Life Fic: Seven Veils: Five
May. 25th, 2009 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anjouficTitle: Seven Veils
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
comice aka Anjou (Anjou@rocketmail.com)
Posting Date: May 2009
Rating: R for language and sexuality; M for Mature readers
Classification: Crews/Reese
Spoilers: post-S2 finale, One
Disclaimer: Not mine, but they are fun to play with. All respect to Rand Ravich, Far Shariat and especially to Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi and the rest of the exceptional cast. They created something I will always treasure.
Author's Note: The series finale (:: sighs ::) of Life opened up so many interesting possibilities. Here's the direction my brain took, mostly because I can't believe that I'll never see Charlie and Dani again, so … I'm telling myself a story. Seven different perspectives, in seven parts, beginning immediately after the end of One (which I'm assuming was supposed to have taken place in April 2009) and continuing into the future over the course of the next year or so. This is a WIP, but the whole story is plotted, if not completed.
I'm taking advantage of my day off to post earlier than usual. Some NSFW elements, but nothing explicit.
~*~
Charlie Crews wasn’t the only man capable of unraveling a mystery – Ted Earley had his own methods, and he was applying them now, as he looked for a quiet space in Charlie’s suddenly too small house to figure out when, exactly, Dani Reese had moved in.
He had tried, of course, to use the room he thought of as the office, even though both he and Charlie were more than likely to lug their laptops around the house and work wherever, but it had been occupied. And Rachel had her stuff pretty much on every surface in both the kitchen and the living room, as she was making Christmas ornaments for the enormous live tree that dominated one corner of that room. He had to admit though, they were really quite pretty, as was the tree. He wondered how much of a market there’d be for beaded fruit ornaments as he contemplated the pear that he’d plucked from the tree. It was covered with iridescent green beads, but it was shaded like an Anjou pear, with a pink-red splotch amidst the green beads.
He probably shouldn’t use the word ‘splotch’ on the marketing materials. He’d need to make a note of that. Maybe Charlie would know what the real name for the splotch was.
Anyway. He couldn’t use the office because the aforementioned Dani Reese was in it, and he couldn’t really use the area that Rachel was working in, because … well, he could have used some of it, but he knew himself and he knew that he’d ask Rachel too many questions, and then she’d pin him with that withering stare, the one that told him without saying so that he was interminably stupid. Sometimes, Rachel reminded him of his ex-wife, a comparison that would also probably make her very angry, since she wasn’t too fond of Sophia. She did like Ann, though, so that was good. It made him happy that Ann had a friend. Or at least he thought they were friends. It was hard to say.
When Ted had gotten back from Spain with Olivia, it wasn’t really obvious how much things had changed, but they had. Well, sort of. Things were mostly the same, and Charlie hadn’t really changed, exactly, but he was different, too. Sort of.
Anyway. He’d noticed, of course, that Charlie's scary but beautiful partner was around a lot more, but that wasn't exactly new. It had happened before, the first couple of days after Charlie had been released from the hospital, when he’d been recovering from being shot. But then, she’d been staying in the room that Charlie had outfitted for Rachel, which made sense. Ted could’ve come into the house and kept an eye on Charlie, but he wasn’t really very good with emergencies, and Detective Reese – Dani – she was trained and everything. So, that made sense. At least, he thought so, but Charlie’s captain, that Tidwell guy, he hadn’t been very happy about it. Ted was pretty sure he’d overheard a fight between Dani and the Captain, which he had totally lost. Which also wasn’t a surprise. Because, seriously, Dani Reese was kind of scary, which also wasn’t a surprise. In Ted’s experience, it was the smaller women you had to watch out for, because they never, ever, gave up.
Sophia had been small, and Ann was kind of small like her mother, too, come to think of it. But, Rachel Seybolt was kind of tall and thin …
OK. He needed to focus on one thing at a time, and small fierce women was basically the topic, so he sat down at the table near the pool and began his investigation. Since he was Ted Earley, he was going to figure out the money, and let it tell him the story. He began to update the spreadsheets of Charlie’s household accounts, which had showed a steady and rather unusual amount of activity for the past couple of months. He’s done one cursory update in … September? Was that true? He couldn’t believe that it’d been so long, but … of course, he balanced the big accounts, worked on the business side of things and monitored the investments daily, but these smaller expenditures, the household stuff, he tended to let slide for awhile. Well, the truth was that there’d been so little for such a long time that it was easier to just wait until there was a bunch of stuff to post. Especially when he thought of all the things he’d had to do since he came back from Spain: getting a new year of classes in shape, helping Olivia look for and buy a house, and then, once she was in it, helping her buy furniture and paint, and organize, and it had all taken time. So, it wasn’t until she’d gotten on the plane yesterday to go home to her parents for Christmas that he’d …
OK, now he was thinking of Olivia's hurt eyes at the airport again, of how she still wanted him to go with her and meet her parents. Her parents, for God’s sake! They were his peers, or only a few years older than him. He just … he knew how he would feel if Ann came home with a man the same age as him, and even if Ann had rolled her eyes at him when he said that and told him that Olivia was more than ten years older than she was, and that he wasn’t thinking clearly, he just … he was right, wasn’t he?
Anyway.
Small, fierce women.
Proof.
And, yes, water, electricity and food expenses, all up. And actually, there were some substantial expenditures, now that he was really looking at the receipts. Like the patio he was sitting on. He wasn't sure what was wrong with the old one, but it all began when Charlie had decided that he wanted to get a non-chlorine pool filtration system, “but not the plant-based one. I think that’s a little too weird.”
So, Ted had gone ahead and done a lot of research and presented all the options to Charlie, although he had pointed out to Charlie that if the plant-based one had used underwater fruit trees that he was sure that he’d go for it. Charlie’s only response had been to ask him if they had them, which no, they didn’t, and besides the new system was expensive enough without Ted having to create a company or somehow fund the R & D to get Charlie a fruit tree infused pool. However, Ted had to admit that it was actually nicer to swim in the pool without the tang of chlorine and the eye-burn, and Olivia really appreciated it, too. Redheads did have very sensitive skin; he knew that for a fact.
But installing the new system had required digging out the old one, and changing the filtering system entirely, and then the pool had to be retiled and Charlie’d put in some new beds for plants. Specifically, he'd ringed the pool with fruit trees, which was … typical Charlie, and they were growing in nicely. But all that had cost money, not to mention the fact that with all the trees and the other new landscaping that Charlie was doing, Charlie seemed to have acquired a gardener, a hulking, kind of menacing Russian guy that reminded Ted of one too many cons that he knew.
Charlie insisted that Pyotr was absolutely harmless, but Ted wasn’t so sure. He’d caught Pyotr staring at him a time or two, like he was trying to assess whether or not Ted should be allowed near Charlie. Still, that wasn’t all that surprising. Charlie inspired a huge amount of loyalty in people, and when he’d hired the other Russians to lay the patio, and fix the drive, Ted’d figured out that these had to be Roman Nevikov’s people. Except that now they were Charlie Crews’ people, and Ted wasn't sure he exactly wanted to know how that had happened. Charlie had moved onto the fourth block of his conspiracy wall, and all the new lines and information from that radiated out and back and forward, and there was no more activity at all around the Rayborn/Roman Nevikov section. In fact, that area was as quiet as the one around Jack Reese's name and well, Ted didn't want to think about that for too long.
