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He worked alone.
He said it to the indifferent face of his boss as he handed him the file of his new partner, and to the janitor as he rode the lift to the hall. He said it to himself, gritting his teeth against the migraine blooming in his temples as he rummaged through his pockets for his sunglasses, coming up empty. I work alone.
The main hall seemed as unconcerned by his declaration as his boss had been.
He thought to say it one last time as he stepped outside, putting his hand up to protect his eyes against the furious sun.
“I work alone.”
The woman before him nodded in acknowledgement. Her hand remained steadfast, hanging in the air between them like a silent offer.
“Saga Anderson,” she greeted.
She was tall, black, at least ten years younger than him and she looked him directly in the eyes. Her gaze was sharp, full of a startling focus. He damn nearly took a step back.
“She’s a brilliant profiler,” his boss had said in a half-forgotten meeting. “Sure, she has no field training, but she has cracked one too many cases to keep her benched any longer. And anyway, the suits at Quantico seemed impressed, so there’s really nothing I can do. Take her, Casey, and don’t scare her off.”
He took her unwavering hand and shook it. It was warm.
“Alex Casey.”
Their first case took them to the border between Utah and Colorado, deep into the bellies of the canyons. The names of two towns stared back at him, innocently, from the plastic folder he held in his hands; both unremarkable, forgettable enough that they slipped from his mind as soon as he read them.
Oh, he could almost picture them – the pungent smell of compost completely flooding the car, wooden white houses lined up on the sides of the road, all yellowed with the wear and tear of the desert. A clear sky overhead, the dizzying height of the canyons standing guard in the distance and within their streets, a legion of drunk hillbillies and women addicted to opioids filling the single diner and, if he was lucky, the still functioning general store.
“Ohio,” he murmured to himself. Then, as if for clarification, he scoffed.
Instinctively, as if the air had shifted around her, he knew Anderson was looking at her.
“Problem?” she asked, and Casey smiled to himself.
She had spoken in a perfectly neutral tone, weaving a barrier of nonchalance so thick no traces of curiosity or judgment could possibly pass through. Training at Quantico was getting better and better, it seemed. He felt the urge to roll his eyes.
“Well, it’s not New York.”
She smiled. It was a small thing, polite rather than amused, but enough to show the slightest hint of dimples.
“New yorkers say that about everything,” she remarked.
“Yes,” Casey retorted. “For a reason.”
*
On that first night, they stopped at a motel three meager hours from the state of Colorado. Alex Casey stared at the fan buzzing lazily on the ceiling and dreamed of the darkness.
*
A year passed. It surprised Casey to realize it. It seemed to him sometimes that he had blinked in a motel in Nebraska and the world had shifted under him, rearranging itself into new and often incomprehensible shapes.
Saga Anderson had, so easily it felt almost insulting, carved a space for herself in the barren thing he called life. His car had a stereo now, after Saga had fallen prey to a fit of laughter when she’d seen his cassettes – Cassettes! she had repeated under her breath for the fifth time an hour later, and Casey had done his best not to smile. There were Saga’s favorite fiber bars in his trunk and a pair of Saga’s spare shoes under his backseat. In case it rains, she had said, or human remains fall on my clothes.
And in this time, he had learnt some things. He had discovered that Saga Anderson was a small town girl; she had gotten used to the city, but let her mingle with the locals of whatever backwater town America could throw at them, and she would thrive. He’d found Saga was a mother and her daughter, Logan, loved anything to do with baseball and despised anything to do with school – it was normal for a girl her age, Saga said. Not like Casey would have known.
He learnt, too, that there was a silver cross around her neck that she talked to before bed. From that silver cross, the faded-out face of Christ looked at her through beady eyes.
“I’m not a christian,” she had said, once, when she had felt Casey’s curious eyes on her. They had been in a cheap motel on the road to God-knows-where and there was nothing in the room but them, a foul-smelling green carpet, two small beds and a lamp.
“And yet you pray.”
She shrugged. Asking did not come naturally to Casey, and answering did not come naturally to Saga.
“You grow around it, I guess,” she replied. “My mother wasn’t religious either, or at least not in a way I could understand at the time, but everyone else was. It’s a comfort, anyway.”
And besides it all, he learnt she was beautiful. It wasn’t a strike of brilliance, an instant of blinding realization, as much as a knowledge that revealed itself – piece by piece, in increasing glimpses, with the lazy grandeur of things that are, in their very nature, inherently true. He noticed how her hair caught glimpses of the sun when she left it unbound, how her eyes weighed heavily with stubborn traces of sleep before her morning coffee. He discovered too, in a vertiginous mix of surprise and horror, how he thought it endearing.
Casey, half-asleep on his side of the car, glanced at her as she drove – she smiled distractedly, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel and bobbing her head to the noises she insisted on calling music. She hummed the lyrics and Casey’s chest ached in a way that almost startled him awake.
“Casey,” she called out. Her high spirits had a way of bleeding into her voice. Instinctively, he turned towards her. “There’s a gas station nearby. Want me to stop?”
“No, no,” he murmured. The road stretched ahead, onto the wilderness. “Don’t stop, Saga.”
*
“Are you married?”
The question came at a bad time. Firstly, he hadn’t had his coffee yet and secondly, it was Monday before 11 a.m. and Casey had decided a long time ago never to think about his ex-wife before 11 a.m.
His response wasn’t as eloquent as he would have liked.
“Huh?” he asked.
