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i had a dream, or was it real?
we crossed the line, and it was on
(we crossed the line, it was on this time)
i’ve been denying how i feel
you’ve been denying what you want
(what you want from me)
talk to me, baby
- carly rae jepsen, “cut to the feeling”
He says, “Oh, Cassie.”
He says, “Oh, Cassie,” and he looks into the infinite darkness of her eyes, at all her hauntings he never got to learn about, at all the hurt he put into them with his own wretched hands, and he sees the terrible web of blood spreading ugly and bright across her cheek, the red lines marked over her skin by Rosalind Devlin’s fingernails, and he watches her body give in to the gravitational pull of his own for one precious instant, and then he watches her remember.
The shove Sam gives him is really more of a nudge, firm but nonetheless gentle, and then it’s Sam’s hand on Cassie’s head, Sam’s fingers in her curls, Sam’s shirttail dabbing at her cheek, and finally Cassie’s head down against his shoulder in the midst of Sam’s soothing murmurs and a tremor running through her body over and over again, little shockwaves over her back and down her arms, and O’Kelly finally arriving, breathless and belligerent.
And Rob looks at Rosalind’s placid face and listens to O’Kelly’s bluster and watches Sam’s fingers on Cassie’s hair and feels his heart erupt right out of his chest, yanked from behind his ribs by the pull of the woods, thorny, tangled branches ready to pierce, and he finds his broken heart tugging forward, yearning for the pain.
The observation room, once they learn Rosalind’s still a minor, is full of such strange and pointed tension that Rob imagines there must be strands of red thread invisibly stretching between them all. Cassie is still on the floor, knees pulled to her chest, elbows squished between her thighs and her stomach, forehead pressed against clenched fists. Sam is still in his impressive rage, fingers curling into his palms occasionally. He keeps casting heated, disbelieving glances at Rob and painfully earnest concerned glances at Cassie. Sam is the point of a triangle: one red-hot laser beam of emotion pointed in each of their directions.
Their triangle is completed by Rob’s eyes on Cassie. He thinks he might be doing a decent job at pretending to stare blankly at one of the tiles on the floor near her, but his eyes are on her hair, no longer windswept and bouncing but limp against her shoulders, like even it feels defeat, and on her shoulders, tightened in toward her ears, and on the sliver of her face he can see: faintly flushed cheek, pink corner of mouth, precise edge of jaw.
If Rob were a better man, or a better partner, or perhaps even a better person, he would put his knees on the floor in front of Cassie and confess every one of his sins, own each of them for her and for himself and for Katy Devlin and for Jamie and Peter. He would give her all the apologies he owes her, and he would mean them. And in the fantasy world in which Rob is capable of such an act, Cassie has a well of forgiveness inside of her deeper than he deserves, and she’d call him an arse fiercely but with no real malice and let him touch her knee. He can feel it beneath his palm, her skin cool even through the fabric of her trousers, her kneecap infinitely delicate and impossibly strong, all at once.
But Rob has proved several times over that he is not a better person or friend or partner or ex-lover, so he stays where he is, pretending to look at the floor, and imagining the cool, solid feeling of Cassie’s knee.
Sam crouches down next to her eventually, when he’s paced off the worst of his anger. “Cass,” he says, in this calm, soft voice that makes Rob want to scream loud enough to make the suspended ceiling cave down on them all.
“Please don’t touch me,” she says tightly, curling into herself even more firmly.
The look of a kicked puppy crosses Sam’s face, but only briefly. “You need those cuts disinfected, Cassie, yeah?” he prompts, still so softly.
There is a long moment of silence, and then Cassie unfurls herself, spine straightening slowly. Sam gets to his feet and keeps her request in mind; he doesn’t reach out to her, not even to help her up. He holds the door open for her, though, and she leaves without the slightest glance back at Rob, a bloody tissue still clutched in one of her hands. Sam follows her, and Rob is alone.
Alone: it is the way of being that has defined his life. He listens to their footsteps fade away, and remembers two other pairs of footsteps, moving forward without him, grass underfoot muffling each footfall until they faded away entirely.
Eleven days and three bottles of vodka later, Rob finds himself exactly where he never expected to: back in Dublin Castle, standing next to Cassie, keeping his face neutral under O’Kelly’s withering glare. Sam is there, too, and Quigley, and to Rob’s surprise, Mick Kennedy, the veteran-of-the-squad detective whom O’Kelly probably desperately wishes he’d given Katy’s case to.
“You’ve put in for a transfer, Maddox,” O’Kelly finally says. Rob can’t help the quick dart of his eyes in her direction at this, but he manages to keep most of his shock off of his face.
“Yes, sir,” Cassie says. Her voice sounds muted, like she’s speaking to them from underwater.
O’Kelly makes a disgruntled sound. Ostensibly, this should be good news, since he’s never liked Cassie, but of course he’s managed to turn it into some kind of personal affront. “Ryan’s disciplinary is being scheduled,” he says, once he’s made his displeasure known, “and Internal Affairs have graciously allowed you to review your old high-profile cases and make arguments for Ryan’s impartiality, under strict supervision - ” He jerks his head toward Kennedy, “ - and with the help of these two morons - ” A jerk of chin toward Sam and Quigley, “ - who are somehow, remarkably, less moronic than the pair of you.”
With effort, Rob clears his throat, and with greater effort, he manages to grit out, “Thank you, sir.”
“Thank me is right,” O’Kelly grumbles. “Thank me, after all you’ve put me through - ”
He’s cut off, to everyone’s surprise, by Cassie. One second, she’s standing there wearing a neutral expression to match the one Rob’s got on; the next, she’s doubled over, both arms across her stomach, vomiting on the squad room floor.