Anyway. Charlie had started a small business where these “skilled craftsmen” as he put it, were out building walls and doing landscaping, and Ted had to admit, it was doing surprisingly well, even in this bad economy. Of course, they did a lot of the maintenance work on foreclosed properties, and God knew, that was a booming market, but still … Pyotr was always here at the house, painstakingly planting and pruning and watering and tending to Charlie’s new fruit trees. And he was building some kind of water feature over on the far side of the patio, which was still demolished. Rachel had told him that the water feature was going to be a koi pond. He flipped through the receipts.
That was Zen, right? A koi pond? Or were koi Chinese? He'd have to look that up later. Charlie seemed have grown awfully fond of fish, though, because he’d had another huge tank put in the office, the one Dani Reese was currently working in, and that tank was filled with exotically colored, and very expensive, fish. Ted whistled at the prices of some of the fish as he made notes on the spreadsheet. He was going to have to up Charlie's homeowner's coverage, that was for sure.
Charlie had also bought more furniture: some new patio furniture, office stuff and some bedroom furniture. He was still puzzling over some of these receipts when Rachel stopped by the open door and glared at him, coming over and scooping the forgotten Anjou pear off the table. “I knew that I’d made a dozen,” she said accusatorily.
“They’re very nice,” Ted said. “I was just admiring it.”
Rachel looked at him warily.
“Seriously,” Ted said. “You’re very talented. You could definitely sell those.”
He watched as Rachel’s shoulders softened. “You really think so?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it,” Ted said.
Rachel still looked faintly surprised, but was looking thoughtfully at her pear.
“Plus, I’m sure that Charlie really loves that you made him fruit ornaments.”
For that, he was rewarded with a rare, full out Rachel smile. “He really likes the pluots,” she said softly, then added, “Thanks,” before she turned to go back into the house.
“Hey Rachel,” Ted said, “maybe you can help me figure some things out?”
“Like what?” she asked.
Ted pulled a receipt from the pile of things yet to be entered. “Ballet barre and mirrors?”
“Charlie had them mounted in the weight room upstairs.”
“Oh?” Ted said.
She made a face and then conceded. “I used to take ballet when I was little, and I kinda mentioned that I still did the exercises.”
“Ah,” Ted said, indicating the receipt for the speed bag and the heavy bag. “Do you box, too?”
“I’m learning,” Rachel said slowly.
Somehow, Ted didn’t think that Charlie was her teacher.
“And this furniture?” Ted asked, handing her a receipt.
“I watch Teddy sometimes for Ann, and Charlie wanted him to be comfortable,” she said.
“So he outfitted a nursery?” Ted asked. He heard his voice doing that aggravating cracking thing that he’d never outgrown since he hit puberty.
Rachel shrugged. “He came home and saw Teddy sleeping in his car seat, and he didn’t like it.”
“Oh,” Ted said. "That actually does look uncomfortable." He paused to think about that, and then moved on, “I think it’s really nice that you and Ann have become friendly.”
Rachel shrugged again, “She’s teaching me how to edit film,” she said. “The least I can do is help her out with Teddy.”
Ted nodded. He appreciated the fact that Rachel was leaving unsaid the part about how Ann’s own mother had refused to help her out which Ted did not understand at all. Sure, he’d had his own problems about becoming a grandfather at his age, but really – Teddy was adorable! How could Sophia just refuse to have anything to do with him? Especially since Ann’s loser ex-husband had left California, he said, because he couldn't find work. He'd supposedly moved to Seattle for a job, but Ann wouldn’t give him a straight answer one way or another about whether or not the jerk was actually sending any money for Teddy. Although the quiver in her chin when he'd asked her told him more than enough. He wondered if Ms. Puryer would find that jerk for him if he asked nicely. Then he could tell Pyotr that Charlie wanted him to make a visit to Seattle and …
OK, he'd definitely end up back in prison for violating parole. And besides, Ms. Puryer, who was both small and fierce, now that he thought about it, was still pretty mad about the whole Rayborn thing. At him. Charlie, she seemed fine with.
Anyway. He liked the fact that Ann was comfortable enough to leave Teddy here when she did errands, even when he wasn’t home. And how she would stay for dinner sometimes afterwards and how they'd eat and talk together while Teddy whacked his spoon on his high chair tray and tried to join in the conversation with his babbling.
Actually, he secretly worried that Ann would rather leave the baby with anyone in the house other than him, and that included Pyotr. He’d never forget the day that she’d hesitated to leave until Olivia had appeared. She’d practically thrown the baby at Olivia in relief that she wasn’t leaving the baby alone with Grandpa. Ol’ incompetent Grandpa.
Ted shuffled through the receipts morosely, and handed the one he was really curious about to Rachel. “And this one?”
“That’s for Dani’s room,” Rachel said simply, handing it back.
“Dani’s room?” Ted asked. Why did Dani have her own room, with her own bed? Were Dani and Charlie really just still partners?
“Dani’s room,” Rachel said firmly, and then turned and walked away without another word.
“Dani’s room …” Ted said, staring at the receipt.
~
He had watched them carefully, of course, all throughout the long days of Christmas celebration. With Olivia gone to Austin to be with her family, and Ann having to split some of her time to give her loser ex-husband's family a chance to celebrate with Teddy, there wasn't much else to do but eat, and drink, and try to figure out what the hell was going on between Charlie and Dani. He saw a tremendous amount of fondness, and bantering, and they weren't uneasy with each other, like they fumbled the dishes when passing them to each other and their hands touched or anything, but there was some kind of current that was running between them. What he couldn't figure out was whether or not it was at a constant hum of satisfaction, or if they were working up to something.
Of course, they didn't make it easy for him, either. On Christmas morning, he stumbled into the house after a late, long and delicious Christmas Eve dinner, desperate for some coffee, only to have his entering the house wake Charlie, who was sleeping on the couch.
"Why aren't you sleeping in your bed?" he asked, voice cracking with surprise. He really didn't like having guns pulled on him anytime, but especially not at 6:30 on Christmas morning.
Charlie scrubbed his face wearily with his hand. "Maaman is sleeping in Dani's room," he said.
"Maaman?" Ted paused. "You mean Roshan?"
Charlie nodded.
"Roshan is sleeping in Dani's room?"
"Yes," Charlie said.
"Why can't Dani sleep with her mom?"
"She snores," Charlie said, sotto voce.
"Dani snores?!" Ted said, horrified at the idea of such a beautiful woman sawing wood, although that would definitely explain the whole separate room thing.
Charlie stared at him.
"Oh," Ted said. "Roshan snores."
Charlie tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.
"So you had to sleep on the couch?"
"Reese wanted to do it," Charlie said, "but I couldn't …"
"Oh no," Ted said hurriedly. "That would be ungentlemanly. Except …" he hesitated.
"What? You think I should have slept in the crib?" Charlie was sarcastic when he hadn't had enough sleep. Also, when he hadn't gotten laid. He had really been sarcastic when they were in Pelican Bay. So, that was interesting.
