Date: 20/01/00
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I ran my hair through my hair and looked up at the dark windows of the loft. OK, Caro, so he's not home. What next?

I'd come into town because my sister was getting married--again--and
I thought I'd stop in and see Jim. I hadn't really spoken to him since
I moved to San Francisco, and I missed him a bit. More than a bit.
We'd loved each other once, and he'd held on to that even when the marriage
was long over.

I knew I'd hurt him by not sticking with him, but I barely got out of
the marriage in one piece. Not that he was abusive, or unkind--but he
was into silence, and stillness, and he simply tuned out any noise I
made, or any activity I performed. He'd sit for hours, mostly ignoring
me when I tried to make conversation, and then he'd go to bed early.
By the time I asked for a divorce, he hadn't touched me in six months.

I remember his face when I told him. Just a quick flash of intense pain
and shock, and then he reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind
my ear. It was tender, sweet, so like the Jim I thought I'd married;
so unlike the stranger who had shared my bed for most of the last year.
Then he stepped back, his face expressionless, and said "Whatever you
want, Caro."

He had the next day off from work, and when I got home, the place was
a mess--broken glass everywhere, furniture overturned, the stuffing spilling
from one or two pillows. But he hadn't broken anything of mine--that
was all neatly packed and in the spare room, waiting for me.

Jim himself was making dinner, as though the loft weren't a shambles
around him, carefully picking his way over the glass on the kitchen floor--and
leaving bloody footprints behind. I started to clean as he continued
cooking, thinking, my God--what the hell does it mean?

I moved out two weeks later, and I remember standing at the door, looking
at him as he stood in the middle of the loft--the bare, empty loft, as
neat and impersonal as it had been when I moved in there. "Jim," I said,
softly, watching his face, "be careful."

He smiled at me, but the smile never reached his eyes, and so I turned
and left him. As I walked away I could almost feel the brush of his
hand over my hair and ear--a memory of the only physical contact I'd
had with my husband in months.

"Carolyn!" A voice snapped me out of my reverie. I turned around to
see Blair Sandburg smiling at me, his arms full of groceries.

"Hello, Blair."

"Come to see Jim?" he asked, juggling the paper bags slightly.

"Here--let me." I grabbed one of them, and he made a face and then smiled
again. It made me feel like smiling back, and so I did. "Yes--but he's
not home, is he?"

He jerked his head towards the door, and we walked inside. "He'll be
back soon. Want to stay for dinner?"

"Oh, I couldn't--"

"Sure you could." He turned on the charm, like turning on a switch,
as we waited for the elevator. "It's poker night tonight, and we're
hosting it. I'm sure all the guys would like it if you stayed, and if
you have dinner with us, you don't have to come back later."

I grinned and gave in. Never let it be said that I turned down poker.

I ended up playing chef's assistant to him as he cooked something unnecessarily
complicated. "Milk, please," he said. I opened the fridge and saw two
quarts, both opened, and grabbed the older one. He checked the date
on it, and frowned. "Isn't there anything fresher? Jim can't take this."

I swapped the quarts, and said, "What do you mean, Jim can't take it?"

"It's fine for you and me, but he can taste that it's not fresh anymore,
and he hates that. I mean, he can dial it down, but then he doesn't
enjoy the meal--so it's easier just to have two bottles. I'll drink
that myself later."

I just stared at him. "What?"

He frowned down at the sauce he was making, then offered me a spoonful.
"Do you think this needs salt?"

Try as I might, I couldn't get him back on the subject of why Jim could
taste the freshness level of perfectly good milk. It was as if he realized
that he'd said something he shouldn't have said, and was now pretending
he hadn't said it.

"So," I said, "are you still observing at the PD?"

He blinked at me, startled, and then said "Actually, no."

"So you got your doctorate? Congratulations." I wondered why he was
still living here, but it wasn't really any of my business.

"Actually, no." He was smiling now.

"I don't understand."

The smile grew broader. "It got national press. You must have been
buried in a case or in court or something to have missed it."

"Probably," I said. "That happens more often than I like to think about."

"A publisher got ahold of my dissertation and leaked it to the press.
It made Jim's life hell. I mean--there was some pretty personal stuff
in there. So I resigned from the university." He shrugged, and I got
the impression that he was only telling me part of the story, and that
he was amused by the parts he wasn't telling.

"So what do you do?" I asked, and he switched the spatula he was using
to push onions around to his left hand and offered me his right.

"Detective Sandburg, Cascade PD, at your service, ma'am."

I shook his hand. "Really?"

"Really. Had to break Jim of the 'stay in the truck, Chief' habit somehow."

The door to the loft opened, and Jim said, "It never worked anyway.
You *never* stayed in the truck."

"Yes, actually, I did. More often than not. You just like to exaggerate--but
*I* was the one keeping notes."

