Bang Read online

  “Shit,” she pants into the pillows. “Come down here, come here, come.”

  Jackson shakes his head. “Bend your knees,” he says, pushing on her heels until she listens. Then he kneels between them himself, ripping open the condom. On second thought he grabs two pillows and slides them under her hips, tilting her pelvis up up up.

  “Jackson.” She’s wise to the position now, he can tell from her voice. “I don’t want you like, looking down on me while we—”

  Jack slides her heels farther up the mattress, pretzeling her knees up. Her ass looks so fucking good. “I wanna look down on you, though.” He cups her, jiggling his hand a little. Mari makes a soft, embarrassed sound. “I wanna see this,” Jack says, jiggling again. He has no idea what prompts him to add, “Wanna fuck you to pieces, Jesus, Mari, I swear to God. Wanna come all over it, and—”

  Mari whimpers. “Do it. Please.”

  Which is how Jackson ends up accomplishing about thirty seconds of penetration before pulling out, stripping off the condom, and blowing his wad all over his partner’s ass. He feels like the top of his head has come right off. Mari talks to him the whole time it’s happening, telling him how good he feels and how much she wants him to. He thinks it’s her voice as much as her body that gets him off.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he says when he’s finished, his whole body hot and shaky, like bombs have gone off in every single one of his joints. He can’t keep himself from reaching out and rubbing the slippery mess across her skin. “Are you okay, was that okay?” he asks, voice breaking embarrassingly, tugging her hip so she’ll roll over onto her back and he can see her. Suddenly all he wants in the world is a look at her face.

  “Mm-hmm,” Mari says, sounding pretty wrecked herself. Then, trying to stop him from pulling her against him, “Easy, dummy. I’m going to get it all over the bed.”

  “So?” Jack asks, nudging her onto her back on the mattress. “We’ll do laundry, fuck. Come here, come here.” He pushes the dark, messy cloud of hair out of her face, running his palm up the sensitive inside of her arm until she shivers. Oh, he likes her from this angle too. “You remember to bring the keys to these things?’ he asks her, rattling her wrists a little.

  Mari makes an exaggerated oh shit face, then grins at him wickedly. “They’re in my purse, yeah,” she says, but shakes her head when he moves to get up. “Leave ’em on a sec.”

  Jack gets her off one more time while she’s wearing them, slow and gentle, featherlight fingers on her clit and her hips moving ever so slightly to urge him on. She comes with a deep, satisfied shudder, and Jackson grins. “This is your real calling, I think,” Mari tells him sleepily, holding her hands out and letting him uncuff her. “Probably you should just turn in your badge.”

  There hasn’t been any word from work yet, though neither one of them mentions it. Jack tells himself these things can take time.

  Not like there isn’t plenty of distraction, anyway. They rinse off in his stall shower while the sheets are in the washer, then Jack orders a pizza while she towels off her hair. “What’d you get?” she asks, turning up in his kitchen a moment later in her panties and one of his GBPD T-shirts. He can tell immediately she’s not wearing a bra.

  “That’s your real calling,” he says, raising his eyebrows. Mari smirks.

  “What, my jugs, or being police?” She gives him a pointed look, sitting herself at his counter like a queen. “Now, what’s on my pizza?”

  She’s bossier now that they’re doing this, Jackson notices. He remembers how she used to talk to Andre at parties, this no-nonsense honey-do tone that made Jack absolutely sick with jealousy. The kind of voice that said, Manners aren’t for you, you’re family.

  “Extra mushrooms,” he says. “Obviously.”

  Mari smiles.

  They wash down the pizza with a couple of beers out of Jackson’s fridge, doing a lap of the condo while they figure out where to settle, from the kitchen counter to the table to sitting side by side on Jackson’s leather couch. After a second, Mari reaches for the remote and flips on the flat screen.

  “Yeah?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. Jack nods.

  And that’s the afternoon. It feels weird and novel to Jackson, watching Mari flip through the channels. In all the years they’ve been partners, they’ve never really hung out somewhere that wasn’t a bar or a work event or a barbecue, never just bummed around watching TV. It takes them a while to figure out how they’re gonna sit. “You’re making me all sweaty,” Mari complains after five minutes, but finally they wind up with her head in his lap and her ankles crossed on the arm of the sofa, her graceful chin tilted up so Jackson can see a tiny beauty mark on her neck he’s never had occasion to notice before.

