moment.

  “Another cup of coffee?” Paige asked, getting up and taking her mug over to the Keurig on the opposite counter.

  “Nope. I’m good.” He was still looking at the front door, longing for it.