“Jaysus,” O’Kelly says after the stunned beat of silence ends, and he turns to go, clearly unable to tolerate either of them for another instant.
“Cassie,” Sam says, sounding like he’s about one breath away from clucking like a mother hen. He puts a hand at her elbow in case she needs steadying. Quigley has hurried away, gagging.
Kennedy extracts a handkerchief from inside his suit coat, pinches it between forefinger and thumb, and extends it to Cassie.
“Thank you,” she says quietly as she accepts it. She’s taking small, quick breaths, high up in her chest. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright,” Sam assures her, “I’ll go - ” And he heads off without clarifying exactly where he’s going, but Rob imagines it involves some poor member of the custodial staff.
“Do you need to go home, Detective Maddox?” Kennedy asks in an even, unhurried voice.
“No,” she says, pressing the handkerchief to her lips. She manages to gulp in a big breath of air, right down into her stomach, and Rob realizes, as he sucks in a breath of his own, that he’d been matching the shallow pattern of her breathing. “I need some water, is all,” she adds, and walks quickly out of the room.
Left alone with Kennedy, Rob finds that he hates the feeling of the older detective’s gaze. Kennedy’s looking at him like he’s an anomalous piece of evidence, something that refuses to fit into any of the existing theories.
“Let’s get to it?” Kennedy proposes, one eyebrow tilting upward, and Rob nods, and they both step around the contents of Cassie’s stomach.
Cassie comes into the incident room - set up to deal with the extravagant deceitful fuck-up of one Rob Ryan, née Adam Ryan, and his accessory-cum-accomplice, Cassandra Maddox - with a bottle of water clutched in one hand and her lips in a flat line. She takes a seat, leaving one chair open between herself and Sam, two chairs empty in the space that separates her from Rob.
Once they’ve started opening files, she starts talking to him - she has to, after all. Her voice loses that under-the-sea quality, growing more steady and sure. They speak to each other the way they always have, unnecessary words vanishing: she says, “the blood on the mat,” as she hands him a file and he nods; he gives her two files in exchange and tells her, “BO Brian; the garden with the gnomes,” and she nods too, in immediate understanding, immediate agreement that the evidence in those cases speaks for itself, regardless of the fact that it was the two of them, lying blatantly or by omission, that compiled it.
Kennedy is studying his own stack of files with the posture of a man who thinks he should be out on the streets doing important police work, not cleaning up the mess of two arrogant detectives a decade younger than him who thought they could hide their secrets forever, but he’s alert and tuned in to everything they say to one another. Rob catches the occasional tilt of an eyebrow, the pull at the corner of Kennedy’s mouth. He’s known them long enough that he knows how they are with each other, which makes his attentiveness all the more mysterious and disconcerting. Rob can’t shake the feeling that Kennedy is listening to him and Cassie and searching for a conclusion - a solve, whether it be the motive for the fight the whole squad knows they must’ve had, or the reason for the lies in the first place, or some revelation that will tie the two together.
Hours pass before Rob dares to say something to Cassie that isn’t about their former cases. She’s got a cup of lukewarm coffee in front of her, but she’s turned up her nose at the pizza Quigley’s ordered. The bones in her wrists look like they’re threatening to break out of her skin. Rob knows he’s lost weight, too, but the depth of the hollow at Cassie’s clavicle gnaws at him all the same.
“You should eat, Cassie,” he says in a tone he hopes is benign.
She lifts her head slowly and blinks at him like his presence has stunned her. “Oh,” she says, and even in that single syllable, her voice is acerbic and jagged. “I should eat, should I? Well, thanks, Rob, for that wisdom. I’ll get right on doing what you think I should do.”
The room is perfectly quiet for several heartbeats. Kennedy is the one who breaks the silence with a sigh, lifting a sheet of paper out of his file and laying it on the table in the space between Rob and Cassie. “Talk to me about this witness statement,” he says.
Rob knows without checking that he and Cassie are looking at Kennedy the exact same way: faint disbelief, moderate resentment, unmistakable exhaustion.
“I took the statement,” Cassie finally says, and Sam and Quigley snap out of their frozen, apprehensive positions to start digging through boxes again, and they carry on.
On the third day of case reviews, Rob receives an e-mail notifying him of the date and time of his disciplinary hearing. His desire to tell Cassie is so immense it feels tangible, like he could hold it in two hands, the weight of it like a boulder. He went so, so many years with only the ghosts of Peter and Jamie to tell his private thoughts to - it should be alarming, that he started letting Cassie into the deepest corners of his mind, but it had happened as easily as breathing.
She sits across the table from him, that day, her hair pulled back into a bun that looks about half a second from falling out. Her hair’s a bit longer, he thinks. It’s in wisps at the front, just a touch unkempt: this isn’t the professional Cassie of the mornings, arriving on a murder scene, chin up-tilted and gun settled at her hip, but post-professional Cassie, three fingers of whiskey in an old mason jar, a knitted blanket thrown around her shoulders and papers fanned across her lap. The boulder of longing feels exponentially heavier in Rob’s hands for every moment he looks at her.
They’re discussing a fairly old one, a domestic dispute between brothers turned bloody, when Cassie snaps to her feet with the precision of a gymnast who’s just completing a tumbling pass and darts out of the room. Rob hears the distinctive creak of the door to the stairwell.
