Olivia (27 page)

“Oh! Hang on!” George disappeared into the office. He came back a few moments later and loaded a CD into the jukebox. He slid a handful of quarters in the coin slot, and seconds later John Cougar Mellencamp brought Olivia all the way home.

George held out his hand and Olivia slipped hers in. He spun her around and into his arms and kissed her. Olivia and George danced and sang and acted out the lyrics while Clete settled onto one of the bar stools, sipped his beer, and watched. George and Olivia danced to a few more songs then he left the dance floor to get more beers and Olivia looked over at Clete.

“Are you ready for your dance lessons now?” she asked with a giddy grin.

“Uh…” He looked around to see if she was talking to someone besides him. As if. “I don’t need dance lessons.”

“Yeah, you do!” She laughed. George’s quarters still had credits on the machine and she sifted through the play menu trying to find the perfect song for Clete.

George pointed to one of Olivia’s favorite songs. “What about this one?”

“Too hard for his first try.”

“How about some Lil’ Wayne?”

“Don't want to scare him off.”

“This one then?”

Olivia shook her head and flipped through more titles. Clete sighed and shifted his feet and looked nervous.

Her eyes lit up when she found the perfect song. “
Ooh!
This one!”

“No way!” George laughed.

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll kill him if you dance with him to that one,” George said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you about kill me every time we dance to that one, and I'm used to dancing with you. Pick something milder.”

“I do, huh?” She smiled.

He smiled right back at her. “Yeah, you do.”

She leaned into him and kissed his cheek near his ear, and whispered, “Poor baby.”

“It’ll take more than that to make me feel better.” George tapped his cheek.

Olivia kissed him again. “I’ll make it up to you tonight.”

“Promise?” he whispered. His hand traveled down her back and around her curves.

As Olivia’s eyes drifted shut, she caught sight of Clete inching his way toward the door. She snapped to attention and commanded him to stay. She backed away from George and flipped through the titles faster before he could make another break for it. The perfect song caught her eye, and she pushed the button without asking George’s opinion.

“What did you…” he started to ask, but when Flo Rida’s popping dance track “Low” started, he laughed. “Aw, hell! Better buckle up, Clete. You’re in for one helluva ride.”

“Oh, hush now, George. This is the perfect song for beginners.” She took Clete’s hand in hers and pulled him to the dance floor

“What planet are you living on?”

“Should I be afraid?” Clete asked, his face betraying that he already was.

“You should be terrified.” George leaned against the jukebox and took a drink of his beer, settling in for a good laugh.

 “Ignore George and put your hands on my hips.”

Reluctantly, he did.

She started to move with the music and said, “Feel the rhythm of the music and move your body with mine.”

They moved jerkily together. Olivia tried to get Clete to loosen up, but he was loaded down with a hundred pounds of cop gear and what little movements he did make were restricted by the weight. Every time she tried to press into him to help guide his body, he stiffened up and stopped dancing altogether. Clete on the dance floor was like a rock in a hurricane. He was solidly anchored, stubbornly immovable, impervious to the rhythm of the earth.

“Clete!” she cried out in frustration midway through the song. “This isn’t me doing a pole dance where you’re the pole! You have to move your ass! Haven’t you ever had sex?”

“What?” Clete asked in horror and took a quick step away from her.

“Sex, Clete! Sex! The good kind of sex—the nasty, sweaty, bumping and grinding kind of sex. Sex and dancing go hand in hand,” she said. “Play it again, George, so I can show him.”

George started the song over. He leaned against the jukebox with a shit-eating grin plastered on his face as Olivia grabbed Clete and forced her hips into his. She held him tight against her as she undulated in a slow, seductive motion.

“Feel that?” she asked. “Feel how the rhythm enters your body and courses through your blood? Just close your eyes and let everything else go… let the heat and the passion of the moment consume you as you imagine we’re making love to each other in time to the music.”

“What? No!” Clete turned red and ripped away from her in embarrassment. “I’m not doing that!”

