Kim
Upon learning whose voice it was, Carrie laughed. I didn't recognize it, but though it may have been prejudiced and misguided, it being a female voice assuaged my initial fear.
"Points for creativity," she whispered, "But I'm not alone."
"Bonus points," the other voice said.
"Though I appreciate the enthusiasm, I'm not into ménages à trois."
"What a relief," she said, right before I heard the unmistakable sound of the safety being released on a revolver. "Neither am I."
I reached for the lights. I didn't have time to properly assess the situation. It didn't have time to register exactly that there was a gun and it was trained on Carrie. It wasn't yet a personal moment, but a procedural one. As I'd been trained, when a person with a gun gives instructions, you listen. You don't cause a commotion; you move slowly and rationally.
Once in the light, I made the recognition that Carrie had already made in the dark, ever a step ahead of me. This wasn't some unknown assailant; it was someone we both had met. It was her neighbor.
Lindsay McVale.
"Pause," I said coolly. "Put the weapon down."
She almost surprised me by laughing, but the one time I'd met her she'd been nothing short of all smiles.
"What are you, the bodyguard?"
"The police," I corrected, drawing my own service weapon. "Place it on the floor."
"I don't think I want to," she said. "You see, this is kind of the moment I've been waiting for so please understand that I'm not going to give it up so easily."
My gaze shifted for the first time to Carrie, who for whatever reason did not emote that she was in mortal danger. Not that I was shocked.
"Caroline, lock the door, please."
"Don't tell me what to do."
I sighed. Headstrong in the face of a threat on her life. "Do it, Carrie, don't be stupid."
"Don't call me stupid."
She was really unbelievable. She slid the lock anyway.
"So what are we doing here, exactly?" she said, sounding bored.
"Let's go with finishing up some business," Lindsay said, not dropping her revolver from chest level. "Sit, we'll talk about it."
She swallowed. "I don't think I want to-"
"Sit," she said.
"Carrie," I said. "Sit the hell down and stop being a little shit. She has a gun, or do you not realize?"
"Yes, I realize, but I don't like her tone."
"Are you fucking-"
"You sit too," she said.
"Okay," I said, much more docile than Carrie could manage. "Let's just talk this out."
"Put your gun down."
"Yeah," I said uncomfortably. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"I could kill you right now and take it from your dead hands," she offered.
"You could," I noted. "But my reflexes are pretty good at this point in my career, so if you pull that trigger I could just pull mine, then you and I would be dead, but my friend Caroline here would escape, and then your end objective would just kind of be blown to shit, so..."
"Shut up."
"Sorry."
It was almost humorous. I had no idea what this woman wanted out of us, but if this was her way of getting Carrie back for seducing her, she sure was an extremist. Carrie and I were seated adjacently on stools at her kitchen island, as Lindsay the hot neighbor stood, playing red rover with her handgun and shifting her aim intermittently between Carrie's forehead and my own.
It fell silent, as though she didn't know how to proceed.
"So," Carrie stabbed at conversation after a while. "Is that a licensed firearm?"
"You'll speak when you're spoken to."
Carrie whistled slowly. "You know, you are not as pleasant as you come off at first."
"Yeah, well," she said bitterly. "We all have another side."
"If this is for not having sex with you earlier this week," Carrie prodded. "We could give it another go. I mean, no weapons involved though, I'm not really into that."
"Carrie, shut up," I pleaded.
"You really think this is about that?" she laughed. "You really think I was ever interested in you in the first place?"
"Oh," Carrie said, coming to a realization. "I get it. That sex was going to be decoy sex, to get me where you wanted me, so you could properly end my life."
"More or less."
"Because it looked like you were going to tear straight through your shirt, but I suppose that was just decoy arousal?"
"Carrie, you are asking for a bullet in your head."
"Well I mean, shoot me, that's one thing, but don't pretend not to be attracted to me. That's just an insult to my intelligence."
"If you were all that intelligent," Lindsay pointed out, "You wouldn't be moments from your own death right now."
"What did I do to you, then?" Carrie wondered out loud.
"Oh, no," Lindsay said. "Not to me. No, it's nothing personal at all. Just part of the job."
"Wow," Carrie said, acting impressed. "When you said you worked in corporate strategy, you never mentioned moonlighting as an assassin."
"I do work in corporate strategy," she said. "This is just part of the strategy. The company felt it was best for all involved if you weren't around to fuck with everything."