Kennedy doesn’t react to her departure, continuing to trace his pen down a list of evidence. Quigley mutters under his breath about the weirdness of women. Rob can feel that Sam wants to go after her; he can see O’Neill’s eyes casting in the direction of the door every thirty seconds or so. Cowardly as ever, Rob waits a full fifteen minutes, staring at Cassie’s signature on a form, until Sam clears his throat and starts pushing himself away from the table.
Rob manages to beat him to it, springing to his feet nearly as quickly as Cassie did. “I’ll go,” he says. The words in his mouth are doing something weird, snapping past his lips in robotic bursts.
Sam gives him a measured, uncertain glance. Rob draws himself to his full height and gives that same glance right back until Sam gives a brief, sharp nod and drops back into his chair.
Cassie has gone down two floors, to one of the two single-person bathrooms in all of Dublin Castle, the ones sobbing victims or witnesses are typically gently steered toward so they can attempt to pull themselves together. It was Rob’s first guess when he heard her head for the stairwell, and it turns out to be correct.
He raps two knuckles on the door, tentative. “Cass?” he asks. Her name makes his throat feel so raw, like he’s been swallowing shards of glass.
Most of him is expecting a vehement response telling him to do something creative to himself, but he doesn’t get one. He gives her a few seconds, but still, nothing. It’s his detective habits that bring his hand to the doorknob - try everything, try anything. To his utter surprise, it gives, turning all the way.
“I’m coming in,” he announces, giving her a chance to yell at him again, and then forces himself to count to five before he swings the door open.
The reason behind the door being unlocked is immediately obvious to him: she didn’t have time. Cassie’s on the floor in the far corner of the room, by the toilet, taking the slow, opened-mouth breaths of the nauseated. The sharp, sour smell of sick lingers in the air. She swallows with apparent difficulty and doesn’t look at him.
“Cass,” Rob says again, in a murmur this time. He kicks the door closed, flicks the lock, and goes over to crouch next to her. As he predicted, her hair has fallen out of its bun, and a couple strands are stuck to one flushed cheek. His fingers itch with the yearning to push those hairs back behind her ear. He misses the freedom of how he used to be with her: thumbing chocolate from the corner of her mouth, smoothing out deep creases between her brows.
“Why are you here?” she asks him. Her throat sounds about the way his feels, all scratched up. “You’ve made it pretty clear you want nothing more to do with me.”
Rob can’t deny that he has, not anymore than he can find the words to explain to her that every awful thing he said to her was both the truth and treacherous artifice. All her can say is, with a shade of concern he’s not entitled to: “You’re sick.”
Cassie breathes out such an abrupt and powerful laugh that deep inside Rob’s stomach, there is a painful flinch. “You fucking idiot,” she says, and she looks like she wants to keep laughing, or maybe like she’s going to cry. “I’m pregnant.”
In an instant that seems to take a very long time to pass, Rob’s ass hits the bathroom’s tiled floor, and his lungs empty themselves. In that instant, hard floor against his tailbone, his body no longer engaged in the simple act of breathing, he sees the long line of Cassie’s neck, the flutter of her eyelashes, the dig of her teeth into her bottom lip, the delicious weight of her bare breast in his hand.
When the moment finally passes, and real time comes rushing back, he discovers that he’s staring at Cassie, at her dry lips and sharp eyes, and shaking his head very slowly.
“I already made an appointment,” she says. There is defeat in her voice and all across her body, defeat deeper than an obvious perpetrator who won’t confess, deeper even than that observation room looking in on Rosalind Devlin. “So don’t… worry.”
His hands so tight on her hips, a grip that could leave bruises, wanting to bury every inch of himself and his soul inside of her, wanting to belong to her. He had fallen asleep in her bed feeling the peace of home, sinking into the kind of dreamless sleep he hadn’t had since the woods.
“I want to go with you,” he says. It’s the same thing he said as she was being wired to talk to Rosalind, and he won out then, wore O’Kelly down and made his way into the van, but this is even more urgent. His heart is hammering with it, insistent.
“No,” Cassie says, frowning deeply.
“Cassie - ”
“No. No, Rob. The last time you wanted something and I - ”
He watches her fingers clench the fabric at the front of her shirt into a ball. It’s dark green, and it falls between each of her white knuckles like leaves between the branches on a tree. The raw lining of his throat feels like it’s swelling, threatening to close over.
The bathroom floor is disgusting, covered in rain-muddy footprints and piss and god knows what else, but he inches himself closer to Cassie regardless. Her eyes on his face are so wary; he wants to say, Cass, it’s me, but when she’d tried to reason with him with those same notes, he’d given her absolutely nothing, and it wouldn’t be fair to turn that plea back on her.
“You’re right,” he says. “Christ - you’re right, Cass. I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve been shit to you lately. More than shit.”
“You’ve noticed that, have you?” she murmurs, but there’s no heat in her voice.
“I’m fucked up,” he tells her. “My mind’s fucked up. I had no business on Vestal and I knew it. I fucked up as your partner and I know what I did - ” It’s such a cardinal sin, what he did to her, sending her in there to be hurt in the name of a confession that had turned out to be inadmissible, and it had hurt all the more to have Sam be the one to point it out in that damn observation room. “I fucked up as your friend, too. I’m fucked up and I fuck up.” He looks at her and she’s still something warm to him, something bright, even with what’s happened between them, even on the nasty floor. “The only real friend I’ve had since I left Knocknaree. And then I dragged you back there and raged at you when you tried to help me get out again.”