  “You’re pretty,” he says without really thinking, tracing a path from that pinprick mole down along her collarbone. Her skin is very, very smooth.

  Mari smirks, flexing her toes up on the couch arm. “Oh yeah, I’m a beauty queen,” she says.

  “Hey, I mean it,” Jackson says, sounding dorkily earnest even to his own ears. “You’re pretty.” Then, ’cause it’s not like he’s not already in it, “I’ve always thought so.”

  Mari reaches for his hand then, laces her slender fingers through his. “I know.”

  “You did, huh?” It’s the closest they’ve come to talking about it, whatever torch he might or might not have been carrying all these years, but he finds he can’t summon up the scratchy resentment he was feeling earlier today. “I thought so.”

  “Kind of,” Mari admits, running her thumb back and forth across his knuckles, wrapping her fist around his middle finger in a gesture Jack feels in his groin. “What’s one thing you remember?” she asks quietly, tilting her face to look up at him. “About when we were rookies?”

  Jackson snorts. “Oh, you’re just blatantly fishing for compliments now, hm?”

  “No,” Mari defends herself, then smiles. “A little, I don’t know. I did just let you put me in fucking handcuffs for an hour, Officer Ford.”

  “Oh, let me,” Jack says with a laugh, but then he gets serious, thinking, wanting to please. “I was scared all the time, I think,” he tells her finally. “That’s a thing I remember. Like, not of getting hurt, or whatever, but of like. Doing the wrong thing.”

  “I remember that feeling,” Mari says. “Prepared me for having a baby, I always thought.”

  Jack smiles. “What about you?” he asks. The TV is still chattering away, low volume, a commercial for one of those bogus law firms that wants you to call if you’ve been injured in any kind of accident. “What’s one thing you remember?”

  “Hm,” Mari says. Jackson scritches the fingertips of his free hand through her hair as she thinks, tugging gently through the tangles. “That feels nice,” she murmurs quietly, eyes sliding shut and then opening again. “Okay,” she says, sounding thoughtful. “Do you remember the first winter we were on the job, that kid who got stuck between the garage and the shed in the snowstorm?”

  “Oh damn, yeah,” Jackson says. “I haven’t thought about that in years.” The kid had been six or seven, maybe, and the two structures built close enough together in the backyard that Jack could understand why he thought he could shimmy his way through. He’d slipped on some snow, though, got himself wedged sideways, and totally panicked. His equally rattled mother had called 911, but a tipped-over space heater had turned into a five-alarm blaze at a two-family house across town, so they were pretty damn low on the fire department’s priority list. Mari and Jack were the only emergency response team who showed.

  “You were so patient with him,” Mari is saying, still holding his hand, her wrist twisted at an awkward angle. “Remember? You talked to him for like a full hour, until he figured out how to get out of there. You told him that story about you and your brother getting locked in a bathroom at Meredith’s ballet school. And I thought, ‘I want to
kiss that boy.’”

  Jack peers down at her teasingly. “The little kid?” he deadpans.

  Mari huffs. “Jerk,” she says, throwing her elbow in the direction of his junk. Jack catches her just in time. “I’m telling you a nice thing about yourself. It doesn’t happen very often, so I’d listen if I were you.”

  “I’m kidding,” Jack says, as the ’90s electric guitar of the Friends theme song starts up. “It is nice.” It is, too, the memory of it, the winter cold and the feeling of actually helping somebody who needed it, of being out in the world with her. It’s been a long time since he felt that way. He doesn’t know if he has at all since he came back.

  “Mm-hmm.” Mari smiles at him for a minute, but then her face gets serious. “I’m sorry I didn’t come to the hospital,” she says.

  Jack shakes his head like an instinct—he doesn’t want to go down this road, not now. To dredge up those dark, angry feelings, and for what? “Come on,” he says, “we don’t have to talk about that.”

  “We do though, don’t we?” Mari asks, looking at him with wide, mournful eyes. “Eventually we have to talk about it.”