"No, no, I just …" Ted drifted off. "You need an actual guest room." Then he laughed.
Charlie just looked at him. "I don't get it."
"It’s just funny, Charlie," Ted said. "You've got all these bedrooms, but you've got, like, permanent guests in them."
"Permanent guests?" Charlie asked.
"It seems that way to me," Ted answered.
"Permanent guests," Charlie mused. "I think I like that." Then he got up off of the couch and groaned as he stretched, and announced that he was going to make some juice. "Soon I'll be able to just pick the fruit off my trees for juice," he said loudly.
Ted just nodded and hoped that he'd start some coffee. He stared at the couch and wondered what was up. Or not, as the case might be. The thing was, though, that Charlie was enough of a gentleman that even if he was sleeping with Dani Reese, he wouldn't flaunt it by sleeping with the unmarried daughter of the woman he'd invited to his home to spend her first Christmas as a widow. It just wasn't done. Well, not by Charlie Crews anyway.
So. He clearly wasn't going to get a definitive answer Christmas weekend. He sighed and moved into the kitchen to find the coffee.
Then, of course, Olivia was home by the New Year, so he hadn't spent all that much time at the house in the evenings. In fact, it wasn't until the whole debacle on Valentine's Day Weekend that finally got his answer.
The night had been an unmitigated disaster, which he should have realized when he began planning it. He never should have taken Olivia out on the 13th, instead of the 14th, even if the 13th had been the Saturday night. Maybe 13 wasn’t unlucky for some people, but experience had proven that he was not one of them. For one thing, he’d been married to Sophia for just over 13 years when she’d left him and unknown to him, began cooperating with the federal authorities to protect her own assets. That had been a few months before he was arrested, and then sentenced to 13 years in Pelican Bay, just days after Ann's 13th birthday. And even though he didn't serve the whole sentence, it was 13 years until he’d seen Ann again.
So, he should have known better, but the evening had started out so well. They had tickets to a showing at a gallery that Olivia was particularly interested in, and then had dinner at a romantic little bistro that Charlie had pulled some strings to get them into. It was an intensely warm night for February, with the temperature still near 90 degrees after 8:00 o'clock at night, which was the kind of thing that made Ted believe that Al Gore and his whole crew might not be too far off in their assessment of where the world was going. However, end-of-the-world scenarios aside, the heat made Olivia take off the small jacket that she'd worn over her beautiful green dress, so he got to watch her white shoulders gleam in the candlelight while they ate a leisurely meal. He was mellow and happy, and just … amazed that he'd ended up there, holding hands with Olivia across the table, drinking some excellent red wine and sharing a terrific dessert.
Then Olivia had put down her fork and told him that she wanted to have a baby. With him.
A baby! When he was already a grandfather!
Grandfathers had no business having babies at all, especially grandfathers who would be what, 76, when the kid got out of college? If he lived to see the day, that is. He’d tried to talk her out of it, but it had ended up in tears and anger and Olivia storming out of the restaurant, taking the car with her. He’d called Charlie, but didn’t get any answer, so after hesitating for a while, he’d finally called Ann, who’d driven in with Teddy asleep in his car seat. And, of course, she’d wanted to know what had happened, and when he told her, then it was Ann who was yelling at him.
And here, he’d thought that she would agree with him, because he’d been under the impression that she didn’t think he’d been that great of a dad. But when he said that, she’d told him that he was an idiot and that Olivia was great, and that if he couldn’t see that, he deserved to lose her. And he protested that of course he knew that, but that Olivia was way too young for him, and she should be with someone closer to her age who wouldn’t die and leave her alone and who wasn’t the same age as her parents. But Ann had just yelled louder at him and said that Olivia clearly had a thing for older guys and that he should just deal with it, and that her parents were probably thrilled that he was only 53, since Charlie’s dad had been like 70 years old.
Before she kicked him out of the car, she yelled at him that he’d actually been a great dad, and that was why she was so angry with him for leaving her. And when he said that she’d made his point, because how mad would the kid be if he died? That was when she burst into tears and told him that he really was an idiot before she peeled out. As she drove away, he could hear that all of the turmoil had woken Teddy, who added his own wails of misery to his mother's, which was just the icing on his crap cake of a day.
He watched as Ann's taillights flashed red as she drove away from him and then turned a corner. And for a minute, he thought that she’d left him out in the middle of nowhere because it was so unbelievably dark, but then the headlights from her car as she wound down the canyon road shone on the familiar windows and the door and he realized that he was in front of Charlie’s house. It was just so big that it blotted out the sky, and he was standing in the enormous shadow that it cast. Also, all of the lights were off, everywhere, and it was really, really dark and kind of scary way up here in the hills.
Just when he was on the verge of freaking himself out, Charlie said, “Blackout,” from somewhere nearby, and Ted jumped a mile, clutching his heart. Charlie, who was smirking, handed him a flashlight, and turned and padded barefoot and with no light to see by back into the darkened house. He was wearing low-slung shorts with those big pockets on the sides and as Ted’s eyes adjusted, he noticed the line of sweat visible down the back of his white t-shirt. When they entered the kitchen, he saw that Reese was sitting at the candlelit island with a Scrabble board, two big sweating water glasses full of ice, a pitcher of what looked like fresh-squeezed lemonade and a container of ice cream with two spoons coming out of it.
"Rough night?" Reese asked him drily, but he thought that he heard a tinge of sympathy in her tone. Just a tinge.
She had her hair piled on top of her head in a messy ponytail that she'd doubled over, and was dabbing the condensation from her water glass on the back of her neck. She was barefoot and wearing shorts too, and not that much of a t-shirt. It was one of those old man style undershirts like his father used to wear, which she'd rolled up to just under her breasts. A river of condensation or sweat ran down her neck and disappeared in the valley between them, and Ted turned and looked away at something else when Charlie put the gun Ted hadn't noticed he was carrying down on the island near hers and climbed back onto his seat.
Jesus. Scrabble and guns. They were a pair, all right.
"Olivia and I had a fight," he mumbled, as if there were any other reason that he would be appearing in the middle of what might be their Saturday night date, and a sort of Valentine's night date at that, otherwise. On the island, he saw a few scattered dark red foil wrappers from chocolates, and for the first time, he had the sense that he really might actually be intruding. "Would you mind if I got myself a drink?" he asked.
Charlie looked at him funny, as if wondering why after all this time he'd ask so formally, but Dani understood what he meant and said, "I'm pretty sure Charlie's got some of the hard stuff in the cabinet near the oven."
Ted knew that, but he mumbled his thanks and went to the cabinet and poured himself two generous, OK, more like four generous fingers of Scotch, and then added some ice cubes and a dash of water for show. "Is Rachel home?" he asked, turning back toward them.
