Author's notes:
The idea for this story was born back in February, in a series of e-mails between me and Resonant. It takes place at the beginning of the fourth season, shortly after the events of Sentinel, Too and Murder 101.

Resonant: The way I remember it, I hijacked your idea until finally you said, "Hey, looks like we're collaborating."

Livia: Really? The way I remember it is me making lots of subtle hints-- "Gee, you sure you don't want to help? Gee, it might be fun to collaborate."

Anyway. I asked Res to write it with me, hoping she would write all the sex. She said yes, hoping I would take care of the plot. We each ended up doing a little bit of both, and it was a great experience. Very fun.

Resonant says: Collaboration is kind of like pregnancy. Sometimes you plan it, but most of the time it just happens to you.

Grateful thanks from both of us to Anne and Francesca for their thoughts and help.

"Chief, she's lying through her teeth."

"What?" Blair followed Jim out of the interrogation room, glancing over his shoulder at the woman seated inside. "Why do you say that? I gotta tell you, man, that girl doesn't look like she could kill a mouse." He stepped away from the door and nodded at the one-way glass. Behind it, the young woman clutched her arms across her calico-clad chest and closed her eyes. "Or even stay in the house while somebody else killed it. You're sensing something?"

"Yeah. No. I don't know." Jim rubbed his forehead. Blair gave him a look that communicated five paragraphs of skepticism in a single raised eyebrow. "Well, look, just keep an eye on her, okay, Chief? I'm not thinking of this as a routine question-the-wife thing any more. I think she knows something."

The woman flinched as the interrogation room door clicked open. She opened her mouth, then shut it again without speaking.

"Tell us about--" Jim began, but Blair shot him a quelling look, pulled a chair around to her side of the table, and sat in it backwards. "Mrs. Clay, just a few more questions, and then you're free to go, okay?" he said softly, and she looked at him gratefully.

"Try again to remember anything you can, anything at all," Blair said. Jim was impressed; Sandburg was broadcasting comfort and safety with every word, every gesture. He noticed one long hair stuck to the collar of Blair's blue-plaid flannel, its curls tangled in the fuzzy weave. Jim's fingers itched to pull it off, let it fall away, but he made himself sit still, not wanting to disturb Blair's rapport with Mrs. Clay. "Was there anything out of the ordinary that evening?"

"I've already told you everything I know."

"Well, go through it one more time for me, all right? Maybe something will come back to you."

"All right." She scrubbed her hair back from her face. "I couldn't eat dinner-- I don't know why they call it morning sickness when it hits like that after lunch," she said with a damp little laugh. "I usually feel better if I lie down, and Josefina brings me some ginger tea. It couldn't have been more than five minutes after she left that I heard it, because I remember the tea was still steaming."

Jim watched the woman closely across the tabletop. This itchy feeling of wrongness-- was it something he was sensing?

"What did you hear exactly?" Sandburg was saying.

"At first I thought a branch had broken on the sycamore tree, but then I realized it was coming from inside the house." Jim focused in on his hearing. Her nasal passages were swollen-- pretty standard in a pregnant woman. Heart rate slightly elevated-- that could be a pregnancy thing too, or she could be nervous.

"So you went to investigate right away?"

"N-no. I-- I stood up too fast, so it-- so my stomach--" Sudden heat in her face. No, wait, that was a blush.

"You threw up, yeah." Sandburg became even more soothing. "It's all right. It's perfectly normal." He patted her hand. "And then what?"

"I called for Josefina over the intercom, I think I told you. I didn't-- didn't want to go alone," she said. "It took her a few minutes to come back up from the kitchen, and she said she heard it too and it was coming from Barrett's office."

Blair made a sympathetic little "Mm" noise, but she hardly seemed to hear it. Now that they had gotten her talking, the whole story came spilling out again. Jim could almost feel her muscles relaxing.

"The door was open, and-- and I called out to him, but no one answered. And Josefina went on ahead of me, and she said, 'Señora, don't, don't,' but I came in anyway, and he-- and he--" She pressed her knuckles hard against her mouth and pushed the other hand against her belly.

"Deep breaths." Blair was right there. "Deep breaths through your mouth." He pushed a plastic wastebasket between her feet. "Use this if you need it."

For a few moments there was no sound in the room but Mrs. Clay's carefully controlled breathing. "I'm all right. I'm all right," she said, sighing.

"Mrs. Clay, I'm afraid not everything we've heard about your husband has been good." Blair leaned an elbow on the table to put his face on the level with hers. "Would you say he was a faithful husband?"

She looked up, face brimming with misery. "I never tried to tie him down," she said very quietly. "Sometimes-- sometimes people just need different things. It's nobody's fault." She looked down into her lap at her ringed left hand and her bare right one. "But he always took care of me. He-- he looked after me in his own way."

It was nothing Jim hadn't heard before, the pathetic litany of the cheated defending the cheater. There was nothing overtly off about her behavior, but some inner voice was screaming wrong wrong wrong.

Before he could frame a question, the door clicked open and a sharp female voice said, "If I may interrupt, de-tec-tives," and it took no effort at all to hear the impatience there.

"Oh, Camille," the suspect breathed, "I thought you'd never get here. I keep trying to explain..."

"Annie." Camille's voice was gentle, as if she were talking to a child. "I told you: You don't owe anybody an explanation." She turned back to the two men, gave Blair a quick, dismissive glance, and said to Jim, "Is my client under arrest?"

"Not at this time," Jim said stiffly. He hated the posturing face-off with the lawyers. It was always the same. Now, he thought, she scolds us for wasting our time with innocent people when we could be out arresting real criminals.

"Then I suggest," she said crisply, but Jim tuned out the rest of her speech. He sleepwalked through the motions-- handing Annie a card and saying, "Anything... anything at all," making the official request not to leave town, warning that further questions might be asked, duly noting Camille Mason's ceremonial protestations of her client's busy life and delicate condition.

So much for their unmediated access. The next time he spoke to Mrs. Annabelle Hollingsworth Clay, whatever she was hiding would be buried deeply and protected fiercely. They'd had their chance, and it hadn't been enough. The murdered man's money could provide his widow with one hell of a lawyer.

"So where do you want to eat?" Blair asked once they were in the truck, one foot kicking restlessly at the floorboards.

Jim sighed and consciously turned his mind away from the Clay case; worrying about it now wasn't going to do any good. "Fat Al's?" He wasn't just saying it to hear Blair groan. Sure, the place was a grease fire waiting to happen, but they had great coffee, waitresses who were cheerful without being perky, and the best barbecued anything in Cascade.

Blair did groan. Theatrically. Then he mustered his defense. "Look, Jim, I can't eat anywhere that includes a synonym for 'big' in its name," he said earnestly. "It's one of my rules."

"What? It is not," Jim denied, glancing over his shoulder as he pulled out of his parking space. "Since when?"

"Since always, that's when. No Fat Al's, no Big Pig Palace--"

Jim scoffed at him. "Sure, sure. And why haven't I ever heard of this so-called rule?"

Blair stared out the window. "So I don't always have a thesaurus handy." Glancing over quickly, Jim caught him smirking at his reflection. "But seriously--"

"Yeah, yeah." Jim cranked the steering wheel, turning out of the parking garage onto West Fourteenth. "How about the new Japanese place?"

"There's a new Japanese place?"

"Yeah, Fat Bento."

Blair grimaced, screwing up his face in an attempt not to laugh. "Hilarious, man."

Jim just grinned. But the joke was on him, because of course once he'd mentioned bento Sandburg had to have it, effectively carjacking Jim with his enthusiasm. He ended up parking downtown and following Blair down the street as his partner chattered about "the best sweet-and-sour pineapple sauce in Cascade, really."

Jim had to admit it sounded good, but he still stopped in his tracks as they rounded the corner and came into view of the Hawaiian-themed sidewalk cafe. "I have a rule, you know."

Blair grinned and kept walking in a casual, unhurried stride, presumably acting on the theory that if he could actually get inside the restaurant, Jim would refrain from bodily dragging him out.

"I don't eat anywhere with a transvestite mannequin in the window!" Jim called after him. But Sandburg was already at the door and it was too late to get him into a headlock, too late for ribs, and probably way too late for good black coffee.

Blair waited in the door of the bento bar, pulling it open wide as Jim arrived. "Take a deep breath, Jim."

"Sandburg..." Jim's eyebrows went up as he breathed in automatically, and then his eyes widened and he inhaled deeply. "Is that chili burgers? Is that coming from in here?"

"Just because I like you so much," Blair said, holding the door open for him as he went in.

And it was okay. Blair ordered teriyaki and a shot glass of wheatgrass juice. Jim stuck with coffee, ignoring Blair's wheatgrass proselytizing ("seventeen different amino acids, man, and the chlorophyll content's supposed to be really good for you-- they call it liquid sunshine..."). The cafe's advertising fliers did indeed call it liquid sunshine and even sported a suspiciously new-age graphic of a pyramid-shaped prism splitting a beam of light into a rainbow. Blair insisted that the graphic design was beside the point and that Jim's liver would thank him. Jim explained that any day he didn't actually have a conversation with his liver was a good one, and so it wasn't until the food arrived at their table that Blair returned to the original topic.

"So this thing with Annie Clay," he began, fingers working carefully to slide his chopsticks out of their paper envelope and snap them apart. Morning sunlight reflected off the pale blue-gray restaurant walls, heightening the contrast of his features and making him look almost unnaturally thoughtful. "Is it a hunch, or what?"

"Not a hunch," Jim said, and took a bite of his gourmet cheeseburger-- not bad. The odd feeling he'd gotten from Annie Clay was still an irritant, but given a little time to process, Jim had hoped to be able to explain it somehow. It was still wordless, though, a faraway image that wouldn't come into focus. "It's like there's something I should be able to sense. But it's not coming through."

Blair frowned, but had to chew and swallow before he spoke. "Is it something about her, or your senses?"

"No, no, the senses are fine. I was listening to her heartbeat," Jim remembered suddenly, "and it was a little fast, but she's pregnant, so..." He shrugged.

"Yeah, who knows." Blair nodded. "So sound's okay. What about your other senses?"

"They're fine, Sandburg. I don't think that's it."

Blair pursed his mouth impatiently. "Just describe it to me, okay? What about sight?"

Jim squinted, and the action triggered a sense memory of the interrogation room, the matched gleam of Annie's lip gloss and her shiny pink nails, Sandburg becoming a blur of plaid flannel and pale denim. "I think I was focusing in on her, a little. I mean, more than usual."

"Why?"

"I don't know... It was like if I knew what to look for, I could just see it, see that she was lying," he said, then grunted in frustration. "That's stupid."

There was a moment of stillness, and Jim looked up to find Blair staring into space, lips parted vaguely. "Well," he began, then stopped. "Actually, that's not so dumb, Jim."

"Oh yeah?" Jim said, taking a sip of his coffee.

"Yeah," said Blair, and began to tap his chopsticks against the edge of his plate thoughtfully. "Interpersonal communication happens on a lot of levels. There's lots of little cues people send out, lots of little nuances they pick up on--"

"I know how to read people, Sandburg."

"I'm not talking about the obvious stuff, I'm talking about things that aren't even apparent to your conscious mind. Length of eye contact, whether you make eye contact, these barely audible undertones in the voice that convey dominance or submission-- you start reading some of these studies they do and it's amazingly complex, really," Blair said, and he was grinning now. "In there, with Annie, you were opening up your senses without even thinking about it, weren't you?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Jim said. The snap-thump-whoosh of her heartbeat. The tiny fluttering echo of the baby. That pregnant-woman smell, rich with hormones underneath the oily sweetness of White Shoulders body lotion. But none of that had been important. He'd been looking for something else.

"Totally could've been your subconscious at work, there. Your senses, responding to cues your brain wasn't even consciously aware of." Blair tapped his chopsticks more emphatically, then stopped. "Man, I should have put this together years ago. Barely audible tones-- well, not for you. And that's gotta work on all your senses. Of course you can pick up so much more, all this really subtle stuff, and as far as putting it all together--"

"Sandburg, you want to lower your voice?"

"Right. Sorry," Blair said, looking seriously abashed for about a second. "But think about it. Here's your subconscious, integrating this new information, bringing it out into your conscious mind--"

"So it's basically like a hunch."

"Yeah-- well, no. Information, based on the data your senses are bringing in," Blair said. He was grinning now.

Jim considered it. "Well, that just sounds like what I've been doing all along," he said, then narrowed his eyes. "So maybe I could turn it up. Dial it up, I mean. Use it on purpose."

"Very cool," Blair said approvingly. He pursed his mouth, eyes flickering over the other patrons of the restaurant, then gestured at a dark-haired woman sitting alone, over by the left wall. "Look at her. What do you get from her?"

Jim glanced over, a little more discreetly than Blair had. Black turtleneck, black skirt, silver jewelry. A calm, vaguely distant face. "I don't know."

Blair frowned, shooing Jim's gaze towards her again. "No, come on. Give it a chance."

"Okay. All right," Jim said, if only to stop Sandburg from pointing at people. He took a breath and focused his senses towards her. She had good posture, was idly toying with the straw in her glass of ice water. Her breathing sounded shallow; could be allergies or a cold. He could see the faint brush of her eyelashes, long and clean. Attractive. Mascara was pretty disgusting to look at close up.

"Get anything?" Sandburg prodded.

"Give me a minute." Jim looked harder, studying the set of her mouth, the tension around her eyelids. What the hell was he trying to do? She could be thinking of anything.

"Don't over-think it," Blair coached quietly, leaning across the table. "Just say whatever comes into your head."

Jim sighed sharply. "Caucasian female, early twenties. Five eight, maybe a hundred forty pounds..."

"Jiiim." Blair slumped back in his chair.

"Look, I don't know, Chief." Jim turned back, taking a long drink of his coffee. "Maybe it was just a fluke, you know, something about Annie. 'Cause I'm getting nothing here."

But Blair was turning it over in his head now like a Rubik's cube, and just like a child with a new toy, Jim knew the chances of him letting go of it any time soon were slim to none. "Okay. You know the psychology exercise where they, like, show you a picture and tell you to make up a story about the people in it? Well, do that," Blair ordered. "Don't worry about whether it's for real or not. Just look at her and make something up. Go on, try--"

Jim caught his hand, pinning it to the table before he could point again. "All right," he hissed, and glanced over one more time. "She's, she's at lunch. She works at a bookstore. Or a gallery," he said, although honestly he wasn't entirely making that up. That outfit plus Birkenstocks-- she probably didn't work at Saks 5th Avenue. "She's annoyed, she wants to complain about something," Jim kept on, then blinked. Of course. That was why she looked distant: she was sitting there and not eating. He sniffed the air. "Yeah, her burger's raw in the middle and the waiter hasn't been by. She's had a rotten day; this is pretty much the last straw. She's pissed."

"Here he comes now," said Blair, trying to suppress a fascinated smile.

Jim flicked a glance at him. "He won't stop," he said, and the waiter walked on by, disappearing into the kitchen, utterly missing the hand the dark-eyed lady raised to flag him down.

Blair watched him go, then looked at Jim. "How did you do that?"

Jim just stared at him.

Blair was murmuring under his breath about tests as they entered the bullpen. Blair had been murmuring about tests since halfway through lunch. It was like some kind of weird flashback, back to when Blair had never seemed to stop talking or sit still, and every other phrase out of his mouth had something do with either post-processual analysis or diachronic pedagogies. "Maybe I should do some research first," he was saying now as he scribbled in a worn notebook, "behavioral studies, get the info on where normal levels are, y'know. Set some kind of a baseline so we can figure out how just far beyond the curve you are-- man, this is so cool..."

"Jim," Rhonda called from her desk, covering the receiver of her phone with her palm, "Captain Banks wanted to see you."

"Thanks, Rhonda," Jim said, halfway into his seat. He stood up again, turning back to tap Blair on the shoulder when Blair didn't follow. Blair dropped the notebook with a sigh, then leaned over the desk to add one last frantic scribbled note and followed Jim, muttering to himself about social competence. Oh god, thought Jim, and put it out of his mind as he entered Simon's office. "Hey, Captain."

"Jim!" said Simon. "How's the planning on the Pearson bust coming along?"

"Ah, the Pearson bust." Christ, but he was getting it from all sides today. "Yeah. I haven't really had the time to confer with Lieutenant Henke about that yet, Captain, but..."

"What? Why not?" Simon demanded.

"Well, we've kind of been busy on the Barrett Clay murder." Blair said helpfully. "We spent this morning going over the scene and interviewing Annie." Jim went still in his seat, hands suddenly itching for about six inches of duct tape. Simon had been amazingly tolerant of all Jim's crazy Sentinel shit during the mess with Alex Barnes, and he really didn't want to push his captain any further. One word to Simon about this latest flare-up of sensory weirdness, just one word, and Sandburg would pay.

Luckily for everyone, Simon didn't give Blair a chance to continue. "Oh, yeah. Sorry about that, Jim, but Barrett Clay was a major mover in certain local political circles--"

"A major Mr. Moneybags, you mean, who bought himself some friends at City Hall," Blair muttered, rubbing next to his eye with the side of his thumb.

Simon shot him an impatient glare, but Jim could detect no real anger. Instead, Simon was probably remembering the Ventriss case. Remembering, as Jim was, the stiff awkwardness which Blair had been moving lately, and the battered rawness around his left eye that was still healing up. "Regardless," Simon said, "Chief Brogan specifically wanted you-- and Sandburg," he added in a growl, "on the case. Although he did mention: In future, if you plan to arrest any more pillars of the economy, call ahead to the DA's office. Give them a little warning, you know."

And of course Simon meant it as a joke, but it might turn out not to be one. If Jim's theory were right. "Uh... yeah. Will do, sir."

"Pardon me?" Simon raised an eyebrow.

"Jim thinks Annie might've had some involvement in the, uh, murder," Blair said, no hint of his own skepticism in his voice. Jim slumped a little in his chair.

"Annie Clay?" Simon blinked, waiting until Jim met his gaze. "What makes you think she had something to do with it?"

"Just a hunch." Jim muttered, trying to remember if he kept duct tape anywhere in his desk. Probably not, damn it.

"Just a hunch?" Simon repeated disbelievingly.

Maybe there was electrical tape in the tool kit in the truck, Jim thought. "Well--"

"Well. It would have to be, now wouldn't it, detective?" Simon said sharply, but there was something off in his tone. Jim's eyes widened slowly.

It was real. It hadn't been a fluke in the interrogation room with Annie. It was happening again. Jim glanced away coolly, staring over Simon's left shoulder. "Just trying to do my job here, sir."

Simon growled and reached for a pencil, usually a sign of impending dismissal. "Your job, Ellison, is what I tell you to do. And I believe I mentioned something about a bust."

"I just think it's important to investigate all the possibilities," Jim said, his eyes back on Simon's face. He could hear Blair shifting nervously, already edging in microscopic movements to the door. And maybe yesterday he would've picked up on that and backed off, trusting Blair's instinct more than his own. But not today.

"Of course," Simon agreed. "And since you've got so much free time, Ellison, I'd like the preliminaries for the Pearson bust on my desk by the end of the day."

"Yes, sir," Jim said, a little too stunned to be resentful. After all, he'd seen that coming. Literally, he'd seen that coming, and as he stood, following Blair back out into the bullpen, he was filled with conflicting emotions-- amusement, a little astonishment, and yeah, okay, he'd pretty much just shafted himself into working late on a Friday night. But as Blair would say, it was a small price to pay for advancing the cause of science.

Jim did end up working late. Still, he woke early the next morning. Blair was making noises in the kitchen downstairs: the scrape of a spatula, tuneless humming. Jim sniffed the air and grinned-- bacon, mushrooms, eggs, and cheese. Someone was going to try to bribe him into doing tests today. Well, at least Jim wouldn't have to wake him up. Grabbing his bathrobe, he slung a towel around his neck and headed downstairs.

"Hey, Jim. Get those prelims done?" Blair asked as Jim crossed the living room.

"Yeah," said Jim, leaning on the kitchen counter for a moment. "How about you? Got any plans for today?"

Blair pulled his head out of the fridge, and Jim took the opportunity to zoom in with his vision, focusing in on Blair's right eye and cheekbone. The scrapes and bruises that Ventriss' hired goons had inflicted were barely visible now, even to Jim's eyes, and the faint tracery of blood vessels beneath the skin looked almost completely healed. "Well, yeah," Blair said, and Jim pulled away from the close-up confused blink, a sea of blue and wash of eyelashes. "I thought we could do some tests, if you--"

"Fine with me," Jim said, turning to head down the hall. "But first we're going back to the Clay house. I want to get a better look around."

"What?" Blair put a whisk down on the counter, trying to get a glimpse of Jim's face. "But Simon said..."

"I know what he said," Jim replied, a bit smugly, then went into the bathroom and shut the door.

Now this had to be the best part of the senses-- using sound, smell and hearing to be able to stay in the shower until his spinach and mushroom omelet was exactly thirty seconds away from being done. He tied the belt of his bathrobe around his waist and emerged from the bathroom, toweling his hair dry, just as Sandburg set their plates on the table. "Smells great, Chief."