Saga smiled. She took a bite out of her eggs, the smell of them enticing enough that Casey’s own appetite had stirred its lethargic limbs – that had been before the question, of course.
“I asked if you were married,” she repeated, although Casey had heard and although she knew Casey had heard. “Something tells me you are.”
A thin trail of yolk dripped from the corner of Saga’s lips. Casey focused on it.
“Once,” he replied. “Not for a while, though.”
Saga nodded, as if she understood. Casey felt sudden annoyance – at the dogshit three dollar coffee he pretended to enjoy, at the sun that was far too bright for the early hour, at Saga and her joyful husband that she called at least twice a day and at the yolk that she hastily wiped off her chin. At Miranda, too, and the empty spot on his middle finger, and the haunting feeling that she’d been somehow right to leave as she had.
He grunted. “It’s unimportant.”
Saga shook her shoulders. Not my business, she said wordlessly, and Casey was inclined to agree until she spoke again.
“Marriage is hard,” she said. “Tell me about it.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“David calls you sweet pie,” he replied, trying to sound lighthearted and tripping on sardonic.
Saga remained unfazed. She seldom gave Casey the importance – the right, he thought sometimes, petulantly – to get to her. The thought was, for some reason, a bitter one.
“He resents me for taking this job,” she said. It fell through her lips so easily, the admission, as if it was an easy thing, a gentle thing; as if her hands didn’t tremble around her fork.
There were many types of silences among them – easy and comfortable in the car, filled with music and Saga’s humming; acute, in the motel, each in their bed after a gruesome crime scene, waiting for sleep to take them when it wouldn’t come. Silence as they worked, silence as they scouted for new leads, silence as they carried the news to a grieving mother that her son’s body had been recovered, or something that looked like him, and if she could please ride to the station to examine the remains.
This silence, however – here, among eggs and butter on toast and bad coffee, among the waitresses in pink dresses and the sweat-smelling truckers, before Saga’s tired face – felt on Casey’s spine like acid. He squirmed.
“Saga,” he said – to fill that silence, to grasp as the straws of the one recognizable thing around him. It was a soft thing, her name. It rolled off the tongue easily.
She shivered.
“Let’s go, Casey,” she said. “It’s almost 10. At this pace, we won’t reach California.”
*
He dreamed, sometimes, of himself — or something unrecognizable, twisted, that wore his face like a mask. He laughed and laughed in his dream and his bones cracked with the effort of it, splintering like rotten wood.
Under his skin, darkness crackled like lightning.
*
Saga got sick for a while; not all that long, but enough to miss the case they got assigned in the meantime. It’s nothing serious, she said when she called with the news, Logan must have given me some bug. Don’t worry, Casey, she insisted. And thus Casey didn’t.
There was a sort of satisfaction that came with his newfound loneliness and Casey, giddy with the vertiginous feeling of returning to a state he’d been forced to abandon, embraced it. Time to take the old boy for a spin myself , he thought to himself, grinning widely, as he got into the car.
It was silent as he rode it.
The case, as they often were, turned out to be gruesome and stupid and tinged with enough of an impression of self-importance that it left the aftertaste of bile in his throat. The interrogations seemed designed to get a rise out of him. The mother would talk too much and the son wouldn’t talk at all and the father – oh, how Saga would have loved interrogating the father.
He felt a pang in his chest at the thought. It echoed inside his ribcage as he drove.
*
The door opened to the curious, round face of a little black girl. Alex Casey smiled at her.
“Hello, Logan.”
“Oh, are you mama’s friend?” she asked. Then she grinned widely in an expression that was all drool and toothlessness. He found it more endearing than he’d have thought.
“Yes, I am.”
“Mama!” she yelled out. “Your friend is here!”
Saga came to the porch, waving him in. It took him a second to remember how to move his legs.
She wore a burgundy dress that billowed around her hasty steps, tied to her waist by a black leather belt. Her hair was loose, falling freely down her shoulders, and golden earrings adorned her long neck.
Casey couldn’t remember whether he’d ever seen Saga wear a dress.
“You look good,” he said.
The words came out before he could stop them. He had barely moved his lips to say them; they had materialized, as if fully formed. Saga smiled warmly.
The bottle of wine weighed heavily on Casey’s hands.
“Come in, Casey,” she waved.
Perhaps it was the smell of turkey, the warm lights, the laughter of Saga’s daughter flooding the living room to his right; perhaps it was Saga’s unburdened face as she waved him in or the specks of color of a kid’s scattered toys in his peripheral vision, but he heard – distantly, as if through thick water – a coat of velvety softness draped around Saga’s voice.
Then her husband came.
“Alex Casey,” he said. He put his hand out, solid and surprisingly thick and perfectly polite. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“All bad, I hope,” he joked, weakly.
David Anderson was kind enough to chuckle.
“Not at all,” he replied. “Sorry to disappoint.”
The table was already set, Logan’s toys dutifully placed around her place.
“She’s marking her territory,” David mentioned when Casey had to move a bear plushie to take a seat. “Don’t mind her.”
Casey, surprisingly, didn’t.
He found himself liking David, whom he had known only from the frowns and smiles his muffled words on Saga’s ear elicited from her, and the turkey too; roasted to perfection, it melted on Casey’s mouth.
“This is very good,” he said, swallowing a mouthful of mashed potatoes.
David smiled, grateful, and Saga grinned brightly, as though some sort of weight had fallen off her shoulders. Her face opened up, illuminated from within by a radiant, joyous glow.