The wariness in her eyes fades and gives way to something melancholy. Her grip on her shirt has relaxed, and now her fist rests on her abdomen, and somewhere far beneath it there is a cluster of cells that they’d both brought into existence. There is so much he did on the case, and to Cassie, and with Cassie, that was unintentional, and those cells, that collection of terrifying potential that neither he nor Cassie can even begin to contemplate - they’ll have to take their place on his list of regrets. But Cassie in her bed, Cassie fitted perfectly against him, Cassie’s mouth opening against his slow and warm and searching, all the things that led them to this grimy floor; those, Rob’s list of regrets can’t seem to accommodate.
“I don’t want to be a shit partner this time,” he sighs. “Or a shit friend. I’d like to go with you.” He shifts his jaw, trying to work away some of its tension. “Please.”
She rubs at her forehead, leaning into her hand. She looks like she’s aged about five years.
“Fine,” she finally says. “I booked the eight o’clock boat on Saturday. You can come if you can get a ticket.”
Rob is at a computer to book a ferry ticket as soon as the door to the stairwell closes behind Cassie. (“Tell Kennedy I had to go home,” she’d said once she’d pulled herself up off the floor and rinsed her mouth, “Tell him I got my period. Watch Quigley go green.”) There are thankfully still a few tickets left for Cassie's boat, but his heart thrums anxiously in his throat until he’s got a confirmation of his purchase.
Cassie stays in his head. The uncertainty between their lips when he pulled back from the kiss he’d given her; the assurance in the way she’d closed that tiny space and kissed him back. The gasp of a laugh she must save for her lovers, caught between two pillows. The curve of her waist, not pronounced but blissful all the same. Her hands on his shoulders, her nails scraping his skin. The way she’d caught her tongue between her teeth and her eyes had landed on his, and he hadn’t needed to ask her a single question - what do you like, is that good, are you close - because he could read her, the flush creeping over her cleavage, the heel digging into his back, the bite of her teeth into his bottom lip. She came for him without a single word passing between them, and all it took for her to take him with her was his name, tumbling out of her mouth hot and desperate and pressed into his cheekbone.
He’d never known his name, the one he’d chosen as a lost kid at a boarding school, could sound like that. He’d never known that he’d been waiting, weeks or months or maybe even years, for Cassie to say his name just like that. He’d wanted to bottle it up. He would have begged for it, that acute, unblemished sound.
For two more days, they review old cases, speaking in their old shorthand, avoiding conversation that veers even slightly from work. Rob keeps an eye on Cassie’s face, watching for a sudden paleness or a tinge of green, but at least in the time they’re together, she doesn’t vomit again.
Her sickness is somehow astounding to him. They slept together ten weeks ago, though it feels like a lifetime and a half. In those weeks, something inside of her has been shifting, changing, and now: this demand for attention. It is, he thinks, nothing short of what he’d expect of Cassie’s child, and the thought turns everything fuzzy-edged for several minutes. He had not intended to think that word, child. Rob’s not sure he’s ever been or will ever be suited for fatherhood, and Cassie is wrecked right now; there will be no child. But there is something intoxicating about the thought all the same: his genes, and Cassie’s, mingling and tangling until they’re laced together, an unbreakable knot.
Even if the disciplinary ends with him out, totally out, not even back in uniform, not even stuck at a desk for the rest of his miserable life, and even if they return from England and Cassie blocks his number and moves on from her twisted-up partner and the screwed-up things he did, even if she does exactly what he’d implied he wanted her to do and extricates herself from his life forever, this will always be.
There will always be these ten weeks, where he got his partner pregnant during a night he’s called a mistake many times over, and that pregnancy was real, real enough to make her sick, and across the table in the incident room her dark eyes meet his and he has the slightest sense of what might be going on in her head, and once again, the two of them, they have a secret.
Cassie chooses the quiet room on the ferry. Rob follows after her wordlessly, though he would have liked to stop at the café and get coffee first. She extracts a Jane Austen novel from her bag - Persuasion - and opens it firmly, like a woman on the DART sending the message that she’d like to be left alone.
He takes the signal and spends a good twenty minutes watching, in his peripheral vision, as she flips pages at random intervals, clearly not absorbing a word. Then he shifts his body toward hers slightly, making sure not to let their knees bump, and says, as conversationally as if they’re driving back to Dublin Castle from a scene and the air in the car is feeling heavy, “Did I ever tell you about my first kiss?”
She looks over at him, one corner of her mouth downturned. “Rob,” she says, a scowl starting to form. “What are you on about?”
“Did I ever, Cass?” he presses, keeping his tone conversational. He hopes she understands what he’s asking, what he’s proposing. Come into the car with me, he wants to say. We’re driving; we’ve just left a flat with a murder victim inside of it. The day is weighing our shoulders down. Meet me there. Let me make this lighter.
Cassie closes her book, but keeps one finger crooked between the pages, marking her place. He can see the quirks of curiosity passing across her face. He wonders if she knows that he knows her face as well as he knows every single one of the lines on his palms. He wonders if she knows his face that way, too, and if it hurts just as much. He thinks he can guess the answer.
“Go on, then,” she says, like he’s asked her for a great favour that she’s deigned to grant him. Seemingly as an afterthought, she adds, grumbly like they really are in a car together again, “Arsehole.”
He suppresses the sudden, surprising impulse to smile, and gets on with it. He tells her about sitting with his thigh pressed to Jamie’s, and tears on her cheeks, and their mutual grief at their looming separation when she was sent away to school, and Peter somewhere close by plotting their escape, and his lips on Jamie’s damp cheek, maybe pursed just a little too much, eager to get the gesture right on this, his very first try. He tells her about the look on Jamie’s face and about how he thought she might kiss him back.