"No prob," Blair said, sitting down across from him. "Look, I called around and I can't get us any lab time this week, which sucks, but that doesn't mean we can't work on some baseline stuff. I'm so psyched about this, Jim. Listen," he said, turning to a magazine folded open next to his plate. "The processing of facial expressions is poorly understood," Blair quoted, "and it is unknown if different pathways are activated during effortful-- compared to implicit-- processing. Isn't that cool?"

"Sure." Jim made a face; it was too early for anthrobabble. Especially anthrobabble that sounded a lot like it would eventually lead to electrodes being applied directly to his scalp.

"So anyway. What did you mean," Blair continued, "'I know what he said?'"

"Hmm? Oh, yeah. In the office yesterday, Simon was thinking that he trusts my judgment," Jim said, and grinned. "He just doesn't want me to go haring off every time I've got a different idea about a case. And he especially doesn't want to hear about it till we've got, you know... evidence."

"Oh, yeah," Blair said with a grin as he poured himself a glass of orange juice. "Evidence."

"Anything yet?" Blair asked, glancing up from his notebook.

"Nothing." Jim knelt on the sidewalk and swept his vision across the lawn one more time, zooming in until every dewy blade of grass stabbed up like a spear. Carefully, he checked every foot of grass, going up from the sidewalk, up the angled lawn to the Clay house with its tall windows.

Behind him, Blair waited. He wasn't fidgeting, but it was still obvious he was just dying to get to the library or the lab or wherever the tests were going to be. "Anything now?"

"No," Jim growled, He turned away from the lawn, scanning the sidewalk one more time-- and then there was something: a flash of light at the edge of the curb, down under a grate. His vision focused in immediately, zooming in between the criss-crossing bars, pulling his line of sight into the sewer. Hearing cranked up as well, providing Jim with gurgles and rushing as last night's rain guttered under the city. Under a few inches of running water, a sparkle...

He blinked. Blair's hand was on his arm. "What is it?"

The grate was two and a half feet long and almost as wide, and bolted into place. The bolts probably hadn't been removed since their installation, and were practically melded into the metal. It was Blair's suggestion to use Jim's tire iron to remove them, and he was grinning almost as triumphantly as Jim was when their combined manhandling of car tools and city property finally paid off and the thing came up with a wrench.

"All right, your turn," Jim said, and Blair's smile faded.

"What?" he asked, and Jim raised his eyebrows, then glanced down at the grate. "Aw, man, you have got to be kidding me."

"Come on, Sandburg, I can't fit down there," Jim said. "Think of it as an example of the archeological record," he added helpfully. "You're investigating transformational processes."

Blair stared at him with suspicion and disbelief. "Have you been reading my class handouts again? Never mind. No way. That is so above and beyond the call of duty. You want anything investigated down there, you radio for backup." He squeezed his eyes shut against Jim's steady, expectant regard, then flung his hands up in frustration. "It's probably just a paperclip."

"It's not," Jim said, stretching out a hand.

With a long-suffering groan, Blair steadied himself on Jim's arm and carefully lowered himself down into the sewer. He landed awkwardly, crouching in the small space. As he moved forward, one of his hiking boots skidded on a pile of half-disintegrated wet leaves, and he fell forward onto his hands and knees with a splash and a hissed "Shit!"

"Hey, be careful!" Jim said, kneeling by the edge of the grate. "You okay?"

"Hey, Kreskin, guess what? I'm kind of thinking you suck," Blair said under his breath. "Just point me to the damn paperclip."

"It's over to your left," said Jim, "just a little more. A little more."

It wasn't a paperclip; it was a monogrammed diamond and obsidian cufflink. Blair found the other one only a few inches from the first.

"BC," Jim said, reaching past Blair into the glove compartment for an evidence bag. "Barrett Clay's initials... I'll tell you, Chief, somebody went to a lot of trouble to make this look like a robbery."

"Oh, come on." Blair was leaning against the truck, scrubbing at the knees of his jeans with a dirty rag Jim kept in his toolkit. "Now you're thinking this was a hit?"

"Everything fits," Jim said, holding the baggie with the cufflinks up to eye level and studying them. "The shooter does the job, then sees these-- well, if he'd left them behind, we'd have known it wasn't a robbery, right off the bat. So he takes them, but he knows he can't sell them, right? Not without leaving some fence who could connect him to the murder."

"Seems kind of complicated," Blair groused, finally giving up on his jeans and tossing the rag back into the truck.

Jim shook his head as he walked around the truck, climbing into the driver's seat. "This guy's smart enough to cover his tracks pretty damn well. He's smart enough not to get greedy."

"Still could've been a thief, though." Blair pointed out, crossing around to the passenger side. Jim sighed as Blair climbed into the truck, hiking boots squelching on the plastic floormats. Lysol, he thought, extra-strength Lysol, or the truck would smell like Blair's shoes forever. "Like, say he has a buyer already for the bonds he stole out of the safe, but he gets greedy and takes the cufflinks too. Then he realizes the thing about the fence..."

"He realizes it when?" Jim asked, pointing through the windshield to the route they'd traced for the killer. "In the ten seconds it takes to get from the house to the curb?" He started the truck and backed up cautiously into the street.

"Well, maybe he dropped them accidentally," Blair said, picking up the baggie and examining the cufflinks closely. He glanced up in time to catch Jim's skeptical eye-roll. "Come on, Jim. Occam's Razor. The simplest possible explanation is most likely the truth."

"You saw the body, Sandburg," Jim said. "One bullet, straight to the heart. A clean hit. This guy was no klutz. Besides, how often do any of our cases have the simplest possible explanation? What about Dennis Chung?"

Blair looked exasperated. "Well, as I recall, Jim, that actually was a robbery gone bad!"

"Yeah, but my point is--"

"Okay, yeah, I get it," Blair waved his hands, cutting Jim off, "but a hit man? I mean, c'mon, Jim. You're thinking that Annie hired him, right? That's your theory?"

"That's my theory."

"Based on your feeling?"

"Yes, based on my feeling," Jim said defensively.

"Hey, I'm just confirming here." Blair held up his hands.

"You're just stinking up the truck here," Jim growled, rolling down his window.

"Yeah, yeah, everyone agrees. Survey says: Blair needs a shower. So, home, Jeeves," said Blair, pointing dramatically. "And then we are gonna do some tests on this thing."

"You know the thing I can't figure out?" Blair's voice emerged in a puff of steam from the half-closed bathroom door.

"What's that?"

"This whole thing," Blair said as he came out of the bathroom, "this whole, you know, nonverbal perception, sixth sense, know which way the waiter's going thing? Well, uh, no offense, man, but..." Blair stopped in mid-tie to point accusingly at Jim. "You are terrible at reading people."

"I am not."

"Jim," Blair said sympathetically, "you totally are. I mean, whatshername, Lynette? I met her, like, twice, and I still could've told you a Jags game wasn't great place to take her on her 35th birthday."

"How was I supposed to know--"

Blair was leaning against the doorframe now, bent over with both hands vigorously toweling his hair dry. Jim frowned, thinking of the water-spots on the floor.

"Oh, and speaking of the Jags," Blair glanced up, "remember how you thought Orvelle Wallace was a murderer? Oh, and that thing with Beverly and Carolyn!" Blair clutched his towel to his chest, wet curls hanging in his face, and laughed. "That was too funny, man."

"Point one," Jim said, stung, "I did not think Wallace was the killer-- I didn't think anything. I was going on procedure like cops are supposed to do, and point two-- Beverly Sanchez?" Jim shook his head. "Jesus, Sandburg, that was, what, two years ago!"

"I know, but it was so--" Blair cleared his throat, manfully stifling his laughter when he caught Jim's glare. "Look, all I'm saying is, you can tell a girl doesn't like her lunch, but there was nothing about David fucking Lash that set off any alarm bells?" He crossed his arms in front of his chest, looking well-scrubbed and smug. "And, hell, you don't have the slightest clue when I'm lying to you--"

"You lie to me, Chief? I'm wounded." Jim really wished Blair would tighten the belt of his robe.

"I mean, this whole thing would make more sense if you were some kind of sensitive, intuitive guy, you know, one of these 'You looked like you needed a hug' kind of guys." Blair and his robe disappeared into his room, and through the open door Jim could hear drawers opening and shutting. "So why is that, you think? If you've got this skill, why haven't you been using it?"

Jim tried to remember if he had ever picked up nonverbal signals from anyone before he got that first "wrongness" signal from Annie Clay's freckled face. He couldn't recall any. Hell, if he'd been able to do this, maybe he'd still be married. "Search me," he said. "You got any explanation, Darwin?"

"No." Blair appeared in the doorway, stepping into a pair of briefs. "But I'll bet I can come up with a theory."

"Because guessing's as good as knowing," Jim observed. He was feeling strangely uncomfortable with Blair's state of undress. Which was stupid-- one thing you could say about the military was that pure repetition took the discomfort out of nudity pretty quickly.

"Naw, man, guessing's way better than knowing. See, there's only one right answer, but there can be an infinite number of guesses. Guessing rules."

"And you have a guess." Maybe he had been watching Blair too closely, lately-- checking his skin tone, the resonance of his voice-- but Blair had been injured, and the kid was too damn stoic about this kind of thing. He'd limp around the loft all day instead of just taking a damn aspirin if Jim didn't keep an eye out. So it was perfectly normal, Jim told himself, to be paying his partner a little extra attention.

"Yeah, I think I do. Try this. What does your body do when there's too much light?" He had stepped away from the door, but now he came back, this time zipping up a pair of disreputable jeans.

Jim averted his eyes again, hoping he wasn't being too obvious about it. Letting on that this bothered him would be a good way to sentence himself to hours of either loud mockery or quiet considering looks. He wasn't sure which would be worse. "Too much light-- I squint. Cover my eyes. My pupils contract--"

"All ways of protecting the eyes by blocking out the light." The voice was muffled behind an enormous tan sweater. "So my theory is that you've been subconsciously blocking all this information-- a sort of self-protective instinct."

"Like repressing the senses." It made a strange kind of sense that his first instinct would be to block out this barrage of information.

"Were you a sensitive kid?" Apparently the reverse strip was over, because Blair was dragging his socks and hiking boots over to the couch. "Although, wait a minute, most children are way more sensitive to emotional cues than adults are, it might be hard to tell if you were any more so than an ordinary kid would be."

Jim thought of Sally's warm approving glances, his father's eloquent silences.

"Okay, all right, don't worry about it--" Blair said hastily, and Jim found that he didn't want to look too closely at his roommate's face. "Let's just focus on the obvious question here, which is, how are we gonna test this?"

"I knew we'd come back around to testing," Jim growled, relieved. "What, you want me to play 'Guess What I'm Thinking'?"

"Not on me, man, no way," Blair said.

"You can dish it out, Sandburg--"

"Yeah, no doubt," Blair agreed placidly. "This loft is only big enough for one human guinea pig. Let's go over to the U and let you loose on some strangers."

The slightly overcast morning had become a clear, warm afternoon by the time Jim and Blair arrived at Rainier. Jim parked in front instead of in the Hargrove Hall lot, and watched Blair out of the corner of his eye as they approached the college on foot. Blair had always seemed at home at Rainier, maybe more so than in any other place Jim had ever seen him. And after he'd-- well, after the fountain, Jim had worried that Blair might be apprehensive about going back.

But he hadn't seemed to be apprehensive at all. He'd gone back to Hargrove Hall, back to teaching, and then less than a month later the Dean had tossed him out in favor of an arrogant little sociopath and his father's dollars. And still Blair seemed to be comfortable on campus; he led Jim confidently down the path, chin up, basking in the sun on his face. And that was good.

Really, it wasn't that much of a surprise. If Blair could forgive Jim for the shit that had gone down with Alex-- if he could come back to the loft after being thrown out-- well, why wouldn't he come back to Rainier, too? Jim shivered a little, and looked around to find Blair. Who was staring at him.

"Hey, what is it?" Blair said, moving closer.

He could hear the fountain, the water being forced through the pipes, the relentless spray and the hissing splash. "What? Nothing."

"You just looked kind of funny for a second there."

"Where are we going?" Jim said bluntly, staring ahead at the looming blockiness of Hargrove Hall, and Blair realized.

"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. Let's go this way," he said, and turned sharply to the right, finding another path. This one went around the back of the library, squeezing between it and the college bookstore, finally leading to the main quad. The shadows between the two buildings were deep and the silence grew tense.

"Why the hell would you think I'd want--" Jim said, and cut himself off sharply. Too angry. Not quite safe to speak yet.

"I'm sorry," Blair repeated, which didn't make Jim feel any better. Just the opposite. "I didn't... I mean, I don't remember a lot about that night," he said. "Mostly being in my office... then you, and then the hospital. I guess I just forgot," Blair said, and laughed disbelievingly at himself, "that you might, I mean that you..."

Jim turned away again, passing a shaking hand over his face. Daffodil pollen was high in the air, its yellow-green grainy scent suddenly permeating the breeze, the soft powdery smell of it choking him as he tried to breathe. He didn't understand it. Didn't know why the world had suddenly tilted, why he suddenly wanted to hit something, fight something or grab onto Sandburg and not let go, unless it was because this was the first time he'd been this close to the fountain since-- since the very early morning when Blair had died.

"No. I'm sorry," he said, distantly amazed at how his voice shook. He turned away for a moment, painfully aware of Blair standing very still behind him. He took a quick breath, pinching the bridge of his nose, and calmed himself. "Jesus. Sorry," he said, turning to flash a shamefaced smile at Blair. "I don't know what the fuck's wrong with me today."

Blair's mouth was quirked in amusement, but affection shone from his eyes, and behind that there was a cold awareness of Jim's depthless, turbulent sorrow. "It's okay," he said, and laid a hand just above Jim's elbow, squeezing hard and holding on tight.

"Is it?" Jim had to ask. "I mean, all of it? You can come back and it's just... okay?"

"It's okay," Blair repeated. Then he turned, tugging Jim between the corners of the two buildings, out into the light and towards the sunny square. "Come on now. No more stalling."

Jim took a breath and followed Blair. As they emerged into the quad, the main face of the library was over to their right, with a combination bookstore/coffeeshop on the left. A two-lane road described an arc between the far corners of the two buildings, creating a fat, teardrop-shaped, sunlit space between them. Students tended to congregate there, lazing on the steps in front of the library, slouched around the shaded tables in front of the coffeeshop, or sitting on benches in the interior space. Tulips and daffodils were blooming in concrete planters around the benches, creating a spring perfume touched with grace notes of dusty denim, patchouli oil, and cigarette smoke.

Jim stopped and blinked in the sun for a moment. His attention was drawn almost immediately by a cloud of self-disgust radiating almost visibly from a curly-headed girl in capri pants and a tank top, sprawled on the library steps with a jumbo-sized bag of peanut M&Ms. "Should have studied," he murmured under his breath, and winced. Were kids really more sensitive, like Sandburg said, or did they just make a big deal about everything?

"What'd you say?" Blair glanced up at him, then followed his gaze across to the girl. "Oh. Okay. What's her story?"

"Don't you see it?" Jim glanced from Blair to the girl, startled. She'd flunked something this morning, screwed up a whole semester in fifty minutes. It was right there. Wasn't it? The girl's rounded shoulders said she'd expected to fail whether she studied or not. The bags under her eyes spoke of partying instead. Her hands clutching the bag showed how hard she was kicking herself now.

"Not a clue, man." Blair shrugged.

"Huh," said Jim. He turned and walked further into the quad.

After the girl on the steps, Blair began pointing Jim at people he knew, at least by reputation. Blair explained patiently that if he couldn't verify Jim's findings, it was unscientific and therefore unhelpful. Jim saw his point, but suspected that his partner was motivated less by dedication to science than by the fact that the kid was a total voyeur. Still, it was a hell of a rush to be right when he nodded at a blonde TA and said "Cheating on her boyfriend," and Sandburg said he was dead-on for the fifth time in a row.

Watching the blonde stroll off, Jim squinted suspiciously at his partner. "Sandburg?"

Blair was scanning the crowd for more targets. "Yeah?"

"How do you just happen to know all this stuff?"

He got a look of total innocence in return. "A college campus is a lot like a small town, Jim. News travels fast. Uh-- those kids over there, do them."

"Sex, studying, sex, overdrawn checking account, sex-- oh, man." Jim breathed.

"What?"

Jim nodded at a redheaded girl in turquoise leggings. "See that piece of paper in her hand? Her-- her sister, she's dying. She just got the phone message this morning."

"Oh, no." Blair bit his lower lip. "I've met her. Allison something. She's a new anthro major."

"Her little sister," Jim said softly.

Blair put a hand on his arm.

"Time for a break," he said.

Let it go, let it go, Jim told himself as they walked into the coffee shop. And Sandburg seemed to understand; without overtly clowning, he managed to divert Jim's attention with a complicated justification as to why it was absolutely necessary that the test subject pay for the researcher's coffee. And he waited until they had picked up their coffees and cleared a table before picking up the testing theme again: "You know, Jim, some people call intuition the sixth sense."

Jim groaned. "Aw, Sandburg, come on," he said. "Picking up cues or whatever, that's one thing, but now you're saying I'm psychic?"

"Blow Megan's mind, wouldn't it?" Blair grinned, then waved that away, sunlight and shadows flickering over his hands. "But really, Jim, this is all normal. And from what we've seen, pretty damned accurate. Really, you're just gonna have to trust what it's telling you. Y'know, Mom has this friend Karen who's really into this sort of thing. Back in, I think it was '85, she was working with this guy, real nice, real normal. He asks her out, but Karen gets this bad vibe, so she says no. A week later, there he is, front page of the paper..." Sandburg spread his hands, eyebrows raised.

"Oh, let me guess," Jim said. "Ex-wife, in the freezer, in handy saran-wrapped chunks."

"Ah, six dead prostitutes under the floorboards-- but you were close," Blair answered, mouth twisted wryly. "So, why didn't she go out with him?" He shrugged his shoulders theatrically, the motion extending to jitter his upturned hands. "No reason! Just the vibe. Karen, she does self-awareness seminars for women now. You know, 'trust your inner voice. Get in touch with the wisdom in your deepest self.'"

"Are rainbow prisms at all involved?"

Blair folded his hands on the table primly, leaning over them. "Karen says that if you could explain the vibe, it wouldn't be the vibe."

"Oh, very Zen," said Jim. "I like that."

"Well, Mom used to do it all the time-- 'Oh, I don't think you should go to that party, Blair, I have a bad vibe,' and then she'd be right, of course. Totally infuriating," Blair said with a grin. "So, yes, some people would dismiss this because it's not quote-unquote rational, quantifiable or whatever, but there's nothing necessarily rational about the unconscious. And just because you and I don't understand how it works, exactly, doesn't mean we can't trust the information that--"

Blair stopped suddenly as Jim snorted with laughter, then jerked a surreptitious thumb towards the group of kids sitting two tables down.

The presiding brunette was clearly audible, even from two tables away. "No! Seriously! This lady was so mean to me! No, really!" she wailed, and Jim grinned at Blair, who was already shaking his head, smirking into his coffee.

"I'm like, all I want to do is get onto the waiting list! Okay?" continued the brunette. "And she was like, it's the first week of classes already? And it's like Monday, I mean, Monday!" the girl explained, and Jim could hear it in her voice: She wasn't just telling this story for effect. She was honestly aghast that Monday counted. "So I'm like, I really have to take this class, put me on the waiting list, okay? And she's like, you can't do that! She's just, like, no!" the girl complained, and Sandburg was starting to choke with the effort not to laugh aloud. "So now I have to track down the teacher and the department head and get, like, their signatures? What's up with that?"

"What's up with that," Jim murmured, and Blair leaned across the table expectantly, "is that the more she talks, the more her boyfriend is starting to wonder why he's still dating the same girl he was with in high school."

"Man, that's harsh." Blair shook his head, then twisted around to look at the group of kids. "Which one's her boyfriend?"

"Blue T-shirt," Jim said, puzzled again. Okay, maybe the depressed girl had been tricky, but wasn't this obvious? Sure, they weren't sitting next to each other or anything. But that was just another clue that the sullen-looking kid was ready to detach from the valley girl and start seeing if what everyone said about college chicks was true.

Blair was shaking his head ruefully. "Just tell me she doesn't want to take anthropology."

"No," Jim said, and without thinking added, "art."

"Hey, Blair!" came a pleased voice from the distance, and a slim blonde in black with a stack of folders approached the table. "Great day, isn't it?"

"Oh, hey! Gorgeous!" Blair grinned up at her. "And yeah, it's a nice day, too." The blonde laughed, accepted the compliment with a theatrical smirk and eye-roll-- but she was actually touched, Jim could see it. Thinking how Blair was always so sweet. "Hey, uh, Jim, this is Sheryl from Computer Science. Sher, this is Jim Ellison--"

"Oh, hi, it's nice to meet you," Sheryl said, then turned back to Blair-- not physically, but her attention just wasn't on Jim any more. "Look, Blair, I have to get over to the computer lab, but I just wanted to ask if you were going to come to Sidney Morgenfeld's retirement bash?"