Casey reeled, dangling at the cusp of some great revelation.
“It is,” she agreed, leaning over to kiss David’s cheek.
The understanding came, boundless and terrible, as if prophesied. An instant later, so did the nausea.
He would not remember how the dinner ended, afterwards, or what they talked about. He tried to recall sometimes, with gritted teeth, where he’d put the drawing of a police car Logan had made for him or how David’s hand felt like in his as he said his goodbyes and the shade of Saga’s dress under the glow of the fireplace. It all eluded him like smoke.
He remembered, however, this: his feet, wobbly and distorted underneath him, taking him to a bar; the alcohol burning his throat on its way in and later, folded onto himself in an alleyway, on its way out.
If he thought of that night he saw his own hands, shaking uncontrollably, flying over his keyboard, frantically looking for Miranda’s number. It had gone to voicemail. Of course it had gone straight to voicemail. She had a life now, a real one, presumably even with some measure of happiness in it.
And Casey, he had this – the blinding headache, the scotch and the alleyway. Whatever else she had taken, he had kept this.
*
The blood work didn’t match, the fingerprints didn’t match, the phone records didn’t match.
Anderson pointed it out – again, painstakingly – counting the reasons off with her fingers. One finger down, and out went the blood; two, and the fingerprints weren’t of any use any longer. With the third finger, she grabbed the phone company report and crumpled it, throwing it across the room.
“Fuck!” she yelled.
Casey sipped on his coffee and wished it was whiskey instead.
“It wasn’t him,” he said.
Saga’s lips pressed together in irritation. She was holding tightly onto her patience, Casey could tell, in a valiant effort not to bite his head off – which was fine by him, he thought, more viciously than he’d admit, because so was he.
“It was not him, Anderson,” he said again, even though it would make matters worse. Perhaps because of it. “It cannot have been.”
“I know it,” she growled. There was a ferocity in her voice that he recognized – she had her claws gripped tightly around an idea, and she wouldn’t let it go.
If they hadn’t spent the past six weeks on an endless succession of dead trails, Casey would admire her for that. Hell, he would even-
No. No, he could not say it. He would not say it.
“It is not possible, Anderson!” he roared then. The sound of his chair being knocked back startled them both – him, into submission and her, into full-blown rage.
Her eyes blazed as she leaned forwards, closer and ever closer, until all he could see was the flame trapped within her eyes.
“I don’t know what’s been going on with you these past weeks,” she murmured. She punctuated every word with a disappointment that scratched disdain. She sharpened her voice into ice shards, deliberately, with care. She had always been the better interviewer of the both of them. “But you need to get the fuck over it. Now, Casey, before you mess this whole thing up.”
Her tone was calm, almost cold, but he could see the storm raging underneath. Heartache tasted like bile in his throat.
Her hair fell down, framing her face against the unflinching evening light.
“Anderson,” he murmured. She was terribly beautiful. Something unspeakable made its way across his chest, burning a path outwards. “I’m-”
“Save it,” she said, pulling away. “I’m going to eat something. Whatever it is, you can deal with it in the meantime.”
They solved it, in the end. Saga had been right about some things and wrong about some others and it had barely mattered. Justice, as it often did, remained unmade; widowers remained widowed and grieving mothers remained empty-eyed shadows of themselves.
The flashes of the cameras from the press, the pats on their back, the deafening chatter – it was all too much. The air felt like needles on his skin as Casey made his way out of the police station, bursting through the back door like a drowning man.
He found Saga sitting cross-legged on the stairs.
“Hey,” she greeted.
A half-finished cigarette consumed itself lazily between her fingers. Casey followed the smoke with his eyes as he sat by her side.
“What a mess, huh?” he murmured.
She smiled at him.
“We did our best,” she said in a flat tone that carried within it a valiant attempt at aplomb.
He loved her. A sudden clear-headedness befell him like a curse, bereft of excuses and work to hide behind of, right then and there – sitting by his partner’s side, his friend, as it had done several months before under her welcoming roof.
He had loved her for a while now.
She let her head drop on Casey’s shoulder and he passed a warm arm around her hips. She had been crying. He felt it, her grief, like a vibration in his marrow.
“You look tired,” he said.
Saga nodded. A bracelet Logan had gifted her glimmered under the moonlight within her hand, trapped between her palm and her wedding ring.
“I want to go home, Casey”.
“I know,” he murmured. “I know.”
*
The renowned American novelist Alan Wake had published a new book. It started, they said, like this: “When Alex Casey got home, he carefully took off his blood-spattered shoes, set his keys on top of his coffee table and walked to the kitchen in seven perfectly calm steps before screaming.”
*
“Don’t start,” Saga sighed.
A deep voice croaked in reply in her ear. Casey could scarcely make out the details – anger, he assumed; no, not anger. Reproach.
“What do you want me to say, huh?” Saga replied. Her brow was furrowed and there was a tinge of impatience to her voice – far more than she would have allowed herself if she wasn’t dangling so close to her tipping point. “I work, David. One of us has to.”
Silence on the other side. Saga closed her eyes.
“David, I’m sorry, that was not-”
A murmur. Saga’s hand closed tightly around her door’s handle.
“David, come on.”
Whatever else she may have said was swallowed by the incessant beeping of the phone. Casey heard it, loud and clear, but Saga seemed not to. Her face was expressionless as she kept her phone, an iron grip around it, pressed against his ear ten seconds after the beeping had stopped and then twenty, and thirty.