“On your cheek?” Cassie asks, a soft interruption. “Or your lips?”
She’s slumped in her seat a little, and he remembers a time, not so long ago, when it would have only been natural to slip an arm around her shoulders and to let her use his pointy shoulder as a crap substitute for a pillow. “I don’t know,” he tells her, which is the honest truth.
Cassie rolls her lips together and sighs. “D’you know what I think?” she murmurs. “I think we always want to know things, you and me. I think we say we have all kinds of reasons for ending up at Templemore, but I think the biggest one is that we were looking for answers.” She exhales again, slower this time, and Rob wonders if she’s nauseous. “And I think I’ve realized there aren’t nearly as many answers out there as we thought there were going to be.” Her eyes fall to her lap. “Can you believe us? The gall of us? We thought if we knew how to look, where to look, we’d find them all.”
An ache builds, fast and fierce, in Rob’s chest. If he let it take over, he thinks he would cry. He reaches for her, just his hand toward her hand, but she pulls away, the book in her grasp held up almost like a shield.
“I think I’m going to try to get an hour’s kip,” Cassie says, and then she closes her eyes, and the conversation’s over.
Rob sits next to her, nothing to read and nothing to occupy his mind but his memories, and listens to the breaths Cassie’s fighting very hard to keep long and measured to fool him into thinking she’s asleep.
The clinic is about what Rob was expecting: inside a nondescript building, the walls of the waiting room painted a colour he imagines is supposed to be soothing, comfortable enough looking chairs lining the walls. It occurs to him that he should have asked Cassie how this was going to go - can he stay with her? - but the opportunity for that conversation has passed. She goes up to the desk, and he takes a seat in one of the chairs. There are only two other people in the waiting room, likely a mother and daughter; the girl is eighteen or nineteen and looks impossibly young to Rob, who feels, lately, like he’s rounding the corner toward eighty-five.
When Cassie sits down, she leaves a chair between them. He will not, apparently, be touching her knee or rubbing her arm or offering any whispered words. He doesn’t think Cassie needs those things - or at least he doesn’t think she would have, before the mess of Operation Vestal - but he’s starting to feel very useless, and the sensation is vaguely troubling.
A nurse calls Cassie’s name, and she gets up without looking at him, which makes at least one thing clear - he won’t be going with her. He hears the nurse ask, “Anyone with you, Cassandra?” and Cassie’s quiet, firm reply of, “No. Just me.”
He watches her vanish behind a door and tries not to let her response burn as he struggles to swallow it down.
She’s gone for what seems like a very long time. Rob manages to keep himself together for about thirty minutes, but after that he starts bouncing his knee, and when he manages to stop that he starts clenching his jaw, and when he manages to stop that he starts cracking his knuckles. He can’t stop remembering all the things that flickered over Cassie’s face when he’d kissed her, and the flinch in her eyes the next morning when he’d started brutally, studiously dismantling their partnership, brick by brick.
It’s been nearly two hours before a nurse pokes her head into the waiting room and asks, “Here with Cassandra?”
Rob all but rockets to his feet and takes long strides toward her. “Yeah,” he says. “Yes.”
She sends him a little calm, reassuring smile that she probably often gives out to boyfriends and husbands. “This way.”
On their path down a sterile-smelling hallway, the nurse explains that Cassie’s procedure is done, everything went fine, but they’re keeping her a bit longer than the standard time because she’s had some excess bleeding. Rob’s heart somersaults and for a minute he can only see his own small trainers, filled with blood, but he manages to latch onto the rest of the nurse’s words: they expect to let Cassie go in about an hour, as long as nothing changes.
“Thanks,” he mutters.
The nurse pulls up that smile again, gives his arm a solid pat, and opens up a door. “In here,” she says, and leaves him alone with Cassie.
The room is fairly small, two beds with a curtain divider, but the curtain is pulled back since the other bed is empty. The head of Cassie’s bed is raised halfway, so she’s reclining halfway between sitting and laying, and she looks swallowed up by the pale green hospital gown. She’s got her arms crossed over herself, each hand gripping the opposite wrist.
“Hey,” Rob says, moving into the room like he’s walking through water, each of his steps slow and heavy. He wants to cup her face in his hands and lay his lips on her forehead, wants to feel her soft touch on his forearms, wants to melt into her and feel her melt into him. Instead, he takes a seat in the chair by the bed.
“Thought you might be bored,” she says.
“Thought I might be worried,” he corrects.
There’s something strange about her eyes, glassy one instant and then shuttered the next, so open to him he could almost step into her irises and then so closed he’s not even sure she’s seeing him. “I don’t know what you think anymore,” she says.
He remembers her anger on the day they arrested Damien. What the fuck goes on in your head?
“God, Cass,” he says, trying for a wry smile but probably coming up with something closer to a grimace. “Neither do I.” He studies her for a beat. “Are you alright? Are you in pain?”
“Just a little.”
He’s not sure whether she’s lying. He tugs the chair closer to the bed and it makes an awful scraping sound. “Cassie,” he says. He considers trying to take one of her hands but decides against it. “Cassie, I want to say sorry to you. Not about this - not just about this. About it all. Every fucking piece of it, from when we first went to Knocknaree. Even before that - telling you the truth about me, so you’d have to keep it to yourself.” The lump in his throat hurts like hell. “Would you let me, Cass? Would you let me say sorry to you, and believe that I mean it?”