"Funny how earlier this week you wanted me to 'fuck with' something else," Carrie began to mutter as I began to consider quite a different route.
"Company," I repeated. "What company?"
"It's going to be a lot harder than that to coerce a confession, Detective," she said. "But I appreciate the enthusiasm."
"Well if you were so certain of your ability to kill us both, you'd have no problem with confessing," I egged her on. "So tell me, did just Shaw put you up to this, or the whole board at Novita?"
"Okay," Lindsay said. "Fair enough. You're going to die anyway, so I'll walk you through it. The first two, I don't even know their names, but they were easy enough. You follow her home, you tell her your phone died and ask if you can use hers to call a cab - that was similar to your own approach, wasn't it, Detective?"
"I see the irony," I admitted.
"So she lets you in, because let's be real, no one expects a female assassin, you put a bullet in her head, and from then on, it's like setting a stage in a theater. You do some damage to the body to get sex crimes to come knocking - see, Detective, we've been waiting for you - and before you know it, the entire unit is plugged up. And that's what we wanted. I always get what I want, you know. So that was the first few, and then we found the perfect pawn, this pathetic little street kid with a hell of an addiction that his budget can't support. We pay him off in company money, to fund his crack addiction, and hire him to find your little plaything, I forget her name. But that one, that was as easy as telling a kid you've got candy in your van. She didn't need much coercion, but from what I hear, she cried a lot."
"You're fucking sick, you know that?"
"Shh, Kim," Carrie said. "This is my favorite part."
"I swear to God, Carrie-"
"Can I finish my story now?" Lindsay requested.
Carrie laughed. "Are you getting off on this?"
"So by this point, we've admittedly gotten a little messy. And David Devere - you know David, don't you, Caroline?"
Carrie's face fell completely. She knew Lindsay was fucking with her, and she didn't like it, not an ounce.
"He decided he didn't want to do business anymore. We were blindsided, clearly. He'd played us, you know. You can't just decide one day that you don't want to participate in a growing conglomerate, after all, and it was a shame, really. He was sharp, and a legal wizard. A complete asset. But we would have let him go, if he knew how to keep his mouth shut, which of course, no lawyer does. But the best part is, I got to kill two lawyers with one stone on this one; when I shot the Devere girl, it was really like putting a bullet through all three of you."
"You're a sadist," Carrie apprehended.
"I am," she agreed. "Want to hear about how she bled, Caroline?"
"No."
"You should have seen the way her eyes rolled back into her head," Lindsay continued. "I mean, I'm sure you've seen it, but not exactly in the same situation, if you know what I-"
"That's enough."
"Am I hurting you?"
"I said that's enough."
"Look," she marvelled. "You do have feelings, Caroline."
"Don't fuck with her," I warned, unable to watch this go on. I hated seeing Carrie in pain, even though she refused to ever let on.
"Aw," she cooed. "That's really cute. What are you going to do about it, Romeo?"
I exhaled. "Even our murderer thinks we're dating," I thought out loud.
Carrie surprised me by laughing. "I always thought I'd die at Grace's hand, but this isn't all that different."
"Why the hell are you laughing?" Lindsay asked. "You're minutes from death, and you're laughing."
At that, we just laughed some more.
"Sorry," I said at last. "It's just that we've worked together for quite some time now, and this is, like, the eighth time we've been minutes from death. We're kind of getting too old for the whole song and dance."
"Yes, keep carrying on like you're unafraid," Lindsay insisted. "When I actually pull this trigger, in that final moment, you'll admit your fear."
"I'll admit my fear," Carrie wagered. "When you admit that you actually did want to have sex with me."
I rolled my eyes. Relentless. "Excuse her," I said. "She was raised by wolves."
"Kim," Carrie taught. "It's pronounced Republicans."
Carrie's home phone started ringing then, which ruined Lindsay's planned climax, I was sure.
"I should probably get that," Carrie said, tentatively reaching a high-heeled foot off her chair.
"You stay right where you are," Lindsay warned. I'd never seen Carrie move so fast, back into place.
"It's probably the PD," she still explained. "And when I don't answer, they'll come looking, which is probably the last thing you want."
"One out of the three of us should answer that phone," I agreed, not adhering to my own keep-your-mouth-shut doctrine.
"Where is it?"
"Bedroom," Carrie answered. "Oh, wait, you don't know where that is."
