Author's webpage: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jacquez/writing/fanfic.html

Author's notes: For Mary Ellen.

Stranger than Kindness
by Laura JV
for Mary Ellen

I didn't go to Blair's wedding. I didn't even request the time off of work, and Simon and the others shrugged and left town without me.

When his first daughter was born, three years later, he didn't even invite me. I sent a present and a check to start a college fund and Blair knew enough not to send pictures.

He doesn't bring his wife or his children with him when he comes to Cascade. I've never seen them, never heard their voices, never smelled them on him. Simon told me once that Blair's wife was pretty, that the kids looked just like him, but I pretended not to hear him.

It's an easy enough thing to pretend. My senses are here, operating, functioning perfectly--but I don't tend to use them, and Simon thinks that they left when Blair did. At night, I like to stand on the loft balcony and stretch out everything, letting myself fly, but I have to be careful. I set an alarm to bring me home after an hour, and I never let myself go looking for Blair Sandburg.

Because Blair's not here, not within my range. It's as simple and as complicated as "he left me." He realized before I did that this wouldn't work; that by staying with me, he was marking me as different; that by partnering with me, he would raise questions best left in their graves. He went through the Academy and Simon wrote him a recommendation and he went to Seattle, where he's the best homicide detective in the city, bar none.

The night he told me he was leaving, he kissed me and slammed me against a wall, his motions jerky and desperate. We left each other bruised and sore, and he slept curled against my side, his grip on me unbreakable even in sleep.

The night before he left, he made love to me slowly--the practical application of everything he'd learned about me in the years we had been partners, in the week we had been lovers. I tried not to think that it was the last time, but it was, and I savored every instant. Every sound, every movement: the last time he would do this, the last time he would touch me, the last time I would taste him.

He calls me every week, runs me through a quick sensory drill, and says good-bye.

And, five years after he left, he started coming back to Cascade.

The first time was a business trip. A joint operation between the Seattle and Cascade PD's, and his partner watched, amazed, as he and I slipped back into our partnership without so much as a thought. After five years, we could still read each other. He still knew me, intimately, as I still knew him.

"Why don't you come by the loft, Sandburg?" I asked. "I'll cook you dinner."

"Noodles?"

"Yeah."

"OK."

We never got to eat the noodles. His kiss was as savage and desperate now as it had been the first time, and I backed away. This wasn't Blair, my Blair: my Blair would never cheat on his wife, never betray her.

I managed to ask about her.

"Shut up," he said, and tangled his fingers in my hair, his body pressed against mine.

Five years during which nothing had tasted as sweet as Blair Sandburg's mouth defeated all my noble intentions, and I found myself driving into that willing body, watching the sweat run over him and pool in the small of his back as he braced himself on my bed.

The three days he was in Cascade were the best of my life up until that point. He never mentioned his wife, and I didn't bring her up again.

I heard his partner transferred shortly after they returned to Seattle. Rumor is that the guy went straight to their captain and said "Sandburg's already got a partner."

I don't know if it's true, but in a way I hope it is.

Six months later, I came home and found Blair leaning against the loft door. "Sandburg," I said, my mouth dry.

"Hey, Jim," he said.

I let him in.

For the past four years he's come once or twice a year, and every time I think it's the last. Every time I kiss him and think that nothing has ever been like this before, that nothing will be like this again, that we're each other's pain and pleasure and everything in between. Every time, we say almost nothing until we're finished, naked and sweatly and sometimes hurting and sometimes just tired, and then we talk about everything except his wife and kids--he has three now, two girls and a baby boy.

And then he leaves in the morning and never tells me if he'll be back.

He knows I'll be waiting the next time he shows up, if he shows up.

I know he loves his wife and his children, and that I'm simply an addiction he cannot break, the man he's forever tied to.

I know.

And still I wait, knowing everything he's sacrificed before, knowing everything he risks now. It would be kinder not to wait, to push him away, to not give in.

But this has nothing to do with kindness.

So I wait.

The End