Her eyes are brimming and it makes his eyes sting, too. He’s seen the evidence of Cassie’s tears on her face, after the fact, and he’s heard her weeping during her conversation with Rosalind, but he’s never actually seen her cry. She gives her head a little shake and says, “Rob… ”
“Honey,” he says, his hands on her mattress but not yet reaching for her fingers in their iron grip on her wrists. He’s called her hon before a hundred times, late nights at her flat, tipsy and silly or solemn and candid, so many moments and moods stretched between them. But he’s never called her that full word before, two syllables of affection. His mouth is too dry for him to figure out how it tastes. “I’m so sorry. I am so fucking sorry.”
Tears fall out of Cassie’s eyes, glide swiftly down her cheeks, and drop onto the thin blanket spread over her lap. “Me too,” she says in a small, shaking voice.
He thinks of that night, after he’d been in the woods, when Cassie had come to get him just because he’d needed her to, before they’d lain down together and hurried each other out of their clothes. She’d let him sob, a steadfast presence at his side, a solid support, without overwhelming him with an embrace or placating words.
So he does that, for her, now: he lets his hand stretch out, and he rests it atop one of hers, and as Cassie cries he strokes his thumb over her knuckles, over and over and over, a steady and unfaltering pattern. When her tears peter out, he hands her a box of tissues and reaches into her bag and pulls out her Austen novel.
“Shall I read to you, yeah?” he asks, and he doesn’t wait for an answer, just flips open to a page at random and starts reading to Cassie about Anne Elliot, and he can feel, the whole time, her eyes on his face. The weight of her gaze is the same as it’s ever been, and despite his attempts to fight it, one single drop of moisture fights its way out of Rob’s eye, and finds its way to the page.
On the ferry back to Dublin, they go to the café. Rob gets a very large coffee and a mediocre sandwich, and Cassie picks noncommittally at a croissant.
“I need some air,” she says after a few minutes, and Rob nods and lets her go, knowing that she’ll probably snap at him if he starts to hover.
He finds a discarded newspaper, flips through it, and drinks his coffee. By the time he’s finished the dregs of the cup, Cassie still isn’t back, so he goes looking for her.
Rain and wind smack viciously against his face when he steps out onto the deck. He’d known the water was rough from the ferry’s rocking, but he hadn’t realized the weather had turned so badly. He squints through the rain, down the deck, and sure enough, there’s Cassie.
He moves toward her as quickly as he can, head ducked against the wind. “Cass!” he calls, hoping she’ll hear him. “Come back in.” He heaves half a sigh when he comes to a stop next to her. “You’re already soaked. Come on.”
She shivers but she stays put, feet planted, and he recognizes this immovable version of her. “What’s happening here, Rob?” she asks. The wind cuts through her words; a raindrop lands directly in the center of her bottom lip. “What do you want from me? From us?”
He shoves his hands into his pockets and hunches his shoulders against the sheets of rain. His coat couldn’t be further from waterproof. “I wanted to apologize to you, Cass. And I didn’t want you to have to do this alone.”
“I did everything alone for a long time,” she says. “Just like you.”
“I know. But then - ”
“But then,” she agrees. It’s impossible to know if any of the wetness on her cheeks is from her tear ducts; maybe that’s her intention. “But then I got on Murder. But then I met you; we met each other. But then we became partners. Then we became friends. Then we were - it was like you were me, sometimes, how well I knew you. Remember how O’Kelly used to yell for us? MaddoxandRyan. It was one word.”
It had barely been long ago at all, really, that they’d been so inseparable. “I remember.”
“I know you were wrecked that night, Rob. I should’ve realized how badly. When you kissed me I probably should’ve said, you’re drunk, Ryan; go to sleep. I know whatever happened to you in the woods was trying to eat you from the inside out, and I was the next thing, once it got through you.” She glances away, out at the waves. “But you wrecked me, too. I’d been just me since I was five. Then you came along and I wasn’t Maddox, I was MaddoxandRyan. I couldn’t even picture my future without you, d’you know that? I saw us working Murder ’til we were grey and then drinking our way through our retirement at my flat. I never saw anything different. You were my family, Rob - more than my aunts and uncles. I hadn’t had that since I was a kid. And then you yanked it away.”
She’s being frank with him, and the veracity in her words is painfully obvious. His mind trips over family - he’d felt it with her, too, of course he had - and his eyes slide down her body without his permission, settling on her midsection.
Cassie reaches out and grabs his elbow so that he snaps his eyes back to her face, slick with water now. “It’s not that. This isn’t me saying I regret it, that I wanted to have a family. I’m saying you were my family. I meant it when I told you I didn’t go into what happened between us expecting something, and I still mean that. Neither of us is in the right mind to be anything near a decent parent, and neither of us is alright enough to be going after a relationship. But you were my family, and then all of a sudden you weren’t.”
“I don’t… think I felt like there was much of a choice,” Rob says, words thick on his tongue. “I thought if I wasn’t going to be your boyfriend, then anything else we were would have imploded anyway, since I wasn’t ready to take it further. To take it closer.”
“That’s not true,” Cassie says quietly.
“Maybe,” Rob concedes, holding her eyes. “And maybe not, Cass.”
“That takes me back to my question, Rob. What do you want?”
He looks at her, a couple locks of hair glued wetly to her cheeks, her hood soaking wet, her hands curled into her jacket sleeves. It takes him back to the first time he ever saw her, by her vespa in the rain in her red jacket, that piercing impulse to shelter her. He always told himself he hadn’t fallen in love with Cassie that day, told himself he’d been struck by her in a different way, that they’d formed a bond that went far beyond the appeal of her small stature and beautiful eyes, that dove into the depths of who she was, and who he was, and who they were, together.
