2
Today has been a hot steaming pile of shit and it’s barely ten a.m.
Annie turned me down again this morning when I put my arm around her and tried to cop a feel, pushing my hard cock into the crack of her ass. It’s always been our love language. I wake up horny, she falls on her back, I get my release, we get on with our day. But she’s turned me down again just as she has for the last few months. I know she’s not on her period, so it can’t be that, and some nights I feel the mattress shaking and her body tense beside me as she touches herself, so I’m pretty sure she’s not getting it from someone else. But she won’t talk to me, not unless her face is red and the words are coming out in screams. To top it all off, I didn’t have time for my wank in the shower. One of the girls needed the toilet and the downstairs one was occupied, apparently.
We fought before I left for work. She was pissed at me for getting in late again. I asked her what else she wanted me to do to pay the bills. Of course, she threw in the fact that I should have finished high school and gone to some prestigious university, maybe learn how to spell. But fuck her, she knew my circumstances. I told her that if I was doing such a shit job maybesheshould get her own fucking job. She looked at me for a long moment before she hissed that her job was the most important – raising our girls – of course. There was no replying to that one.
My gaze roams the room and lands on the spider web attached to the bottom of Ben’s seat. He hasn’t noticed it in the two weeks it’s been there. There’s some kind of dead animal trapped inside. I stare at the cocooned corpse and wonder how long it tried to fight before it succumbed to its inevitable death. How long it tried to fly or jump away from the sticky webs that held it as it watched the rest of the world go by, until eventually, it gave in, overwhelmed by the impossibility of the task. At what point did its survival instinct buckle? When did it give up? When did it determine that enough is enough? When will I?
I drag my gaze away from the web and try to focus on the heap of papers in front of me. A thin film of sweat coats my skin, trapping wisps of hair against my forehead and sticking my shirt to my body. Sun pours through the large windows at the other end of the room making the office feel like an oven. I peel my tongue off my palate, lick my dry lips and attempt to close a few loose ends in my lethargic, barely legible handwriting.
“How’s it going, Rossi?” My head jerks up to see Sergeant Williams hovering like an unwanted stray near my desk. He’s only two years older than I am but looking at him you’d never know it. His overindulgence in burgers, fish and chips and bourbons have his three chins hanging over his collar, his brow perpetually oily, and his uniforms covered in sweat as he moves his overbearing gait awkwardly around the station. He lives his life as if to dispel any suggestion that “fat” should be auto linked to “jolly”. He is the most sullen and cynical bastard I’ve ever met and never sugar-coats anything that isn’t edible. I appreciate that about the guy. It’s honest, and it’s his best quality if you ask me.
“Shit, as you can tell.”
His piggy eyes look over my desk and a ‘fuck you’ smile creeps over his features. “Good.”
I know it’s a jab about what happened. Everyone still has a stick up their ass about that. “Fuck off,” I hiss through my tight jaw, and the fucker chuckles as he turns to step away, but his bulk crashes against my desk and the clumsy fuck drops his polystyrene cup of steaming tea all over my fucking desk. The brown water seeps through the paper in rivulets and soaks into everything.
I push off and away from my desk to reach for some tissue paper and my chair clanks on the floor. Every head on the floor turns towards me as I pat at the files in a flustered hurry. Williams is trying to help, but he’s slow and his movements only serve to smear more of the sticky drink all over my desk.
He apologises once before leaving me to the remains of my files. I pick up a sheet and it crumbles in my hands, the frail paper dissolving with the moisture.
Fuck.
I rescue what I can and the realisation I will need to fill in even more paperwork about this incident and will have to go through each file to see what damage has been done slowly sinks in. I push my palms into my eyes and rub furiously, trying to contain the rage that’s been building inside me all morning. When the phone at my desk goes off, I stare at it, not prepared to deal with whatever other bullshit this day has to offer.
Staring at it doesn’t make it stop and soon, I once again feel the eyes of other officers as they bore through me.Fuck.I grab the phone and bring it to my ear barking my hello.
“Hello?” The voice on the other end is feminine and young and vaguely familiar. “Is this Sergeant Detective Rossi?”
“Yes, how can I help you, miss?”
“Oh, I found you.” I can hear relief bleeding into her voice. “It’s Amy. From the other night.”
“Yes, right, hi.” My heart stutters for a micro second and my mind’s eye flashes with images of her tiny fucking skirt. I’m sure by now they can’t be real anymore; my mind has made that skirt exponentially shorter and her ass a thousand times more desirable. I grab a tissue and pat down my desk just for the sake of keeping my mind on doing something else. “What can I do for you?” I’m short and abrupt and still mildly irritated at everything that’s happened this morning.
“Did I catch you at a bad time?”
I clear my throat. “No, it’s fine.” I take a long breath. “How can I help you?”
“Well, I was wondering if I could take you for a cup of coffee, to thank you for the other night.”
“Thank you, Amy, but it was nothing. Just doing my job.”
“I know.” She states it matter of factly. “But you guys always do so much and your work really is thankless. I noticed how Derek spoke to you. I bet you get that all the time.” Her empathy is sweet but misplaced.
“Thanks again, but really, I can’t accept.”I want to, but it’s against policy.
“Please?” She stretches out the word adding a cute little accent to it, and it makes me think of that cat in Shrek with the big round eyes.
“Amy, I—”
“Tell you what, Sergeant Joe.” She pauses for a brief moment, and I find myself falling into my chair, the soaked tissue in my hand dropping with a splat into the bin by my feet. “I’ll be at Federation Coffee for the next few hours. Maybe you’ll show up, maybe you won’t. I mean it’s not breaking the rules if we run into each other by accident, is it?”
“The one out in Brixton?”What the fuck am I doing?
“Yes.”
“Look, Amy, I’m grateful but—”
“—Federation Coffee. Bye, Joe.” The line goes dead.
I set the handle back into the cradle and look at the shit show on my desk before I let my head fall back into my chair. The fan spins lazily above our heads, moving the smell and heat around the cramped office. I look at the clock, then back at my desk. Fuck it, the city pays me for a one-hour lunch break and I’m going to take it.