"Uh..." said Blair, then turned it into a laugh, so quickly that Jim doubted Sheryl had seen any hesitation at all. "I don't know. The Chancellor is gonna be there, and a lot of administration types..."

"So what? Who cares?" Sheryl demanded over her armful of folders. "What are you, a leper? In exile now?"

Blair only grinned. "Just call it keeping a low profile."

"Well, don't," Sheryl said emphatically. "There are a lot of people who are sick of the politics here. You did the right thing and you got screwed for it," she said, planting a hand flat on the table as she leaned slightly into Blair's space. "You shouldn't be hiding out now."

"All right, all right," Blair said, half-growling, and then laughed. "I'll think about it. Okay?"

"Okay," Sheryl said with a wide grin, and waved as she backed away from the table. "Great. Remember, it's Saturday, okay? So you've got today and Thursday to RSVP, and don't you dare forget!"

"Yeah, well, we'll see. Bye, Sher!" Blair said, turning in his seat to wave and then staying twisted in his seat, watching Sheryl for just a few moments too long as she walked away. After all this time, Jim didn't even bother to poke him about it, just rolled his eyes as Blair turned back to the table. "What?" Blair said innocently. "We used to go out."

"Oh-- Blair and Sher, huh?" Jim grinned. "Isn't that adorable."

Blair just smiled. "So, Jim, what are you doing Saturday?"

"I don't know, I think--" said Jim, and then Blair's expectant tone rang clear and he got it. "Aw, Sandburg, no. Don't we have a poker game this weekend?"

"That's Friday. Come on, Jim. I wouldn't ask you this unless--" Blair was giving him the earnest face. "I mean, I want to know! Do most people feel like Sher, or what? You get it, right?"

"I'll think about it," said Jim.

"Hey. Try this." Blair tapped Jim's arm as they made their way back to the truck. "Goatee at ten o'clock. Theater major, right?"

Jim followed his glance. "Nuh-uh. Communication studies."

"Jesus, Jim," Blair said under his breath as the black-clad student approached. "You're good."

Jim looked at him. "That was a trick question, wasn't it?"

"Of course it was! Kids in Comm Studies do not dress like that," Blair said, as though it were obvious. "So now you can look into his mind and see, what, ethnographic diagrams? I swear, I don't see where you're getting Comm Studies from that guy without ESP."

"It's not ESP," Jim said sharply. How could Sandburg not be seeing it? The clothes, the facial hair, the pierced eyebrow-- those were just fashion. But the gaze-- the way the kid's eyes passed over each group on the path and then went out of focus for a split second. Trying to see past the specifics to the processes behind them. Wasn't it obvious?

"Look at her," Jim said, grabbing Sandburg's elbow and directing his attention with a nod. A tall, slim black woman with her hair styled in a wild puff of short braids was walking towards them. Walking slowly, because if she walked faster she might unbalance, fly apart, or just start crying. Her eyes were numb. "I mean, look. You can't see that?"

Blair shook his head blankly. "That's Nika-- I know her. She looks kinda tense. What's up?"

"Tense, yeah," Jim murmured. Her hands were tense... why? He squinted. Because she was telling herself it was time to damn well get on with life. She wasn't really heartbroken. Shocked, angry, but mostly dealing with it. "She broke up with her boyfriend."

"Aw, Nika," Blair said sympathetically, and then, "Oh, man. Her fiancé, even. I remember when she got engaged. Damn." He wrinkled his nose for a moment, then squared his shoulders and headed for her.

Jim watched from the path as Blair encountered Nika, putting a hand on her shoulder. His expression was compassionate, understanding-- Jim could have dialed up to hear the tone and the words, but he didn't really need to. Nika looked at him for a moment, pressing her lips together. She looked away, then accepted a hug from Blair. Jim snorted, turning away.

Blair was smiling widely when he rejoined Jim. "That is so cool, Jim. She thinks I'm like Mr. Sensitive now. We're gonna catch a movie sometime. Let's see if you can do that again!" Jim shot him a look.

"What? She asked me. Hey, uh, Jim-- you think you could do that again? I mean, you gotta repeat the experiment, it's part of the scientific process... Hey." Blair's gaze latched onto a dark-haired girl in a tank top and denim cutoffs. "Check her out," he urged, elbowing Jim in the side. "Think I'm her type?"

With a sigh, Jim looked. And then grinned. "Sorry. Maybe if you shaved your legs."

"Aww," said Blair, looking unaccountably forlorn.

Jim clapped him on the back. "Cheer up, Chief. I just saved you from chasing after the one woman in Cascade who doesn't want to go out with you."

Blair smirked. "Hey, man, the chase is the best part."

Wednesday morning's report from Forensics brought a bit of a surprise: The bullet that killed Barrett Clay had come not from a handgun but from the kind of high-powered rifle favored by serious hunters. "So the guy made some enemies down at the skeet-shooting range, huh?" Blair said when Jim called the loft to report this new development. "If I get a break from school stuff, I'll poke around on the Internet and see if he had any hunting connections." But Jim cut the conversation short when Simon appeared at the corner of his desk looking faintly disgusted.

"Managed to fit Pearson into your busy schedule yet, Jim?" Before Jim could formulate an excuse, Simon went on, "Well, you can mark it off the calendar. The heroin shipment ended up in one of the national parks, so the Feds have taken over." His voice suggested that the smugglers were in more danger from bears than from the FBI.

Jim looked around and saw that every tense, harassed face in the room was bent over a phone receiver. Rafe was saying, "An axe handle or an entire axe?" Brown was asking Research to correlate recent downtown sexual assaults with low tides, cocaine busts, and Mercury retrogrades. Megan, hand over her eyes, was sighing, "Please slow down, ma'am, and go back to the part about the tinfoil..."

He turned back to Simon. "I think," he said, "that we'll be able to find something else to keep us busy."

Jim could smell burning dust even before he came through the door that night. The laptop must have been on all day long while he was at the station. "Hi, honey, I'm home."

"Very funny," Blair's voice said from behind the French doors. That was odd; why wouldn't he have the laptop out on the couch, the way he usually did? "There's some spaghetti still on the stove if you want some," Blair called out, but Jim had already followed the smell of garlic into the kitchen.

"So what levers and switches do you have prepared for me tonight?" Jim asked through a mouthful of marinara sauce when Blair finally emerged from the bedroom.

"What?" Even snagging a piece of garlic bread off Jim's plate, Blair was somehow... not there. Jim looked at him curiously, but he was already turning away, pulling the milk out of the fridge as though it took all his concentration.

"You know. Any more mazes for your resident rat to run through?" And wasn't it just ten minutes ago in the truck that Jim had been hoping Blair wouldn't put him through any tests tonight? But he found the lack of enthusiasm vaguely disconcerting.

Especially when Blair, still without looking at him, said, "To tell you the truth, I've been thinking we should hold up a little on the intensive testing until I can do some research. No point in doing the testing until I've got the, you know, theoretical framework in place, right?" When he turned around, his mouth was full of garlic bread. It didn't, of course, stop him from talking. "I've been doing some poking around in the journals-- you did know that Richard Burton coined the term ESP, right, Jim? Now he was never able to correlate enhanced senses with ESP, but I figure, number one, he didn't have modern laboratory equipment-- not that I do either, but there are a few strings that remain to be pulled-- and number two--"

"Jesus, Sandburg, take a breath!" Jim shook his head. "Just tell me the part that has to do with me, okay?"

"Right, right, well, the thing is, none of this has anything to do with you. That's the point. I don't have any tests ready for you because I've spent all day going back through the sources, and now I..." He leaned against the counter with his research clutched to his chest and heaved a sigh, the very picture of industry. "Give me some time, okay?"

"What I want to know is, why now?" Jim blurted out, and Blair sighed. "No, I'm serious. Three years we've been working at this, it seems like it's under control, and now this..."

"Well," Blair said calmly, looking at the floor, "maybe it could have something to do with Alex."

Her name was the last thing he'd expected to hear from Sandburg's lips; Jim narrowed his eyes, bristling as though the other Sentinel were actually in the room. Sandburg's voice flattened to a buzz as Jim scanned the loft, then the rest of the building, automatically with his hearing. He shook his head, hard, gritting his teeth-- cut it out. There's no threat here, he told himself, no threat--

"--exposure, either to her," Blair was saying, staring distantly now out the loft windows, "or the hallucinogens in that drink she gave you." He stopped, looking at Jim, and Jim immediately shoved his disturbance to the back of his mind and focused on looking impassive. You're wrong, was his first reaction, that's wrong, but if he started to argue about it they'd actually have to talk about it, and he wasn't sure why Blair was wrong, either. He stepped past Blair, heading for the sink where Blair had left a small collection of dirty dishes.

He glanced over his shoulder to check and see if Blair had noticed the emotions raging through him, but Blair had turned away before Jim could get a good look at his face. "Oh, hey, I know," he said. Veering off into the living room, Blair took up residence at one end of the couch, milk in one hand and the remote in the other. "You can look at television."

Jim was washing the last few dishes, but even over running water he could identify the voices from the screen: "Oh, lord, Sandburg, no. Not the X-Files again. I have a rule: Any show that can't pay for lights, I don't watch." Even he recognized the objection as token, though. As he made his way to the other end of the couch, he was already focusing in on the actors' faces, voices, body language, resigning himself to an evening of picking through the inner states of FBI agents who were even more messed up than the real kind. Which took some doing.

But all he got was a strange blankness. "I can't get anything from them."

"What do you mean? Nothing at all?"

"It's like they're not real people at all. Look at that," Jim said. "They're not moving. Real people are always moving."

Blair, of course, had a theory: "Yeah, okay, that makes sense, I guess. Actors are trained to control what they communicate, and they're probably a lot more conscious of nonverbal communication than most people are. I mean, no actor ever taps his foot or raises his eyebrows without a reason."

"So can we give this up and watch something decent?"

Jim switched over to a basketball game without waiting for an answer, and Blair threw up his hands. "Why do you even bother to ask when you just do what you want anyhow-- whoa, Bryson's fouled out already? It's not even halftime yet!"

"Yeah, and coach's pissed about it, too," Jim said. "Look at him."

"Don't know how you can tell that, man, coaches always look pissed. It's a coach thing. I think they go down to the zoo and study the leopards for practice."

"He's gonna put the first string back in."

"Little early, isn't it?" But the Jags' coach had already called a time out and was sending his starting lineup back onto the court. Blair raised his eyebrows at Jim as the whistle sounded, a wordless challenge.

Jim grinned. This he could do. "Left-handed pass to their number 31... three-point throw, but he's gonna miss because he's off balance... Jackson's gonna get the rebound... Schenck's pissed because Jackson won't pass to him... fake left... look at number 11 trying to draw a foul... when Jackson passes to Kent, Kent'll pop it right back and... two! What'd I tell you!"

Blair was giving him a grin that contained equal parts admiration and calculation. "Man, if you're this good at poker tomorrow night, you're gonna have to arrest yourself."

"Put your nachos on the table, Brown, because anything in your hands I'm going to win off you in the first five minutes," Jim said over the rattle of grocery bags as Rafe and Megan followed Brown into the kitchen. They needed the break, all of them. It had to be a full moon; there was no other explanation for the unending stream of craziness that had flowed through Major Crimes this week. Megan had dark circles under her eyes, and even Rafe was looking wrinkled.

But it was only a minute or two into the game before Jim threw down his cards in disgust and stalked off into the kitchen. " 'scuse me," Blair said, laying his own hand down and following.

"What's the problem?" Blair said softly.

Jim turned the water on and hissed over the sound, "I know what everybody's holding."

"Whoa, really? Man, you could clean up tonight!"

"Sandburg, poker is a game of skill and chance. Got it? Skill and chance," Jim growled. "And if Simon picks up his cards and I look at his face and see, 'Oh, shit, pair of twos,' then there's no skill. No chance. No fun, you got me?" Figuring he might as well take advantage of the running water, he began washing the bowls from his earlier adventure in homemade hummus.

"Well, just don't look, then," Blair suggested.

"Tell me how!" Jim hastily dropped his voice as Blair made frantic shushing signals. "I'm trying, Sandburg, I'm trying. I don't look at Megan's face, and her hands tell me she's got queens. I don't look at anything, and Rafe's breathing tells me he's working on a flush."

"Damn." It was a sigh of mingled awe and sympathy. "All right, Jim, you've got two choices. You can rob 'em blind and cackle over your ill-got gains, or you can bow out."

"How? Megan already knows something's up. She's been giving me this look ever since the Clay interrogation."

"Just turn off the water and leave that to me--" and as the sound ceased, Blair's voice switched from conspiratorial to aggrieved, as he said, loudly, "Jim, you know my grant doesn't come through till the nineteenth-- I couldn't give you the rent early even if I wanted to. Which I do not, because with the beer you've had you're just going to lose it and it won't do either of us any good."

Leave it to Sandburg to get him out of a jam by making him look like an alcoholic incompetent. Jim made a resolution to have a talk with his roommate later. For now, though, he had a script and he was going to have to play by it. "Fine, then," he said. "I'll just stay in here and make some guacamole."

Sandburg looked at Jim, and at the poker table, and at the wooden bowl on the kitchen island that held his treasured store of perfectly ripened organic avocados, and gave a little sigh. Jim grinned at him: Serves you right for making me look like a drunk. "If you're so broke, what're you betting with?" he said as he dug in the vegetable drawer for an onion.

"We're not having your sorry body, Sandy!" Megan shouted from the table.

"I wouldn't be throwing pearls before you swine," he called back. "No, let's just say that if I lose, Jim and I are going to be eating a lot of ramen when it's my turn to cook. But don't worry," he said to Jim, "I'm not gonna lose. You, man, just watch and learn."

And Jim did watch and learn. Freed from the difficulty of playing a fair game when he couldn't breathe without cheating, he stayed in the background, cut up tomatoes, endured the good-natured joshing of his co-workers, and took in everything he could.

It was astonishing how specific he could get. Joel's "crappy hand" resolved itself into a two, a four, a nine, a jack, and an ace. When Sandburg drew most of a full house, Jim could see that Simon had the missing queen, and that he was going to discard it in a couple of moves. Brown's two kings were both red. Rafe had three tens, and was thinking that Megan smelled really nice--

Well, shit. There was scientific observation, and then there was eavesdropping-- which with his abilities was closer to surveillance. Jim turned away from the table, towards the fridge. "Get anybody a beer?" he said, and counted the minutes until the game was over.

Counting the minutes was something he was doing a lot of these days, Jim thought less than twenty-four hours later, looking around the banquet hall for someone interesting to talk to. He could barely believe he was wearing a jacket and tie on a Saturday night for this. Grimacing, he scratched behind his collar; the fabric was irritating his skin. He and Sandburg might need to switch dry cleaners again. Trying to ignore the itch, he went over to the bar for a drink.

Academic party. Maybe it was just this particular example of the genre, but-- damn, talk about a fucking oxymoron. Blair had given him the lay of the land on the way over, managing to slip in several heavy-handed hints on how to behave-- obviously aware that he could dress Jim up but not too sure about taking him out. "Two things are always constant at college shindigs," Blair had told him, "bad munchies and good booze. And please don't talk to anyone about politics, especially campus politics. Hmmm... probably avoid religion too."

Eyes on the road, Jim had raised an eyebrow. "What about sex?"

"Well, if you can find someplace private, I say go for it-- ow! Hey!" Blair defended himself valiantly against Jim's disgusted smack. "Hands on the wheel, Jim, jeez."

What a joke. Forget quickies in the coat closet; Jim couldn't even find anyone to make small talk with. No one approached him, and everyone he could see was broadcasting something that made him not quite eager to engage them in conversation. The couple in the corner with their marriage breaking up-- the man's back practically turned to his wife. She barely noticed the chill; all her attention was for her lover, over by a potted plant in the corner. He was chatting with a visiting literature professor, desperately sucking up. All over the room it was like that. And no one else seemed to see.

Sure, the first ten minutes or so had been fun enough. Most people tended to like Sandburg, mainly because unless he was in the company of a complete asshole, Sandburg tried hard to be liked. Jim had spent a while relaying flattering comments like "cute," "prodigy," "glad he's not dead," which had made Blair more or less delighted. But "academic snob," from a trim-looking redhead, had wiped the smile right off Blair's face. He'd stared at his shoes for a moment, then patted Jim's shoulder, told him to stay right there, he was just going to say hi to someone... and Jim hadn't seen him for almost ten minutes.

He sighed and took a healthy gulp of his drink. Sandburg had been right about one thing. The booze was good.

"Oh hey, Jim!" Sandburg was apparently done mingling, for the moment. Sidling up to Jim's side, he cocked his head expectantly toward a mild-mannered professor type in a jacket and bow tie, chatting with a younger blonde in a green dress. "That's Sidney Morgenfeld, it's his party... Hey, Sidney!" he waved.

"You're a better person than you are a teacher," Jim said as the man held up one finger, then turned back to the blonde.

Blair glanced up. "What?"

"Idealistic. He's not like that any more. That's why he gives you such great performance reviews." Jim said as the older man gestured towards them, obviously telling his protege great things. "One boring, over-academic class isn't going to kill anyone..." Jim added under his breath, and almost bit his own tongue as he realized what he'd just said. "Jesus, Blair--"

"No. That's-- not exactly a surprise," said Blair, but he still sounded as though he'd been punched. "I mean, I've always thought that nothing's boring if you come at it with an open mind," he went on, "that's how I learn, so that's how I teach-- Hi, Sidney."

"Blair, hello. And Detective Ellison. How nice that you could join us. Enjoying yourselves?"

Jim nodded politely, distracted by a sudden twinge of resentment from the girl in the green dress. Sandburg must have something on the old bastard, she was thinking, to get such great appraisals. She flashed mentally on a sordid sexual image, shuddered, and headed for the bar set up in one corner of the room.

Blair had already engaged Sidney in conversation, and Jim was sorely tempted to follow the blonde's example and head directly for another drink. He glanced away instead, and caught an off-glance from a trio just converging in the corner.

Looking down at the drink in his hand, he sipped it, then tilted the glass slightly till the curved surface reflected the small group. He dialed up and focused in with his hearing.

"Geoffrey, hello. Nice to see you outside the office." Poetry teacher, with more than a passing resemblance to Janeane Garafalo. Her voice was pleasant, rich and low, but her glare said, Gee, could you ogle my breasts a little more obviously? I don't feel enough like a showgirl.

"It certainly is." It wasn't, really. "Raye, I don't think you've met my wife, Lisa?"

"No, I don't think so. Nice to meet you." You poor, poor woman. "Are you enjoying the party?"

"We sure are." Geoffrey replied, and Raye winced in horror, reminding herself once again-- never give up your own voice. "Oh, Raye, I wonder if you'd know-- who's that young man, over there? Talking to Sidney. Haven't I seen him around Hargrove Hall?" The head of Anthropology made a beeline for him when he came in. If he's one of Ted's new pets, he could be someone to watch out for.

"Hmm? Oh, Blair Sandburg. Anthropology." Smooth talker, thought Raye. Always showing off how smart he is. Probably overcompensation, something to do with... size.

"Oh, yes, of course. He was involved with the arrest of the Ventriss boy."

"Yep, that's him." Who knows-- maybe if his class was a little less esoteric and a little more relevant to the real world, the kid wouldn't have cheated...

Jim's hand tightened around his glass, and suddenly Blair was touching his wrist, pulling him back to reality a little. Jim glanced around; Sidney was gone.

"You getting anything from over there?" Blair asked.

"Did you know Eli Stoddard?" Geoffrey was saying. "Blair was one of his star pupils when he taught here. Takes after him quite a bit." Just watch him put away the booze.

"They're talking about you. Eli's student," Jim said softly.

Beside him, Blair took a nervous sip of his drink. "What are they saying?"

"Ah-- yes, I see." Wonder if he keeps a bottle in his desk the way Eli used to?

Slightly mocking laughter rose and fell, seeming to curl with an almost tactile sensation in Jim's ears. He shuddered, then snapped out of it as Blair tool a sharp breath-- oh fuck, Jim thought as he realized he'd unconsciously repeated that last damning phrase.

Blair looked more shocked than angry, though his hand was white-knuckled, curled around his glass. "That's not true."

"Calm down, Chief," Jim said, putting a hand on his shoulder, turning them slightly away from the group in the corner. Blair's shoulder was tensed under his hand, and his lips were tight in a grimace of anger.

"But who's he talking to, then?" Raye was speaking again, and Jim tuned in without thinking, feeling her frosty loneliness, the warm creep of her lust.

"Eli's been sober for over ten years," Blair was growling, "way since I've met him-- how can they be so goddamn petty?"

"His, er, life partner is the term, I believe?" Disgust, under an ice-thin veneer of politeness.

"How can anyone remember stuff like that just to laugh about? It's fucking sick!" Blair hissed. He drank deeply, coughing slightly, and looked up at Jim. "And I'm not a snob!"

"No, you're not," Jim said intently, attention torn between Blair and the crowd of vultures in the corner. Blair shook his head, looking lost, then handed Jim his empty glass and reached for Jim's drink. "Look, Jim. Maybe this isn't such a great idea. Any more." He pressed the heel of his hand to his temple, as though he too were hearing the voices from across the room. "I... don't know."