Rob begins to understand, standing there on the ferry deck, that he is skilled at lying even to himself.
“You,” he says, his voice a little louder than it needs to be, tempered by the wind and rain. “Cass, in this whole world, I think you’re all I’ve ever really wanted.”
She looks at him for a long time. Her eyelashes are wet and stuck together in clumps; there are drops of rain gliding sensuously down her neck. Her eyes don’t move, but her lips do, pressing together and then coming apart before she manages to say, “Do you think I have a single brain cell left, Ryan?”
She sounds so much like Cassie on what used to be a normal day, so much like they’ve been slagging each other for a good few minutes, all grins and wit and brattiness, that Rob finds himself blinking in surprise.
Cassie doesn’t wait for him to answer. She turns away instead and leans on the railing, gazing out over the tempestuous sea. “A single brain cell,” she muses. “Or am I thick? Have I always been thick and I just didn’t know it?”
Rob moves in closer to her. “What are you talking about?”
It’s like the crashing waves are in her eyes, when she turns to him. “If I had a single brain cell,” she says. “I wouldn’t do this. Maybe I wouldn’t have even told you I was pregnant, but I definitely wouldn’t do this. I would go back and stay far away from you and ignore the results of your disciplinary and tell Sam I would be delighted to go to dinner with him because I know he’s been wanting to ask. If I had one brain cell.”
“Cassie,” he says quietly, unsure of how he should feel. He thinks of the book tucked into her bag: half agony, half hope.
She shakes her head and looks at him like she’s genuinely perplexed by herself. “Why can’t I say that I hate you?”
“Cass.” He pushes his hand into her hair, soaking wet at the front and damp back toward her ear. Her hood falls down. She gives her head another shake, disbelieving, but her fingers find purchase on the front of his coat, which is so damp now that it should probably be wrung out. “Cassie.” She tilts her eyebrow up at him, a silent inquiry. He dips his head down to hers, lets their wet, slick noses brush, and holds his breath.
Her mouth feels, at first, like a question, like his lips will grant hers an answer. And they must, somehow, to his enormous relief, because her next kiss is crushing, her hands on his coat pulling him closer, her body pressing into his, and suddenly Rob can’t feel the rain at all, can only feel the heat of her, somehow sustained in the storm, and maybe all this time, all along, he was the one who was looking for shelter.
Back at Cassie’s flat, he boils water for tea, because it seems like the right thing to do. She takes a hot shower and comes back in an old oversized shirt and blue plaid pyjama pants, a slight slow, painful shuffle in her steps, and curls up in one corner of her sofa. Rob presses a steaming mug into her cupped hands and runs a hand lightly over her wet hair.
“We’re not together,” she says as he sits down. “We can’t be. You need to see a therapist, Rob, and I probably do, too. If we try to work this out now we’ll only ruin each other again.”
He nods. It is dark beyond her windows, save for the city lights, and he hopes with everything in him that there are no murders tonight. He hopes, against hope, that they can all stop hurting themselves and one another. “I’ll sleep here tonight,” he says, patting the sofa.
Cassie casts an excuse me? sort of look in his direction as she blows into her mug. “You’re staying, are you?”
“In case you need anything.”
“I won’t need anything.” There’s a pause, heavy between them, and then she adds, “But you can stay.”
He stays that night and the four after, always on the sofa. Starting on Monday he sets an early alarm so he can go back to his place and shower, change his clothes. Before he leaves, he leans down over Cassie to put a kiss against her temple. She is always warm with sleep, and fills his nose with all her familiar scents: the mint of her shampoo, the faint traces of nicotine, and that unnameable smell that’s just Cassie, that make it feel like it’s safe to close his eyes, to unclench his fists, to breathe in deep.
They review the last of their old cases on the Thursday. Watching the last file close feels like the end of era that Rob’s not quite ready to part with. They don’t say anything to one another - they’ve stayed careful with each other, at work - but Kennedy nods to the files and says, “Good work,” which makes Quigley frown, and after an awkward moment of hesitation Sam holds his arms out to Cassie, and she steps easily into his hug.
When they’ve pulled apart, Rob manages to extend a hand, and Sam shakes it. If they’d worked closely on some other case, if Operation Vestal hadn’t come along, he thinks maybe they could’ve been friends.
They hand in their work to O’Kelly. He grumbles, “Never should’ve let the two of yous work together,” and dismisses them with a flick of his hand. They ride the elevator down to the first floor standing shoulder to shoulder, and in the nudge of Cassie’s elbow against his own, he feels a burst of reassurance.
She waits for him around two corners from his disciplinary hearing, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. There’s a mug of coffee waiting for him, and when he takes a long sip he discovers Cassie’s added a healthy dose of whiskey. He smiles at her and brushes the pad of his thumb across her cheek, a silent thanks.
“So?” she asks, after she’s granted him a minute of silence.
“I’m back in the floater pool. It was heavily implied that I shouldn’t expect to get out of it any time soon.”
“Not back in uniform?” Cassie asks, her eyes lighting up.
Rob nods his confirmation. “Just to General.”
“Rob, that’s great,” she says in that unfeigned, enthused way of hers. “God. I was worried they’d take you off the force altogether.”
“So was I.”
She reaches over and grabs his hand, squeezes it. “I’m glad.”
He squeezes her hand in return. Her palm is soft, her knuckles just slightly chapped. “Thought I’d be back to nudging drunks home in Ballygobackwards,” he admits. He doesn’t say what he really means: I thought they’d send me far from you.
“You’re a good detective,” Cassie says. “They know better than to do that.”