At that point it was more about staving off the inevitable questions than making conversation, but as Charlie told him with a grimace that Rachel was off with her boyfriend, and Dani sighed and rolled her eyes, he realized that they wouldn't ask, either of them, not that he was in any mood to offer up more of an explanation. It was all too raw, and too real, this feeling of being loved but hopeless, or in an impossible situation. He only hoped that they, Charlie and Dani, would not find themselves at a similar impasse at some point. It would really be – it would go a long way toward restoring his faith in something like a higher purpose, if someone could just be happy. And more than most people he'd known in his life, Charlie Crews deserved to be happy. He suspected that the same would be said about Dani Reese by those people who knew her better than he did. So, he watched them arguing about Rachel's boyfriend like two people who cared about her, and he felt a simmering of hope. Maybe someone would be happy, after all.
He drank half of the enormous amount of Scotch and refilled it while they argued, then said good night and used the flashlight to light the way to the garage apartment. The flashlight didn’t really give him a big enough perspective of what might be lurking around him, so he hurried. At least Charlie had given him one of the big heavy Maglights, so that if necessary, he could clock a roaming coyote off the head with it.
The night was dark, with only a few stars visible in the overcast, and the moon had not yet risen. Charlie's fruit trees were still in the humid air, and Ted wondered if the rain would come and cool things down as he successfully navigated his way around the koi pond and stumbled up the narrow staircase to his lonely bachelor apartment. He managed to strip down to his shorts and open the windows up as wide as they would go, but the air was still fetid and stale. The miserable weather was the perfect accompaniment for his mood. Nights of oppressive dark and thick heat like this inevitably reminded him of prison, except that the juxtaposition of the quiet here made him feel jittery. He'd forgotten, just in the few short years that he'd been out, how to sleep in the heat, and the alcohol would only made him feel hotter. He drank it down anyway, then took a cool shower and fell into bed naked and alone, hoping the alcohol would knock him out, although he knew it would not keep him from reaching for Olivia in his sleep.
He must have dozed off, because he woke up at some unknown hour, hot and fearful, at a sudden noise that jolted him from his uneasy sleep. He realized just after he stood that the noise had been the sound of a body splashing into the pool and gasping at the chill, although he found it hard to believe that the water temperature had dropped that much in the hours that the heater had been off. He sat back down wearily and fumbled for his cellphone on the bedside table. It was earlier than he expected, barely two o'clock, and it was still stifling. He also noted morosely that he had no messages, but then again, he also had no bars. All of the nearby towers must be down because of the continuing blackout. He sighed and tossed the useless phone on the night stand and wondered where he'd last left his swim trunks, and if Charlie, who used to swim a lot in the middle of the night, mindlessly doing miles of laps, would mind if he joined him. His Scotch-addled brain also noted that it was odd for Charlie to make so much noise when he was swimming. Charlie actually placed a lot of value on silence, he thought fuzzily, and then identified the sound as soft laughter.
It was a woman's laugh.
Dani Reese's laugh.
Curiosity overcame him at that point, so he crept as quietly as possible to the one window that overlooked the patio and looked out it. By the thin light of the stars and the fragile new moon that peeked out from between some clouds, Ted finally spotted them. Sadly, it was the gleam off the long length of Charlie's white skin as he rose from the pool and walked to one of the lounge chairs and bent over it that finally revealed where they were. Hot as it still was, Charlie lay down and wrapped himself around Dani Reese, although at first Ted could barely see more than her hand as she stroked the wet hair back from Charlie's brow, then cupped the back of his head in her palm.
The darkness had stolen the color from Charlie's red hair, but enhanced his pallor, so that between that and the water on his skin, he seemed to glisten like a reflection of the light above them. He was naked, and Ted assumed that Dani was too, but Charlie’s back was to him, and he was so much bigger than Dani that all Ted could see was her face once Charlie had settled into the chair. The rest of her was almost entirely blocked from Ted's view, which was probably just as well. Because if Charlie had caught him looking – well, he didn't want to think about what Charlie would do.
As he watched, Charlie twisted Dani's long hair around his hand, winding it up so that it wasn't sticking to her neck. He could hear Dani's low laughter, and by some trick of the night, a fragment of her conversation echoed up to him on a puff of cool air. Ted heard Charlie's answering murmur, if not his words, and understood that Dani was complaining about her hair, and that Charlie was protesting her desire to cut it.
The hum of her voice was cut short when Charlie kissed her neck at the junction where her shoulder met it, and the pleasure on her face transformed Dani from her normal self into something incredibly beautiful. She'd always been very, very pretty, but small and fierce and tough as nails, and often as not, the expression on her face was mean. But now, as Charlie continued dropping kisses on her neck, moving up the long column of it toward her chin, Ted saw how truly stunning she could be when she was happy … and the look on her face when she opened her eyes and moved her hand to Charlie's cheek as he let go of her hair and moved in to kiss her smiling mouth … Ted dropped the curtain and stepped back, surprised to feel the sting of tears in his eyes, even though he was smiling.
If someone had asked him three and half years ago what kind of woman he'd have picked for Charlie Crews, he'd have pointed them to Constance Griffiths, Charlie's lawyer. Ted had always been sorry that she was married, and that Charlie was too noble to ignore that fact. Or he would have picked Jennifer, out of a romantic desire to see all the years that Charlie had spent longing for her requited by her returning to Charlie's side when he was vindicated.
Not in a million years would he have picked Dani Reese, but maybe … maybe she was exactly what Charlie needed, a woman as tough as he was.
Part of what Ted liked about Olivia was that she would never have made it in prison. She belonged to the world that Ted wanted to live in again, a world that was untouched by violence and corruption.
But Dani Reese? Dani Reese lived in the same world as Charlie. If she had ended up in prison, not only would she have survived it, she would've come out swinging. In fact, she had come out swinging, after Roman Nevikov had done God knew what to her.
And maybe that was part of what Charlie loved about her, that forged steel aspect of her. She was nothing like Charlie's ex-wife, or his, really. Dani Reese might be small and fierce, but he was pretty sure that Sophia had never once looked at him like that, not in all of their years together.
But, Olivia … Olivia looked at him like that.
Ann was right. He was a fool if he gave that up, if he gave Olivia up.
Ted wondered how long it would take him to walk to Olivia's house, if he started now – the coyotes be damned. He glanced out the window at the thick, impenetrable darkness that still surrounded Charlie's house, providing cover, peacefulness and privacy for the lovers at the poolside. Then he crossed the room and lay down to rest.
Charlie Crews deserved every minute of happiness he could get, and Ted wasn’t going to interrupt him twice in one night.
He would wait, and start out at first light.
~*~
Four
Author:
comice aka Anjou (Anjou@rocketmail.com)Posting Date: May 2009
Rating: R for language and sexuality; M for Mature readers
Classification: Crews/Reese
Spoilers: post-S2 finale, One
Disclaimer: Not mine, but they are fun to play with. All respect to Rand Ravich, Far Shariat and especially to Damian Lewis, Sarah Shahi and the rest of the exceptional cast. They created something I will always treasure.
Author's Note: The series finale (:: sighs ::) of Life opened up so many interesting possibilities. Here's the direction my brain took, mostly because I can't believe that I'll never see Charlie and Dani again, so … I'm telling myself a story. Seven different perspectives, in seven parts, beginning immediately after the end of One (which I'm assuming was supposed to have taken place in April 2009) and continuing into the future over the course of the next year or so. This is a WIP, but the whole story is plotted, if not completed.