At that I laughed out loud, then shut my mouth fast because I wasn't in a mood to be blown to shit. I began to think that maybe the alcohol had hit Carrie a little harder than we'd anticipated.
"Do you not understand that I could shoot either one of you through the chest right now?"
"Then fucking shoot me," Carrie challenged, appearing to have grown horribly bored with this whole process. "I'm sure no one will find out. God knows gun shots have a reputation for being quiet. Did you even think this through?"
"Are you going to doubt my ability to cover up a murder?" was her reply. "Do I need to remind you what you've been doing for the past several weeks?"
"I for one am not going to doubt that," I decided. "I was just going to charm you with my endearing quick wit until you realized, you know, Wait a minute. I can't kill this woman I've grown to love so much. Something like that, that was kind of my plan over the last few minutes or so."
She didn't crack a smile. "You graduated from the police academy and that's really your plan?"
Carrie nodded somewhere to my left. "She's got a point, Kim, you have a responsibility to protect and serve and to be honest I'm not feeling exceptionally safe right now."
I looked down to my watch. "Look, I've delayed our death for like ten minutes now, which I'm calling a win considering I've been drinking and I had zero warning that there would be a gunman in your apartment when we got here."
"Wow, a whole ten minutes of living," Carrie said. "Do wonders never cease with you, Kim Hayden?"
"Listen," I finally said. "I could try to wrestle the gun, and on my own, I would. But on the chance that I lose that war, I don't want to leave you alone here with someone who's trying to kill you. I don't feel too good about those odds."
"Gosh, Kim, I'm touched. You're really going out on a limb for me."
"If I let you kill me," I finally said, not to Carrie anymore. "Will you let her leave?"
"Alright, Kim," Carrie said flatly. "That's morbid and somewhat insulting."
"I'm serious," I said, not looking at her because I didn't want to play martyr. "Let her walk out, give it twenty minutes for her to get good and far away, blow a cap through my skull, we'll just call it even."
"You have to think I'm moronic," Lindsay said. "Twenty minutes for her to run crying to the PD and get back-up to the scene?"
"No," I said. "No scheme, no games. Just a compromise."
"Kim," Carrie exhaled. "Don't be a hero. This isn't the time for your-"
"No," I interrupted. "This isn't the time for you to tell me I'm being stupid and ridiculous. If one of us can get out of this alive, it's going to be you and I'm not going to listen to you object."
"I object."
"Okay, good talk."
"Excuse me," Lindsay said. "Can I interrupt?"
"You're holding a revolver," Carrie said grimly. "You can do what you please."
"I'm not going to use this," she said, with a strange, sadistic smile.
"Oh," Carrie said. "Okay, well now that that's off the table, can we get out of here?"
"I'm not going to use this," she said, reaching into her own back pocket. "Because I've already placed an IED somewhere in this apartment, and it's scheduled to detonate in thirty minutes."
Faster than I could have, she'd produced a single pair of fetters and affixed one end around my own wrist and a spoke of the chair I was sitting in. The other she attached to Carrie.
"Handcuffs," I said flatly. "That's clever. Good use of irony."
"I thought so," she said complacently.
"Where's the IED?" Carrie asked for her own purposes.
"In the last place you'll want to look. Consider that a hint. And while I'm being generous, here's another. As soon as I'm out of here, I'm rigging the door with trip wire that's hooked to the detonator. So if you manage to find a way out of here, know that you won't get far. Now I really should get going," she said. "And ladies, it's been a pleasure doing business."
***
Jenn
I wished I were drunk, or on vacation. Or drunk on vacation.
I almost wished that the late night phone call tonight had actually woken me up, but that responsibility belonged to my own thoughts. I couldn't have slept if I tried, not for my own lack of exhaustion.
"Carver," I answered apathetically, rolling onto my stomach toward the phone.
"Jennifer," someone said in a shrill voice. "I'm sorry to wake you up. It's Grace. Moore, Kim's Grace-"
"Yes," I said, not meaning to be half as rude as I sounded. "Grace. Hi. You didn't wake me up."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive," I sighed. "Is everything alright?"
"I guess," she said. "I'm sorry. I was just wondering if you'd spoken to Kim."
"Not since earlier today," I said. "What happened?"
"She's not answering my calls," she said. "I was just hoping you'd know where she was."
I trained my eyes at the ceiling. "Have you tried Carrie's pants?"
