His lips twitched. “Good enough,” he said. “Let’s go get your engine oil changed.”
She smiled. “Is that because you want to see who this guy is?”
“Yes, I want to get a feel for him.”
“Oh.” She turned the key to start the engine. “Have you ever done that before?”
“I’ve gotten the feel of lots of people,” he said, with a wicked grin.
She rolled her eyes at the innuendo. “I meant on a psychic level, as you well know.”
“Oh, so now you’re asking me about my psychic skills?”
“Well, according to you, you don’t have any,” she retorted, “so I haven’t wasted the energy asking, up until now.”
He snorted. “And you probably shouldn’t even now,” he noted, “because I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. I can’t ever get enough information to help, and, what there is, I find to be sketchy at best.”
“And yet it helps to confirm. In many ways it gives us a direction, and maybe it’s just enough information to make us go after something so that we do find these people,” she noted. “There’s nothing I can stand you up in court over. There’s nothing I can give to my boss and say,Hey, look. Simon said this or that.You know?”
“No.” Simon shook his head. “And I don’t want that anyway.”
“Neither do I,” she agreed. “I can’t imagine anything worse than bringing that circus into town, into the office, or into the courtrooms.”
“Neither can I,” he replied, with horror.
“The fact of the matter is, there isn’t a whole lot we can do about a lot of things. So, the best we can do is deal with what faces us and take it one day at a time. When I took the oath to become a police officer, I didn’t realize the emotional commitment,” she shared, “and the sense of finality, when I have to walk away from a case, because there’s nothing else to go on or because I can’t find anything else to do or any more leads to follow or even another thread to tug on. Knowing the family is still there, waiting, asking if there is any news, and all I have to tell them is,I’m sorry. We have nothing else. We know nothing else. It’s devastating on so many levels.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he noted. “I don’t think I’ve given that aspect even a little bit of thought. I’m sorry.”
“Why would you?” she asked, with a half smile. “Like everybody else, that isn’t part of your reality. Your reality is you get up, you go buy property, you fix them up, you sell them, and, every once in a while, some person screams in your head and tells you that they’re in trouble. And I’m not part of that reality until you bring it to me and tell me that somebody out there is suffering.”
He stared at her. “Doesn’t it make you wonder about how the two of us are so different?”
“Often,” she stated shortly. “And then honestly I brush it aside, realizing that maybe it’s the differences that make it work.”
“And is it working?” he asked curiously.
Her stomach clenched. “Are you saying it’s not working?”
“I’m not saying anything,” he clarified. “I’m sitting here, studying you for the oddity that you are, the uniqueness of who you are, realizing how very blessed I am that you’re in my life.”
Startled, she could only stare at him. When she heard a honk, she quickly turned her gaze back to the traffic. “You want to just not say shit like that when I’m driving?” she muttered.
“Nope, I think I probably still will,” he stated, “because something about you releases whatever is in my mind.”
“Well, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not,” she muttered to herself.
He laughed. “You know what? With anybody else I’m confident, suave, debonair even, if that’s the role that they want me to play,” he explained. “However, with you, I’m not anything but me, and that’s what’s so unique about us. We can both be who we need to be and not put on airs or make it look better than it is. And we’ll still forgive each other because we accept the reality of where we’re at.”
And, with that revelation, he sat back and fell quiet.
*
Simon was stillstruck by the truth of her words, without any semblance of weakness, something that made him want to puke. Of course that was a weakness in itself. But being a victim for so long in his childhood, and swearing to never be one again, and now to come up against a constant array of other victims and not be strong enough to reach out and help them was killing him. And it wasn’t that he wasn’t strong enough,… or was it?
He scrubbed his face and noted that Kate was pulling into one of those speedy oil change places. “I’ve never used one of these,” he murmured. She looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. “I like to take my car in to the dealer.”
“Of course you do,” she said, with an eye roll. “There’s quite a price difference between the two.” She pulled up into the bay, following the employee’s instructions, and rolled down her window. She proceeded to go through the check-in process, sharing the current odometer reading and confirming her account.