  Jack sighs. “Mari—”

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see you,” she tells him, fast like she wants to be sure to say it before she up and loses her nerve. “I just—I didn’t want you to see me. Not after everything that happened.” She wrinkles her nose. “Does that make sense?”

  Jack shakes his head again, laughs a little. “No,” he tells her bluntly, and pulls her face close to his for a kiss.

  They eat the pizza off paper towels on the sofa, drink a couple of sour Coronas Jack’s got at the back of his fridge from last summer. Around seven, Detective Bushur finally calls in with a report. He sounds hassled when Jack answers, like a man who’s been running in circles all day.

  “Well, Ford, I’m gonna give it to you straight. We don’t have him yet.”

  Jack pulls out a chair and sits down heavily at the kitchen table. “I see.” Mari is hovering behind his left elbow like a Halloween specter, looking expectant. Jackson shakes his head and her face falls. “Well, what do you have?” he asks Joe.

  Joe sighs. “A lot of leads, actually. We brought the parents in, for starters. Nice couple from Stockbridge, absolutely mortified when the cavalry showed up at their door. Say he fell off the rails in college, some sad story about going off his meds, who the fuck knows. The kid has their car, which is a plus. We’ve got an APB out, plus a pretty good lead that he’s heading out of state. He blew a toll down by Sheffield.”

  Jack swallows. “Sheffield, huh?” he says, tracing a whorl in the tabletop. It’s a square brick of a thing that Meredith made while she was in recovery the second time around, five maple beams for the table, four for the legs. Terry got a rocking chair that doesn’t rock. “You gonna have to call in the troopers?” Mari is creeping around the table to sit opposite him, lifting the chair off the linoleum so it doesn’t squeak.

  “Not sure,” Joe says. “I hope to fuck not, but we’re gonna do whatever we gotta do. We’re gonna get him, you hear me?”

  Yeah. Jack hears just fine. “Sure. Thanks for calling me, man,” he tells Joe.

  “It’s nothing,” he says to Mari once he’s hung up the phone and set it down on the table, rubbing hard at the bristly back of his neck. It gets cold, is a thing he forgot about shaving his head. He guesses he should have remembered.

  “Nothing what?” Mari asks, still sitting across from him. She’s pulled the T-shirt down over her knees like a little kid. “Hm?” she prods, when he doesn’t answer. “Jack, nothing what?”

  “Nothing, they don’t have him,” Jack says, and there’s an edge in his voice he immediately regrets because of the way her eyes narrow and go a little wary. “Sorry,” he says, then explains the rest of it. Mari listens carefully.

  “You want me to go home?” she asks when he’s finished, fussing with the hem of the T-shirt and not sounding bossy at all. God, it’s tenuous, this thing between them. “You wanna be by yourself, or—”

  “No.” That’s the last thing he wants, actually, to be alone with his fucking thoughts all night. “Come on, stick around, we’ll watch six episodes of Law and Order in a row or something, it’ll be great.”

  “Romantic,” Mari comments, rolling her eyes at him, but in the end that’s exactly what they do, criticizing the fictional police work and kissing through all the commercial breaks. “We’ll get him,” she promises quietly, breath warm and damp against his ear. “Hey. I swear to you. Jack.” She nudges the side of his face with her nose, insistent. “You believe me?”

  On screen Benson and Stabler are fighting over a witness, both of them stalking away. “Yeah,” Jack says finally. “Of course I do.”

  Mari falls asleep with her head in his lap, breathing peacefully. Jackson stays awake a long time.

  Chapter Nine

  They don’t get Carlson the following day, though, or even the day after that. By the end of the week the whole precinct is walking around in a state of suspended animation, like the moment just before a sneeze. Mari thinks Jackson might jump out of his skin.

  “It’s okay,” she murmurs Saturday morning, early, Sonya with Andre and Mari with her hand on Jack’s broad chest, his heart hammering a million times a minute underneath her worried palm. Whatever the nightmare was, it was bad. It’s still dark outside, black sky pressed against the windows of his bedroom. “Jack, hey hey hey. It’s me.”