When a minute had passed, Casey spoke.
“Anderson.”
No reply. Her knuckles had paled around her phone.
“Anderson. Hey, Anderson.”
She startled.
“Are you okay?” he murmured, despite the shaking of her hands and the blood she’d drawn from biting her lip and the shudder that shot through her when he asked.
“Yes,” she croaked.
A new case had gripped Saga’s attention; emboldened and excited, she had launched herself at it with full force. He had watched her all week as she became completely absorbed, barely able to drag the conversation away from the intricacies of the case for longer than five minutes. That had been, of course, until Logan had called her – angry, furious, disappointed, terrifyingly lonely – and told her she’d forgotten her birthday.
Saga had sobbed that morning as she showered, drowning her anguish under the running water, making sure Casey couldn’t hear her. But he had.
Miranda’s voice – her screams, her tears, her empty drawers when he’d come home from a job, the absence of even the merciful humiliation of a note over the pillow – flickered before his eyes. I have seen this, he wanted to tell his partner, I have lived this. I understand you.
But he didn’t, he wouldn’t, because she would ask for comfort; she would beg for a lie, even as those wide brown eyes of hers dug into his skull, somehow uncovering the truth – that this job swallowed them, chewed them and spit them out eventually but only half-broken and only all alone.
Oh, but Logan was such a sweet girl. Casey liked so dearly to visit her.
He put his palm outwards between them – a silent, hopeful offering. Ten seconds passed, then, each one longer than the last before Saga, fingers trembling as she intertwined them with his, finally took it.
*
This case had gotten to him. He had thought he’d seen everything, all those neatly packaged scenes of malice and gore splattered across the States – the world’s rotten, leprous cheek, turned proudly for him to see. And yet this one had, for some reason, gotten to him
He took a bite out of his chocolate bar, attempting to wash away the smell that had gotten stuck to his nostrils and his throat.
It hadn’t been more gruesome than others, or more violent. It hadn’t even featured a particularly surprising amount of dismemberment, but he couldn’t stop seeing it – the bloated flesh, rotten in some places and half-eaten by rodents on others, the maggots slithering calmly out of the womb, the empty space in the swollen belly where a fetus should have been.
He remembered a sign they’d seen a mile ago, announcing a gas station.
“Anderson,” he grumbled then. “I think you may have to stop.”
He barely made it to the bathroom before his stomach rejected the meager lunch he’d had. He coughed, miserably, trying not to notice the stale stench of piss that permeated every surface of the cubicle.
As soon as he was reasonably sure his knees would not give out from underneath him, he got to his feet and flushed.
You’re getting old, he grumbled miserably, wiping the corners of his mouth with the last strand of paper the bathroom had to offer. Look at you.
The man in the mirror stared back at him with the same amount of thinly-veiled disdain he directed at him. What a pitiful sight, he thought bitterly – all angles and bones and pale skin covered by the mercies of an extremely well-worn suit. He looked like his father, he reckoned, and then shivered at the thought.
At least his hair hadn’t thinned that much.
He washed his mouth several times, attempting to cleanse away the bile and the maggots and the decomposing flesh, before leaving.
Saga awaited outside, a cigarette already lit and another at his hand, waiting for him. He took it gratefully.
She wore a face of concern that she’d been kind enough to mask under a delicate veneer of indifference, just enough to avoid spooking him.
“I got you something,” she said, extending a cold bottle of water and a can of soda to him. Her handbag crunched in a way that indicated that, somewhere within it, a bag of salt and vinegar chips was waiting as well.
He smiled. Tenderness sunk its claws onto his chest, making space for the faintest rays of sunlight among the filth.
“Anderson,” he exclaimed. Her eyes dug into his, bright as the dawn. “You’re a godsend.”
*
In his dreams, he dangled at the shore, looming perilously over the water, and stared at its surface. It swirled, terrifying, inviting, incomprehensibly dark. Casey thought, distracted, of illuminating it.
It spoke to him, sometimes, of Miranda. It spoke to him of his father, that cruel beast of a man and he shivered, clinging onto the wood until his fingernails cracked and bled, feeling himself toppled onto the suddenly malicious waves.
It spoke to him of Saga, too. Truth-seer , she called it. Dangerous . He pictured Saga’s bright face and the stern stiffness she got sometimes around her lips. Run .
*
He tapped his leg on the ground over and over and over. He could hear it, the rhythmic noise, loud enough that he knew Saga, sitting before him, would be hearing her too. Tap, tap, tap. To the beat it set, as if they were a marching band, she ground her teeth.
Tap, tap, tap.
“Casey,” she said after merely five minutes. “Stop.”
He tried to. After a brief moment, his leg stubbornly began moving again.
The car mercifully screeched to a stop before Saga could protest again. She got out of the car, testing the trustworthiness of her high heels; she took one tentative step and then another and Casey tried not to look at the way her trousers clang to her hips.
She had taken him dancing. As soon as she had finished reading the invitation, she had put a hand on his arm and told him she was taking him dancing. And he, most pitiful and foolest of fools, had accepted.
Like clockwork, she had driven to his apartment in high-waisted black trousers and a burgundy top and, like clockwork, he had felt something within him creak perilously at the sight, ever so slightly closer to snapping.
“Casey,” she announced herself with a warm smile sitting playfully on her lips, opening his door.