She gave a sad, half-hearted laugh. "No, not recently."
It got pretty silent for several moments, exemplifying the truth that we were not really friends or at all on a phonecall basis. When she spoke again, she wasn't laughing.
"You don't really think..."
"No," I said quickly. "No, of course not. The past is the past, Grace, Kim's probably just trying to give you space since everything that happened the other night."
"I bet they're together."
Oh my God, I thought. Why did you have to say anything at all?
"Don't let your imagination run wild," I advised. "Carrie's probably home sleeping, or drinking herself into a coma because she turned thirty three today-"
"It's her birthday?"
I nodded, somewhat wistfully, as it all came back to me that I hadn't spent it with her. "Well, it was. It's technically the twenty-fifth by now."
"They must have gone out."
"Come on, Grace, worst case scenario, let's say they did. Kim wouldn't try anything with Carrie, or with anyone. She's engaged."
"No, Kim wouldn't try anything. What about her?"
I laughed somewhat. "Well..."
"Mhm."
"To be honest," I considered, "I think if they did something, you'd know. Carrie's quite the bragger."
"Maybe, but she still wouldn't want to ruin things between us. I mean, she would, to get me out of the picture, but if she ever did, I think Kim would be so pissed that that would be the end of them too."
I considered her hypothesis, but thought it was a little far fetched. Anyway, I said, "You're probably right."
"So if I ever wanted to find out," she said. "I'd have to see it with my own eyes. And that's something I don't think I could stand."
***
Carrie
"Okay," Kim said after taking a deep breath and pretending to be calm. "The first step is not to panic."
"Who's panicking?" I asked, sounding very aloof, as I had a talent for doing even in the most tense of situations.
"Right," she breathed. "Exactly."
"Certainly there's no need to panic," I continued. "Twenty eight minutes from now, an improvised electronic detonator sets off just enough C-4 to tear off a couple limbs, until the residual damage from the combustion sends my apartment into flames and we slowly burn to death. No need at all to panic."
"Okay, Carrie, your negativity isn't exactly helpful."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Is there a bright side you'd like me to look on?"
"Maybe the bright side is that you came home with a trained law officer instead of alone, in which case you would definitely die."
"Please, do you know how to disable a bomb?"
"I might if I could hear myself think instead of you being annoying."
"God, I cannot believe I'm going to die handcuffed to you."
"Stop lying to yourself and listen to me," she ordered. "I'm going to get us out of this. Now, can you reach a knife?"
"What, you'd rather reenact Romeo and Juliet than Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"
"No, you sick bitch," she rejected. "If you can use it to saw through the part of the chair that you're cuffed to-"
"Oh, no," I stopped her right there and then. "Absolutely not. This is a Horchow."
"Jesus fucking Christ, Carrie, are you kidding?"
"Does it sound like I'm kidding?"
"If we get out of here alive, I'll buy you a new chair."
I laughed. "You can't afford this chair."
"Well then you can replace it yourself, Miss One-Point-Three-Millionaire."
"That wasn't funny."
"You can thank me in twenty six minutes."
"Listen," I said. "Even if I were to go through with your plan, I only have use of my left hand, and I'm right-handed. I'd just end up stabbing myself, and you'd spend the next twenty six minutes bound to my dead body, at the end of which time that IED would go off and you'd join me in hell."
"I've already been in hell for the last four minutes."
"Please," I said once again. "There is no way you'd rather die than cuffed to me. Stop kidding yourself."
"Carrie," she said. "We can indulge in your autoerotic flights of fancy in twenty five minutes. But right now, can you hand me that knife and allow me to saw through your expensive furniture with my right hand?"
I looked at my Horchow, then back to her. Then back to the chair, then back at her. I shut my eyes, unable to look, and handed her a cleaver.
"Just make it quick," I pleaded.
For what felt like the next forty years of my life, Kim alternated between hacking at my furniture, as though she were cutting down a tree, and actually managing to lift her chair and batter it against the countertop of my kitchen island in an attempt to snap the wood. When she'd finished, mercifully, there was still my chair to go. I'd suggested that she spare at least one designer barstool and drag me around in it, but not surprisingly, she didn't go for my plan. When all was said and done, I was standing there in my kitchen in the middle of the night, handcuffed to Detective Kim Hayden, in a pile of lumber that had once been two seven hundred dollar pieces.