"It's not common knowledge," the bigot was saying-- it was hard to tune out the shuttered rage and repulsion. "I think his partner is a police officer." Why they don't drum him off the force, I don't know.

Jim's attention was drawn back to Blair as he took a sip of Jim's drink, glassy-eyed, then spluttered and coughed, staring at the glass in his hand. "What the hell is this?"

"Vodka cranberry," Jim muttered. "Look, maybe you shouldn't--"

"Never mind," said Blair quietly. He finished it, then shuddered again. "What the fuck kind of girly drink is that?"

Jim shook his head, putting a hand on Blair's shoulder. "Come on, Sandburg," he said. He steered Blair towards the exit carefully, using that as his excuse to avoid everyone else's eyes. "Time to call it a night."

Jim had been listening to the rain for some time without registering it, but when he opened the door and a cool gust of damp air lifted Blair's hair and flipped one of Jim's lapels over, Blair looked up dully and said, "Raining, too." Moving a little too quickly, Blair stumbled into Jim's side as they walked out the door "Sorry," he said, pulling away, and almost fell trying to right himself. "Fuck."

"Sandburg, wait." Jim had to pull Blair back. "I'll bring the truck up. No sense both of us getting drenched."

But instead of going back inside, Blair pressed back against the door under a shallow overhang that offered only the slightest protection from the wet wind. He looked like a dog tied out in the rain, Jim thought, opening his door as he watched his partner take a stumbling step off the curb. "Hang on there, Baryshnikov, hang on." Wrapping an arm around his partner's shoulder, he let Blair lean on him the rest of the way to the truck. "Let's get you home."

Once in the truck, Blair pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window. "Don't take this the wrong way, Jim, but shit. I mean, shit," he said in a low tone. "I feel like Doctor Frankenstein over here. I don't mean..."

"It's okay, Sandburg," Jim said quietly. And I didn't even tell you how many people think I'm your boyfriend-- he thought about saying it out loud, to make Blair laugh, but decided not to, although he didn't quite know why. It was funny, after all. Wasn't it? There had certainly been rumors down at the station about their relationship, and Blair had always laughed at those. Made jokes about preconceived notions. And how observant some detectives really weren't.

"Listen," Blair said suddenly in the elevator, "I think I'm gonna-- I mean, I'd kind of-- I mean--"

"No, you don't have to leave, I'll take off," Jim said. Blair's head snapped around to look at him. "Hey, Sandburg, it doesn't take any kind of super powers to figure it out. A guy who's had a night like this is going to want to be alone for a bit." Jim gave his shoulder a squeeze. Besides, he thought, I'd like to go someplace where all that meanness and pettiness is aimed at people I don't know. "I'll just change clothes and let you have the place to yourself for a while."

Salem, at least, was the same old Salem. He reached across the bar and brought his huge hand down on Jim's shoulder in the usual bone-shaking clap, and gave him a greeting that was two-thirds unprintable, and went off in search of a bottle of the microbrew Jim favored because it was a little lower in alcohol-- all the while thinking how nice it was to see an old friend who wasn't likely to break anything, or get in any fights, or demand any drinks that involved curacao and blue gin and little paper umbrellas.

It was a shame Salem couldn't seem to hire a DJ who shared his excellent taste in blues. At least the new guy wasn't spinning Celine Dion, the way the last one had-- instead it was a series of prefab power ballads. Jim leaned against the wall and settled in for a spell of sentinel-enhanced people-watching.

At first it was a rush to look around at the women and think, "That one wants me. That one too. Damn. That one too." But the downside quickly became obvious. Jim had never realized there was so much wrong with him. Boring clothes. Geeky socks. Showing up at a bar alone and therefore obviously a psychotic stalker.

And after the sixth set of eyes skated over his hairline and dismissed him, Jim decided to look at something else.

It was the girl's haircut that first caught Jim's eye: a wheat-colored pixie cut spiked with rattails of various lengths. Somebody ought to tell her that the '80s are over, he thought. And then they ought to go tell the DJ, too.

She had two guys with her, and Jim amused himself with trying to sort out the relationships. Neither guy had a hand on her, or was otherwise signaling allegiance. She was listening to the dark-haired guy and laughing, but she had some sort of radar on the lank-haired one with the glasses that were too dark for indoors. And he was equally aware of her.

Lovers-- no, former lovers, Jim thought. Shadeboy screwed up, cheated or something, she said, "Let's just be friends," and he actually took her up on it.

And the dark-haired guy-- he said something, and the girl and Shadeboy both laughed absently, and Jim suddenly caught something like longing. Here he was, entertaining two old friends, and somehow he couldn't get through to them, they were so focused on each other. Jim bit back a sympathetic grin. Poor guy, he thought, haven't you figured out yet that a good sense of humor is no match for unrequited love?

As Jim watched, the guy leaned close and shouted in Shadeboy's ear, and Jim focused in on sound in time to catch, "-- any more goddamned .38 Special, I'm gonna puke, Rich, I swear to god." Shadeboy laughed, and the guy said, "Be right back," and moved off through the crowd, headed toward Jim on his way to the bar.

Jim was so caught up in trying to make sense of the triangle that he didn't notice he was staring until the guy looked back. What Jim caught from him was strong, but garbled. He couldn't make the parts of the message match up.

Now why would that be? Intrigued, Jim unfocused his eyes and replayed the gestures. Eye contact. Eyes widening, chin moving up a fraction, heartbeat picking up, nostrils flaring, lips parting-- quick blink-- and then the head turning aside, eyes down and to the side, chin down, shoulders pulling in microscopically, muscles tightening.

The second one was fear, or maybe caution-- what you might feel toward a big dog of unknown temperament. And the first one was... attraction.

Well, that was interesting. Jim opened his eyes and sought out the guy, who was now very carefully not looking his way. He didn't look gay, but then who did? He looked like a class clown who was a little lost without a class to entertain.

Triangular face. Unruly mop of short, dark hair. Nice, compact build. Mobile hands, easy smile. He wasn't dancing, at least not on purpose, but his movement reflected an awareness of the music. Eyes-- Jim sharpened his sight to be sure-- on the brown end of the green spectrum, the color of an army uniform.

And then those eyes flashed up as he caught Jim looking at him, and this time there was more attraction, less fear, and a half-humorous acknowledgment of a shared secret.

He could see the appreciation in those olive-drab eyes as they passed over him, and he had the odd, double-vision sensation of seeing himself through them-- the breadth of his shoulders, the pull of his T-shirt across his chest, the length of his legs, the grace of his stance against the wall. Before he thought about it, he uncrossed his arms and slid one hand behind his back: displaying himself. The interest in the guy's eyes turned up a notch.

Those eyes came back up to his, warm with approval. Jim favored him with a slow smile, and something like astonishment came into the guy's face.

And damned if he wasn't getting a little turned on. Damned if he wasn't starting to feel a little thrill of anticipation, just as if he was going to follow through with this.

He wasn't, of course. That went without saying. So it was time to quit messing around. If the guy was really looking for some action tonight, he'd be wanting to get on with it.

Jim raised his bottle in salute, drained it, and pitched it into the nearest can without looking (because not even a sentinel was immune to the temptation of showing off). Then he made his way to the door.

It was a relief to take his hearing back up to normal, though even in the parking lot the pulse of the music was still audible. For a wonder, the rain seemed to have stopped, and the broken cloud cover let a bit of moonlight through to silver the cars. Jim paused, taking a deep breath, clearing his ears of noise and his lungs of smoke. Then he headed along the side of the building toward the truck.

There was a quick blast of noise as the bar door opened and swung shut again. Footsteps, not walking to a car or wandering aimlessly, but heading for him in particular. He turned and looked into a pair of khaki eyes.

Shit. That thing with the beer bottle-- he had intended it as a goodbye, but obviously to this guy it had looked like an invitation. Jim winced inwardly. He hated to tease, even by accident.

"Hey," the guy said tentatively.

Jim nodded at him, and the guy's mouth quirked up: frustration and amusement.

"I should never have quit smoking," he said. "So handy to be able to say, 'Got a light?'"

Jim had to grin. "But nobody else smokes any more either," he pointed out. "So I'd say, 'No, sorry,' and here we'd be."

"Here we'd be," the guy echoed. He sketched a half-shrug and then stuck out a hand. "Scott," he said.

"Jim," said Jim, and shook. Scott's hand was broad and blunt, unscarred but covered with a thin layer of surface callus. Weekend sportsman, hobbyist-- no, wait, those fingertip calluses were familiar. Guitarist. Left-handed guitarist.

He held Jim's hand just a fraction too long.

A week ago, Jim would have seen nothing but a signal of interest, a standard step in this dance. Tonight, though, a handclasp with a stranger brought a rush of insights so clear it was as if Scott was speaking his thoughts aloud: God, it feels good to touch someone for a change. And: I shouldn't hang with those two, they just make me crazy to find someone to really look at me. And: Just because I felt like a whore the first time I did this with a stranger doesn't necessarily mean I'll feel like that every time, does it? And: But damn, he's hot. And he's got a great smile. And he looks... kind.

What he actually said was: "So, Jim." And then, after a little pause, "Nothing personal, but you don't look like the type for this sort of thing."

It wasn't until that moment that Jim realized he was really going to go through with it.

"I'm not," he said. "Wasn't," he amended, and then, wanting to be completely honest, corrected himself again: "Didn't know I was."

Scott's eyes widened microscopically, but he frowned a little. "Well, hey, if you're not..."

"I am," Jim said. "Yeah."

Scott didn't quite smile.

"All right," he said. "So the next question is--"

"Truck's parked right around the corner," Jim said. "We could go someplace."

"You a mind-reader or something?" Scott's mouth quirked. It was a nice mouth. Lips maybe a little too thin, but wide, mobile, with a grin lurking in the corners even now.

Did guys kiss? Jim had only the vaguest idea about the whole thing, and right now he was remembering entirely too much about latex and nothing at all useful about necking. Nice mouth, though. If it was that responsive to Scott's thoughts, it would probably-- Now it was stretching into an open-mouthed grin, and you didn't need to be a sentinel to see a little smugness there. Jim looked up into his eyes, and...

Oh. Okay. Stand around staring at a guy's mouth, and he's going to get the message. Jim smiled wryly, and Scott leaned in a little-- and then rocked back on his heels and gave Jim a slap on the shoulder as a burst of conversation and laughter came out through the opening bar doors. "This, my friend, would be an excellent time to take a little walk," he said.

Jim waved toward the back of the building. "How about a little ride?"

There was just room for the two of them between the passenger door and the alley wall. Jim opened Scott's door for him, and turned, and Scott was right there, close enough that Jim could feel the warmth of his body. Jim's "Do you--" and Scott's "I think--" came out at the same time, and Scott laughed breathlessly, and moved until their lips touched, and just... hovered there, eyes open, mouth moving over the surface of Jim's lips.

And Jim made a little noise in the back of his throat, because he usually thought of kisses as statements of intent but this one was sex all by itself, electric, intoxicating, overwhelming. After a long moment his paralysis lifted and he stepped forward, pressing Scott gently toward the side of the truck and opening his mouth, and Scott approved, Scott was smiling and murmuring "Good" and wrapping his arms around Jim's waist.

The strong arms, the wide mouth, the hard chest against his were all somehow making it hard to breathe. Jim let the scent dial slip, and he was moving down through the smells of smoke and beer and hair gel when he got a whiff of the same Mennen Speed Stick deodorant that was in his own medicine cabinet, and he tore his mouth loose and gasped and pressed his body hard against Scott's, bending the other man back over the curve of the truck, grabbing a double handful of white oxford shirt, pushing in with his hips, suddenly so close to coming that he was shaking with it.

"Wait, wait a second, easy," and Scott's hands closed on his hips and stilled him. Jim leaned his forehead against the metal next to Scott's head, panting, willing himself back under control. "Easy," Scott said again, and he pushed gently until Jim was standing instead of leaning.

Scott tilted his head to one side, then reached back into the truck and snapped off the dome light. Jim's vision zoomed wildly for a moment, picking up flecks of gray in Scott's changeable eyes, then slid back to normal. Scott was running a finger over Jim's wet lips with a thoughtful expression. "Listen," he said. "I want..." and then he dropped to the ground, and with one practiced motion unfastened all Jim's fly buttons at once.

"Shit." Jim put both hands on the truck to steady himself.

Scott looked up at him with a mischievous smile. "Unless maybe you'd rather go back inside and request 'Free Bird,'" he said, and before Jim could choke out a laugh he felt his boxers tugged aside and his cock engulfed.

And damn, the man was good. His hands, his mouth, his whole body were communicating the same clean, uncomplicated pleasure in making a stranger feel good. Jim closed his eyes, leaned his head forward, and let Scott set a pace that was urgent but not hasty, feeling the cold, slightly rain-damp metal of the truck under his hands and the warm wetness of Scott's mouth and the night air all around them. Until just that quickly he was right on the edge, and he touched Scott's hair gently and gasped, "Scott-- you don't want to--"

Scott's hand took over as he turned his face against Jim's palm. "I do want to," he whispered, "I wish I could--" and then he took one of Jim's fingers into his hot mouth, using his other hand to angle Jim's hips away from his face, and Jim came so hard he could barely breathe.

For a moment afterwards all he could do was pant. His hand on the truck was damp with sweat, and the other thumb was rubbing gently over Scott's lips, over and over.

He pulled gently at the other man's face, encouraging him to stand up, and wrapped both arms around him, feeling Scott's surprise and pleasure at the gesture. "Damn," he exhaled against his neck.

"Good?"

He couldn't see the guy's face, but his whole body told how pleased he was with himself. "You know perfectly well how good," he said, raising his head to look down at the spattered side of the truck and his own relatively clean jeans. "Tidy, too."

"One of the sexier virtues, tidiness," Scott agreed. "You, on the other hand, could stand to work on the less sexy but more practical virtue of a soft voice." He bent down to brush sand and gravel off his khakis, leaving two dark damp spots on the knees.

"Oh, shit." Jim peered out into the parking lot.

"Don't worry," Scott said. "Anybody who heard probably figured you were doing something socially acceptable like getting punched in the gut."

"That would have been much manlier," Jim agreed.

Scott was making restless gestures, and Jim instinctively gave him a little space before he realized he was putting himself together to go. "Wait, wait a second," he said. "I can't believe anybody's as unselfish as all that."

"It's all right," Scott said, and Jim was shocked to discover that he meant it.

"Not with me, it isn't all right," he said, and bent to give him the most incendiary kiss he knew how to give. Damn it, he wasn't the kind of guy to come like that and just walk away. Scott deserved better than that. Acting on a sudden instinct, he leaned down and took Scott's earlobe between his teeth.

The response was all that he'd hoped for. Scott's breath hissed in through his teeth, and his whole body shivered into motion, wrapping one arm around Jim's hips and pressing the other hand to the back of his neck.

"Like that?" Jim whispered very softly into that ear, and without waiting for an answer he traced it with his tongue before moving down the side of Scott's neck and back up to whisper in his ear again: "Tell me..."

"What?" Scott's answer was more than half breath, closer to a sigh than to speech.

"Tell me how to make you as crazy as you just made me."

Giving up all effort at speech, Scott took Jim's hand where it lay on his hip and pressed it against his groin, drawing that same hissing gasp as Jim cupped and explored his cock through the pants before undoing the button and zipper with fingers that weren't altogether steady.

The silky heat surprised an "ahh" out of Jim, and he felt Scott's cock twitch under his fingertips. He bent his neck again, pressing Scott's collar out of the way with his face to nuzzle the side of his neck before diving back into his mouth.

He had a new appreciation for those warm lips, that delicately moving tongue, and remembering heated his belly with a flare of arousal that his body was nowhere near ready to respond to.

Scott's hand moved over Jim's nape. "Hey," he said breathlessly, "You're going to get a crick." He moved aside to boost himself to sit in the truck, pinning Jim's hand so he couldn't withdraw it, with a sidelong grin.

"Better," he said, and it was-- the truck equalized their heights so Jim could kiss his fill. He wriggled his fingers under Scott's hand until Scott got the message and let go, and Jim went back to exploring him. Scott threaded a finger through Jim's belt loop and tugged him closer, and Jim began to stroke him faster, feeling hot breath on his face.

"Shadeboy know you do this?"

"Shade-- boy?"

"Your friend. Shades, earring. You cruise together? Ever do this with him?"

"Shit-- no." But Jim could feel the heat of that thought wash through him. He thought about spinning a fantasy, wondered how good Scott's imagination was, because Shadeboy, though close to his height, was long-haired and scrawny and really there wasn't much resemblance at all. But if Scott wanted that--

But Scott was running a hand up Jim's arm, pushing over his sleeve to grip his shoulder, and Jim felt his pleasure in his own particular body, his bulk, his strength, their uncomplicated desire.

"What were you thinking?" he demanded. "In Salem's."

"Thought you were hot," Scott gasped. "Thought," he added with a breathless laugh, "if you caught me looking you'd beat the shit out of me."

"That sucks," Jim said.

"You get used to-- ah," as Jim applied his teeth to the underside of Scott's jaw. Scott's hand slid up his white shirt to pinch a nipple through the fabric, and Jim watched, transfixed.

He felt it when Scott caught him watching, a flush of embarrassment, inner voice saying, "Slut." What, the guy was ashamed of wanting it? That didn't make any sense.

"Don't stop," Jim said. "Fucking hot."

"Ohh." Scott's fingers went back to work. Jim took his other hand off the back of Scott's neck and started undoing buttons for him, exposing a surprisingly pink nipple in the smooth, golden chest. On the other side, the still-covered nipple was standing up in sympathy. Jim bent his neck and nuzzled it through the fabric.

Scott moaned again, softly, and let go of Jim's neck to scrabble clumsily in his jacket pocket, pulling out a blue bandanna. "Tidy," he said with a hint of a smile, and then gasped as Jim gripped him more tightly, moving more surely. "Hell yes, Jim, don't stop, just-- almost-- just--"

Jim had never seen another man come, and he wanted to pull back to watch, but Scott's mouth suddenly came alive under his, and Jim could feel his pleasure and relief and gratitude and warmth in the kiss as Scott sighed into his mouth and came almost silently.

Jim shallowed the kiss into a soft touch of lips, so that if Scott could read him at all he'd feel Jim's enjoyment of his pleasure, pleasure moving back and forth between them like echoes in a narrow canyon.

"Oh, man," Scott sighed. Jim felt him consider several phrases ("Thank you" and "You okay?" were the first that occurred to him) before he settled for another "Oh, man," laid his head back against the seat, and closed his eyes. Jim gave his cheek a soft kiss and got back a sweet, closed-eyed smile.

Fingers stroking the back of Scott's neck gently, Jim tipped his head back, breathing in and out, listening to the ebb and flow of traffic, the whine of music coming through the walls. Good lord, they actually were playing "Free Bird." He wished Scott could hear it; he would appreciate the joke.

"Getting late," he said after a while. "This was... pretty wild."

Scott gave him a sidelong grin, half amusement, half sympathy. "I'll bet." He was, Jim thought, remembering a summer night when he was sixteen-- and remembering the next morning was enough to make him lay a hand on Jim's arm and say, "People try stuff, you know. It's no big deal."

Jim gave him a warm smile and saw his concern ease a bit. "Yeah," he said. "Gonna have to do some thinking."

"Well, if you want to do any more experimenting, give me a call," Scott said. "There's only two Luniaks in the book, and the other one's an eighty-year-old named Margarethe." He stretched, a graceful arch of his back and arms, and then tucked the left side of his shirt back in.

"Can I give you a ride someplace?"

Scott waved a hand. "I expect they waited for me," he said. "But I just live over on Piña, so I can walk." Jim watched him calculate Shadeboy's probable state of intoxication and decide that walking was his best bet anyway. "No big deal."

"Listen," Jim said seriously, "you're careful, aren't you? I mean, you were ready to get in a truck with a strange man, and no offense, Scott, but I could break you in half..."

Scott grinned. "I'm a good judge of character," he said. "Sixth sense, you know."

"Uh-huh," Jim said skeptically. "Just... look out for yourself. And hey-- your friend? Shadeboy?"

"Yeah?" Scott looked suspicious.

"This is gonna sound crazy, but you should know. He... he could want you. If the thought occurred to him. But he loves her, and it's her he's going to go back to. If she'll have him."

Scott was staring at him.

"Just keep it in mind, is all."

"So you're, what, psychic now?"

Jim shrugged. "Good judge of character."

"Jeez, Jim, it's like icicle city in here!" Blair hissed, rubbing his hands together as he climbed into the truck the next morning. "What'd you do, leave the windows open all night?"

"There was a smell," Jim said, and immediately regretted it. Damn it, he was going to have to learn to lie.

Sure enough, Sandburg jumped all over it. "A smell? What kind of smell?"

It was a sentinel thing, and he wouldn't let go until he had an answer; what are you going to tell him now, Ellison?

But the gods were smiling on him today, and Blair supplied his own answer: "Oh, man, I bet that storm drain smell is still in here, isn't it. What, in the seat covers? In the floor mats?-- I was dripping all over the place, no question, that stuff is everywhere, Jim, can you still smell it even after last night?"