I'm taking advantage of my day off to post earlier than usual. Some NSFW elements, but nothing explicit.
~*~
Charlie Crews wasn’t the only man capable of unraveling a mystery – Ted Earley had his own methods, and he was applying them now, as he looked for a quiet space in Charlie’s suddenly too small house to figure out when, exactly, Dani Reese had moved in.
He had tried, of course, to use the room he thought of as the office, even though both he and Charlie were more than likely to lug their laptops around the house and work wherever, but it had been occupied. And Rachel had her stuff pretty much on every surface in both the kitchen and the living room, as she was making Christmas ornaments for the enormous live tree that dominated one corner of that room. He had to admit though, they were really quite pretty, as was the tree. He wondered how much of a market there’d be for beaded fruit ornaments as he contemplated the pear that he’d plucked from the tree. It was covered with iridescent green beads, but it was shaded like an Anjou pear, with a pink-red splotch amidst the green beads.
He probably shouldn’t use the word ‘splotch’ on the marketing materials. He’d need to make a note of that. Maybe Charlie would know what the real name for the splotch was.
Anyway. He couldn’t use the office because the aforementioned Dani Reese was in it, and he couldn’t really use the area that Rachel was working in, because … well, he could have used some of it, but he knew himself and he knew that he’d ask Rachel too many questions, and then she’d pin him with that withering stare, the one that told him without saying so that he was interminably stupid. Sometimes, Rachel reminded him of his ex-wife, a comparison that would also probably make her very angry, since she wasn’t too fond of Sophia. She did like Ann, though, so that was good. It made him happy that Ann had a friend. Or at least he thought they were friends. It was hard to say.
When Ted had gotten back from Spain with Olivia, it wasn’t really obvious how much things had changed, but they had. Well, sort of. Things were mostly the same, and Charlie hadn’t really changed, exactly, but he was different, too. Sort of.
Anyway. He’d noticed, of course, that Charlie's scary but beautiful partner was around a lot more, but that wasn't exactly new. It had happened before, the first couple of days after Charlie had been released from the hospital, when he’d been recovering from being shot. But then, she’d been staying in the room that Charlie had outfitted for Rachel, which made sense. Ted could’ve come into the house and kept an eye on Charlie, but he wasn’t really very good with emergencies, and Detective Reese – Dani – she was trained and everything. So, that made sense. At least, he thought so, but Charlie’s captain, that Tidwell guy, he hadn’t been very happy about it. Ted was pretty sure he’d overheard a fight between Dani and the Captain, which he had totally lost. Which also wasn’t a surprise. Because, seriously, Dani Reese was kind of scary, which also wasn’t a surprise. In Ted’s experience, it was the smaller women you had to watch out for, because they never, ever, gave up.
Sophia had been small, and Ann was kind of small like her mother, too, come to think of it. But, Rachel Seybolt was kind of tall and thin …
OK. He needed to focus on one thing at a time, and small fierce women was basically the topic, so he sat down at the table near the pool and began his investigation. Since he was Ted Earley, he was going to figure out the money, and let it tell him the story. He began to update the spreadsheets of Charlie’s household accounts, which had showed a steady and rather unusual amount of activity for the past couple of months. He’s done one cursory update in … September? Was that true? He couldn’t believe that it’d been so long, but … of course, he balanced the big accounts, worked on the business side of things and monitored the investments daily, but these smaller expenditures, the household stuff, he tended to let slide for awhile. Well, the truth was that there’d been so little for such a long time that it was easier to just wait until there was a bunch of stuff to post. Especially when he thought of all the things he’d had to do since he came back from Spain: getting a new year of classes in shape, helping Olivia look for and buy a house, and then, once she was in it, helping her buy furniture and paint, and organize, and it had all taken time. So, it wasn’t until she’d gotten on the plane yesterday to go home to her parents for Christmas that he’d …
OK, now he was thinking of Olivia's hurt eyes at the airport again, of how she still wanted him to go with her and meet her parents. Her parents, for God’s sake! They were his peers, or only a few years older than him. He just … he knew how he would feel if Ann came home with a man the same age as him, and even if Ann had rolled her eyes at him when he said that and told him that Olivia was more than ten years older than she was, and that he wasn’t thinking clearly, he just … he was right, wasn’t he?
Anyway.
Small, fierce women.
Proof.
And, yes, water, electricity and food expenses, all up. And actually, there were some substantial expenditures, now that he was really looking at the receipts. Like the patio he was sitting on. He wasn't sure what was wrong with the old one, but it all began when Charlie had decided that he wanted to get a non-chlorine pool filtration system, “but not the plant-based one. I think that’s a little too weird.”
So, Ted had gone ahead and done a lot of research and presented all the options to Charlie, although he had pointed out to Charlie that if the plant-based one had used underwater fruit trees that he was sure that he’d go for it. Charlie’s only response had been to ask him if they had them, which no, they didn’t, and besides the new system was expensive enough without Ted having to create a company or somehow fund the R & D to get Charlie a fruit tree infused pool. However, Ted had to admit that it was actually nicer to swim in the pool without the tang of chlorine and the eye-burn, and Olivia really appreciated it, too. Redheads did have very sensitive skin; he knew that for a fact.
But installing the new system had required digging out the old one, and changing the filtering system entirely, and then the pool had to be retiled and Charlie’d put in some new beds for plants. Specifically, he'd ringed the pool with fruit trees, which was … typical Charlie, and they were growing in nicely. But all that had cost money, not to mention the fact that with all the trees and the other new landscaping that Charlie was doing, Charlie seemed to have acquired a gardener, a hulking, kind of menacing Russian guy that reminded Ted of one too many cons that he knew.
Charlie insisted that Pyotr was absolutely harmless, but Ted wasn’t so sure. He’d caught Pyotr staring at him a time or two, like he was trying to assess whether or not Ted should be allowed near Charlie. Still, that wasn’t all that surprising. Charlie inspired a huge amount of loyalty in people, and when he’d hired the other Russians to lay the patio, and fix the drive, Ted’d figured out that these had to be Roman Nevikov’s people. Except that now they were Charlie Crews’ people, and Ted wasn't sure he exactly wanted to know how that had happened. Charlie had moved onto the fourth block of his conspiracy wall, and all the new lines and information from that radiated out and back and forward, and there was no more activity at all around the Rayborn/Roman Nevikov section. In fact, that area was as quiet as the one around Jack Reese's name and well, Ted didn't want to think about that for too long.
Anyway. Charlie had started a small business where these “skilled craftsmen” as he put it, were out building walls and doing landscaping, and Ted had to admit, it was doing surprisingly well, even in this bad economy. Of course, they did a lot of the maintenance work on foreclosed properties, and God knew, that was a booming market, but still … Pyotr was always here at the house, painstakingly planting and pruning and watering and tending to Charlie’s new fruit trees. And he was building some kind of water feature over on the far side of the patio, which was still demolished. Rachel had told him that the water feature was going to be a koi pond. He flipped through the receipts.
That was Zen, right? A koi pond? Or were koi Chinese? He'd have to look that up later. Charlie seemed have grown awfully fond of fish, though, because he’d had another huge tank put in the office, the one Dani Reese was currently working in, and that tank was filled with exotically colored, and very expensive, fish. Ted whistled at the prices of some of the fish as he made notes on the spreadsheet. He was going to have to up Charlie's homeowner's coverage, that was for sure.
