Cross the Line

Chapter four

It was gone two am when Naomi finally got home, and it was half past ten the next morning when she was woken by an unrelenting rap on her front door. Dazed, combing her bed hair with her fingers as she yawned, she dragged her unruly self to the door.

Her heart stopped for a moment when she came face to face with a very drawn pale looking Conor.  She instantly regretted not removing her make up the night before, she could feel the mascara crusty on her eyelashes, and wished she’d worn her new pyjamas instead of the tatty old vest and short shorts, talk about revealing. Self consciously she tried to tug the fabric further down her legs as she looked up at him. There was seeing your nemesis when you were at your best and feeling a million dollars, and there was being caught unaware and feeling like death.

Conor couldn’t take his eyes off her. Over the two weeks that he had known her, he’d been searching for her vulnerability, she was always strong, almost aggressive, yet he had the constant feeling that he needed to protect her, look after her, but until now he’d not seen a single reason why. As he looked down at her forlorn, tired face, unruly hair and skimpy pyjamas, he felt a strong desire to scoop her up and keep her safe. All animosity and anger towards her had long gone.

                “I’m sorry about yesterday.” Naomi offered looking up at him.

He shook his head gently, dragging himself away from his rambling thoughts. “I think that was my line?”

She shrugged, “I shouldn’t have hit you. I was just very angry.” This was the opportunity to make things good, before they started work, just as Emma had suggested, so she gestured him into the apartment. “Come in. Do you want coffee?”

Conor shrugged, “I didn’t come here for coffee and small talk, I just wanted to apologise for being such a Neanderthal. I was out of order. I should never have accused you of that. Two and two in my head obviously made five, and I regret my actions. I know that doesn’t really come close to explaining or excusing...” he shrugged. “I’m useless at this...”

Offering a half smile, she gestured to the lounge, “Have a seat. I’m just going to go and put something more appropriate on.” The need to gain some protective armour was greater than a cheap snipe at this man.

                “Don’t worry on my account!” He offered with a little more enthusiasm than was appropriate, then he tried not to smile, he was more than happy to follow those infinitely long legs into the lounge, but didn’t want to create yet more animosity.

After a glare, and the quickest shower in history, Naomi found her newest jeans, a bright red square neck, sleeveless linen tunic, and a pair of low heeled sandals. He was glancing through her CD collection when she finally emerged from her bedroom feeling a little bit more in control.

Looking up Conor sighed, the facade was back. Once again she was hidden away, all angst and disgust for reasons that existed before he’d acted so ridiculously the previous day, that slight intimacy he’d felt when she’d been awkward and vulnerable in her scant pj’s had gone.

Sighing he offered, “Nice tunes, you’ve got good taste.”

She nodded without answering, instead standing with her hands on her hips in question.

Conor knew he had to speak first, “Are we going to let all this animosity get between us? We’ve got to work together Naomi. Like I say, I really am sorry for the presumptions I made yesterday, my actions were...well disgraceful. But since I’ve arrived here you’ve acted as though I’m the bloody Grim Reaper. Maybe I took your anger towards me as guilt...I don’t know...I don’t know why else you’d hate me so much.”

Naomi knew he was right, she’d done everything she could, bar sabotage his work directly, to make things hostile for him, but she honestly felt he deserved that. He had hurt her friend, immeasurably; it was his fault that she wasn’t here anymore. She couldn’t forgive that, could she?

“I was thinking I should take you out for breakfast.” He offered when she made little attempt to reply.

She shook her head, suddenly aware of her rudeness “I do a mean bacon sandwich, and I’ve got THE best coffee! You’re right; we need to bury this hatchet...”

Conor lifted a hand to cover his mouth as the words; “preferably not between my shoulder blades!” came out in an uncontrolled rush, under his breath.

Bursting into laughter, Naomi managed to struggle out the words, “you beat me to that. Ok, ok, I make you breakfast, we take baby steps? Ok?” She knew she couldn’t let this fester, she had to get to know him, make her own decisions. Didn’t she?

Eyes wide with surprise at the gesture which seemed against all odds, he laughed, “sold!”

So he spent half an hour perched at the breakfast bar, watching her expertly make the coffee, and eggs and mushrooms to go with the bacon in huge hunks of a fresh baguette.

Sitting opposite each other silence prevailed as they attacked the mammoth sandwiches, silence that was until she laughed. There was no dignified way to eat something this big, and he was making a complete hash of it.

                “What?” he asked wiping a huge dollop of tomato ketchup that had landed on his chin.

She shrugged, “just made me laugh, Mr Serious-hotshot-lawyer, sat there wolfing my food down like a starving man, tomato sauce everywhere.”

                “I thought I was a fly-by-night?” When she scowled he laughed. “Anyway, it’s damn good food, and most needed with the hangover I’ve been fighting today.”