“You’re a good detective, Cass.” He examines her face for a beat and tells her, “You should rescind your transfer request.” A frown tugs at her mouth, but he keeps going before she can protest. “O’Kelly fought for me in there. More than I ever would’ve expected him to. He’ll let you stay on the squad, if you beg a little.”
“Beg O’Kelly?” she repeats distastefully.
“You’re meant for this job. You’re right for it. You’re the only one on the squad who can profile decently. And you knew. About Rosalind. You knew when no one else did.” Rob gives a small, apologetic grimace before he continues, “If any part of you wants to stay, Cassie, you should.”
She frowns down at their hands, their tangled-together fingers. “And who would be my partner?”
“Sam.” Her eyebrows shoot up. “He’s a good detective, too. He saved us more than once, on this last case - it might’ve been even worse without him.”
Her tongue pokes into her cheek. “What happened to your jealousy?”
Rob doesn’t bother denying it. “Sam plays by the rules. You stay on the squad, you become his partner? He’ll kill his crush for the sake of the job.” He pauses. “And I trust him.”
“You trust him to what?” Cassie asks, some heat in her voice now. “You trust him not to go after your woman?”
“Is that what you are?” he asks her, with a quick flash of a grin, but hurries on before she can hit him upside the head: “I trust him to be a good partner. To look out for you on the sketchy scenes, to have your back, to listen to you. And he trusts you, too; that’s obvious.”
Cassie turns it over in her mind for a few moments, worrying her bottom lip with her teeth. Then she sighs. “I’ll beg O’Kelly.”
Rob takes another long drink of his coffee, a new grin forming. “That’s a girl.”
They get a takeaway and a bottle of wine and head back to Cassie’s flat, just like always, and while they eat they play a game of remember-when, letting themselves bask, one last time, in all the best moments of their Murder squad partnership. Cassie will form new memories with Sam, assuming he agrees to the partnership (and Rob is certain he will), and Rob will run around Dublin taking witness statements and combing over crime scenes and tracking down contacts of suspects and victims, but they’ll come back here when the day is done, to Cassie’s sofa, and exchange war stories instead of talking over each other in a rush to recap the stories they shared.
While Rob does the washing up Cassie pours them both a second glass of wine and puts on Tom Waits, Closing Time. It’s an album that’s always made him think of her, though he’s not sure she knows that. When he hears, “the girl with the sun in her eyes,” his mind always rushes to Cassie in the springtime, cartwheeling down Sandymount Strand, and it used to make him smile, privately, to himself, to hear “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” while they were buried in case notes together: it had seemed impossible to him, then, that their relationship was anything but something special, unique and immune to the oldest laws in the book.
The gall of them, like Cassie had said.
When they’ve finished the bottle, he holds a hand out to her and says, “C’mon.” She gives him an inquisitive look, but she takes his hand; her trust in him is coming back, finding its old footing, and that’s a gift he knows not to undervalue.
He turns up the music and opens the window that leads to the extension, and Cassie tilts her head, not moving anymore. “What are we doing?”
Rob keeps moving, tugging her along until he has to let go to make his way out of the window. “I want to dance with you.”
“Rob,” she says on a huff of a laugh. “What? Do you mean - this isn’t exactly swing music.”
He nods. He knows that. “Come on, Cass,” he says.
She squints at him, clearly not sure what he’s after, but she gives into his request and crawls through the window. The last time they were out there, when Cassie’d taught him to dance and they’d laughed the night away, he’d wanted to believe that everything was going to be okay. Now, thanks to several undeserved second chances from the universe, his belief is edging toward certainty. He wants to find a way to show her that.
On the extension, he pulls Cassie against him, wraps his arms around her waist and slips one foot between both of hers, fitting their bodies together as closely as possible. She looks up at him, messy curls framing her face. Her expression is inscrutable, but her eyes are soft and shining, the eyes of a glass of whiskey extended to him after a shit day, the eyes of the night sinking into its deepest hours and an offer to sleep on her sofa, the eyes she’d had when they woke together in her bed, before he’d destroyed their shine, quickly and cruelly.
Her arms lift and her fingers link at the back of his neck, and he releases a sigh with enough gratitude in it that she must feel it, grazing over her skin. Her fingertips slip into the hair at the nape of his neck. Inside her flat, Tom Waits is crooning: though we’re stuck here on the ground, I have something that I’ve found.
There’s still one faint line on her cheek from Rosalind’s fingernails - maybe she should've had stitches, after all. He wants to put his mouth on that scar, glide his tongue along it, erase it from her skin and absorb it into himself; he’s the one it should belong to. He runs his knuckles along the line of it and her lashes flutter, her eyes falling shut, before she lays that cheek against his chest, her arms dropping to curl under his and settle against his back, fingers spanning outward like she wants to touch as much of him as she can.
They’re barely dancing, just a hint of a sway, feet shifting oh-so-slightly. He needs to say something to her, something that will make her understand. He can’t call her honey, it’s a word that’s been shortened and passed between them too many times to strike the chord he’s seeking. Darling feels terrible and awkward on his tongue, babe and sweetheart just don’t sound like him - they’d break the moment, make Cassie giggle.
In the end, he dips his mouth down toward her ear, and he gives her four letters.
He says, right against her ear, soft and definite and aching, “Love.”
Cassie doesn’t lift her head, but her grip on him tightens, and he can feel the curve of her smile against his chest. He kisses the shell of her ear, and his fingers find the sliver of skin between her shirt and her trousers, and Tom Waits keeps singing: it’s you.
And it’s you, and it’s you, and it’s you.
fin.