Into the Void [The Mary Chronicles: Year One, Episode #2]
Chapter 1
Three, fucking, endless months since Carmen’s—
“I’ve noticed that you haven’t worn your wedding ring lately…”
By that, she means four appointments ago. She means for him to explain since he hasn’t brought it up himself, as though he’s supposed to because he’s done something that she hadn’t prompted him to do or think or rethink or whatever the fuck all her psycho babble instructs. She means, take her lead by answering her leading and highly obvious observation. He hates how each statement sounds like a pseudo-question.
“Detective…” she prompts. She raises a brow, pen tapping against her knee.
His eyes dart to a pair of inquisitive, intelligent, and highly annoying light brown eyes across from him. He shifts in his seat.
“What?” he returns, sharply.
She smiles wanly at his defensive tone. “Your divorce was recently finalized,” she says, moving on.
One week, four days, and some hours ago. But who’s counting? “Yeah,” he says, tersely.
He has no desire to talk about his private thoughts and personal emotions on his divorce. But that’s what got him in the hot seat in the first place. He’d reacted badly and unleashed it at work when he should have been more professional and exercised a lot more self-control.
She’s staring at him, waiting for more. His eyes dart around, landing on the low glass table that sits between them with a bowl of fresh flowers in the center and bracketed by two porcelain bowls. One holds white marbles; the other, black smooth rocks.
“It must be somewhat of a relief,” she resumes, ignoring his resistance, or waiting to pounce on him later. “A fresh start.”
Shit, this woman can needle and say all the things that irritates the fuck out of him. “I suppose,” he answers, haltingly. The skin around his wedding finger almost burns. He even glances down at his left hand. Despite fifteen years under the desert sun, there is merely a ghostly hint of a ring line. As though it’d never meant to be in the first place.
As Dr. Salia Mannis writes a few things down on her oversized legal pad, Dorian glances around the sterile space with a critical eye. It has a magazine vibe to it, too perfect and modern with subdued colors and no personality. It makes him uncomfortable. It makes him want to bolt out of the room and not look back.
He looks outside, where salvation is waiting for him. Any place out of this office would be heaven. His iPhone buzzes again. If it’s Taylor Barton’s secretary, or his friend Julian with the information he’d asked for, he’s going to be royally pissed if he’s forced to miss either call.
“How have you used your time since you’ve been reinstated, detective?”
He hasn’t been reinstated, not in the complete sense. He’s been pushing paper. Desk-jockeying and listening to everyone else do real police work. Not that paperwork isn’t important; he just hates doing it 24/7.
He wasn’t even allowed to go with Ash and visit crime scenes, talk to witnesses, and the like. He helped coordinate and analyze various reports and information as it came in—at the station. However, he still gets to help his co-workers figure shit out and he excels at theory and developing them into something concrete.
Right then, Carmen pops in his head. He’d only scratched the surface and he may never solve the mystery surrounding her.
“Well?”
His eyes go to the doctor’s. He offers a mirthless, cold smile. “My partner’s almost jealous at fast I can type now.”
Dr. Mannis’s expression becomes academic. “I can imagine being stuck at your desk must be difficult for you.”
He shrugs at the understatement of the year. For once, he swallows his pride. “It’s the price I have to pay. So be it.”
She regards him, this look in her eyes that makes him want to groan aloud with frustration. “Have you spoken to her?” she finally asks, raising a brow.
Her? Dorian gives a slight jerky movement in the plush leather seat. His immediate thought goes to Carmen, but no one knows about her, so—
“Who?” he asks, too sharply.
Her eyes sear into him directly and the pen in her left hand stops in mid-sentence. “Everly,” she says, “of course…”
He relaxes a fraction. Yeah, that kind of ‘of course’. A specific her. “No… I think she’d prefer I never existed,” he answers, with a small, empty laugh.
“I doubt that,” Dr. Mannis replies, her expression carefully controlled to emote nothing. He sees right through her. “How long since you’ve spoken to her, detective?”
He leans back in his seat, impatient, and restive. “Not since she moved back to Laguna Beach.”
“Why there?”
His jaw ticks. “Family’s from that area. Upper crust California types.”
She smiles, lightly. Her hands are now folded neatly over the legal pad, which balances perfectly on her right knee, which is crossed over her left. She sits so still she could pass for a mannequin. “Do you miss her?”
The question strikes him as weird. Does he? He rubs his eyes with his right hand. “I don’t know, doc,” he starts, bluntly. He’s so fucking exhausted thinking about the breakdown of his marriage and constantly revisiting it every month.
He wanted to be out and doing something relevant, not talking about his personal anything with a stranger.