Charlie had also bought more furniture: some new patio furniture, office stuff and some bedroom furniture. He was still puzzling over some of these receipts when Rachel stopped by the open door and glared at him, coming over and scooping the forgotten Anjou pear off the table. “I knew that I’d made a dozen,” she said accusatorily.
“They’re very nice,” Ted said. “I was just admiring it.”
Rachel looked at him warily.
“Seriously,” Ted said. “You’re very talented. You could definitely sell those.”
He watched as Rachel’s shoulders softened. “You really think so?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t believe it,” Ted said.
Rachel still looked faintly surprised, but was looking thoughtfully at her pear.
“Plus, I’m sure that Charlie really loves that you made him fruit ornaments.”
For that, he was rewarded with a rare, full out Rachel smile. “He really likes the pluots,” she said softly, then added, “Thanks,” before she turned to go back into the house.
“Hey Rachel,” Ted said, “maybe you can help me figure some things out?”
“Like what?” she asked.
Ted pulled a receipt from the pile of things yet to be entered. “Ballet barre and mirrors?”
“Charlie had them mounted in the weight room upstairs.”
“Oh?” Ted said.
She made a face and then conceded. “I used to take ballet when I was little, and I kinda mentioned that I still did the exercises.”
“Ah,” Ted said, indicating the receipt for the speed bag and the heavy bag. “Do you box, too?”
“I’m learning,” Rachel said slowly.
Somehow, Ted didn’t think that Charlie was her teacher.
“And this furniture?” Ted asked, handing her a receipt.
“I watch Teddy sometimes for Ann, and Charlie wanted him to be comfortable,” she said.
“So he outfitted a nursery?” Ted asked. He heard his voice doing that aggravating cracking thing that he’d never outgrown since he hit puberty.
Rachel shrugged. “He came home and saw Teddy sleeping in his car seat, and he didn’t like it.”
“Oh,” Ted said. "That actually does look uncomfortable." He paused to think about that, and then moved on, “I think it’s really nice that you and Ann have become friendly.”
Rachel shrugged again, “She’s teaching me how to edit film,” she said. “The least I can do is help her out with Teddy.”
Ted nodded. He appreciated the fact that Rachel was leaving unsaid the part about how Ann’s own mother had refused to help her out which Ted did not understand at all. Sure, he’d had his own problems about becoming a grandfather at his age, but really – Teddy was adorable! How could Sophia just refuse to have anything to do with him? Especially since Ann’s loser ex-husband had left California, he said, because he couldn't find work. He'd supposedly moved to Seattle for a job, but Ann wouldn’t give him a straight answer one way or another about whether or not the jerk was actually sending any money for Teddy. Although the quiver in her chin when he'd asked her told him more than enough. He wondered if Ms. Puryer would find that jerk for him if he asked nicely. Then he could tell Pyotr that Charlie wanted him to make a visit to Seattle and …
OK, he'd definitely end up back in prison for violating parole. And besides, Ms. Puryer, who was both small and fierce, now that he thought about it, was still pretty mad about the whole Rayborn thing. At him. Charlie, she seemed fine with.
Anyway. He liked the fact that Ann was comfortable enough to leave Teddy here when she did errands, even when he wasn’t home. And how she would stay for dinner sometimes afterwards and how they'd eat and talk together while Teddy whacked his spoon on his high chair tray and tried to join in the conversation with his babbling.
Actually, he secretly worried that Ann would rather leave the baby with anyone in the house other than him, and that included Pyotr. He’d never forget the day that she’d hesitated to leave until Olivia had appeared. She’d practically thrown the baby at Olivia in relief that she wasn’t leaving the baby alone with Grandpa. Ol’ incompetent Grandpa.
Ted shuffled through the receipts morosely, and handed the one he was really curious about to Rachel. “And this one?”
“That’s for Dani’s room,” Rachel said simply, handing it back.
“Dani’s room?” Ted asked. Why did Dani have her own room, with her own bed? Were Dani and Charlie really just still partners?
“Dani’s room,” Rachel said firmly, and then turned and walked away without another word.
“Dani’s room …” Ted said, staring at the receipt.
~
He had watched them carefully, of course, all throughout the long days of Christmas celebration. With Olivia gone to Austin to be with her family, and Ann having to split some of her time to give her loser ex-husband's family a chance to celebrate with Teddy, there wasn't much else to do but eat, and drink, and try to figure out what the hell was going on between Charlie and Dani. He saw a tremendous amount of fondness, and bantering, and they weren't uneasy with each other, like they fumbled the dishes when passing them to each other and their hands touched or anything, but there was some kind of current that was running between them. What he couldn't figure out was whether or not it was at a constant hum of satisfaction, or if they were working up to something.
Of course, they didn't make it easy for him, either. On Christmas morning, he stumbled into the house after a late, long and delicious Christmas Eve dinner, desperate for some coffee, only to have his entering the house wake Charlie, who was sleeping on the couch.
"Why aren't you sleeping in your bed?" he asked, voice cracking with surprise. He really didn't like having guns pulled on him anytime, but especially not at 6:30 on Christmas morning.
Charlie scrubbed his face wearily with his hand. "Maaman is sleeping in Dani's room," he said.
"Maaman?" Ted paused. "You mean Roshan?"
Charlie nodded.
"Roshan is sleeping in Dani's room?"
"Yes," Charlie said.
"Why can't Dani sleep with her mom?"
"She snores," Charlie said, sotto voce.
"Dani snores?!" Ted said, horrified at the idea of such a beautiful woman sawing wood, although that would definitely explain the whole separate room thing.
Charlie stared at him.
"Oh," Ted said. "Roshan snores."
Charlie tilted his head and raised his eyebrows.
"So you had to sleep on the couch?"
"Reese wanted to do it," Charlie said, "but I couldn't …"
"Oh no," Ted said hurriedly. "That would be ungentlemanly. Except …" he hesitated.
"What? You think I should have slept in the crib?" Charlie was sarcastic when he hadn't had enough sleep. Also, when he hadn't gotten laid. He had really been sarcastic when they were in Pelican Bay. So, that was interesting.
"No, no, I just …" Ted drifted off. "You need an actual guest room." Then he laughed.
Charlie just looked at him. "I don't get it."
"It’s just funny, Charlie," Ted said. "You've got all these bedrooms, but you've got, like, permanent guests in them."
"Permanent guests?" Charlie asked.
"It seems that way to me," Ted answered.
"Permanent guests," Charlie mused. "I think I like that." Then he got up off of the couch and groaned as he stretched, and announced that he was going to make some juice. "Soon I'll be able to just pick the fruit off my trees for juice," he said loudly.
Ted just nodded and hoped that he'd start some coffee. He stared at the couch and wondered what was up. Or not, as the case might be. The thing was, though, that Charlie was enough of a gentleman that even if he was sleeping with Dani Reese, he wouldn't flaunt it by sleeping with the unmarried daughter of the woman he'd invited to his home to spend her first Christmas as a widow. It just wasn't done. Well, not by Charlie Crews anyway.