"Oh God," I exhaled. "I'm going to die in twenty minutes and this is still the most depressing part of the night."
"Will you stop it?" she willed me. "I did this so we don't have to die. All we have to do is find that bomb."
"And, ahem, disable it," I pointed out.
"Okay, let's take it one step at a time."
"Shouldn't we call the police?" I reasoned.
"I am the-"
"Bomb squad, backup, your partner? Jennifer?"
"Absolutely not," she said all too quickly. "There's no way you're involving Carver on this."
"Why-"
"Because," she interrupted. "She cares too much about you to use her head. She'd end up rushing over here, no backup, busting your rigged door open, and blowing us all to hell. No. You can't call her. You dumped her, anyway."
"This has nothing to do with-" I began, then interrupted myself. "I didn't even-"
"I'm telling you, Carrie, Jenn Carver or any police call is just a lost cause. We have nineteen minutes now. By the time they get here, there's absolutely nothing they could do. It's me, or it's no one."
"Are you sure you don't just want to be the one?" I asked bitterly, because I apparently didn't think more highly of her than that.
"What?"
"You don't want to be saved because you want to be the hero," I said, unable to put it through the filter first. "You don't want Jennifer to save my life because you want to do it yourself."
"You're conceited, Carrie, and you're deluding yourself."
"I am?"
"Nineteen minutes," was what she decided to say. "Are we finding this thing or not?"
"Okay," I finally said. "She said it was in the last place I'd want to look."
"Okay, well your heart's clearly off the table, so she must have meant the second last."
"Would it kill you to not be a bitch to me for our last nineteen minutes together?"
"Probably not, but it will kill us to stand here arguing instead of locating the IED. So, since the divide and conquer strategy is clearly out, we start in here and we tear everything apart at rapid speed."
I stopped breathing then, for several moments.
"Tear it apart?" I repeated.
She dropped her head to one side. "Carrie, if we live through this, I'll help you clean it up, I promise."
"I don't let others clean with me. Cleaning is my time."
"Then all the time is your time."
I looked blankly at her. "Yes."
She shook her head. "Come on."
***
Jenn
Somewhere around the twentieth minute of listening to Grace obsess, I ran out of empathy and became pretty much completely dispassionate. Mostly, I was just tired. I wanted to go to bed, and that while that would have been easy to do listening to her ramble, it wouldn't have been the nicest thing, and as much as Carrie had screwed me up, I liked to think that I was still a nice person at heart; I knew I'd grown to be more like her in many ways, but I swore I'd never let that be one of them.
"But what's making me nervous," Grace said when I decided to tune back in, "Is that Kim always answers her phone."
"Mhm."
"I mean, even when she's mad at me, like really mad at me, she always answers. She just does. Because it could be a work call, you know, right?"
"You're right."
"Isn't that a requirement of the job? I mean, as a police officer it's your duty to answer your phone, isn't it?"
"Yup."
It took me a few moments to realize that that question hadn't been rhetorical. "Well, it's our obligation to protect and serve even when we're off duty. But if Kim's not on call, no, she doesn't necessarily have to answer her phone."
"But she would anyway," she answered her own question. "She always does."
"Okay, I'll tell you what," I said, putting my own sleep and Grace's peace of mind before any common sense. "If it makes you feel any better, I'll give Carrie a call. Maybe she'll know what Kim's up to. And I'll give you a call back if I hear anything."
"Cool," she finally said as though she'd never been worried in the first place. "Thanks, Jennifer."
***
Kim
Four minutes and thirty seconds later, Carrie's apartment finally looked like the crime scene that it was. I'd never seen a thing out of place in there, and now I'd be hard pressed to find something that we'd left in place. I'd defiled her couch, upturned the potted plant in her living room, opened and tossed every drawer in her kitchen, emptied every last cabinet. Nothing read improvised explosive; no low budget phone, no digital clock, no wires, certainly no C-4.
Then her home phone rang, which didn't make any sense, because it was the middle of the night, and she certainly wasn't having sex with anyone. A middle of the night phonecall to a person like Carrie usually only meant one of two things: booty call or death threat. But the death threat was already staring us in the face, and if you'd asked me a week ago the two most likely candidates for one of Carrie's ad hoc sex dates, I'd have easily said Jenn Carver and the hot neighbor. But those were now both so obviously far gone from the list of possibilities, that I didn't know who was calling, and I certainly didn't know why.
Carrie didn't seem to either.