  “Hi, me,” Jack mumbles, sitting up tiredly. “It’s okay,” he says when Mari makes to follow him out of bed. “I’m just gonna take a leak.”

  Mari bites her lip. “Sure,” she says. Only then he’s gone for a whole lot longer, quiet footsteps like he’s pacing around the apartment. When he finally comes back to bed, dawn is breaking. Mari presses her eyes closed and pretends to be asleep.

  Work is a nightmare. Leo has them doing roundup of unpaid traffic tickets, knocking on doors and interrupting Saturday morning pancakes. Keeping them away from the search, Mari guesses. It isn’t hard; the manpower assigned to Carlson has been chipped down to the detectives, Sara Piper and Fitzgerald, everyone else back on regular rotation. Mari tries not to notice Jackson noticing during roll assignments.

  “Traffic violations on a weekend,” is all he says on the way out to the cruiser. “We’re gonna be popular.”

  He’s not kidding. Every person who answers the door is wearing less clothing than the last, it feels like, with state of undress being inversely proportional to how calm they are when confronted with the prospect of driving down to the station. “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s a bench warrant,” Mari informs a man who answers the door in a robe. He’s holding a sippy cup that reads MY DADDY LOVES ME. “We have to bring you in.”

  “Don’t forget your credit card, man!” Jackson calls as the guy shuffles forlornly back inside to put on some pants. He’s in an obnoxious mood, Jackson, sulky and brash by turns. “These are some hefty fines!” He gets a glare over the shoulder for his troubles.

  Mari rolls her eyes as the door shuts. “Stop. We’re annoying enough.”

  Jack shrugs. His nose and cheeks are red in the wind, GB baseball cap pulled way down like a trucker or those dumb white kids who sag their pants. “Just don’t wanna make two trips,” he says, fingering the pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. Already he’s lit up twice between trips. Mari hasn’t bothered to remind him it’s against the rules.

  Traffic roundup basically means they’re acting as glorified couriers, delivering people to the precinct where they turn themselves in and schedule a court date. Outstanding bench warrants generally resolve easy enough, a next-day court appearance and settling up on the underlying fine plus bail. But people hate being dragged in.

  “Are you sure it’s five hundred dollars, Officer?” someone’s grandmother asks on their third house call.

  M
ari grits her teeth. This job really knows how to make you feel like an asshole some days. “I’m sure,” she says.

  After work, all she wants to do is drink or fuck or zone out in front of the TV with someone to rub her feet, but Jackson turns down her invitation to come over for dinner. Mari tries not to feel disappointed about that. “Your loss,” she tells him, faking a smile she doesn’t feel, exactly. His mood swings are hard to weather. “I’m making organic mac and cheese and chicken nuggets.”

  It kind of works, at least. Jackson grins back, glancing over his shoulder to make sure nobody’s coming down the hallway before he presses a warm, friendly kiss against her mouth. “Tempting,” he says, lacing his fingers through Mari’s and squeezing. “But I think I’m just going to crash.”

  “Okay,” Mari says, trying not to worry about what exactly that means for him—if he’s going to brood or get drunk and chain smoke alone in his apartment, if maybe he’s just had enough of her for one day. Instead she goes home, and she and Sonya have a Girl Party, a tradition Mari thought up out of desperation when Andre first moved out: dinner with a bunch of Sonya’s dolls lined up side by side around the table, followed by ice cream sundaes, a long bath with extra bubbles, and getting to fall asleep in Mama’s bed. It started as a one-time surprise but since then Mari’s sprung it on Sonya intermittently, whenever it seems like either one of them needs a boost. While Jack was in the hospital, they had Girl Parties more often than not.

  “So hey, baby girl, we need to figure out your Halloween costume,” Mari says now, crouched by the side of the bathtub while Sonya splashes happily away. The holiday’s next week, and when pressed, Sone has cycled through princess, cat and Iron Man, but has yet to commit to one once and for all. “We’ll go shopping tomorrow, sound good? Find something for you to trick-or-treat in?”

  Sonya nods seriously, shaping herself a voluminous Santa Claus beard out of bubbles. “Can my friend Jackson come trick-or-treating?” she asks.