He made his bumbling way to the club, followed closely by Saga, as if she was keeping him from wandering off – and perhaps she was. This was no place for him here, the both of them knew. He hated dancing. Miranda had never even been able to take him dancing once in their five years of marriage.
The thought must have soured his face as deeply as his mood, because Saga dug her merciless elbow on his ribs.
“Focus, old man,” she ordered cheerfully. “It’s only a night out, not a funeral. It’ll do you some good.”
He doubted it. Somewhere beneath her cheer, Casey could tell Anderson doubted it too.
The music was loud, the drink was too expensive and the lights would give him a headache if the vodka was kind enough to spare him first, but Saga grinned from ear to ear so he let himself be guided through the crowd.
“She sounded happy,” he said, spinning his drink in his hand. His body moved erratically to the irregular beat while Saga’s seemed to flow around him.
“She ought to,” Saga replied. “It’s a wedding invitation. She can’t sound anything but.”
Casey tried to recall the invitation to his own wedding. It was hard here, surrounded by sweat and alcohol and Saga’s intoxicating perfume somehow protruding through it all. He remembered, in haphazard bursts, Miranda; young and giddy and as beautiful as she used to be – as she was, still. He remembered endless calls for floral arrangements and stressing over the seating dispositions of people whose names he could not recall and whom he would never see again. He remembered himself clumsily turning off his alarm at 5 a.m. and seeing the glow of his ring in the darkness and believing himself to be the luckiest a man could possibly be.
It hadn’t been that long ago, really. Not even a decade had passed since he’d sunken his knee onto the ground in Miranda’s childhood park and begged her to accept the light he wanted so desperately to shed into her life. She had cried when she’d said yes.
He remembered her sitting cross-legged on the couch, some years later. Casey argued and argued and she looked up blankly, her eyes filled with such despondence that his words had died in his mouth. “I have no tears left to cry, Alex,” she had told him.
She was gone a month later.
Saga had stopped dancing around him. Instead, her hands had cupped his own around his drink, her fingers covering his. The tenderness trapped in that gesture was, somehow, too much.
“Casey,” she murmured, trying to call him back.
A strange sort of petulant grief, indistinguishable from anger, flooded him. Say my name, he thought then, thoughts muffled by the incessant music. Say my name at least once tonight.
“Do you miss her?” she asked, before he could say anything.
“No,” he replied, and he didn’t. He didn’t. Miranda hadn’t really known how to make him happy and he, in turn, had made her completely miserable. But she had been so sweet, so beautiful in her wedding gown – and now there was a light in her eyes he had never seen as she smiled next to a man that looked, for lack of a better word, as a Swiss accountant.
She traveled the world and he was trapped here, in the dancefloor, shoes sticking to the dirty ground, running circles with his thumb on the hand of a married woman.
Saga was close, too close, close enough that her breath made his skin tingle and he desperately needed air. He drowned and drowned and he needed air but he was stuck to the ground, bolted to it, the burden of his sins laid bare, exposed for all to see.
Somewhere in his erratically beating heart, he felt that if he looked up he would see the inevitable unfurling of a realization in Saga’s eyes. He tried to anticipate it even as her arms closed around his hips, swaying them both to the rhythm – the understanding, striking like a bolt of lightning and leaving nothing but charred remains in its wake; that he loved her, that he had loved her for years, that she came to him in dreams and in nightmares, twisted and grotesque, and he reached out to her all the same. He tried to picture it, the tension in her spine, the kind and placating smile that would remain entrenched on her face forever, the intimate light of his joy never to be revealed to him again.
He saw all this and felt sick to his stomach and yet he didn’t look, he didn’t check, because if he did he would kiss her. If he looked up right now, and saw the flickering pinks of the disco ball reflected like a crown of lilies on her hair, he would kiss her.
She was unspeakably beautiful. Casey thought he would never be able to breathe again.
“Casey,” she said again. Her voice was soft, gentle, almost tender as it caressed his name. She put a hand on his cheek. Her wedding ring was cold against his skin.
Casey felt sick with bitter and disgruntled desire, rotten, reduced to nothing but seawater, hollow bones and the echo of Saga’s voice saying his name over and over and over.
What a pitiful creature you are, he thought even as his arms tensed around Saga’s figure, pulling her closer.
She gasped but didn’t pull away. Starving, half-crazed, Casey began to turn his face towards hers.
Logan’s face flickered before his eyes for a second, a wayward bit of memory conjured by his traitorous heart. It stopped him. At the very last second it stopped him, as Saga’s golden ring had stopped him before, as the taste of cranberry sauce on his lips and the echo of laughter in a wooden living room had stopped him before.
“I’ll get a drink,” he murmured then, half to Saga and half to himself.
He pulled away. Saga let him.
*
I’m going to die. Saga understood this in a sudden flash of clarity, overcome with the unmistakable stomach-dropping vertigo that came just a second before a realization. I’m going to die.
It shouldn’t have come to this. Casey paced and paced – like a caged animal, he walked in circles.
“Agent,” they said, “sit down. Have a drink, agent.”
But he wouldn’t – not coffee, nor alcohol. He walked until his feet blistered, until he had the feeling that the pavement dissolved under his feet. He walked and walked and waited and walked and waited.
“He’ll kill us all,” a woman cried. Her speech was almost indistinguishable through the snot and tears. Clenching his jaw, Casey read her file – mid-fifties, averagely tall, accounting job, three kids, no criminal record. Something twisted in his gut. “He’ll kill us all, please, give them to him. Just give the codes to him.”