"Do I answer it?" she wondered out loud. I looked at the clock, which told me I had eleven minutes to save her life, but nodded anyway.
"Hello," she finally said into the receiver.
She looked back up at me, her eyes questioning. Jennifer, she mouthed silently.
"You can't tell her," I said out loud, forgetting how close I was to the receiver, given the fact that I was handcuffed to the person holding the phone. "It'll make it worse."
"Who's that?" I heard Carver ask. Shit.
Carrie's eyes snapped back to me, as though I had the answers. I was at a loss.
"Television," she finally said, the calm in her voice belying her panicked expression. "Is everything alright?"
I didn't hear what was being said after that, so I had to gauge it through Carrie's downward gazes, and her intermittent looks back up to me, through her eyelashes, almost sadly, as though she didn't want to lie. I figured she didn't want to spend what could have been her last ten minutes making up stories to someone that I knew she cared about deep down. Not when she could have spent them apologizing, or better yet, thanking her. But none of that was in her nature.
"No," she said after a while. "I don't know where she is. Last I heard, she was giving Grace the space she wanted and checking into a hotel for the night. I'll text her in the morning, but it's late. She's probably sleeping."
Finally, when she spoke again, Carrie actually sounded like Carrie.
"So tell the Princess to calm her tits."
I smiled, but only briefly. I didn't want to think about Grace worrying. I wanted to call and tell her I was alright, but I didn't have the time and it would have been a lie.
"Right," Carrie said. "Okay. Thanks. Goodbye."
She hung up.
"Grace is looking for you," she said unnecessarily. "And they both think we're having sex right now, given the fact that Jennifer definitely just heard you say 'don't tell her, it'll make things worse.'"
"Well, they'll know the truth come tomorrow," I said, the unspoken ending to that sentence being, whether we live or die.
"Toss the bedroom," she said, not wanting to waste any more time. So we did. All her expensive sheets and throw pillows went on the floor. We overturned the mattress, pulled everything out of her closet. We opened what felt like thirty billion shoe boxes containing the same pair of black stilettos. Such a woman, I thought.
Finally we made it to her dresser, pulling drawers and scattering their contents on the ground. When we went for the top left, I recoiled at the sight.
It was as I'd expected; an old school cell phone attached to some wires by electric tape.
I considered Carrie's words earlier, about the points for creativity, and I considered that it was time to take those points back, as she'd placed her IED at the very surface inside a bedroom drawer.
But when I carefully pulled the device out, Lindsay's words began to make sense. There underneath it was a check made out for thirteen hundred thousand dollars in Carrie's name.
It was the place that Carrie had obviously chosen where she could avoid the check forever if she wanted.
Only now she couldn't avoid it - any of it - her father, Lindsay, Novita, or Collin Shaw. Now she was in the last place she'd want to look. And she couldn't look away.
"Okay," I finally exhaled, not needing to spell out that this was in fact what we'd been looking for, as I imagined Carrie didn't remember having anything similar in her bedroom drawers before this. "Is there any other way out of here? A back door, a window?"
"Of course I have windows, but we're on the twelfth floor," she reminded me. "And the only other door leads to my laundry room. Dead end."
"Is it a shared room?"
"No," she pressed. "I've already thought of it. It's not an exit."
"It'll have to do," I said, pulling her with me. "Show me."
"What are you planning to do in there?" she questioned.
"The further we can get from the explosion, the better our chance of survival. Usually they'd say go for a basement, but I'll take what I can get."
She led me silently down a flight of stairs, into a sparcely decorated room that more resembled solitary confinement than any appreciable wing of Carrie's otherwise posh apartment. I rejoiced in the fact that the walls seemed to be thick stone and concrete.
"What now?" she asked.
"I'm placing it in the corner," I said. "And we have six minutes to push as much shit as we can in front of it and get as far the hell away as we possibly can."
I prayed to a god I didn't believe in that I was still as strong as I once was, as somehow I doubted that the highly feminine privileged child to my left had somehow grown up to lead a double life as both an attorney and a body builder. In my estimation, I'd have to do the heavy lifting here, and I wasn't too far off. But nothing like pushing a washer, a dryer, and four shelving units several yards into a corner to make you feel small.
When every last piece of furniture that had ever existed in that room was in the same corner, we had three minutes to run.