He needed a way to get his mind off a beautiful girl with dark blue eyes and hair dark as pitch.
Neither was going to happen to him any time soon.
He realizes the doctor is still waiting for him to speak. He shrugs. “Everly…and I…had been at a disconnect for years before she filed.” He pauses. “I hadn’t realized that until I got served,” he resumes. He shifts uneasily his seat, at how easy the words come even as he wants to keep resisting. He clears his throat, Dr. Mannis observing him expectantly. “I…” In for a penny, in for a pound. He exhales. “I think we’d both been vacant in our marriage for a long time and we didn’t know it. Being apart so much, we forgot how to be together. I don’t know when that started, only that it did—and that it’d ended us. So when she left, it felt like it came out of nowhere because I’d checked out a long time ago, had lost this sense of an ‘us’, and what that meant, but some part of me knew it’d been over for a while.”
Dr. Mannis nods. “How did you come to this conclusion?” she asks, pushing. “And when?”
He thinks about it, his gaze becoming unfocused and then he blinks. “Looking back, I didn’t fight it. I took the papers. Sat on them for months because of ego and delusion. When I realized that Everly leaving me didn’t really hurt, I signed them.”
The glasses that always slide down her nose nearly falls off before a manicured index finger pushes them right back in place. “You signed the papers, uncontested. Why?”
His lawyer had been frustrated by his acquiescence but he didn’t regret his decision. “I felt a lot of guilt,” he admits without ceremony. “Still do.”
“For what?”
He rubs his left temple, hard. “Too many reasons, doc; that’s the problem,” he states, mentally wrung out. “Some buried so deep I may never unearth them.”
Another nod. “What about Everly’s role in the divorce?”
He says nothing, a little surprised.
She stares back at him questioningly. “You place a lot of blame on yourself but you never seem to put any of the responsibility on your ex-wife. It takes two to fail a marriage.”
Not always. But the observation is startling to him. “I’ve…never thought about it in that way.”
“I know. But you should, detective,” Dr. Mannis replies, soothingly. “Everly played her part as well. Consider that.”
His brows furrow and he gives a brief nod.
Then Dr. Mannis smiles that practiced, useless smile at him, which puts him on his guard. It means she’s switching topics. Her flawless, barely there skin with hardly a stitch of makeup is a few shades lighter than her dark blond hair. She must burn like bacon during the summer, he thinks. She always wears her hair up in a severe twist, and with her pale-hued business attire and those horn-rimmed glasses, she reminds him of a prim and uptight librarian. Even though they are roughly the same age, he feels small and stupid whenever he visits her and the idea that he has several more months of this bullshit makes him want to scream.
“So. Have you been seeing anyone?”
He sighs.
“Are you taking the steps to move on?” she clarifies, interpreting him expertly.
His fingers rap against the leather armrests, not at all enjoying someone pulling apart the fragmented details of his social life, or the lack thereof. However, to humor the good shrink, he answers her first question because the answer to ‘Are you moving on?’ is still a work in progress.
“Not really,” he states, shrugging. “Not ready…”
He loses his train of thought, thinking about Carmen again. And again, and again. Why can’t he just be done with her, inside out, mind, body, and soul?
“Do you see yourself involved in another long-term relationship? Perhaps even marriage, again?”
He blinks at her. Distaste coats the back of his throat. He hates this line of questioning but he bites back a snarky response and just shrugs again. “Hasn’t crossed my mind.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
“What about children?” she asks, her voice modulated and flat.
Despite himself, he shifts in his seat, which he knows is his tell whenever he doesn’t want to answer or is discomfited with even thinking about the answers swarming his tired brain. “Kids…” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
Fucked up childhood. A fucking stressful job… He’d make a terrible father. “Just not in my cards, doc.”
She regards him for a time. “Are you glad to be on the force, detective?”
Another difficult, complicated question and one that comes out of left field. “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?” he returns, and even he knows, said a little too automatically.
That earns him another smile, and she’s writing shit down on her notepad again. He looks away, out the window, trying to relax but feels only tenser, more agitated. The mid-September sun is bright, a stark contrast to his mood, which tanks further as he thinks about tomorrow—another long Friday spent at his desk; and his meeting with a realtor over the weekend. His brain can’t think past that. He just knows that next week is a repeat of the same motions, the same processes, an endless cycle that never changes. However, moving out of the Hilltop to a condo or even a townhouse is as close to moving on as he’s going to get for now, however small the gesture may be. He focuses on the things that make him feel like he’s resuming his life. To focus on anything else, anything more, might break him.
“Would you like to discuss anything specific with me, Detective Glass?” she asks. “Anything that may be on your mind that we haven’t addressed?”