“Ma’am,” the officer said, “stay calm. If we all just stay-”
She screamed. It pierced the air, her voice. It reminded Casey of his youth, of the day his father had taken him hunting for the first and last time. They had caught a rabbit, shot it in its legs. Look, Alexander, his father had barked as he’d approached the animal, this is how you hold a knife. The rabbit had screamed when his father had gutted it. It had turned Casey’s stomach for years.
This woman had sounded just like that. At his side, Saga tapped her fingers against her arm.
“Give them to him,” the woman bellowed. “Give them to him, give them to him, he will kill us! He will kill us!”
Someone on the other line hung up the phone. All lines of communication with the inside of the bank were down.
An officer in uniform, clad in badges and medals, had turned to look at Saga.
“We’re wasting time,” he said. Then, to the FBI officials, he ordered: “send in the negotiator.”
Casey held back a wave of nervous nausea. His hands trembled as he wiped the sweat from his forehead, scouring the dark monitors for the slightest change in the shadows inside the building. Saga had gone in, unguarded and barely armed at her insistence.
She had not returned.
“Attacking and kidnapping a federal agent will get you a life sentence, if not the death chair,” Saga pointed out. Her voice was cold enough to freeze the air around her, sharp enough to cut oneself on it, but the kidnapper did little more than look at her with vague disdain. He looked so incredibly young. Saga blinked through it. “Is the money so important if you’ll never be able to spend a dime of it?”
He looked at her. Something shone in his eyes – doubt, she prayed, even as she found anger. In his round cheeks, unable to grow anything beyond a strangely endearing peach fuzz, she glimpsed some ancient, horrible grief.
“What do you know?” he asked, waving one hand. In the other, he held a gun, unwaveringly turned towards her. “You wouldn’t understand anyway.”
A shot rang through the air. Outside the building, everything seemed to quiet – the chopper doing nervous laps overhead, the sirens, the screeching of a hundred cameras and a thousand phones all going off at once. Every soul stood, breathless, on the precipice.
And then, just as suddenly, all hell broke loose.
Phones trilled in desperation, the journalists shouted at each other and themselves, the cameras went off fast enough to bring daylight into the heart of night. “The units on the roof! Get the units on the roof ready!” the field officers screamed. “Agent, step out of the command center, please,” they told him.
Casey was screaming. His knees wobbled and he folded onto himself on the lawn, gasping for air. He heard himself, his voice distorted and unrecognizable, thick as if in a dream, calling Saga’s name, over and over, until he tasted blood on his throat.
She had taken three showers already and put ice against the bruises on her body, but she still squirmed, trapped underneath a skin that felt dirty and foreign. She ran a hand through her hair and took it out, smelling gunpowder.
She thought of her daughter, her beautiful daughter, chirping happily on the phone, unaware of her mother’s fate. She replayed her voicemail over and over, sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall.“How’s your night, mum? Tonight dad’s letting me have pizza! I hope you’re having fun! Love you, mama.”
Love you, mama.
She thought of her hands tied to a steel chair filled her – a gun to her head, sirens blaring outside, Alex Casey kneeling on the floor as they took her to safety, doubled over in relief.
“Saga,” he’d murmured against her sweaty, blood-splattered hair when she had run to his arms. “My dearest, my dearest, Saga.”
Love you, mama.
The hotel was too quiet, too empty. The warm light flickered comfortably, unaware of her distress. There were footsteps in the next room, rhythmic, almost methodic. There had been footsteps in the next room for the past two hours.
Alex Casey waited for her. She knew this, felt it within her body as instinctively as she felt her own souk tethered to her bones, as innately as she sensed her daughter moving through the world further and ever further away from her.
Love you, mama.
The few steps that took her to the next room felt like a choice. Her knocks on the door – one, and then silence, and then another – felt inevitable.
Casey looked a mess when he opened the door – halfway to drunkenness and disheveled, red-rimmed eyes locked onto hers.
“Saga,” he breathed. “What-”
Before he could say anything else, before her daughter’s honeyed voice could flicker back into her mind, she kissed him.
Casey’s mouth trembled in a faint gasp under her lips, affording her an instant’s hesitation, a momentary grace for her to retreat, to stumble back to her room; a chance for her to say no, this cannot happen, this has not happened. Casey, you’re dear to me and this will not happen.
But she didn’t – she couldn’t, she would think to herself, many months later, lying awake at night. Her hands traveled to his face and she held onto it tightly for dear life as her stomach twisted with the vertiginous lurch of a world coming loose, falling into a new and unknown place all around her.
He made a wounded noise in the back of his throat, grating and vulnerable enough to break her heart and then – tremulously, violently, like a wounded thing, a wretched thing – he kissed her back.
“You’re okay,” he murmured. Everything around him was dulled – the hands pulling Saga away, the sirens, the flashing lights, even the sobs wrecking her body. A gaping wound had been carved upon his chest and blood spilled out of it. “You’re okay, Saga, you’re okay.”
There was nothing careful about this. A straight line of strewn clothing marked their path like stepping stones – from door to desk, from desk to bed. Casey’s tie had gone first, unceremoniously; Saga had pulled on it, relentlessly, mercilessly, biting small noises out of her partner until it had given out, granting her access to the man’s neck. Her teeth had moved, then, to explore the new territory.
Casey groaned.