"The bedroom is furthest away," Carrie conceptualized, and I knew better by now than to argue with Carrie. That was where we went, even though it was depressing to reenter the room that we'd just torn apart.
"Now listen," I said, leading her to the floor behind her bed as though she were just another civillian. "You need to get as low to the ground as possible and cover your head. When that explosion happens, you're going to lose breath. You might be disoriented. You can't panic. You have to wait, let your breathing return, and when you get up, get up slowly."
She just looked back at me. "When I get back up," she said.
"Yes," I said. "Not if, when."
"If you say so," she exhaled.
"And I want you to know now, that I'm going to cover you," I said. "And I don't want you to object to it, because I am, and that's my job."
"That's stupid," she protested, disobeying my commands. "You're just putting yourself on the line."
"I know," I said. "And I told you no objections."
"Why put my life before yours? You have more to live for than I do, Kim. There are people that depend on you, there are victims, there are other lives at stake, and there's Grace-"
"I'm not just in it for you," I cut her off. "I'm being selfish, too. You know I wouldn't be able to live without you."
Before I could take that back, she was making her own mistake.
"I love you," she'd finally said.
I just looked back at her, as though I'd imagined it and needed clarification.
"I'm in love with you. You're perfect for me, and I don't know why it took me this long to say it, but I do. I love you."
There had been a promise, all that time ago, that she wouldn't put me in this position. That she wouldn't become attached, that she wouldn't develop feelings, that she wouldn't ever call again if that was what I wanted. And that was to be reciprocated by me. And that was what I'd wanted, all that time ago. But it had been so long ago, and it took until now for me to realize just what a different situation that had been.
All that time ago, we were strangers. We'd had some arguments, we'd had some laughs, but we were strangers. I'd felt bad about staying the night in her apartment. And now here we were, just moments from what very realistically could have been the end of both of our lives. And I wondered just what had happened over the past two years to cause us to arrive at this point, where I couldn't fathom what she was saying, but where simultaneously, I was perfectly willing to die for her.
And not knowing what to do, but never being one to take serious situations seriously, I laughed.
"I'm making myself vulnerable here," she reminded me. "And it scares me. So if you wouldn't mind..."
"I just kind of can't tell if you're being serious."
"Kim," she exhaled. "My apartment is going to explode in under two minutes, and you can kill me yourself if I'm being anything short of serious. I know this isn't what we wanted, but it's what happened. And that's always the way it works out."
"Who said this wasn't what we wanted?"
"We did," she reminded me as though I couldn't recall on my own. "We promised that neither of us would do anything like this, and I am. I'm making it complicated. And I'm sorry, I don't want to put you in this position, but I am. Because I was suffocating, Kim, I was. I can't live this way, not anymore, knowing what I want, and what I need, and suppressing it because I crave that reciprocity that I don't deserve and can't expect. But I mean, I couldn't die not having said anything. And I, I can't say anything else. I've never said it, not to anyone, and I...I love you, Kim. God, I love you, and I...I don't know what else to do. God, will you say something?"
When I finally did say something, I know it wasn't what she wanted to hear, but it was the first thought in my head that ended up making its way out loud.
"What took you so long?"
She looked bemused, and a little bit ticked off. "What?"
"You've always been the one, Car," I told her honestly. "I just thought we'd agreed-"
"I know what we agreed. That was then. I had no way of knowing that...that I, and you, and I mean, that..."
"That Kim Hayden is like crystal meth," I filled in. "I understand completely."
She pulled a face, unamused. "Can you just be sincere with me for a moment?"
"I'm sincerely in love with you, Carrie," I finally said. "Sincerely, passionately, and insanely. And I always have been. Is that enough?"
"It's enough for now," she agreed, but just then we shared a look and we both knew what it meant. That this wasn't logical, for a number of reasons. That it created more problems than it solved, more questions than it answered. And then, of course...
"But Grace," she said after some time.
"I know."
"I don't expect you to-"
"I know. But that's tomorrow."
She smiled sadly, taking my wrist and looking at my watch. "If we see tomorrow. We've got a minute."
I took her by the shoulders and eased her gently from her seated position toward the ground. We both knew it was time. It was almost like I was laying her down for bed, being parental and protective. I positioned her arms around her head the way that it'd be of the most use, and then I laid my own over them as reinforcement. And then, just like we were sleeping, the silence fell, and from then on out it was a waiting game.
"I love you, Carrie," I said just one more time. "Whatever happens, I always will."