Jim cocked his head and gave Blair a look I couldn't decipher, then walked
around the island to me and kissed my cheek. The touch of his hands
on my shoulders was full of ghosts. After I moved out, he started to
touch me again, at work--a brush on my arm, an affectionate poke in the
shoulder. And then he started asking me out: dinner, lunch, movies.
I took him up on lunch occasionally, but not on the rest. It confused
the hell out of me, and it hurt that I'd had to leave him to get him
to treat me like...well, like someone he wanted around.

When Blair first arrived at the station, Jim was affectionate with him
in the same way. By the time Blair moved into the loft, the physical
contact between them was extensive enough to start some rumors, which
all of their friends, me included, ignored.

It occurred to me that maybe Blair's dissertation wasn't quite what we'd
all thought it was. He and Jim were too attached to each other for him
to be a simple ride-along. And I can't imagine anything Blair learned
at the station or on a case making Jim's life hell, for any reason.
Maybe that was the reason behind all of this--the living together, the
closeness, the open look on Jim's face now.

"How've you been, Carolyn?" he asked, looking like the Jim I'd married.

"I've been fine," I said. "Blair invited me to poker night."

"Chief, are you dragging home strange women again?"

"She was here when I got here. I'm clean."

"You don't seem surprised to see me, Jim," I said, fighting down jealousy
at his easy relationship with Blair. His space had been so personal
to him, and he'd rarely let me in--and it had been impossible to live
with. He'd changed, I suppose, or else Blair was a lot more tolerant
than I was.

"I'm not," he said. "I heard you talking from downstairs."

I stared at him, but he stepped past me to investigate dinner, sliding
in between Blair and me and bumping his partner lightly with his hip.
"Smells good, Chief. Hope it's gonna be ready soon, or the guys will
march in and steal it off our plates."

"Set the table, Jim," Blair replied.

Jim turned to the cabinets, and I almost missed it.

It was important, and I almost missed it: Jim sliding his hand as he
turned, across Blair's waist and down over his ass.

Not that there's anything wrong with Blair's ass. I spent a good few
months admiring it before I moved to San Francisco. It's just...well,
when I'd moved, I knew for a fact that Blair was crammed into the curtained-off
spare room of the loft, and he was dating one of my technical support
crew, a pretty young woman named Sam.

And Jim was straight. Before our marriage went south, we'd spent more
than a few nights in pillow talk, and he'd said that he'd turned it down
more than once. Wasn't his thing, he said--asses, what was so great
about asses? So seeing him casually run a hand over another man's ass
was something of a shock.

I took a deep breath and looked at the floor. I was going to pretend
I hadn't seen that. It wasn't my business. Jim and I had been divorced
for years, he was all grown up. Right?

Except I was furious. How could he have kept this from me? Was this
what was really behind the breakup of the marriage? Deep breaths, Caro,
deep breaths.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up into my ex-husband's pale
blue eyes. "You OK?" he asked. "Your heartbeat just skyrocketed."

"Ixnay," Blair said, but Jim didn't seem to hear him. He seemed genuinely
worried, his head bent towards me, frowning.

"It's just--" I said, waving vaguely at Blair, who was watching us both
with a puzzled expression. "Just--"

"He's the only one, Carolyn," Jim said, tucking a strand of hair behind
my ear. "He's my Guide."

I closed my eyes. Time to take stock. Blair was his what? Blair's
dissertation was national news. It made Jim's life hell. It was, at
least tangentially, about Jim--I'd been interviewed for it, after all.
Jim heard me from downstairs. Jim heard my heartbeat. What else odd
about him was there? When David Lash had abducted Blair, Jim had smelled
duck waste in the water. Jim had told me my watch was on the rear floorboard
of my car. Jim had reacted badly to mildly spicy food when we were out
to dinner together, just before Blair showed up at the station, and then
stopped eating the curries and tandoori he had been so fond of. Jim
claimed to have seen Tommy Juno from an impossible distance.

I opened my eyes and looked back up at Jim. "What are you?" I asked.

He grinned--that all-out boyish grin that I loved. "You want to read
Blair's dissertation?"

"Dinner's on," Blair said. "I can email it to you if you want it, Carolyn.
But the short answer is that he's got heightened senses, which I helped
him learn to control."

"Oh," I said, weakly. So my ex was living with another man, and was...abnormal.
Sure, I could deal with this.

Like hell.

"I don't think I'm going to stay for dinner," I said, backing away from
Jim. "I should get back to my sister's. Tell the guys I said hi."

"Carolyn?" Jim's voice stopped me at the door.

"Yes, Jim?"

"Be careful, OK?" he said, and I turned my head and saw once again the
face of the man I'd married, warm and open. "Be careful," he said again,
and I nodded at him before walking out the door.



### The End ###