Then it’d been Saga’s t-shirt. As Casey pulled it over her head, her hair had come loose. He stopped for a moment then, bewitched.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmured with a shaky gruff that he would have been hard-pressed to recognize as his own voice.
Saga shivered then grabbed his hand and placed it on her breasts, laying claim to his train of thought. Her skin was warm under his touch. He felt himself harden.
“Don’t say that,” she ordered, and her voice trembled as she said it.
Casey thought of Miranda; how she had blushed, at first, when he’d called her beautiful. How she had looked away in the last few months, grief-stricken and cold, her gaze impervious to his pleading and his anger.
He had the vision, all of a sudden, of rot pouring out from between his fingers, corrupting Saga’s skin where he touched her – and he’d touched her everywhere, he touched her everywhere still.
“Saga-” he tried to say, but she kissed his words away.
He thought of David and of Logan and of tender roasted turkey. He thought of a fireplace on a living room and of puzzles strewn over the couch. He thought of Logan running to Saga’s arms before she could get out of the car calling mama, mama, I’m so glad you’re back.
By the time Casey’s back hit the bed, all but her panties and his socks had gone. Saga straddled him, running coveting hands across his chest. It was thin and pale, splattered with more moles than she’d ever seen on a single man and a few patches of long, light-brown hair. He looked nothing at all like David.
She could feel his hardened cock through her clothes as Casey moved his hips, seeking friction against her. Perhaps she would have been playful, if it’d been someone else, anyone else.
Mercy , his eyes seemed to ask, suspended in that moment. She felt his plea as strongly as if he had spoken, his voice forming on its own, filling every lightless corner of her mind. Have mercy on me, Saga.
Relenting to his urgency and to the wordless weight in her chest, she put his cock to her mouth.
Perhaps, if it had been someone else, anyone else – if Casey had mattered any less – she would have dragged it out. She would imagine it often in splintered images, in treacherous tendrils of thoughts that she struggled to quash – his face mirroring his desire as she toyed with him, as she denied him for long enough for his want to mount and boil over, for his hands to shoot out towards her, pinning her to the bed, satiating his hunger on her warm and welcoming flesh. He looked joyful in her dream, a coy smile adorning his lips.
This Casey looked nothing like that. Saga glanced up through blurred, half-lidded eyes to find his visage wrecked, twisted with an emotion that seemed to choke him, to drown him. Pleasure looked, in him, indistinguishable from sorrow and his face cracked underneath it like a mask of marble.
He thrusted upwards, sliding deeper into her throat, not entirely aware of his own movements. Saga could feel the muscles on his thighs clenching rhythmically under her chest.
“If you go on much longer-” he managed to mutter through gritted teeth.
She was tempted to push him, to swallow the little grunts and noises he emitted until his body tensed underneath hers to the beat she set, attuned like a fine instrument to her every whim. She pictured it – the pleasure, the bitter taste, the headless sensation of power – and it made her ravenous.
With great effort, she pulled away.
“Casey,” she said, and something in it – her voice, perhaps, or his name – made the man startle. “I need you to fuck me.”
For a moment, Casey feared he would cum right there; too early, far too early. Sudden stubbornness roared within his chest. He hadn’t had enough, not yet, not yet. Trembling, he brought himself back from the precipice.
Saga’s hair fell unbound over the pillows and he buried his face in it, smelling it – it smelled of the citric shampoo of every hotel he’d been, but somehow there was an undertaste of gunpowder to it, of blood. Propping himself up on an elbow, he searched for her entrance with his cock.
“Need help?” she joked, and somehow the shit-eating grin he could picture in her face, trapped within the good humor of her voice, overwhelmed him.
Damnable woman, he thought to himself; smug, self-satisfied woman. He loved her so terribly much.
“Not just yet, Anderson,” he replied, entering her.
A gasp left her at the same time as a laugh and Casey’s chest tightened. This was easy, this flirting, too easy, almost indistinguishable from their routine. He thought of an endless stretch of asphalt stretching before them, the sun relentless over their heads and his hand on Saga’s as she drove, singing along to Led Zeppelin. His heart ached in despair, with all the loneliness of his empty apartment and the gloom of his favorite bar, with the space on his finger where a golden ring once was.
He thought, too, of his nightmares, of Saga’s laughter drowned by the rhythmic sound of a typewriter.
The pleasure hit him when he moved his hips, wiping away everything else. There was nothing but skin, tight and warm, and the low whimpers Saga made. Her blood on Casey’s discarded clothes vanished from his mind as he fucked her, and so did her wedding ring and Miranda and Miranda’s soon-to-be husband. He didn’t feel his years, for a moment, or the tiredness in his bones exacerbated by a work that had left him with nothing to show; he didn’t feel a fool, more prone to drunkenness than he would ever admit, more foolishly in love with his young coworker than he could bear.
There was nothing at all in the world but Saga.
The sex was good. Saga knew, from the moment Casey had started fucking her in earnest, she would want more. She guided Casey through the increasing rhythm with touches – gentle at times, rough at others and observed, captivated, as he took it all, abandoning himself to her body and her will.
His eyes were wide when he looked at her, full of a devotion that moved her, frightened her and Saga found himself trapped in the knowledge that she had known. She would try her best, for a long time, to deny it to herself, to look away from the singular, blinding truth; that she had known Alex Casey had already been in love with her when she’d kissed him, that she had drank in delight the desperation and ardor with which Casey had replied to her touch. She had wanted this, she had wanted to have him like this, vulnerable and carved open, his heart spread out like a feast for her.