It was a sad day when he was actually happy to have his sense of smell tested all the way to the station. Jim rubbed his forehead. It looked like the beginning of a very long day.

Blair was trying to make Jim sniff out the fiber content of the wallpaper when they got into the station elevator, but Jim was rescued by the arrival of Judkin, who was cheerfully waving a sheaf of black-and-whites. "Hey, Blair, we got graffiti this time!"

"All right, Sonia!" Blair shot her a thumbs-up.

"Graffiti is good news for the Civil Rights Division?" Jim asked as Blair pushed the button.

"Well, we've got the usual minor assault and damage to property down at the Paragon-- bunch of cars keyed, couple tires slashed, some guys hassled in the parking lot," she said. "Only this time," she added, turning over the stack of photos, "somebody scratches 'Die fag' on the hood of a pickup."

"Classy," Jim said.

"No, but see, it's good, man, it's good, it proves intent," Blair said as the doors slid open. "It means if they arrest somebody it's not just vandalism, they can charge hate crimes."

Jim thought about Scott's narrow back retreating across the shadowy parking lot of Salem's, and felt a hot wash of anger. "Good," he growled. "Somebody ought to teach those bastards a lesson-- you nail 'em good, Judkin!" he shouted after her.

The elevator doors slid closed. Blair was staring at him.

"What?" Jim said. "Some asshole thinks it's okay to mess with innocent people who are just trying to live their lives..." He trailed off, struck by Blair's expression, which was radiating surprise and, stunningly, pride. Jim was abruptly ashamed of not having publicly declared sides in this battle sooner.

Because he had been on this side all along, hadn't he? Of course he had. It just went along with everything else he believed: You mind your own business, you don't mess with other people's private matters, it was tough enough making sense of your own love life without feeling like you could dictate someone else's, right?

It had nothing to do with Scott Luniak's laughing mouth and guitar-roughened fingers. Or with wanting Blair to be proud of him.

Blair was strangely subdued as they entered the bullpen, and Jim spared a glance from the pile of pink phone messages to see him hastily turning his chair away from the desk. What was up with that? The set of Blair's shoulders was both guilty and relieved.

Shit. He knows what happens at the Paragon because it's happened to him.

As soon as he thought of it, Jim knew he was right, could tap into the memories with terrifying clarity: litter of broken pebble-glass underfoot, some kind of drum-machined dance music hissing through the open club door, sudden painful grip of a stranger's hand on his shoulder--

Shit. Jim was sweating. He'd promised himself he wouldn't pry into Sandburg's private life. Had made it a point of honor, his own personal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

But damn it, when he made that decision, he hadn't known what it was like. He hadn't known how vulnerable Sandburg would be despite his strength and wiry energy, how easy it would be for some Neanderthal with a Messiah complex to single him out--

He hadn't known Blair could get hurt.

A sudden pain made him look down, and he was surprised to find his fists were clenched. Breathe, Ellison.

Sandburg made it easy to give him some privacy by the simple expedient of disappearing for most of the morning, returning just after noon with a big stack of paper on the Clay and Hollingsworth families from Research and a vending machine spread that pre-empted any suggestion Jim might have made about lunch.

It looked like paper wasn't all he had picked up in the Research Department, either, because he was talking a mile a minute in metric again: "Man, Jim, Deanna Murphy is her name, and I am telling you, legs like you have never seen. And smart, too-- I noticed she was reading Lorca. In Spanish even." He was eating a burrito out of the machine-- a burrito! As if what was in it wasn't right there on the label!

"Hey! I've got an idea!" He smacked Jim on the arm with the hand that didn't have refried beans on it. "Can you check her out and see if she's seeing anybody and if she has any objection to dating a guy who's not all six feet tall and four feet wide and, like, well, you?"

"Jesus, Sandburg, what am I now, your pimp? No way I'm going to do surveillance on some innocent woman just because you're too lazy to just ask her out." Jim snagged Blair's bag of M&Ms and started picking out the blue ones.

Blair didn't seem too upset at the failure of that scheme. As a matter of fact, Jim could swear that he was looking... satisfied. As though he'd given the class a test and they'd passed it, every one of them.

He looked sharply away. Blair was aware of his attention. Jim couldn't help invading his privacy, no matter how hard he tried. And worse still, he couldn't do anything to protect him. Anything at all.

"So look," Jim said, standing abruptly. "I was going to head downtown." Sandburg gave him an inquiring look, and Jim flashed him one of the phone messages. "Barrett Clay's ex-wife and son-- I figured it couldn't hurt to interview them. Personally."

"Hmm? Oh, yeah," Blair said, digging through the stack of folders. "I think the initial interview report is in here. The son is a doctor, right? Oh, here, Nicholas Mitropoulous-- what, he took his mom's maiden name back? What's up with that?"

"Must be easier to spell."

Blair rolled his eyes. "So we can assume he's got some hostility-- and he didn't have an alibi, did he?"

"He's not a suspect," Jim said. "I just figured I could get a little more info face-to-face, if you know what I'm saying."

"Okay," said Blair, drumming his fingers on top of the stack of folders from Research. "So, I could come along, or I could stay here."

His voice was casual. Almost too casual, and Jim blinked. He'd been trying so hard not to read his partner that he was just realizing that Sandburg was trying equally hard not to allow himself to be read. What came through was very much like what Jim had seen on television: a highly disciplined focus on one idea at a time and an intentional damping of anything else. Who knew Sandburg was such an actor?

"I think I can get this one on my own," Jim said, unsettled. "One of us might as well get through these reports."

"Okay," Sandburg said, but even that single word was wrong. He should have complained about being left behind at the station. Or made some smartass comment like "I'll be expecting flowers on Secretaries' Day," or something besides settling coolly into Jim's chair and gesturing at his vending-machine bounty. "You gonna eat, or what?"

Jim tipped his palmful of M&Ms into his mouth, grabbed the most appealing-looking thing on the desk-- a ham sandwich encased in saran wrap-- and shrugged his jacket on one-handed. "There. Happy?"

Blair settled back in Jim's chair, spread his hands. Jim watched out of the corner of his eyes, under the pretense of putting on his jacket. "Sure," Blair said. "Deliriously. Oh, Jim--"

Jim turned back, but Blair was already staring down at the desk, pen tapping against a folder. "What?"

"Allison dropped my class," Blair said. Jim could only see the top of his head, and his voice betrayed nothing. "Remember, the girl from Rainier? Her sister has leukemia."

It shouldn't have made him angry; it made absolutely no sense to get angry. Hadn't he just been vowing to give the guy some space?

To get irritated with him for making that easier-- it made no sense at all.

Jim went to the front desk at Cascade General and had Nicholas Mitropoulous paged. Finding himself an uncomfortable chair in the reception area, he settled in and prepared to wait.

He watched the medical personnel come and go, talking quietly to each other. Everything seemed oddly damped down, and then Jim realized that he had his senses down almost to normal. Another protective reflex. Hospitals just put him on edge these days. The scents were the worst part: The mingled reek of blood, disease, antiseptic and latex permeated the building. Sound was almost as bad.

It was hard to relax, hard to bring his senses down. Sandburg always told him to focus on something simple, something calming, and so Jim tried his usual routine, blocking out everything but human voices. Here, doctors and nurses were talking in the trauma rooms that lined the hallways to either side of the lobby. Voices full of tension, worry and frustration. They grated. He blocked them out, and tried to focus on the small group bustling around the front desk.

"Yo, Jeff, the barfing third-graders in three? Doctor Hayes doesn't think they've ingested anything more toxic than paste. But we are gonna need a clean-up."

"Oh, that sounds like fun," the masculine voice answered.

"Tell me about it. And Shelley says Mr. Edelman is getting extremely agitated-- how about starting him on 50 of Demerol?"

"Sure thing," said the nurse behind the desk, then turned back to her private conversation. "Look, Abby, I'm just saying. We all saw the signs, and we should've admitted the kid to psych last week when he came in."

"He wasn't critical then. Look, we did all we could-- just shut up about it in front of Mitropoulous," Abby hissed, and Jim raised his eyes, searching out and finding the dark-eyed med student coming down the hall. He zoomed in on the blue-and-white nametag. Mitropoulous.

Nick Mitropoulous had straight dark hair that fell across his forehead and thick black-framed glasses that intensified his dark, weary eyes. "Hey, guys," he said, leaning across the desk. His voice was low and rusty. "What'd we get from the lab?"

"CBC shows a low white blood cell count," said the blonde nervously. It took almost no effort to hear her trepidation, but pinning down the source of it was a bit harder. Setting his jaw firmly, he let the dials slide up a notch. It wasn't coming from being the messenger of bad news. More like apprehension in the face of someone who might respond unpredictably, no matter what the news was.

"Damn it," Mitropoulous hissed under his breath, flipping through the chart handed to him by the blonde. "Anyone check this guy for bites?"

The male nurse, Jeff, was lost. "Bites?"

"Insect bites," he clarified sharply. "Ants, spiders, ticks--"

The blonde looked even more taken aback. "It's too early for tick season."

Jim stood and began approaching the desk, watching Mitropoulous. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the kid's eyes were way past tired. Probably nearing the end of a long shift; banked rage was all that was keeping him awake at this point. "Have you seen the fucking chart?" Nick tossed it at the male nurse's chest. "We've got rigid abdominals, muscle pain and vomiting, and now a low white count-- I want you checking for bites, blisters and rashes, now-- and get Bradley in for a consult!"

Teeth gritted in frustration, he turned away, almost bumping into Jim. "Can I help you?" he asked, meaning 'Get out of my way.'

"Detective Ellison, Major Crimes." Jim flashed his shield. "I called ahead. Is this a good time?"

"Uh-- sure, I guess," Nick said uncertainly. Unlike a patient or nurse, Jim wasn't someone below him in the hospital's hierarchy. It was unsettling for him to switch gears so suddenly. "Is this going to take long?"

"It shouldn't. I just have a few questions."

"Okay. I'm just gonna be outside!" Nick called over his shoulder, and led Jim out of the lobby. "We can talk out here. Mind if I smoke?"

"Go ahead," said Jim as they walked out into the concrete entryway. The wind had picked up, making it seem colder out than it really was.

Ignoring the chill, Nick leaned back against on a concrete pillar. Taking a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his white coat, he shook one out, then patted his pockets with a grimace. "Shit. Got a light?" he asked, not really hopefully.

"No, sorry," Jim said, experiencing a sudden deja vu.

Nick sighed and stuffed the pack back in his pocket. "Screw it," he muttered. "So this is about my dad, huh? I already talked to the cops once."

"I know," Jim said. "I just have a few more questions. You hadn't lived with your father since you were fourteen?"

Nick shook his head, and pulled off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I spent a few summers with him," he said, "after he and my mom split up, but it wasn't real comfortable. I mean, you've met Annie." Jim nodded, and Nick tipped his head back and closed his eyes. "I didn't blame her for the divorce... but I didn't like her much, either."

"You didn't blame her?" Jim said, keeping his voice light, trying to indicate curiosity and not insulting disbelief. Amazing how much easier it was to say what you meant, when you could read how people were really reacting.

"Mom wanted to believe that Annie was this... gold-digger, homewrecker type, and Dad just another victim in the whole mess," Nick shrugged, putting his glasses back on. "I gave him credit for making his own damn stupid decisions," he said, looking straight at Jim. "I didn't know... I was just so pissed off at his whole attitude towards our family."

"You didn't know what?"

"Camille Mason told me about it at the estate hearing yesterday," Nick muttered. "My scholarship... I got a free ride through med school from this charitable fund. For Greek-Americans studying cardiac surgery." He grinned a little crookedly. "I thought I hit the jackpot. Turns out my dad set the whole thing up." He stared off across the parking lot. "I hadn't talked to him in years. Don't even know how he knew I wanted to be a surgeon."

Jim nodded, then glanced back at the hospital doors as they swung open with a bang, and female voice broke the silence. "Doctor M, the hiker in observation three's disoriented and spiking a temperature. Margit needs you, now!"

Nick sighed. "Sorry, Detective, I gotta go. You get everything you need?"

"Yeah, sure. Thanks!" Jim called after him as he headed for the door. He stood there by the hospital doors for a while, thinking, and then headed back to the truck.

Jim was driving on auto-pilot as he came down the hill from the hospital, thinking on two tracks at once. Nick's anger was one clear note, overriding every other thing that might have attracted Jim's attention. Like a squeal of feedback, it had made Jim edgy... edgy enough to wonder for a moment if he was on the wrong track with Annie Clay. Maybe Blair was right, and she'd had nothing to do with her husband's murder.

After all, this whole emotional nuance thing was still new. When the senses had first kicked up, they hadn't always been helpful. He gritted his teeth with embarrassment, remembering Carolyn's wide eyes as he freaked out in the middle of her favorite cafe.

So maybe he'd misread Annie. It was possible. Sure, maybe she hadn't been telling them the entire truth, but there were lots of things people didn't want to spill to strangers. Especially cops. He remembered the twitch of her glossy mouth as Blair brought up Barrett Clay's infidelity. Could that have been it? Who knew, maybe the young wife had been having her cake and eating it too.

But the means didn't quite make sense now. Hiring a hit man was a big investment, and it usually meant a financial motive. Mitropoulous was a doctor, with no family to support and no student loans to pay off. He'd been angry, sure, but angry enough to cold-bloodedly arrange his father's murder?

Then again, you had to be a little cold to make your living cutting into helpless bodies. What was it they said about surgeons having God complexes? Sandburg would probably know.

Barrett Clay's first wife, Penelope Mitropoulous, owned a small pottery shop called Bowl of Joy, situated in one of Cascade's artier districts. From outside, it smelled of different varieties of clay, both dry and wet, and the cool chemical paint-smell of glaze. When he walked in, Jim was surprised by its dusty, old-world ambiance. He'd been expecting something glossy and high-rent, but the shop was simply one small room lined with plain metal shelves, stacked thickly with clay vases, bowls, plates and kettles.

In the center of the room, a few wooden blocks of different heights had been set up to serve as more display space. Here, the vases displayed sheaves of wheat, and the plates were set with shining silver, dusted lightly with fine, white particles of dry clay.

"Can I help you?"

Jim turned to the dark-eyed woman, dusting her hands as she emerged from the back room. She, too, surprised him by being neither glossy nor high-rent.

This woman had probably never been as polished as Annie, but even dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans stained with clay and glaze, she was striking. Aristocratic. There was something about her neck, her long pale arms, that demanded the adjective. Her mouth was sweet but wide, her nose prominent and bumpy. Her hair tumbled in wild coils around her shoulders, glossy black except for a few long streaks of gray, directly front and center. "Penelope Mitropoulous?"

"Yes?" She pushed one of the gray curls behind her ear, smudging her cheekbone with reddish clay in the process.

"Ma'am," Jim said, offering her his hand. "I'm Detective Jim Ellison, Major Crimes. I'm currently in charge of the investigation of your ex-husband's death."

"Barrett?" she said softly, her hand pausing in his for a moment. She had long, elegant fingers, but her knuckles were swollen and red with work. "Oh. Yes. Of course." She blinked, lips slightly parted, and Jim saw that she was surprised. Not expecting another visit from the police so soon was a part of it, and not really understanding why they'd want to talk to her at all was also part. "What can I help you with, Detective?"

"I just have a few questions. This won't take long," Jim said and Penelope nodded. "You hadn't spoken to your husband recently?"

"No. Not for years." To Jim's surprise her hands were shaking slightly, and the next sound out of her mouth was a quiet sob. He reached out, feeling entirely clumsy, and put a hand on her shoulder as she turned away, covering her mouth with her palm.

"I'm sorry," he said, and she waved her other hand apologetically, turning and crossing behind the shop's counter for a box of tissues. A stab of irritation hit Jim-- he should have brought Blair along, no matter how edgy his partner was suddenly making him. Blair was better at handling this kind of thing.

"No, no--" Penelope blew her nose, threw away the tissue, and got another to dab at her eyes with. "I'm sorry."

"I know it must have been a shock," Jim said, knowing that the officers who'd interviewed her in the first place had probably said exactly the same thing.

Penelope winced, and Jim suddenly realized he had no idea what she was going to say next; he had damped down his senses without knowing it. Slowly, he put his hand on the counter between them and opened them all up, watching the gloss of tears in her eyes, the twist of regret in her lips-- and loneliness, an aching wave of loneliness that almost choked him.

"I still," she said, and stopped, pressing her lips together tightly to keep her mouth from trembling. "I still loved him," she said, and Jim knew that the only reason that her statement was phrased in the past tense was Barrett Clay's untimely death-- that only his death could ever have caused Penelope Mitropoulous to stop loving her ex-husband. She sighed, and looked up at him ruefully. "Are you married, Detective?"

Jim hesitated. "Divorced," he answered, dropping his shoulders just a quarter of an inch, trying to convey some kind of affinity in his voice. Trying to echo back what he was receiving: the kinship of the dumped.

And it seemed to work; she smiled a little. She was remembering things she'd heard about cops, and how stressful their jobs were. She sniffled slightly again. "I know it's foolish, but Barrett... I was just twenty-one when we were married. And you don't forget fifteen years of marriage." Or at least I don't, she was thinking. But that would've been a jab at her ex-husband. And Penelope still couldn't do that out loud. Dead or not.

Jim nodded. "Did you know Annie Hollingsworth well?"

"No." Penelope shook her head. "I only met her once or twice. Nick spent a few summers with Barrett after the divorce, but he was so angry with his father, I doubt he really--" She caught herself suddenly, eyes narrowing fiercely. "Nick had nothing to do with this."

"He's not under any suspicion at this time, Ms. Mitropoulous," Jim assured her. "I'm just trying to get a better feel for the situation, as it was..." He stopped as Penelope's eyes widened in shock, then filled with tears again.

"Annie," she said disbelievingly. "Oh, no. That little bitch!" More tears pooled in her eyes, and spilled over, and this time she let them slide down her cheeks. "I knew she was using him, but-- but I never thought she was a murderer."

"We're not actively investigating Ms. Clay, either," Jim said neutrally.

Penelope inhaled sharply. "But you think she did it, don't you?"

Jim looked away. "You said she was using him," he said. "Using him how?"

"Well," Penelope waved a hand, frowning. "Just, in the sense that..." She stopped, sighed heavily and started over. "Well, I suppose they were using each other," she admitted. "Annie wanted a big house and the good life, and Barrett wanted to be married to a twenty-one-year-old. Again. I don't know. Maybe it would've been easier for me to-- to let go if I thought they were really in love with each other. But I never saw that."

Jim nodded slowly. "Thank you, Ms. Mitropoulous. If I have any more questions, I'll call."

Blair was making rummaging noises in the medicine cabinet when Jim got home. "Hey," he said as Jim hung up his coat. "How'd it go?"

"Fine," Jim called back, heading to the fridge for a beer. His throat felt as rough as cardboard; he'd done too much talking today, not to mention breathing in that silky clay-dust from Penelope's shop. "How 'bout you-- anything interesting?"

"Depends on what you call interesting," Blair said. "Annie Clay has two older brothers, Jeff and Roland, both of whom have won or placed in various trap-shooting contests in Texas. Neither one has a criminal record, but she's got this second cousin in Oregon who's got a couple of pretty nasty assault charges, and among other things makes amateur bear-hunting videos."

Jim raised his eyebrows. "The second cousin-- that was in the files from Research?"

"Well, the stuff about her brothers was," Blair said, a twinge of something-- was that guilt? in his raised voice.

"Uh-huh," Jim said, half-grinning already.

He heard the bathroom door gently kicked open, and Blair crossed into the living room, both hands holding something to his right earlobe. "Yeah, well, I got through all those files, so I thought I'd look up Annie on the 'Net. I got the usual hits: wedding announcement in the Herald, blah blah. Then I found her grandmother's site, complete with Hollingsworth family history and genealogy. Then I had this George Orwell moment of conscience..."

"Millisecond of conscience, you mean," Jim poked, taking a long drink of his beer. Well, it was only to be expected. He'd left Blair alone all afternoon. Annie Clay was just lucky the CPD didn't have her medical records, too.

"Yeah, yeah, and then I started looking up stuff," Blair said, leaning over the kitchen counter, "and found this online article in a hunting and fishing mag about Ken Guthrie, he's the cousin, and you wouldn't fucking believe all the nasty stuff they do to bears and-- what? What?"

Jim realized that he had been giving Blair a funny look. "What's that smell?" he said almost accusingly, then added "Your ear is hot."

"Yeah, allergic reaction," Blair said. "That earring with the glass beads? Lacquer must've worn off--" and when Jim opened his mouth, "No safety lectures, all right? I usually buy nickel free, but you can't really be sure of the metal content when you're buying jewelry off the back of a cart in Turkey."

There was something about that smell... "Annie Clay smelled like that," Jim said suddenly.

"What, peroxide?" Blair lifted his hand to show the cotton ball. "Well, it's used to bleach hair, too, but I doubt those curls of hers have ever seen a chemical."

"No, I can tell bleached hair. It sounds different," Jim said absently. "Now that I think about it, her ear was hot, too."