So. He clearly wasn't going to get a definitive answer Christmas weekend. He sighed and moved into the kitchen to find the coffee.
Then, of course, Olivia was home by the New Year, so he hadn't spent all that much time at the house in the evenings. In fact, it wasn't until the whole debacle on Valentine's Day Weekend that finally got his answer.
The night had been an unmitigated disaster, which he should have realized when he began planning it. He never should have taken Olivia out on the 13th, instead of the 14th, even if the 13th had been the Saturday night. Maybe 13 wasn’t unlucky for some people, but experience had proven that he was not one of them. For one thing, he’d been married to Sophia for just over 13 years when she’d left him and unknown to him, began cooperating with the federal authorities to protect her own assets. That had been a few months before he was arrested, and then sentenced to 13 years in Pelican Bay, just days after Ann's 13th birthday. And even though he didn't serve the whole sentence, it was 13 years until he’d seen Ann again.
So, he should have known better, but the evening had started out so well. They had tickets to a showing at a gallery that Olivia was particularly interested in, and then had dinner at a romantic little bistro that Charlie had pulled some strings to get them into. It was an intensely warm night for February, with the temperature still near 90 degrees after 8:00 o'clock at night, which was the kind of thing that made Ted believe that Al Gore and his whole crew might not be too far off in their assessment of where the world was going. However, end-of-the-world scenarios aside, the heat made Olivia take off the small jacket that she'd worn over her beautiful green dress, so he got to watch her white shoulders gleam in the candlelight while they ate a leisurely meal. He was mellow and happy, and just … amazed that he'd ended up there, holding hands with Olivia across the table, drinking some excellent red wine and sharing a terrific dessert.
Then Olivia had put down her fork and told him that she wanted to have a baby. With him.
A baby! When he was already a grandfather!
Grandfathers had no business having babies at all, especially grandfathers who would be what, 76, when the kid got out of college? If he lived to see the day, that is. He’d tried to talk her out of it, but it had ended up in tears and anger and Olivia storming out of the restaurant, taking the car with her. He’d called Charlie, but didn’t get any answer, so after hesitating for a while, he’d finally called Ann, who’d driven in with Teddy asleep in his car seat. And, of course, she’d wanted to know what had happened, and when he told her, then it was Ann who was yelling at him.
And here, he’d thought that she would agree with him, because he’d been under the impression that she didn’t think he’d been that great of a dad. But when he said that, she’d told him that he was an idiot and that Olivia was great, and that if he couldn’t see that, he deserved to lose her. And he protested that of course he knew that, but that Olivia was way too young for him, and she should be with someone closer to her age who wouldn’t die and leave her alone and who wasn’t the same age as her parents. But Ann had just yelled louder at him and said that Olivia clearly had a thing for older guys and that he should just deal with it, and that her parents were probably thrilled that he was only 53, since Charlie’s dad had been like 70 years old.
Before she kicked him out of the car, she yelled at him that he’d actually been a great dad, and that was why she was so angry with him for leaving her. And when he said that she’d made his point, because how mad would the kid be if he died? That was when she burst into tears and told him that he really was an idiot before she peeled out. As she drove away, he could hear that all of the turmoil had woken Teddy, who added his own wails of misery to his mother's, which was just the icing on his crap cake of a day.
He watched as Ann's taillights flashed red as she drove away from him and then turned a corner. And for a minute, he thought that she’d left him out in the middle of nowhere because it was so unbelievably dark, but then the headlights from her car as she wound down the canyon road shone on the familiar windows and the door and he realized that he was in front of Charlie’s house. It was just so big that it blotted out the sky, and he was standing in the enormous shadow that it cast. Also, all of the lights were off, everywhere, and it was really, really dark and kind of scary way up here in the hills.
Just when he was on the verge of freaking himself out, Charlie said, “Blackout,” from somewhere nearby, and Ted jumped a mile, clutching his heart. Charlie, who was smirking, handed him a flashlight, and turned and padded barefoot and with no light to see by back into the darkened house. He was wearing low-slung shorts with those big pockets on the sides and as Ted’s eyes adjusted, he noticed the line of sweat visible down the back of his white t-shirt. When they entered the kitchen, he saw that Reese was sitting at the candlelit island with a Scrabble board, two big sweating water glasses full of ice, a pitcher of what looked like fresh-squeezed lemonade and a container of ice cream with two spoons coming out of it.
"Rough night?" Reese asked him drily, but he thought that he heard a tinge of sympathy in her tone. Just a tinge.
She had her hair piled on top of her head in a messy ponytail that she'd doubled over, and was dabbing the condensation from her water glass on the back of her neck. She was barefoot and wearing shorts too, and not that much of a t-shirt. It was one of those old man style undershirts like his father used to wear, which she'd rolled up to just under her breasts. A river of condensation or sweat ran down her neck and disappeared in the valley between them, and Ted turned and looked away at something else when Charlie put the gun Ted hadn't noticed he was carrying down on the island near hers and climbed back onto his seat.
Jesus. Scrabble and guns. They were a pair, all right.
"Olivia and I had a fight," he mumbled, as if there were any other reason that he would be appearing in the middle of what might be their Saturday night date, and a sort of Valentine's night date at that, otherwise. On the island, he saw a few scattered dark red foil wrappers from chocolates, and for the first time, he had the sense that he really might actually be intruding. "Would you mind if I got myself a drink?" he asked.
Charlie looked at him funny, as if wondering why after all this time he'd ask so formally, but Dani understood what he meant and said, "I'm pretty sure Charlie's got some of the hard stuff in the cabinet near the oven."
Ted knew that, but he mumbled his thanks and went to the cabinet and poured himself two generous, OK, more like four generous fingers of Scotch, and then added some ice cubes and a dash of water for show. "Is Rachel home?" he asked, turning back toward them.
At that point it was more about staving off the inevitable questions than making conversation, but as Charlie told him with a grimace that Rachel was off with her boyfriend, and Dani sighed and rolled her eyes, he realized that they wouldn't ask, either of them, not that he was in any mood to offer up more of an explanation. It was all too raw, and too real, this feeling of being loved but hopeless, or in an impossible situation. He only hoped that they, Charlie and Dani, would not find themselves at a similar impasse at some point. It would really be – it would go a long way toward restoring his faith in something like a higher purpose, if someone could just be happy. And more than most people he'd known in his life, Charlie Crews deserved to be happy. He suspected that the same would be said about Dani Reese by those people who knew her better than he did. So, he watched them arguing about Rachel's boyfriend like two people who cared about her, and he felt a simmering of hope. Maybe someone would be happy, after all.
He drank half of the enormous amount of Scotch and refilled it while they argued, then said good night and used the flashlight to light the way to the garage apartment. The flashlight didn’t really give him a big enough perspective of what might be lurking around him, so he hurried. At least Charlie had given him one of the big heavy Maglights, so that if necessary, he could clock a roaming coyote off the head with it.