It was hard, as Casey fucked her, to think of David. It should not have been hard to think of David.
“Saga,” Casey murmured, his name nearly lost between grunts.
“Casey,” she said in reply, and then she added, “Alex.”
The shiver that wrecked his spine was more intimate than the sex, more intimate than the mounting pleasure Saga felt, slipping out of her grasp.
“Say that again,” he begged, whimpering.
She ran a hand through his hair, disheveled and sweaty and falling over his forehead. He looked undone, his soul threadbare, stripped of the sarcasm and roughness that pretended to cover it. A dangerous affection bloomed in Saga’s chest, tinged with sorrow.
“Alex,” she obliged.
He made a wounded noise and his body shook. It would not be long now, she knew. She said his name again and he received it like a blessing, like a pilgrim falling to his knees before the final altar.
Alex, she kept murmuring, even as he convulsed, even as half-sobs escaped him. Alex, she kept saying, even as he came over her thigh and belly; Alex, Alex Casey, as he let his weight fall on her; Alex as he slid down, making his way to her hips and burying his face between her legs, seeking her pleasure with the same zeal with which he had sought his own.
Alex, singsung in a teasing voice as he swayed, depleted from his orgasm; Alex, in a tenderness that surprised her, that burned its way through her chest as she caressed his hair; Alex, in recklessness, in abandon, in a fleeting burst of fearless pleasure as she, too, came.
Quivering, unmade and remade anew, blinking upwards directly into blinding light, Alex Casey smiled.
*
The trilling of the phone broke through the quiet morning.
Casey blinked and noticed several things in slow, sluggish succession. First, he noticed the noise, which came from Saga’s phone and then his bedside, occupied by a sprawling Saga Anderson, drooling and so beautiful Casey feared, for a moment, it would enrage the Lord. Afterwards, the evidence of last night’s activities and the memories of it descended onto him like beasts of prey, waking him up completely with their force and their tangibility and the sheer, unimaginable impossibility of them.
Lastly, he noticed the caller. His name blared, accusing, on Saga’s screen – a silver finger pointed at him and at the stirring figure beside him.
“David!” Saga exclaimed, sprinting out of bed. Her hands trembled over the screen. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Fuck.”
Their eyes met.
“Anderson-” he said and it was bitter to call her like this but he did not dare say her name now, despite how often he’d called it the night before in terror, or outside of a besieged building that would hunt his nightmares or lost to desire, in thoughtless worship in the same bed upon which he sat now, nauseous, watching Saga cross the room to and fro and to and fro in long strides, calling her husband back.
“David,” she greeted, “oh, baby, how are you?”
“How am I? ” the man’s voice came from the other side of the phone, loud enough that Casey heard it. “Saga, god damnit, I saw you on the news. You were a hostage? And I saw it on the news? On the news !”
Saga’s eyes had filled with tears.
“I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry, I should have called, I just- It was not a good time and-”
“Was Casey with you?” he asked.
Saga’s knees faltered and she put a feeble hand to the wall, seeking support. Casey would have reached out to her, as he’d done a thousand times – to steady her or himself or for the simple, selfish pleasure of touching her – but he was bolted to the bed. Like the Son of God to the cross, nails protruded from his body and tied him to perdition.
He moved his head, ever so slightly, from side to side to signal vehement denial. Saga’s eyes didn’t seem to notice, unseeing, glossed over.
“Yes,” she replied, after what hadn’t been more than a second but had felt like a lifetime.
“Good,” David said, and the affection and relief that came through with his voice, beating like a living heart, made Saga’s tears fall freely down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she said then. Sobs wracked her voice into something unrecognizable and she fell to her knees, moving only to cry in sudden, spasmodic bursts.
Casey got up without a word and got dressed. The clothes from the day before were out of question and he could not stomach donning his uniform today, so he wrapped himself in the shittiest, most unremarkable items he had brought with him and moved towards the door.
“I’m sorry,” Saga kept murmuring, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, baby, I can’t imagine how scary that shit must have been,” David was saying.
Her husband made a set of soothing noises, a faint clicking of the tongue and a hum, almost like a lullaby. Saga’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly when she heard it, her face scrunched up in hesitation between a sob and a beautiful, grateful smile. With trembling hands, Casey pictured David standing over Logan’s small, sleeping frame, singing that song and Saga standing at the door, young and inexperienced and earnest and so beautiful even in his imagination he could barely breathe, wearing that same smile.
Saga looked up at him when he got to the door. His hand hovered over the handle, wondering for a moment what would happen if he stayed, if he got to his knees and sat besides her, that gorgeous creature that had burrowed her way under his skin, and if he embraced her and wiped her tears and took off her wedding ring with his teeth alone and-
The sun outside shone outside, marking the beginnings of a good day. Casey had always wondered at its light’s impartiality, its ability to warm the bones of monsters and saints alike – it had bothered him on good days and comforted him on bad ones. It did neither, today, as he closed the door of the motel behind him.
She would be okay, he knew. Her husband loved her, her daughter loved her and she loved them both. She would go home and wash the blood off her clothing or maybe throw the items away, and then she would be out of the field for a month, enduring an endless cycle of psych evals. And then she would return, and she would look at Casey with tender, knowing eyes, and Casey would know that he had loved her too much to be able keep her and she would smile and, to his endless relief, crack a bad joke.
Saga Anderson would be okay. Alex Casey, in the meantime, would go to the bar.