"Just one or both? Usually you'd get an allergic reaction on both sides. Unless you were only pierced on one side, but she doesn't seem the type--"

"No, just on one side--" Jim closed his eyes, remembering--"and not as hot as yours. And not just the lobe, either. All up the side of her ear."

Blair frowned. "A couple of fresh cartilage pierces would account for that, and she'd be cleaning them a couple of times a day with peroxide even if they weren't infected-- but Jim, man, she really doesn't seem like the type to get--"

"She doesn't seem like the type to hire somebody to off her husband, either, Sandburg," Jim said. "I've got to talk to her again."

Through the two-way mirror they could see Annie Clay sitting in a chair, hands clasped in her calico-clad lap, and Camille Mason in a lemon-yellow suit with her arm around Annie's shoulder. Annie looked up as Jim opened the door-- at him, past him to Blair-- and Jim stopped in his tracks. "Ms. Clay... Ms. Mason... we'll be with you in a minute." He shut the door again.

"What?" Blair asked. Confused.

"Go get Megan."

"What?" he said again, this time baffled and annoyed.

"She thinks you're... look, just go get Megan."

Blair headed off to the bullpen, shaking his head and muttering to himself-- Jim caught a "temperamental bastard" that was surely pitched for maximum audibility.

Jim looked through the mirror, focusing closer, closer-- and saw the glint of metal through the fall of Annie Clay's chestnut hair. "A couple of new cartilage piercings," Blair had said, and there they were.

Camille Mason was standing-- no doubt delivering a last-minute reminder about the wisdom of keeping one's mouth shut in interrogation rooms, though Jim didn't bother to pick his hearing up-- by the time Megan arrived with Blair right behind her. "You be the good cop," Jim told her. "Get her to talk about her cousin Kenneth Guthrie. I need to watch her for a while."

"Righto."

"Hey, why not me, man?" Blair held Jim's arm. "I thought she liked me, Jim, I was nice to her!"

"Maybe you were a little too nice to her." Blair glared at him. "Look, I don't know why. I just think she'll be more comfortable with Megan, okay?" He could hear Blair mumbling to himself again as the door swung shut.

"Ms. Clay," Megan began, "tell me about your relationship with Kenneth Guthrie."

"He's a relative on my mother's side," Annie said, softly but without hesitating.

"Your... second cousin, I think?"

Jim listened absently, senses ticking up and down to take in Annie's pulse, temperature, minute shifts in posture, changes in the muscles around her eyes and mouth. It was amazing to remember sitting in this room, just a few days ago, and picking up only the crudest outlines of what she was thinking and feeling-- just that vague feeling of wrongness. And today he could sense a whole range of emotions from her, three-dimensional, full of nuances.

The first time, he saw, she had been lying reflexively, out of fear, the way a child lies to escape punishment. Now her fear was muted. She wouldn't lie today, not unless they rattled her very badly. If they asked her an incriminating question point-blank, she'd say, "I don't remember" or "I can't answer that." Camille had coached her well, and Annie was feeling comfortable. It was familiar to her, saying as little as possible, knowing that if she got into trouble her protector would speak for her--

A protector. A childlike woman. An earful of new jewelry. Suddenly all the clues clicked into place. It was all Jim could do not to interrupt Annie in the middle of tracing out her family tree.

"Ms. Clay," he said as soon as she finished speaking. She started a bit; maybe she'd forgotten he was there. "Tell me about your new earrings. When did you have your ear pierced?"

Megan and Camille were both staring at him. Annie blushed a little and tucked a curl behind her ear. "Um... a week ago Tuesday," she said.

Barrett Clay had been murdered on Monday. Jim could feel everyone in the room making the connection.

"Your husband," he said after a moment. "You said he--" he consulted his notes, unnecessarily--"'He always took care of me. He looked after me in his own way.' Would you say he was protective of you?" She nodded. "Perhaps overprotective?"

He almost held his breath waiting. She wasn't going to go for that. Her lawyer would kill her if she did, no sane person would go for it--

"Yes."

Camille Mason put her arm around Annie's shoulder again, and Jim could feel her sending waves of "Shut up shut up shut up" at her client. Annie must have felt it too; she leaned forward out of the circle of Camille's arm.

"For instance, jewelry in the cartilage of your ear-- that's not something he would have cared for, is it."

"Cared for." It was almost a snort. "He would never have allowed it."

"And yet you're an adult-- soon to be a mother," Jim went on. "I would think you could be trusted to be responsible for a decision like that."

A brief pause. "Yes." And Jim knew he had her.

Megan's look said she didn't know what Jim knew, but he was onto something and she was more than happy to mine the same vein. "Your cousin Kenny," she said. "You talked with him quite recently, didn't you? In--" and she ostentatiously checked the phone log--"early June, twice. And yet you've never called him before in the entire time you and Mr. Clay have lived on High Street."

Megan hadn't actually asked a question, but Annie would have given her an answer anyway if Camille hadn't stopped her. But the comment had served its purpose, and Jim shot Megan a grateful look: Annie now thought the police department had extensive knowledge of Ken Guthrie's recent activities.

"Your husband traveled a great deal," Jim said, and Annie's head whipped around to face him. She was confused about this new direction. "It's too bad," Jim went on, "that he didn't take you along on some of these trips." Quick flash of resentment, and he pushed forward, more and more sure that he was right.

"Let me ask you," he said, "about the trip you've planned. Will this be the first time you've seen Paris?"

Annie's emotions whiplashed wildly at that: shock and terror, and then a strange, sudden peace: They know everything. I don't have to decide whether or not to tell the truth any more. It's out of my hands now.

Most people, Jim thought, really want to tell the truth. The trick is to make that the least inconvenient alternative.

"Ms. Clay," Jim said gently. "We both know that Kenneth Guthrie fired the gun that killed your husband. If you'll testify and help us convict him, we can help you, too."

And after another breathless pause, she said, "Yes. All right."

Blair was waiting for him at the interrogation room door, and he fired off two questions before Jim could open his mouth: "Paris, where the heck did that come from? And, hey, why Megan and not me? I was nice to her. I thought she liked me."

"She thinks you're funny-looking," Jim told him. "And she's a rich man's wife, Sandburg. She doesn't trust a man who's being too nice to her."

"Funny-looking? I'm not-- hey!" But before Blair could demand an answer, he was interrupted by Simon's handshake.

"Nice work, guys," he said. "I knew you two were up to something. How'd you crack her story, Jim? Did you smell something at the crime scene?"

"Better, it's way better, Simon, you are so not going to believe this." Blair launched into a barrage of explanations and amplifications and verbal footnotes, pointedly ignoring Jim's best keep-your-mouth-shut signals. "And the greatest thing is, it's all totally scientific, nothing supernatural about it, but for all practical purposes it's just like ESP! In fact, if you read carefully you'll see that the literature on ESP is full of hints that the subjects may have had enhanced senses, which is exactly--"

"Whoa." It should have been obvious even to Blair that Simon did not want to hear what he was hearing. "Are you saying-- Jim is he saying that you read that girl's mind?" His face said: Please tell me that's not what he's saying.

"Not exactly," Jim said, and Simon's shoulders went down a fraction, only to tense back up when he went on, "but from the outside it probably looks like that. I don't understand it myself," he added apologetically.

"It's so cool," Blair said. "I mean, he picked up from the beginning that she was lying, but he got a confession from her by figuring out that she was getting ready to jet off to Paris. Paris!" he laughed as the three of them made their way back to the bullpen. "Paris, man, if he can read that on her, what's next, telling me where I'm going to lunch?"

"Brie's, of course, you've been thinking about their pancakes ever since we saw those blueberries at the farmer's market," Jim said absently. "And I didn't exactly see Paris on her. That was a lucky guess."

"Well, that's good to hear," Simon said dryly.

"Yeah," Jim said, "all I could get from her was somewhere in Europe. I just figured she wasn't really the type for London."

Simon blew out a gusty breath. "As long as you eventually wind up with admissible evidence and no broken laws, Jim, I suppose how you get it is your business." At his weary tone, Jim turned and saw him thinking sadly, "Jim, my old friend, I was a lot more comfortable with you when you were normal" --and then Simon saw him looking and quickly turned away.

It was a good thing the rest of Major Crimes didn't know about this new development, Jim thought, or nobody would ever look him in the eye again. He looked out over his co-workers-- fine officers, good friends, people he would trust with his life-- and he had never felt so distant from them.

There was Megan returning to her desk, thinking of the taste of pasties from a luncheonette two blocks from Sydney police headquarters and of the thousands of miles between here and there. One quick glimpse of her loneliness took his breath away. There was Rafe shouting congratulations as he passed and mentally updating his checklist of everyone's case rates-- "I've still got more convictions, though," he was thinking, "and that's all solid police work, no lucky guesses and no hocus-pocus bullshit."

Brown was ribbing Joel over a white bakery bag while he tried to remember whether his MasterCard was maxed out, and Joel was offering a good-natured grin while his contempt for Brown fought it out with his contempt for himself--

Jim saw the stairs in front of him and realized with a shock that he had turned himself almost in a circle in an effort not to look at Blair.

And when Blair said, "Hey, I've got papers to grade if you don't need me," Jim could hear that he'd noticed, that he knew Jim was looking away on purpose. Sorry, sorry, Jim said silently, but I just can't stand knowing just what kind of freak of nature you think I am-- and he was surprised at how normal his voice sounded when he said, "Sure, go ahead, Chief, I'll probably be home late."

There wasn't much paperwork to do. Or, rather, there was a lot of paperwork. Just not enough. Jim finished it up by ten o'clock, and sat there at his desk for a while. There might be dinner waiting for him at home, but Blair hadn't called to tell him either way.

He wasn't that hungry anyway.

The parking garage was dark and cool. He stood and stared at the truck for a moment, letting the cold seep in under his dark leather jacket, through the thin knit of his sweater, till it sank deep into his skin. He put his hand out, and touched the cool metal of the truck, and thought about going to Salem's.

Maybe I need to walk, he thought, pulling his hand away from the truck. He was just on edge; there was always a letdown after a case was closed. Tensions lessening, that was all. He'd been sitting at his desk all day. A walk would help him settle.

He went for a walk.

It was getting worse, he realized suddenly. When had it started getting-- for lack of a better word-- louder? He could practically see the life story of every person he passed on October Street. College kids sitting outside the bars, playing chess and drinking coffee or vodka and Sprite and looking up at the stars. The one with the horn-rimmed glasses didn't know how she was going to pay her parking tickets, and she'd already asked her parents for money this month-- desperation, blame, shame. The one with the spiky blond hair was thinking that if he got this new job, his girlfriend would want to move into a new place-- but, shit, he'd miss his roommates, and what were they gonna do about the dog? Change, fear, loss...

Walking by the cheap arty movie theater on Elm, every couple was like an open book-- right there, that guy hates Hitchcock, but his date loved the movie, and he's a fucking swimmer and hot-- and stepping in front of them, that girl's boyfriend was over-analyzing every little detail, talking on and on, but it was better than sitting at home with the cat, again, and--

How could he go home like this? He couldn't. He just couldn't... Maybe tomorrow, he could get up early and head to the station before Blair woke up, but then, shit, then what? Volunteer for a stakeout? But that was risky. Chances were, Blair would cancel whatever he had going and join him. That was what he usually did, anyway. Amazing how the same patterns repeated themselves in a person's life. The job hadn't been an escape from Carolyn, either.

The last major fight he'd had with Carolyn was so brief a storm that Jim didn't really think of it as a fight. That had been one of Caro's good points, actually-- she could let the little things go in a way Jim never really could, but she never backed down from an argument when there was something important at stake. They'd gotten into a few shouting matches, and usually it was a good thing, it cleared the air. They'd have some make-up sex, cuddle, and the next day they could talk.

Except for the last time. It was funny; now he couldn't even remember why they'd been arguing. Oh, the situation was clear, Carolyn's sister was getting divorced and needed someone to come and help with her kids, but why had they not been able to let it go? At work, under their breath, louder on the way home from work and continuing while Carolyn packed, off and on, silence stretching out to end with a snap that just spawned more silence.

Jim had carried Carolyn's suitcase down to the car-- she wasn't ready to go yet, and if he had to stand around for her one more minute-- damn it, he would have paid for the taxi already just to avoid this jaw-grinding aggravation. He pushed open the door of 307, thinking about whether he could get away with asking Carolyn to hurry the fuck up, if she was in such a hurry. But apparently she was ready to go, standing in the kitchen, travel bag in hand. He hadn't really seen her. That had been his mistake.

"Is there anything else," he'd said, already turning back into the hall, "or are we ready--"

There was a thump as Carolyn dropped her bag, and Jim looked up, only now seeing the tears streaming down her face, the mingled rage and sorrow as she hissed, "You're not even looking at me-- why don't you ever look at me!"

Thank god she was in San Francisco, Jim thought suddenly. He really didn't want to know all the things that Carolyn had never said out loud.

At the time, he'd only stood there, staring. He'd never pushed her to tears before. He'd seen her cry, once or twice, but never like that, like it was tearing her up. He hadn't thought it was possible for her to be that out of control, emotionally... He hadn't ever seen her like that again, either. It had been their last real fight. He figured she'd given up on him after that. It hadn't happened all at once, but little by little she stopped fighting him on certain things. Small issues at first, then larger ones. She'd just accepted that he would never be able to understand her, and so she stopped talking to him about certain topics, one by one; her family, her feelings, children.

They had been fighting more and more often, so perhaps the results would have been the same either way, but when it ended, it was quiet. She wouldn't engage anymore, just retreated from the battlefield. And when there was no more ground to give she had retreated entirely from their marriage, leaving Jim braced behind the heavy walls of his encampments, entrenched, unable to follow or grasp her in any way.

He stood and looked up at the balcony windows of the loft. Their glossy blackness revealed nothing, reflected nothing. The whole building was dark and quiet. So often it had been a haven to Jim, an oasis of calm, its thick, solid walls blocking the noise of the city, its elevation lifting it above the scent of reeking dumpsters and exhaust fumes, from the noise of the masses. So often Jim had looked forward to coming home, knowing the loft would be a warm, quiet place, away from the grit and stench and crazy people, but tonight walking in off the street was like inching forward into a dark cave. He'd walked into firefights with less trepidation.

God only knows what Sandburg really thinks of you, he thought grimly as he climbed the stairs, heart running and thudding in his chest. He made himself keep climbing, though he could feel a weighty burden pressing down on his shoulders more heavily with each step.

But he didn't really have to wonder. Sandburg had written it down in black and white, hadn't he? In the first chapter of his diss, right there. Paranoid. Fear-based. Coward. And you got so damned angry. But then he said you'd read it wrong. Said he didn't really think that. Well, no, of course not. Jim Ellison's no coward, not paranoid, certainly not incapable of intimacy-- god, he could just imagine how this chapter was going to read. The Sentinel: his ability to interpret non-verbal cues and emotional nuances, in which The Sentinel wakes his partner up in the middle of the night and fucking begs him to make it go away. Hell.

Blair probably knew all along I wouldn't be able to handle it, Jim thought, keys in hand, and froze just outside the door.

Of course. Blair had known. The tests... maybe it had been a long time since they'd done any real testing, but even that first day had seemed rather perfunctory, hadn't it? As if Blair's heart wasn't really in it. Look at her, look at him, tell me what you see-- but nothing really hard, nothing that pushed Jim's limits or even nudged them a little. Everything Jim had learned about his new ability, he'd learned himself: watching basketball, playing poker, at that awful university party. It didn't fit. Blair always pushed, but Blair hadn't pushed this time.

No, of course not. He'd known.

The knowledge cut Jim, but it also made it easier to turn the key in the lock and go in. He was still a failure, but at least Blair would accept it. At least he wouldn't be too disappointed.

The loft was dark; Jim felt his eyes adjust, and adjust again, to see the familiar shapes of home. He found himself hesitating outside Blair's room, pausing with a hand on one of the cool glass panes of the French door. Blair's sleeping breaths were slow and regular, a familiar homey sound that had meant peace and safety in the loft for almost three years.

It was calming just to stand outside Blair's door for a moment and breathe with him. Closing his eyes, Jim pushed open the door, and Blair's breathing grew incrementally louder, deeper.

"Blair," Jim said, taking a few clumsy steps forward and kneeling by the low futon shoved into the corner of the room. "Blair, wake up," he said, louder. "Sandburg! Come on. Wake up."

Grimacing, he opened his eyes, reaching forward to jostle Blair's shoulder, and stopped, his hand hanging in space. Jim had stood his share of night watches, guarding comrades while they slept, and he'd found that most men when asleep just looked stolid and cowlike in their unconsciousness. But Blair's sleeping face, framed by dark tangles of hair, clear of all emotion, was still powerful, evocative--

"What?" Contrarily, Blair squinched his eyes closed as he came awake. Immediately Jim wrenched down his night vision. The room was horribly dark, but even that was not enough and so he bent his neck, staring intently at Blair's wrinkled sheets, moved by some powerful instinct for self-preservation he could not explain or ignore. "Jeez, Jim," Blair was muttering sleepily, "what time is it?" Pushing himself up on one elbow, he stretched out an arm toward the lamp on his nightstand.

"Don't." Jim stopped him with a sudden move, then pulled his hand back, away from the sleep-warm aura emanating from Blair's skin.

"Jim?" The weary slur was gone from Blair's voice, replaced by the tight awareness of something off. "What's wrong? What is it?"

Closing his eyes again helped Jim pull his hearing in, crank it down to normal. "Look, this thing-- I can't do it any more. I want to turn it off," he said, disliking the panicky volume of his own voice. "You have to help me."

"Okay," Blair said quietly. The sheets rustled as he pushed himself into a sitting position, leaning back against the wall. "Just calm down for a second. I don't know if this is something you can just turn off, but we can try, all right? Whatever you want."

Jim could only hear the words, which meant he couldn't really hear Blair at all-- not the rich, low working of his lungs or his heart, not his hands moving in the air to gesture or offer a reassuring touch. It was uncharacteristic. It felt wrong, in more ways than one. He flushed with shame in the dark, realizing how badly he wanted Blair to touch him.

"I just can't," Jim growled, because somehow he had still expected an argument, a pep talk, a flood of belief that would have drowned him, trapped as he was in the pit of his failure. "It's too much. You don't know, Sandburg," he said, wishing for a moment that it was Blair with this knowledge, so he could hear just how hopeless Jim was. He barely stopped a harsh laugh from escaping his throat. If it was Blair with this ability, there'd be no problem, would there? Blair would have been great with this, and even if he wasn't saying it, he probably thought Jim was over-reacting. Freaking out. Shutting the new knowledge out simply because it was new. Or scary. Like he always did.

"Jim, it's okay, really. Look, maybe we were wrong to push this in the first place," Blair said quickly. "The original sentinels, they were out there, you know, patrolling the borders, not very socialized. But you--"

He was hiding something. Jim heard it, flinched and bowed his head further, not wanting to know or hear.

"--you live in this city, there's all this extra input, crowds of people you can't get away from, so I understand, you know? It's not... this isn't the way it should be."

"Why are you doing this?" Jim asked sharply, and heard the low thump as Blair's shoulders tensed against the wall.

"I'm trying to help," Blair said, an odd anger making his voice creak.

"You've had that little speech memorized for days, haven't you?" Jim shot back, too broken to be really angry. "Just waiting for me to come crawling, right?"

"Jim!" Blair huffed wordlessly, and his hands clenched in his sheets. "I haven't," he said tightly, and now there was more anger, but it was false, a mask. He was still hiding. "You're not listening. This isn't a failure, it's overload. We've been here before."

"They weren't alone," Jim said. "The sentinels."

"Jim--" Blair replied, and he was terrified, afraid for the both of them, and shit! Jim was wide open again, and he could hear the muscles of Blair's throat click as he swallowed, the tiny hitches in his breath, the effort it was taking him to breathe normally when his heart was pounding, racing, hammering so hard it fucking had to hurt.

"They had partners, right? To watch their backs," Jim said, and took a deep breath of his own. "I'm not alone. I have you." He looked up, and Blair jerked his head away, facing the shadows in the corner of the room. His shoulders were tense, but still flat against the wall, as though he was facing a firing squad. He flinched, hearing Jim fumble for the lamp.

"Don't," Blair said, but Jim barely heard the word, lost in the meaning. Blair's voice was uneven now, shaky, spelling a thousand possibilities Jim couldn't begin to sort through.

His own hands were shaking, but he had to know. It scared the hell out of him, maybe more than anything had ever scared him, the fear that he might see nothing more than a twisted shadow of himself in Blair's eyes-- but he had to know. The lamp came on with a click--

--and Jim saw. He could see it in Blair's hands. They were shadowed, half-hidden, clutching the rumpled sheets, but he could see it, he could see it in Blair's tense and curled hands: the guilt, the fear. The dizzying, desperate wanting.

Blair loved him. It was in the shallow movement of his chest and the rasp as he breathed, and suddenly, like a black and white picture becoming color, it was in the stillness of his shoulders, and in the silence between breaths as well. The burn of desire, the ache of need. Blair loved him. Jim struggled to breathe himself, trying to understand the sudden overwhelming and inarguable knowledge. Where did this certainty come from, and how--? And then he realized.