The urge to wipe the palm of his hands on the tops of his thighs is strong but he manages to keep them on the armrests. “Not really, Dr. Mannis,” he replies, his voice even.
“Very well…” Her eyes flick over the tops of her glasses then back down. “Your supervisor needs to sign off on the rest of your paperwork but I see no reason for you to return to full active duty effective immediately.”
Relief floods him. He even smiles. “Thanks, doc.”
Then, without fail, Dr. Mannis destroys his little moment of elation. “We still need to keep our bi-monthly sessions, per Captain Janson’s orders, intact.”
He cringes inside. He’s not entirely sure he hides it on his face. “Right…”
Again, his phone vibrates in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. Dr. Mannis raises a perfectly plucked brown brow. He’s not supposed to leave it on during their sessions.
“We done?” he asks quickly, already standing up.
“Actually—”
Then her desk phone across the room starts ringing. With a sigh and moue to her lips, she gets up as well. She answers and then looks over at him. “Detective,” she starts, a scold in her voice, “answer your cell phone.”
She hangs up just as his is going off again. Eagerly, he digs it out. It’s Ash. “Hey. What’s up?” he greets, already moving toward the door without further ado.
“Making sure you didn’t forget how to be a real detective,” she retorts.
“Very funny,” he mutters, not amused. He loosens his blue-and-white striped tie and unbuttons the collar of his white, button-down shirt underneath the tight knot.
“Oh, by the by—you owe Lt. Racine a fruit basket or something,” she adds.
He frowns. “Why?”
“He took pity on you and bailed you out; cut your shrink session by a solid twenty minutes.”
Bless his merciful boss. “What’s the case?” He almost feels bad that he’s happy that someone got murdered so he could avoid twenty more torturous minutes of ‘talking’.
“Murder-suicide at Pinewood Apartments not too long ago but responding units just called for us,” she says. “It’s a little weird. Right up your alley.”
But before Dorian can respond, he hears a not-so delicate cough meant to get his attention. “Yeah, doc?” he asks, throwing a look over his left shoulder, hand on the knob.
“Check with my secretary for your next appointment, detective,” she says, walking back to her seat behind her desk. “And if your phone isn’t turned off at our next appointment, I’ll recommend another three months.” She smiles. “We clear?”
Well, fuck. He smirks. “As a bell,” he mutters, but impressed. And with that, he escapes.
“Having fun?” Ash teases.
What a bitch. He grins as he makes his way to Dr. Mannis’s secretary, Thora, who smiles back. “All set to go, detective?” she asks, sitting up straight.
He nods, then winces. “I have to schedule my next appointment…”
“How about the second week of next month? Would Tuesday at two p.m. work?” she asks, eyes on the screen and tapping loudly on her keyboard.
“Sure, that’ll be fine,” he says, distracted and accepting it without much thought. Thora writes the time and date down on a reminder card and hands it to him. “Thanks.”
“Be safe out there!” she calls out, but he’s already out the main door of the office and down the carpeted hallway.
“How’d it go?” Ash asks. It’s quiet where she is.
“Like how it always goes,” he grouses, thinking about all the nosy questions and his confessions, like chunks of his soul being cut and bled out before the good doctor for her to assess and determine as safe and not necrotizing. It’s humiliating. And he’s not ever going to admit that talking about his shit does make him feel less…pent up and pissed off.
If only he could talk-out Carmen from his system and just start over in the fullest sense possible.
“Dorian,” she says, a warning in her voice.
He groans. “It went fine.”
“It’s been over five goddamned months of me on my own, with Jack, or one of the rookies,” she shoots back, annoyed. “I’m assuming things are looking good, what with Racine having me call you in for this case, and the doc isn’t teasing the both of us?”
He hits the elevator for the ground floor and goes in, all by his lonesome. “I’m back on full active duty effective immediately.”
“YEAH!!!” Ash booms in his ear.
Dorian winces, pulling his iPhone from his ear as he makes his way out into the spacious front parking lot of Metro HQ. He glances up at the bright sky and brilliant sun, then puts his sunglasses on; thusly obscuring the abundant cheeriness above him. “I’m almost to my car, what’s the case?”
Nothing, then, “Welcome back, Dorian,” Ash says, heartfelt. “It’s good to have my partner back.”
Dorian swallows hard but he’s smiling as he finds his department-issued, unmarked Chevy Impala, and climbs in. It’s his first real smile in months, since Carmen made him smile, and mean it. Feel it.
“Ditto, partner,” he returns, quietly, shoving the key into the ignition. “And thanks. I needed to hear that…”