The night was dark, with only a few stars visible in the overcast, and the moon had not yet risen. Charlie's fruit trees were still in the humid air, and Ted wondered if the rain would come and cool things down as he successfully navigated his way around the koi pond and stumbled up the narrow staircase to his lonely bachelor apartment. He managed to strip down to his shorts and open the windows up as wide as they would go, but the air was still fetid and stale. The miserable weather was the perfect accompaniment for his mood. Nights of oppressive dark and thick heat like this inevitably reminded him of prison, except that the juxtaposition of the quiet here made him feel jittery. He'd forgotten, just in the few short years that he'd been out, how to sleep in the heat, and the alcohol would only made him feel hotter. He drank it down anyway, then took a cool shower and fell into bed naked and alone, hoping the alcohol would knock him out, although he knew it would not keep him from reaching for Olivia in his sleep.
He must have dozed off, because he woke up at some unknown hour, hot and fearful, at a sudden noise that jolted him from his uneasy sleep. He realized just after he stood that the noise had been the sound of a body splashing into the pool and gasping at the chill, although he found it hard to believe that the water temperature had dropped that much in the hours that the heater had been off. He sat back down wearily and fumbled for his cellphone on the bedside table. It was earlier than he expected, barely two o'clock, and it was still stifling. He also noted morosely that he had no messages, but then again, he also had no bars. All of the nearby towers must be down because of the continuing blackout. He sighed and tossed the useless phone on the night stand and wondered where he'd last left his swim trunks, and if Charlie, who used to swim a lot in the middle of the night, mindlessly doing miles of laps, would mind if he joined him. His Scotch-addled brain also noted that it was odd for Charlie to make so much noise when he was swimming. Charlie actually placed a lot of value on silence, he thought fuzzily, and then identified the sound as soft laughter.
It was a woman's laugh.
Dani Reese's laugh.
Curiosity overcame him at that point, so he crept as quietly as possible to the one window that overlooked the patio and looked out it. By the thin light of the stars and the fragile new moon that peeked out from between some clouds, Ted finally spotted them. Sadly, it was the gleam off the long length of Charlie's white skin as he rose from the pool and walked to one of the lounge chairs and bent over it that finally revealed where they were. Hot as it still was, Charlie lay down and wrapped himself around Dani Reese, although at first Ted could barely see more than her hand as she stroked the wet hair back from Charlie's brow, then cupped the back of his head in her palm.
The darkness had stolen the color from Charlie's red hair, but enhanced his pallor, so that between that and the water on his skin, he seemed to glisten like a reflection of the light above them. He was naked, and Ted assumed that Dani was too, but Charlie’s back was to him, and he was so much bigger than Dani that all Ted could see was her face once Charlie had settled into the chair. The rest of her was almost entirely blocked from Ted's view, which was probably just as well. Because if Charlie had caught him looking – well, he didn't want to think about what Charlie would do.
As he watched, Charlie twisted Dani's long hair around his hand, winding it up so that it wasn't sticking to her neck. He could hear Dani's low laughter, and by some trick of the night, a fragment of her conversation echoed up to him on a puff of cool air. Ted heard Charlie's answering murmur, if not his words, and understood that Dani was complaining about her hair, and that Charlie was protesting her desire to cut it.
The hum of her voice was cut short when Charlie kissed her neck at the junction where her shoulder met it, and the pleasure on her face transformed Dani from her normal self into something incredibly beautiful. She'd always been very, very pretty, but small and fierce and tough as nails, and often as not, the expression on her face was mean. But now, as Charlie continued dropping kisses on her neck, moving up the long column of it toward her chin, Ted saw how truly stunning she could be when she was happy … and the look on her face when she opened her eyes and moved her hand to Charlie's cheek as he let go of her hair and moved in to kiss her smiling mouth … Ted dropped the curtain and stepped back, surprised to feel the sting of tears in his eyes, even though he was smiling.
If someone had asked him three and half years ago what kind of woman he'd have picked for Charlie Crews, he'd have pointed them to Constance Griffiths, Charlie's lawyer. Ted had always been sorry that she was married, and that Charlie was too noble to ignore that fact. Or he would have picked Jennifer, out of a romantic desire to see all the years that Charlie had spent longing for her requited by her returning to Charlie's side when he was vindicated.
Not in a million years would he have picked Dani Reese, but maybe … maybe she was exactly what Charlie needed, a woman as tough as he was.
Part of what Ted liked about Olivia was that she would never have made it in prison. She belonged to the world that Ted wanted to live in again, a world that was untouched by violence and corruption.
But Dani Reese? Dani Reese lived in the same world as Charlie. If she had ended up in prison, not only would she have survived it, she would've come out swinging. In fact, she had come out swinging, after Roman Nevikov had done God knew what to her.
And maybe that was part of what Charlie loved about her, that forged steel aspect of her. She was nothing like Charlie's ex-wife, or his, really. Dani Reese might be small and fierce, but he was pretty sure that Sophia had never once looked at him like that, not in all of their years together.
But, Olivia … Olivia looked at him like that.
Ann was right. He was a fool if he gave that up, if he gave Olivia up.
Ted wondered how long it would take him to walk to Olivia's house, if he started now – the coyotes be damned. He glanced out the window at the thick, impenetrable darkness that still surrounded Charlie's house, providing cover, peacefulness and privacy for the lovers at the poolside. Then he crossed the room and lay down to rest.
Charlie Crews deserved every minute of happiness he could get, and Ted wasn’t going to interrupt him twice in one night.
He would wait, and start out at first light.
~*~
Four
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2009-05-27 02:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-25 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-26 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 02:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-26 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-26 07:56 am (UTC)It would really be – it would go a long way toward restoring his faith in something like a higher purpose, if someone could just be happy. And more than most people he'd known in his life, Charlie Crews deserved to be happy. He suspected that the same would be said about Dani Reese by those people who knew her better than he did. So, he watched them arguing about Rachel's boyfriend like two people who cared about her, and he felt a simmering of hope. Maybe someone would be happy, after all.
<3<3<3<3<3
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Date: 2009-05-27 02:07 am (UTC)And thanks!
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Date: 2009-05-27 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-30 12:49 am (UTC):: grins sheepishly ::
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Date: 2009-05-26 09:42 am (UTC)Ted really fits with the rambling you've got him doing and I can imagine him investigating the finances to find out what's going on. Can't wait for more!
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Date: 2009-05-27 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-27 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-30 12:50 am (UTC)Amazing!
Date: 2009-05-29 03:01 am (UTC)Amazing just amazing!
Re: Amazing!
Date: 2009-05-30 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-31 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-31 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 08:28 pm (UTC)And hmm, I take it you're not up for another couple that takes seven years to get together, eh? I can't imagine why. ::eyeroll::
Loving this.
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Date: 2009-06-03 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-03 05:08 am (UTC)Perhaps the only thing good about Life's cancellation, then, is that we can imagine the trauma for Reese and Crews tapering off in a reasonable fashion.
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Date: 2009-06-12 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-06-02 08:32 pm (UTC)This is very, very good!
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Date: 2009-06-03 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-14 06:24 am (UTC)I love his thoughts on scary but beautiful Reese and that scene during the blackout, I could see it so clearly it's startling. I also love that while Crews and Reese are at the center the story isn't just about them.
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Date: 2009-07-19 01:12 pm (UTC)