He had always known.

"Oh," he said, and Blair flinched away from the soft sound. Despair was in every line of his body-- oh, god, Blair was thinking, he hates me, he pities me--

"Blair, no," Jim said, stunned into awkward syllables. Words caught in his throat, and he was kneeling on the futon, straddling Blair's legs clumsily, and reaching out for his shoulders. "Look at me--"

"Goddamn it," don't touch me, just don't say anything-- Blair twisted his head away further, tumbling curls masking his face, and it was there in the curve of his neck, like a panicked animal: fear. Anguish. Desire. Just go, Jim, he was pleading silently, just leave me the fuck alone--

"No," Jim rasped. "Look at me." He tugged at Blair's shoulders, already gathering the words that would reassure him, convince him. And then Blair turned his head, and looked at Jim. And the yellow glow of the lamp spilled across his face in seeming slow motion, like a sunrise illuminating the desert. And Jim was speechless.

Blair's eyes were like cathedral windows: illuminated, beautiful. Revelatory, full of miracles and meaning. Shadows slid across his face, disguising and revealing the dawning awareness, the terrible doubt.

"Listen to me. Listen, Blair. It's not just you," Jim said, raising shaking hands to brush Blair's hair back from his face. Smiling, he dropped one hand to run a thumb over Blair's lips. Blair gasped. "Don't be afraid."

"But--" Blair said tightly.

Jim kissed him softly, lightly, once.

"I mean it," he whispered, then tightened his hands in Blair's hair and really kissed him, taking it beyond reassurance, deeper than kindness. Warm. Wet. Blair's lips were so warm, and his mouth tasted of life, not of bitter chlorine or cold bile but warm life, Blair's want and his joy.

Or maybe the joy was Jim's own, he thought, as Blair's lips moved under his. Dizzied by the heat rising between them, he twisted to the side, pulling Blair with him, Blair's body covering him as Jim landed on his back on the bed. Blair's warmth was still in the sheets under Jim's back, and his breath was hot against Jim's face as he gasped for air when Jim pulled away. "Are you hearing me, Chief?"

"Yeah," Blair stammered, turning his head away to hide his face. Jim caught his chin, turned it back. Blair's eyes were bright. "I hear you." he said. "Are you serious?" Be serious, Jim, please.

"Yeah, I'm serious," Jim said, and Blair relaxed in his arms.

"Oh, man," he sighed, then planted his hands on Jim's chest and pushed himself up over Jim, studying him intently. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Out. Walking," said Jim, and wrapping his arms around Blair, pulling him back down. It was too good to be close like this, to have Blair's body against his. He might never let go again. "I was scared."

He felt Blair's breathed 'ah' of understanding. "Of this?"

"Well, no," Jim said, and couldn't help but smile. "I didn't know about this."

"What?" Blair pushed a tangle of hair out of his face. "You didn't-- How could you not know?"

Jim shook his head. "I just didn't. I guess I wasn't looking for it-- I swear, I didn't have a clue."

"But if you didn't know, then why have you been avoiding me all week?" Blair demanded.

"Me?" Jim said. "I don't think so, Chief. You were the one avoiding me, remember?"

"Uh, yeah, 'cause I thought you knew!" Blair said. "I thought you were freaking out, or feeling sorry for me, or-- well, anyway, I didn't want to deal with that," he muttered, then tensed suddenly. "This-- this isn't you feeling sorry for me."

"You're not that pathetic, Sandburg," Jim said dryly, and got a quick punch in the shoulder for his trouble.

"Thanks bunches," Blair said, sarcastic and reassured.

"Maybe I didn't see it in you," Jim mused against the nape of Blair's neck, "because I was trying not to see it in myself." Blair shuddered, leaning his head back against Jim's shoulder, and Jim took a slow breath. "I want to..."

Blair looked up at him. "Jim?"

"Let me show you." The bed was too small, so he pulled Blair till he was sitting on the edge. He knelt on the floor between Blair's feet, cupping the back of Blair's neck with his hand and guiding his head down for a kiss.

They kissed, and the floor was hard reality under his knees, but Jim's hands were tingling, sweating, and his mouth was somewhere else entirely. In the twilight zone. Fantasy. Dreamland. Because nothing real could be this fucking good, Blair's hands on him, pushing his jacket off his shoulders, unbuttoning the top buttons of his shirt, stroking his face and touching him... "I couldn't look at you. Too damn risky." Jim gritted into Blair's chest. "I didn't want to know what you really thought of me."

"I think you're an idiot," Blair said, and kissed his forehead. "I mean, not to shock you or anything, but I can tell the difference between your blue shirt and my blue shirt-- and you think I'd spend one weekend a month scrubbing perfectly clean bathroom tiles for just anyone? And--"

"I love you, too," Jim whispered, and Blair's indrawn breath was disbelieving, illuminated, joyous: music. If only he could show Blair what he was seeing... Jim sighed, and brought his other arm around to hug Blair tighter, and kiss his mouth. Blair's skin was getting hotter everywhere Jim touched him, his breathing getting quicker, and Jim moved his hand, not even consciously reaching for Blair's cock, just drawn to the source of the heat, compelled to meet Blair's need.

He pressed his palm firmly against the soft, worn flannel boxers and Blair gasped and stiffened, fingers digging into Jim's shoulders, getting harder and growing under Jim's hand. My hand, Jim thought. My touch. I'm doing this to him. And desire struck like lightning through his whole body, his own skin suddenly burning, every inch of it ultra-sensitive.

"Jim," Blair said, "Jim, can you--"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure." Reluctantly taking his hand away from that hot, live heat, Jim leaned back on his heels, shucking off his jacket and shirt with clumsy, shaking hands.

They both smiled, and then Jim stood, stripping quickly, feeling the sharp shocks of lust like static electricity, leaping between them, as Blair sat very still and watched. Jim knelt before him again, naked but uncaring. He wasn't cold any more. He knew what he wanted. He wanted Blair to feel... He wanted Blair to feel. Blair bent his head, helping Jim tug his tank top over his head, and Jim took a too-loud breath, almost a gasp, as he lowered his hands to the waistband of Blair's boxers, fingers prying at the elastic band. Blair sat still, but his muscles tensed as Jim knelt forward to kiss the bare skin of his stomach, to inhale the warm scent of his body.

"Please," said Jim, and Blair leaned back on the bed, feet still on the floor, and lifted his hips slightly. Jim tugged his boxers off quickly and bent his head, basking in the shimmering heat. Jesus, if he touched Sandburg half as much as he wanted to from now on, Cascade would have a long, hot summer-- a fucking heatwave, this year and every year. He inhaled deeply, welcoming the pure infusion of sweat and lust.

He lowered his mouth to the ridge of Blair's hipbone, fastening his teeth on the curving jut of bone and biting gently. Then he moved closer, laying a wet, open-mouthed kiss on the sensitive hollow of Blair's hip. Blair shuddered, throat clicking as he choked down a whimper, or a gasp, and Jim traced his tongue slowly along the curve of bone, tasting the warmth.

Lifting his head, he blew over the wet, sensitive skin. Blair grunted, chest heaving, and Jim leaned over the bed to look him in the eyes.

"Let me hear you," he said softly. Blair stared at him, wild, terrified, turned on-- and nodded.

Lowering himself to his knees again, Jim settled between Blair's spread thighs. He kissed the inside of Blair's knee and heard Blair's high gasp, "ohgod--" then turned his head and pressed his lips to the scar that marred the opposite thigh. "Oh my god." Blair was moaning now, shaking. Enough stalling. Enough waiting. "Please, Jim. I gotta, oh-- oh. Jim."

He took Blair's cock in his hand and tasted it, laving the head with his tongue. Salt. Bitter. Wild. His mouth watered. It was intoxicating, the hard needy twitch in his hand, the taste burning against his lips. When Blair untangled his hands from the sheets to trace the lines of Jim's face and neck, to brush caresses across his bare shoulders, Jim broke into a sweat, and took more into his mouth.

The scents of salt and sex mingled in the small room as they moved against each other. And when Blair began to moan in earnest Jim fell further in, freely abandoning himself to the senses he rarely allowed himself to trust. Touching, listening, loving, he let himself sink into the ocean of sensation, falling so deep that the surface seemed miles away.

His senses strobed randomly, somehow without disorienting or distracting him, so that one moment the world was a murky swamp of sex and sweat, Blair's thundering heartbeat pulsing in his mouth, filling him utterly, jarring his bones. And then in another flash there were only soft breaths and softer-edged shadows lapping the body moving minutely beneath him, all sensation centered in the smallest, most careful brushes of skin against skin, palm pressed to thigh, tongue to cock. And somehow Blair knew; somehow Blair could make love to Jim even when he was completely lost. In those moments when the gentlest touch became almost more than he could bear, he could feel Blair's hand hovering over his skin, blocking the heat of the lamp, a heartbreakingly gentle shadow-caress.

He wasn't necessarily trying to speed Blair to his climax. In fact when it came, it was much too soon, and passed too quickly for Jim to gather it all in-- the taste and scent of Blair's come, the soft choked breaths and rhythmic scouring sound of Blair's hair against the sheets as his head thrashed from side to side.

"Jim," Blair breathed, his arms flung wide, knees sagging apart, his chest rising and falling jerkily. "Oh, Jim." He lifted his hands slightly from the bed in a shaky, beckoning gesture, and Jim heaved himself up, clumsily, onto the bed, wanting Blair's heart singing beneath his own. After a moment or two, Blair turned his head to look into Jim's eyes, and smiled.

"God," Jim said hoarsely, "I wish I could show you-- I wish you could see--" He pressed his mouth to Blair's, and Blair kissed him back enthusiastically, breathlessly, his ragged breathing becoming Jim's new, definitive knowledge of desire.

He brought his hands up to touch Blair's face and gasped, stiffening-- suddenly thrown back to the last time he'd lain sprawled over Blair's body, touched his face, tasted his cold, bitter mouth. He closed his eyes, pushing that memory aside-- it had no place here, not now. Trauma, he thought, and kissed Blair suddenly, searchingly-- it was a period of traumatic isolation that triggered the senses in the first place, so maybe--

He buried his hands in wild curls, breathing in Blair's scent, not wanting to think about it, not wanting to remember. Blair was nuzzling Jim's throat, licking his collarbone, but still the memories flooded his mind, unchecked.

A week ago, he'd looked at Annie Clay and seen wrongness.

Two weeks ago, during the Ventriss case, he'd looked at his partner and seen a stranger. Hell, perhaps even that had been an early manifestation of this nuance thing. Blair's anger and hurt had been disconcertingly visible, burning too hot--

He broke away, clutching Blair's arms tightly, opening up his senses with an effort until Blair's heart was thunder, his breath the tide-- listen, Jim told himself, listen, he's here. Look and see, he's fine.

"Please," he said, and began pressing desperate kisses to Blair's face. Blair lay back, chest heaving, mystified but submitting. He only touched Jim's arm gently; a strange touch, but familiar. A guiding touch, as if even now Blair were keeping watch over him. A keening noise rose in Jim's throat-- "God," he strangled the cry of loss in its infancy, "I love you, I love you."

"I love you," Blair whispered, but only a little more than a month ago, on a cold, clear morning, Blair had been lying on the grass utterly stilled, heart and breath and words all gone, no matter how hard Jim listened, no matter how hard he looked. What could be more traumatic than losing Blair, even for a moment? Living even briefly in that void, that chasm of total, unforgiving isolation-- well, it was no fucking wonder.

He loved Blair. He needed Blair. He'd needed to know. Jim came back to himself, realizing with a hot shock of embarrassment that there were tear tracks on his face, wetness on Blair's throat-- and a flushed mark as well, not even neat enough to be a love bite. Christ. Tears and hickeys. He pulled back slightly. "Sorry, I..."

"No." Blair put his arms around Jim's shoulders, drawing him close again. "Not with me, all right? Not any more."

Jim took a breath, resting his head on Blair's shoulder again, surprised at himself and surprised how easy it was to just let go. To let it all go. To stay locked in Blair's arms, discovering comfort in the hollow of his neck, peace in the warm throb of his pulse and the musky scent of his skin. Fresh tears pricked at his eyes.

"I lost you," he whispered.

"No. I'm here." Blair curled up close to him, and Jim hissed as Blair's thigh brushed against his cock. "I'm right here," Blair whispered, and god, Jim was hard; his erection had flagged slightly during his moment of panic, but now the need for release was almost making him shake.

And when he lifted his head, brushing Blair's curls away from his face, tasting the softness of Blair's lips, his heart pounded with a new and joyous apprehension. This too would change him, would bind them, and Jim found uncommon joy in knowing that it was Blair taking his hands, interlocking their fingers and clutching Jim with uncommon strength.

Jim shuddered as his lover began to twist and writhe underneath him, the slickness of sweat and come contrasting with the wiry scrape of his hairy body and his hard and unyielding muscles.

"Oh, jesus," he gasped, "that's good, you feel so good..." Pushing Blair's hands down into the bed for leverage, he began to thrust tentatively against Blair's willing body.

"Yeah," Blair gasped, squeezing his hands harder. Sweat fired the easy slide as their palms kissed. "Come on, do it harder, do me--" Blair shifted, pulling his feet up onto the bed, clutching Jim's body between strong thighs, arching beneath him, writhing, "Jim, can you, oh--" He broke off, bucking his hips up against Jim's helplessly, "I want you to--"

"Oh, fuck--" Jim grunted, tensed, and came all over Blair-- shocks exploding in his gut, behind his eyes, sending flashes like fireworks up out of the darkness. Clutching Blair's fingers tightly, he thrust jerkily against Blair's belly, shamelessly, over and over, grinding their bodies together in a desperate attempt to draw out the moment until the ecstasy receded.

"Shit," he panted, eyes stinging, and tried to take a deep breath. Aftershocks permeated his body, relaxing every tensed muscle, down to his curled toes. Eyes closed, Jim wiggled his fingers in a weak experiment, and then clumsily began to unlace his cramped fingers from Blair's.

They rolled apart, and Blair stretched sensuously, arching one shoulder up off the bed before collapsing again. "Oh," he said, "that was so fucking good. Oh, Jim."

Jim blushed, kissed Blair on the temple, lay back, and tried to remember how normal breathing went. Eventually he shifted. "You have, um..."

"Hmm?"

"Tissues, or something?"

"Good thought." Blair said, pointing languidly. "Desk."

"Right." Jim reached over and snagged the box. "You want to go upstairs?" he asked after they were both reasonably cleaned up. "Your bed's a little cramped for two."

"'s cramped for one," Blair mumbled into his pillow.

"C'mon." Jim tugged at his arm.

"Mm-mm." Blair shook his head, pulling Jim down and tossing a knee over his legs to trap him. "It's late, it's warm, I couldn't move if I wanted to."

Jim shrugged agreeably, lying back. "Actually," he said, "we have to get up in four, five hours anyway to talk to the DA."

"What you mean we, white man?"

"Oh yeah, you left," Jim realized. "Annie's going to cut a deal. If we can get Guthrie--"

"Jim." A square hand landed gently over his mouth. "Sleep, okay?"

"Okay," Jim murmured against Blair's palm. Turning over onto his side, he gathered Blair in his arms, and pulled the covers up over them both.

Pale morning light filtered in through the curtained French doors to Blair's room, waking Jim up as the morning sunlight moved across the loft. He looked down at the dark head resting on his shoulder, not really wanting to wake Blair up. Feeling his warmth and life in every pulse and twitch and breath, for as long as humanly possible, forever-- that would be good, great. Heaven on earth. But still, they had to get moving. He sighed, and the slight movement of his chest nudged Blair out of his slumber.

"Mmph," Blair said sleepily, one hand moving up over Jim's arm. He clutched Jim's bicep for a moment, and then his eyes went wide. He jerked away, staring up into Jim's face.

"Yep," Jim answered, smiling. "It really happened."

Blair looked down at his hand on Jim's arm. His grip tightened a little, and he took a breath.

"Hell no, I'm not having second thoughts," Jim said, pulling Blair a little closer. "And I'm not pissed off, either. Well, maybe a little-- I mean, I should have figured this all out a couple of years ago, right? But now--"

Blair's mouth fell open. "Jim," he blurted, "you have to stop that, seriously."

"What?" Jim said, startled, loosening his grip on Blair's waist.

"Not that," Blair said, and laughed. Sitting up, he grabbed a pillow from over Jim's shoulder and hid his face in it for a second, shaking with muffled laughter. After a moment, he peeked over the edge and explained, "Look, Jim, no offense, but-- you can't be in my head all the time. It's creepy."

"Didn't I tell you last night I couldn't dial it down?" Jim growled, half-embarrassed, looking away. "So maybe you should have helped out, instead of jumping my bones."

"Jumping your bones?!" Blair gaped. "Exactly whose bones got jumped, man--" and then Jim couldn't keep a straight face any more and started snickering.

Blair shook his head disgustedly and whapped Jim in the chest with the pillow. Clambering out of the bed, he laughed to himself. "This is how it's gonna be?" Crossing to his closet, he pulled out his gray bathrobe and shrugged into it. "We do tests, you bitch about 'em. We have hot sex, you want to go back to the tests..."

"I'll tell you something, Chief-- if those old tests had been anything like last night, you'd have heard a lot less bitching," Jim said. He yawned as he got out of bed, scratching under one rib.

Blair was leaning against his dresser, obviously enjoying the view.

"What?" Jim asked, just to get Blair to look up at his face.

Blair grinned. "Well, I wasn't exactly expecting this reaction."

"What, this one?" Jim said, and kissed him hard and fast, wanting to drive away the last remnants of Blair's apprehension. The stubble rasping against his cheek was even more prominent than it had been last night; a strange sensation, but not unpleasant, not by any means. "I'll admit this is all pretty new to me, but I'm with you a hundred percent here."

"Pretty new?" Blair squinted at him, then stepped back. "Wait a minute, man. How new is pretty new?"

Jim shrugged expressively and stepped past Blair into the hall, leaving his clothes scattered on the floor. Sunlight glowed faintly through the balcony doors and Jim smiled, enjoying the sensation of the sunlight playing across his bare skin. "You know... pretty new."

"Oh, man." Blair covered his mouth with one hand. "So you just figured this out last night? That you liked me, I mean. In a sexual way."

Jim sighed, ducking into the bathroom. "What's the big deal?"

Blair reached out and blocked the door before Jim could close it. "Jim," he said earnestly, "I have a rule about this."

Jim laughed as he turned to the sink, running cold water and splashing it on his face. "Oh, god," he groaned. "You and your rules."

"Yeah, okay," Blair choked on nervous laughter as Jim scrubbed his face with his hands. "Two rules, then-- I don't eat at restaurants with synonyms for 'fat' right there in the name, and I don't sleep with virgins!"

"Oh, for crying out loud," Jim said. Leaning over, he shut the bathroom door firmly in Blair's face.

"I'm serious!" Blair raised his voice. "You don't even know, Jim--"

"Don't worry about it." Jim stepped into the shower and turned on the water, waiting for it to reach a warm temperature before stepping under the spray. "I'll learn to love again!"

The rush of water through aged pipes did little to muffle Blair's sharply muttered "Not if I have anything to do with it!"

As they stepped over the threshold into the Major Crimes bullpen, Jim instinctively laid his hand on the small of Blair's back to steady himself. Blair glanced up at him searchingly, but as Jim looked around, he was surprised and relieved to find that this morning, Major Crimes almost seemed like a different place.

Maybe it was because it was early. The morning shift had just started, and the bullpen was mostly empty. Rafe, Dills, and a uniformed cop were loitering next to the coffee machine, and Megan was across the room by the donut cart, dithering between a glazed donut and a maple bar. Jim laughed a little to himself, realizing that of all the people in the room, only Rhonda was actually at her desk and working. The morning sun gleamed in through the long windows in Simon's office and filtered through the blinds, lighting up Rhonda's blonde hair. She seemed pleased about something; Jim glanced away easily before he could tell exactly what, and breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe today wouldn't be so bad.

"Hey, Jim, Blair." Rafe said as they passed his desk, his voice clear of any resentment. "Morning."

"Yeah," Jim said, and headed for the donut cart. There was something different about Megan's hair; Jim observed her slight, tense knowledge of it before he actually noticed that it was a shade or two off-- closer to maroon than mahogany.

Crossing to the donut cart, Jim solved one of Megan's problems for her by taking the last maple bar. Then he twirled a finger next to his own ear till she blushed. "Hey, Connor. Do something different with your hair?"

"Yes, well." Megan smiled awkwardly. Ahh-- that was it, the stylist had screwed up. Left the color in too long or something.

"It's nice," Jim said. Handing his maple bar and a napkin to Blair, he dug in his pockets for some change. "Rafe was right; brings out your eyes. Sandburg, you want anything?"

"Um. I'm good," Blair said.

"Ellison," Simon said, and Jim turned to see his boss standing in the doorway of his office. "Good work yesterday," Simon said, and Jim could see his silent apology in the set of his shoulders, and under that his unchanged high regard for Jim. There was still a battle going on, an uncomfortable struggle with Jim's sudden strangeness, but partly with his own shortcomings as well. "D.A. Chambers is waiting for you in the conference room," he added gruffly.