She stopped eating to look at him, “did you go out last night then?” She was more annoyed that he looked so good on lack of sleep and an excess of alcohol.

He nodded, “I needed at least five pints of beer to get rid of my anger! Then another five to stop coming over here to have it out with you!”

She laughed, “me too! Though in my case it was to hide after my Mike Tyson impression!”

They both started to laugh, and despite Naomi’s reluctance to like this man, she found herself enjoying his company, the conversation was light, easy and neutral. They shared a lot of common interests, horror movies, football, rock music; it was almost a natural instinctive action when they walked to the local shop together after eating.  With Sunday papers, the two headed back to hers and sat reading them over another jug of coffee.

                “So why do you dislike me so much?” he asked as he topped up their coffee cups.

                “I don’t dislike you, I don’t know you, and I’ve always kept myself to myself. Y’know?” She was deliberately evasive, she wanted to confront him about the way he’d treated Maisy, but something stopped her, she didn’t know what.

He took a long drink before meeting her eyes, “I know what you mean. I used to find it much easier to relax with people.”

                “You’ve never looked anything less than at ease with yourself!” she almost snorted.

He shook his head slowly, “things aren’t always as they seem, just because I’m polite or sociable doesn’t mean I’m comfortable.”

Silence swept between them and Naomi instantly regretted being so aggressive. They drank quietly, awkwardness wafting between them.

                “Sorry,” she eventually offered. “I kind of ruined the atmosphere.”

He shrugged apologetically, “it was a mutual thing! It’s a long time since I met someone new, let alone someone I actually like. Even if she hates me!”

                “I don’t hate you...”she snapped quickly, only to see his face break into a grin.

                “Gotcha!”

She shook her head is mock disdain. Later he left, but they had a basic foundation, the animosity was gone, things were awkward on times, but there was no childish point scoring or bitching.

A few days later she was visiting Simon in hospital, he was bored and she promised to read his horoscopes from his three favourite newspapers. When her mother died, her workaholic Dad was hardly ever around, so she’d started to spend more and more time at the Fisher house. Maisy was a flighty character, her mood so dependent on the weather, the people she was surrounded by...she was delicate mentally despite her feistiness and the trouble she caused, Naomi could see that looking back. She’d taken to reading her horoscope in all the papers when she arrived at the house before climbing the stairs to find her friend; it seemed to help to know what sort of mood she would be in. She’d honestly started to believe that the predictions were real.

Simon had laughed when she’d started to fret about Moon’s entering Mercury and bringing dark clouds for Maisy’s Scorpio sign, or the alignment of fire and earth causing explosions in her own star sign.  Over the months, years, it had become habit that she’d read both hers and Simon’s before Maisy’s every day, after she died it had stopped, but somewhere in the last few months of even years, they’d rekindled the tradition over a morning coffee break. Simon the sceptic loved her interpretation of both the words and any activities that might just tie in to the words.

Sat by his bed she lined up the three sources and read first his – romance from the letter B, money when Venus crosses the Sun, and the third stage of the moon meant he had a long journey to make.

Simon laughed, “Well my nurse today is Becky, do you think I may be about to be swept off my feet?” At that he gestured at his horizontal legs in his hospital bed.

                “Well they got the long journey right...even getting as far as the bathroom must seem like a distant dream!”

He nodded, “you’re not wrong, now read Maisy’s, I’ve never looked at a Scorpio since...”

Nodding her head slightly she turned the page, neither of them had read her horoscope since, but somehow today...it seemed right, and so she started to read, "'You may be highly opinionated today so you need to be careful how you express yourself.” As if Maisy would ever care!” She chuckled before continuing, “‘It's easy to put so much intensity into your words that others mistake your passion for anger. There's some bitter and some sweet late this week. The Moon's entry into sensitive Pisces on Friday warms up your House of Romance until Saturday night, inspiring imaginative ways to play. Yet loving Venus' union with your potent ruling planet Pluto on Thursday is anything but mellow. Sharing intimate secrets as kindly as you can may be hard work but is a powerful step toward healing relationship wounds.’”

She closed the paper and sighed, “I miss her every day you know Simon, still.”

He nodded, “I know she was larger than life. I wonder what scrapes she’d get you dragged into, and if she’d have finally found happiness. There was no one person out there who could’ve handled her!”

                “How can you be so friendly with him though? I don’t understand that bit.”

He turned to look at her surprise on his face, they’d never discussed Maisy’s suicide, the discovery by a jogger of her body hanging from a tree a few days before her eighteenth birthday, “Who? What do you mean?”

Naomi floated back to the last time she’d seen Maisy, a few weeks after she’d slept with Conor at the party, she’d been up and down since, high when he bothered to acknowledge her, low, flat when he didn’t. That evening she’d floated into Naomi’s bedroom beaming from ear-to-ear. She was going to London to stay with Simon, it meant she’d see Conor and she’d laid out her plans in no uncertain terms. A party, followed by a night of passion, she’d settled for nothing less.

The next morning Naomi had woken to an answer phone message, Maisy crying, Conor had humiliated her in front of her family, turned up to the party with another woman, flaunted this raven beauty to everyone, then laughed out loud at  Maisy’s ‘schoolgirl crush’. To Maisy this was worse than anything; she was belittled, made to feel so insignificant.

The next evening she was found, dead.

Shaking her head, Naomi looked up at Simon knowing that there were tears in her eyes, “Conor...it was him rejecting her, humiliating her that made her...do what she did.” She’d never been able to vocalise the words ‘kill herself’, for some reason it sounded so much worse.

                “What?” Simon was struggling to sit up even though he could barely bend at the waist. “What are you talking about?”

                “He slept with her, a few weeks before she died, she thought he loved her...instead he turned up to a party with another woman and then proceeded to humiliate her, call her a child. She was devastated.”

Simon was shaking his head, “none of that happened Naomi, I know that for a fact. Conor had got married a few weeks before she killed herself; he was on honeymoon when she died, he would never have been at the party.”

Naomi shook her head, “But she TOLD me, when she lost her virginity to him, then a few weeks later...she called me in the night crying, breaking her heart.” She couldn’t fathom Simon’s denial of that.

Reaching out he took her hand, “how have we never discussed this in the last six years? Look, she was sick, we all knew that. My parents pretended she wasn’t, but she was so up and down love, honestly. Things were crashing around her, I wanted her sectioned, taken to hospital, assessed, treated...but my parents were living in denial and wouldn’t agree to it. Poor Maisy, she was so troubled and at the end she didn’t know what was reality and what was fantasy. YOU were the only one she seemed consistent with, that’s why my parents were so keen on you being there all the time.”

Naomi was stunned, Simon could see that she was struggling to understand this different story, so he squeezed her hand again, “go and see Steph, ask her for the fireproof box in my study, you never wanted to read her journals at the time, but maybe now you should.”

She nodded numbly, “I’ve been so awful to Conor...shit!” She felt nausea overwhelming her, could she have got it wrong? She needed to read those journals rapidly.

Simon smiled, “he’s a good bloke, and he won’t bear a grudge!”

As Naomi drove her tiny car across town she wasn’t so sure. It was four in the morning when sitting cross legged on her bed, she lowered the last of the five journals, she’d cried through boxes of tissues. The books were no real insight into the rantings of her best friend’s mind, but she started to see some of her despair, her fantasy world, her desperation. She couldn’t recognise events or people; everything was melded together into a mishmash. Her poor, poor friend.

For Naomi there was a new sense of loss and devastation, how had she not seen this back then? How had she let Maisy’s death crucify her so?

There was no coffee on his desk, no pile of opened mail, and no smell of fresh yet floral perfume greeting Conor as he entered the office, or rather unlocked the office with keys he’d not had to use until that day. In the weeks since he’d been covering for Simon Naomi had beaten him to the office every day, and the fact that the coffee was always brewed and she was absorbed in her work seemed to indicate she had never just arrived.

So the empty office at nine am confused him.

He was wrestling with a ridiculously complicated coffee machine when a waft of perfume hit his nostrils. Turning he felt a smile grace his lips before he even saw her, and when he did, he froze. She looked dreadful, puffy red eyes, her usual lustred hair seemed lank, lifeless, scraped back into an aggressive ponytail. She still wore those divine heels under her smart business suit, but today she stirred his protective side as oppose to his sometimes wayward libido.

                “Bloody hell Naomi, are you ok?”

She shrugged, “I’m fine.” She continued bustling at her desk, and Conor turned back to the coffee battle. He appreciated from his larger family that an upset woman is a dangerous woman and he was happy to keep his distance for the moment. This didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned; he just wasn’t after another crack across the face.

After a few grunts, Naomi stood from her desk and paced across the office to the small kitchen.

                “It’s just a simple coffee machine!” she hip barged him out of the way and took over efficiently making the pot of coffee. Whilst she was stern, almost aggressive, he knew it was a front, and he was happy to play dumb arse if it cheered her up a bit. 

He was engrossed in some paperwork when she brought in the mug of coffee he really needed to get the day going and caffeine was a great kicker.

                “Thanks. Are you ok? Do you want to take some time...?”

                “I’m fine. But...” She owed him a huge apology, she knew that, and that was what was making her so prickly. When she was wrong she admitted it, but it wasn’t as simple as that.

                “I’ve got the Owens party coming in any minute for a quick catch up on their case. Shall we take a slightly longer lunch and just chill a little?” When she raised her eyebrow he chuckled, “we won’t be skiving, and if it makes you happy, I’ll work late to make up the time?”