"Good morning to you too, sir." Jim's mouth quirked a little, and then he gave up his poker face and grinned back, trying to project that it was okay-- hell, that as far as he was concerned, everything was great!-- and saw the tight lines around Simon's eyes disappear.

"Well," Simon raised his eyebrows, leaning against the doorframe. "Somebody's awfully chipper this morning."

"Hey, case closed! What's not to be chipper about?" Blair jumped in, just a little too brightly.

Simon raised an eyebrow, pointedly. "You don't have your guy yet, Sandburg."

"No. Well." Subdued, Blair cleared his throat, gesturing sharply to Jim. "C'mon, better not keep the DA waiting, man."

The representative from the District Attorney's office was Ted Chambers, a pretty good guy; Jim had met him a few times before. He nodded hello as Jim and Blair entered the conference room, then returned his attention to Camille Mason, sitting across the table, who was digging her heels in on one point or another. Annie sat at the end of the table, a paper cup of hot tea in her hands. Decaf, Jim noted by the scent, decaf because of the baby, although she desperately wanted a shot of something stiffer.

Casually, Blair pulled Jim over to the window, lowering his voice so as not to disrupt Ted and Camille's negotiations. "You're a psycho, you know," he muttered. "You're so bad."

"Where's the harm?" Jim asked quietly, through a mouthful of his maple bar. "They like each other. I can tell."

"I'm not talking about Rafe and Megan, I mean grinning at Simon," Blair whispered. "What the hell is that? And for god's sake, Jim. Stop humming."

"I'm not--" Jim said, and then realized that he was. He stopped.

"Gentlemen," District Attorney Chambers motioned them over to the table. "It appears we're ready to proceed..." He handed Jim the written form detailing the extent of Annie's cooperation with the police, and the reduced charges the D.A.'s office would be offering in return. "Looks good," said Jim, handing it back. "Thanks, Ted."

"Any time."

Jim escorted Ted to the door, then turned back to see Blair already sitting next to Annie, laying a hand on her shoulder supportively. She glanced up, and he took the apparently untouched cup of tea out of her hands, setting it on the table, next to the phone.

"Do you know what you're going to say?" Blair asked quietly. Annie nodded, smoothing her hands over her skirt, and picked up the phone.

Kenny answered on the first ring, and Jim cocked his head, eyes narrowing.

"It's me," said Annie. "I wanted to know if you still wanted me to, um, take care of the money the way we agreed?" There was an indrawn breath, and Annie interrupted before he could shout. "I just wanted to be sure, Kenny," she said quickly, her voice wavering. "They called me in to question me again--"

"You didn't say nothin' about--"

"I didn't tell them anything," Annie said, and Jim winced; if Guthrie were a tenth as sensitive to the emotions straining her voice-- but apparently he wasn't, because he was going into a detailed explanation of where the second half of his payment was to be deposited.

Blair waited a moment, then spoke under his breath. "Where is he? Can you hear anything?"

"Boats. Water," Jim muttered into Blair's ear. "He's at the waterfront,"

Blair made an impatient gesture. "Great, very good, Jim, that narrows it down to, what, nineteen miles? What else?"

"Um... music. Recorded music. 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'"

Blair made a face. "Okay. Some sort of weirdo with a CD player, whatever. What language are people speaking?"

"English immediately around him," Jim said. "But there's a lot of Spanish being spoken close by. A lot of Spanish." He listened again. "There's something strange about the music, some sort of odd, metallic percussion instrument." Then something in Guthrie's voice caught his attention. "We've gotta get out of here," he said.

"What, what, we're only halfway through the conversation here, man!"

"He knows something's wrong-- he's gonna bolt as soon as he hangs up the phone." Jim scribbled a note and pushed it onto the table in front of Annie: "Keep him talking as long as you can." Her voice faltered momentarily as she read it, then picked up speed again, determined: "But, Kenny, if somebody asks--"

He listened again when they were in the truck and was reassured to hear that she was still talking, and that Guthrie's voice didn't betray any knowledge that he was being strung along. "We've got about ten, fifteen minutes to find him," he told Blair. "After that, he's off for someplace offshore, and we may never see him again."

"Right. Can you hear him from here?"

Jim tried. "Maybe if I knew exactly where he was, I could follow a familiar sound or something," he said. "But no. We'll have to go with the clues we've got." He was weaving through traffic expertly, judging each driver's intent by the tilt of a head, the posture of a shoulder.

"Right," Blair said, ticking off on his fingers: "English around him, Spanish nearby, 'Yankee Doodle Dandy,' which you never hear except at parades or something, weird metallic... whoa. Did it sound like just one instrument, Jim? Was there enough for it to actually be a parade?"

"Yes." Then Jim thought about that. "No. The music itself was recorded, I'm sure of that. And it wasn't moving."

"But it sounded like a parade?"

"Maybe. I don't know," he began, but Blair was already grinning.

"Got it, got it, I know exactly where it is! You want Galliard Street at, um, one of the tree streets, Elm or Chestnut, there's a mercado and then right next door there's a dance school, man, what you were hearing was tap shoes-- wait! Left, left, left, Jim, Elm is a one-way street!"

By the time they pulled into the parking lot of El Supermercado Cardenas, Jim could hear Guthrie's voice over the pounding feet of the Little Charmers Dance Academy. The hitman's agitation was still increasing as they passed the mercado's storefront and turned the corner into a little shaded plaza. "He's gonna be unpredictable," he told Blair.

"Oh, great. A scared guy with a gun is my favorite kind of scared guy."

Jim looked past a cluster of women in bright suits, escaping from jobs at some bank or office, and there behind a chest-high stone planter full of yellow poppies was their hitman, pacing nervously with a cell phone to his ear.

"Him?" Blair sounded astonished.

"You were expecting maybe a sharkskin suit?" Jim responded.

With his red-blond beard, red T-shirt and denim vest, Kenny Guthrie wouldn't have looked out of place on the road crew of a Wynonna Judd concert. The wooden heels of his cowboy boots scraped the brick pavers as he paced. "Annie, I told you twice already. You put the money in the account at First National, and then you just forget about everything, you hear me?"

"I just wanted to make sure, Kenny--"

"'Cause once I'm out of here," Kenny interrupted, talking over her harshly, "we're home free, got it?"

"Listen, Sandburg, a guy this jumpy, our best strategy--" A sudden spike in Guthrie's pulse made Jim stop in time to hear him hiss, "You ratted me out, you treacherous bitch!" He was looking straight at Jim, and the phone clattered to the ground as he reached inside his vest.

"Police!" Jim shouted to the crowd, and then only slightly more softly, "Shit, Sandburg, he's gonna grab the girl in pink--" Jim started forward, but he was too late; Guthrie had already pulled the woman against him, tugging her head back by her sleek black hair and snugging the gun barrel under her jawbone.

"Stay back, now, just stay back," he said. "You don't want innocent people getting hurt."

Without breaking eye contact, Jim spoke softly to Blair. "He hasn't spotted you, Sandburg, you can--"

"-- get around behind him if I go through the mercado," Blair finished, already running back the way they came. Jim used his hearing to track him.

What he had to do was figure out a way to get the woman out of danger. The rest of the crowd had scattered, but at Jim's slightest move, Guthrie pressed the gun at her harder. "Not a step," he growled.

Jim chanced a look at the hostage's face. She was wide-eyed, afraid, but not panicking, and he could feel her focus her attention on her breathing, bringing it into a yoga pattern. He gave her a tiny nod, half "good job" and half "trust me," and turned his attention back to Guthrie.

"Listen to me, Guthrie," he said. "Don't be stupid. Let the girl go. She's got nothing to do with this."

Jesus, the man was strung tight. "You're standing between me and a nice fast boat to the Philippines, dude," he said. "You're standing between me and freedom. And she's standing between me and you."

In the mercado, Blair's voice stood out in the murmur of the crowd: "Por favor... los azules... gracias..." He was almost all the way to the back of the store. Then, in a slightly louder but still matter-of-fact voice: "Jim. There's a shipping entrance out the back. I'll be coming around the corner about fifteen feet behind him. Try to keep him from moving too far."

"So you tell me, dude," Guthrie spat, "why I shouldn't kill her and you both? I've got a body count as long as your arm. What's a couple more?"

Shit. Sandburg was the talker. Jim wished he was here to field this one. And then Blair's voice came again: "I'm in the alley. Might wanna remind him that cop killing's a hangin' offense."

Jim sighed. "Got any capital crimes behind you, Guthrie?" he asked, and saw that hit home. "Shoot the girl and you will be caught. Shoot me and you will die."

He saw Guthrie's arm jerk minutely, then tighten again. "You gotta catch me first," he growled. "I can play hide-and-seek in the islands for--"

And Jim almost felt the shock of a booted foot to his instep, knocking him off balance, the cold of a gun under his ear, the iron grip of a hand pulling his other arm free so that the hostage sagged to the bricks. His own gun was already in his hand as Sandburg's voice, steady as a day at home, said, "Come on, Jim, arrest the guy already."

"See, this is what we should do every day," Blair said as the elevator lurched and began to carry them up to the loft. Jim looked at him curiously, and Blair smiled. "Make sure and catch the bad guy by eleven. Get all the paperwork done by five. And kazam-- Simon lets us go early, and we actually get to eat at a decent hour. See how that works?"

"Sounds like a plan." Jim smiled as the elevator doors opened, but he tensed a little as they walked into the loft. He dropped his keys in the basket by the door, and turned to Blair, who was shrugging off his jacket. What now? He'd been thinking about it all day, really, and especially all afternoon as they worked on the arrest report. Would Blair want a kiss as soon as they walked in the door? Or would it be awkward?

It was suddenly awkward. He stood still, and watched Blair hanging up his jacket. Carolyn had always appreciated a 'hello' kiss, just as a gesture. But then, they'd worked in different parts of the building and not really seen each other during the day. It was strange. He'd never worked that closely with Carolyn, but he'd never missed her either. Why would he have? She was only a floor or two away.

But he'd been with Blair all day, it wasn't as if they hadn't seen each other-- and yet Jim missed him. He missed something, anyway. It had been hard, not being able to touch Blair the way he wanted to, now. Hard not to hold his hand in the middle of the bullpen. He missed last night, he realized. He missed what they'd shared, the intimacy.

"Hey," Blair said suddenly, "something's weird."

Jim glanced at him. "What?"

Pressing a hand to his forehead, Blair narrowed his eyes. "Someone in this room is thinking about sex." Jim stared at him for a second, and then grinned. "Oh wait. It's me," Blair said, smiling back. "Never mind."

"Don't you never mind me," Jim said roughly. Moving forward, he slid a hand into Blair's hair, and Blair's arms came around his waist. "I've been thinking about this all day."

"Mmhmm," Blair said against Jim's mouth, and they kissed deeply for a long while. And if this kiss didn't say hello, it said other things. Like I missed you and I'm right here. And welcome home.

"You're over the virgin thing, right?" Jim asked, breathing in the warm scent of Blair's hair. "'Cause I want to hear the story, there."

"What story? There's no story," Blair said distractedly, untucking Jim's shirt in the back.

"Sure there isn't," Jim said, grinning, and jumped slightly as Blair slid his hands slowly up Jim's back. "Cold hands, Sandburg... Okay, so what's this about my blue shirt, then?"

"Oh. See, I actually do know which one is yours," Blair confessed. "I just wear yours sometimes because..."

"Jesus, Sandburg-- I think that's the cutest thing I've ever heard."

"Fuck off," Blair said into Jim's shoulder, then squeezed him hard before letting go. "Anyway. I was saying something about dinner?"

Jim grinned, decided to let him change the subject for now, and headed into the kitchen. He was pretty sure there was chicken in the fridge. And-- yep, there was a whole container of peanut curry left over from the last time they'd ordered in. "How's Indian chicken sound?" he asked.

Blair snorted. Jim turned his head to look, and began to laugh at the sight of Blair barely restraining himself from making chicken noises. No-- a silly chicken voice with an accent.

"What?" Blair said defensively.

Jim stopped chuckling with an effort. "You're a fucking nut, Chief," he said fondly. "Set the table, will you?"

"Okay," Blair said, looking oddly pleased for some reason. "Sure."

The scent of spices and cooking meat were permeating the kitchen area as the food warmed up, making Jim's mouth water. He breathed deeply, stirring the curry as it heated up on the stove. A good red wine would suit a meal like this, he thought, and hell if it wasn't a special occasion. He turned around to suggest it to Blair, who was stretching up to reach the top cabinet, pulling down a faceted crystal glass in each hand.

"I'm putting wineglasses on," Blair said as he set the glasses down next to their plates. "you want to pick a red?"

"No, you go ahead," said Jim, and turned back to the curry, a quiet joy swelling in his chest. "I'm almost done."

It grew dark outside while they were fixing dinner. They hadn't turned on any other lights, only the hanging lamps in the kitchen and above the table, creating an warm island, a small space that they shared as they sat down together.

"So what are we now?" Jim asked, looking across the table at Blair.

Blair paused in the middle of a contented sigh, but he didn't look offended, just curious. "What are we now?" he repeated. "Uh, depends on what you're looking for. You want a handy label, a dictionary definition, or what?"

"How about a category?" Jim said. "I mean, basically what?"

Blair grinned, forking up a bite of curry and savoring it for a moment. "How about 'partners'?"

"Partners?" Jim repeated, startled at how well the old term still fit. Blair just sat across the table, smiling at his plate as he continued to eat. And after a moment, Jim began to smile as well. "Sure. I guess that works."

"Good," said Blair seriously, and picked up his wineglass. "To partners, then."

"Partners." Jim reached across the table and tapped his glass against Blair's, listening to the twin chimes as they rang together and faded. "I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page," he said, taking a short drink, "you know."

Blair looked at him over the rim of his own glass. "Yeah, I know. Pass the salad-- hey, wait a minute, what's this 'just wanted to make sure'? What happened to the Amazing Kreskin?"

"Don't call me that. I'm not kidding." Jim pointed with his fork.

Blair waved that aside. "Well?"

"You said not to, remember?" Jim took another drink of his wine; the first bite of curry he'd taken was beginning to make his tongue burn. "You said it was creepy."

"Yeah, but--"

"Hang on a sec." Jim stared over Blair's shoulder, rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth absently. After a few moments, Blair rolled his eyes and reached across the table for the salad himself. The movement startled Jim into movement again. "That's... strange," he said, coming back to earth. "Yesterday I was having trouble shutting things out. Last night especially. It just got to be too much..."

"And today that didn't happen?" Blair asked.

"No," Jim shook his head. "Well-- I don't know. It wasn't bad. No one was depressed, or pissed off, or guilty..."

"What, Annie Clay didn't have guilt?" Blair raised his eyebrows. "And, hey, you're the Sentinel and all, but Kenny seemed pretty pissed off to me."

"No," Jim said, then corrected himself. "No, they were, I guess. But... it was like it didn't touch me."

"Okay, so today for some reason, the more positive--" Blair stopped, and then began to laugh. "Okay, so I'm an idiot. God, why didn't I see this?"

"See what?"

"That you're not a magic decoder ring, you're a person, a person who's affected by his emotions," Blair explained. "And your emotions are tied in with your brain chemistry-- whether it's fear and anxiety or falling in love, you get these profound physical expressions of it, in the chemical metabolism of your brain. So it just makes sense that, well..." He sighed. "You have been kind of quiet, lately. Ever since Alex," he added, and looked startled as Jim reached across the table and clasped his hand. "I think it'd be safe to say you've had a lot of strong... not so positive emotions in your system."

Jim squeezed his hand and nodded slowly. "So, because I was off my game..."

Blair nodded. "Your emotional state affects the emotions you read from other people. Today you felt good, so you were more sensitive to certain... shades on the emotional spectrum, for lack of a better metaphor."

Jim began to chuckle to himself. "So you did fix it."

"Well," Blair began, but he was smiling, too.

"You did," Jim said. "You did help." Impulsively, he caught Blair's hand, eyes fluttering closed as he kissed the square knuckles once, then set to biting, gently. Blair sat very still, eyes drifting closed. "You always do."

"Ah. Yeah. But Jim," Blair said breathlessly, "you know I'm-- ohh-- all for the hot sex solution to any given problem, but realistically, you can't hang onto the bliss twenty-four seven, you know?"

"Why not?" Jim said, slipping his left foot out of his shoe. He grinned, encountering Blair's sock-clad ankle under the table. "I've got a good health plan. I'll go on Viagra."

"And stroke out in a month?" Blair fought to keep a straight face.

"And die happy," Jim agreed.

"Jim, I'm being serious," Blair protested. "You're infatuated with me right now, you've got love chemicals in your brain, endorphins and shit, no wonder you've been such a doofus-- oh," he said, as Jim's foot inched up a little farther. "Jim, come on. I'm being serious!" he said, tugging his hand out of Jim's grip.

"Is 'doofus' a scientific term?" Jim asked as he pulled his foot back.

Blair leaned across the table. "What I'm trying to say is, we can't ignore this. You'll either be depressed all the time because you're picking up stuff that makes you more depressed-- or, or, like today, the psycho bullpen yenta. And either way it'll affect your work-- you can't let your emotions color what you're reading off people, or you'll be worse at it than you were before this whole thing kicked up."

Jim grimaced. "So, any suggestions?"

"I don't know." Blair thought for a moment. "There's no way to totally regulate your emotional state. Besides, like, heavy medication. Maybe I should teach you to meditate," he mused.

"God," Jim groaned, and reached for the wine bottle, refilling his glass dramatically.

"Toughen up, Jim," Blair said unsympathetically. "It's not electroshock, I'm just thinking it'd be a good way to get you more in touch with your emotions."

"Just get my gun. Shoot me now," Jim teased. "But seriously."

"Seriously?" Blair teased back, leaning forward and running his foot up Jim's leg.

"Yeah." Jim grinned across the table at him. "We don't have to do that now, right? See, right now there's no problem, because I'm all... infatuated," he said, and Blair shook his head, laughing. "No, come on. We can put off the tests and stuff for a while. Just till we get through the honeymoon phase, right?"

"Okay, and how long--" Blair lost his smile suddenly, and his foot dropped to the floor with a soft thump.

Jim leaned forward, tense and apprehensive before he even knew what he was reacting to. "Blair?"

"Uh. Nothing." Blair was staring down at his plate, lips parted-- something, loss, shock, warring in him, and Jim was standing, pulling Blair to his feet and holding him close before he knew what he was doing.

"Blair, it's okay."

"You don't even know what I'm upset about!"

"So tell me."

"Well-- If other people's emotions can affect you like that," Blair blurted, "what if you were just happy today because I was so happy-- I mean, could you just be mirroring--"

Jim sighed and clamped Blair's head to his shoulder with one hand, cutting off the flow of words. "I loved you yesterday night before I even walked in the door," he said, "and I loved you on Sunday and I was so fucking lonely without you. And I loved you last month with your beat-up face and your shitty attitude. So I think," he said, feeling Blair relax against him, "I think you can believe me when I say it now."

After clearing the table, they were quiet for a while, and the comfortable silence lasted until they were almost done washing and drying the dishes. Standing by the sink, Jim had one more question waiting for an answer. He wondered whether he should even ask-- was it too blunt to just come out and say it? He could just wait until they were in bed and try to sense how Sandburg felt about it, but then, that was part of what Blair thought was creepy, so...

And besides, his other question had gone over okay. So finally Jim decided to just go for it. Rinsing the last plate, turning off the water, he turned to Blair. "So, um..."

Blair was leaning against the counter sleepily. His eyes were dark and heavy-lidded. "Hmm?"

"Last night, you said--" Jim frowned and started over. "You didn't exactly say it, and, well, we didn't get the chance, but I kind of... I got the feeling that you wanted..."

"I wanted something?" Blair prompted, and then blinked. Jim watched, fascinated, as Blair recalled parting his thighs to cradle Jim, hands clutching tight, pulling Jim's weight down on top of him... Blair's face flushed a little, a heat so slight no one else could have even perceived it.

And Jim's heart began to pound as Blair stretched slightly, and was suddenly utterly unreadable. Focused intently on his task, he folded his dishtowel slowly and deliberately, then set it down. Casually, Blair brought his right hand up to clutch his shoulder, rolling it to work out the kinks.

Jim watched tensely as Blair leaned back against the counter, studying the kitchen floor with a strange kind of smile, totally composed.

"We don't-- I just thought--" Jim broke off as Blair altered his stance, planting his feet firmly apart. Still looking away, he tilted his head, letting the curls fall away from one side of his neck. Jim made an involuntary noise low in his throat, almost able to taste the sweet salt of the skin, right there.

Slowly, Blair brought his hand up, trailing his fingers along a slightly reddened mark on his neck. Jim hadn't noticed it before, but oh, he remembered making it.

"Hey, Jim?" Blair began to smile as he met Jim's gaze, and god, it almost hurt-- it was like staring into the sun.

"Yeah?" he managed. His mouth was dry.

Blair grinned at him, wicked and wolfish. "Read my mind."

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