“Why not?” Olivia stuffed her fists onto her hips. “I’m not suggesting we actually
make
love! Just dance with me like you want to.”

“I… what…” Clete sputtered and turned an even deeper shade of red.

“Come on, just try it.”

“I can’t…” Clete started to protest again but Olivia brought a hand up to silence him.

“Fine! How about you watch me and George for a minute? Watch what we do, how we move, and then me and you’ll try it again.”

George started the song over for the third time, then pushed away from the jukebox and swept Olivia up in his arms. He led her in a smooth, sexual dance, and she closed her eyes and allowed her body to listen to everything George’s body wanted to do to her. The pace of the music controlled their dance and their hips, and Olivia leaned back in his arms so her hips could press tighter into his as they gyrated in a fast, pulsing, erotic grind.

She got hot, he got hotter, and before the song was over she forgot Clete was even in the room. George melded her body into his, fusing them together until they shared one breath, one heartbeat, and they danced through another slower, sultry song.

Clete cleared his throat. “Thanks for the beer and… everything,” then made a break for the door.

“Ok,” Olivia murmured dreamily and waved a half-hearted good-bye. A split-second later, she snapped out of her trance and lifted her head from George’s shoulder. “Clete!”

“I'll catch you guys later.”

“Oh, come on, hang out for a bit and have another beer.” She put on her cute, pouty face and Clete started to sway in her favor.

“I don’t know…”

“Why don’t you stay for a bit and keep Liv company while I go and catch up on some work in the office?” George suggested. “She promises not to try to make you dance anymore. Don’t you, Liv?”

“Boo! You’re no fun,” Olivia play-pouted, but she promised. “I swear we’ll just sit here and drink George’s beer.”

She could tell he didn’t want to, but Clete came back over to them.

“Behave yourself,” George warned Olivia. He gave her a quick kiss then headed toward the office.

Clete watched George leave, and as soon as he was out of ear-shot, Clete asked Olivia, “So, I take it he lied about being gay?”

Her jaw dropped. “How did you know I was talking about George?”

“I took a wild guess.”

Olivia watched as he finished his beer and pulled two more out of the cooler behind the bar. He was always a little quiet, a little reserved, but as he walked back to her he also looked a little sad, and she worried about him. With everything that was going on in her life, it made her wonder if something was going on in his besides a crazy girl trying to force him to dance.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

“I don’t believe you.” She motioned him over to a table in the corner and waited until he’d settled in to ask, “So, what’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Something’s wrong. I can tell.”

“Seriously, Olivia, nothing’s wrong,” Clete said.

“Fine, don’t tell me then.” Olivia tried to look disinterested. “See if I care.”

Clete sighed and leaned back in his chair. He looked like he wanted to talk, but he didn’t say anything.

“So how’s Allie?” she asked, assuming his daughter was the problem. Kids always seemed to be the problem in parents’ lives.

“Real good,” he said with a hint of a smile. “She keeps talking about you.”

“She does?” Olivia asked in surprise.

“You made quite an impression on her.”

“Yeah—the wrong kind,” she said with a huff.

“I probably over-reacted that night,” he said as a way to apologize, and he actually did look as though he felt bad. “But Allie’s my life, and if anything happened to her—”

“I understand.”

“Until you have a child, I don’t think you will.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The love you feel for a child is different than the love you have for anyone else,” Clete tried to explain. “It’s fiercely protective and self-sacrificial. Her life is more valuable than any other person’s in the world—especially mine. I would step in front of a train or stare down the barrel of a gun and take a firestorm of bullets to save my little girl’s life.”

“You’d take a bullet for me, too. You have to. It’s your job.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “Not for you.”

“Sure you do. You’re a cop.”

“I would fire a bullet for you, but I don’t have to take one,” he said.

“You’d take one for me,” she said with a smile.

He looked at her for a long, silent moment, and then admitted, “I probably would.”

“I knew it.” She smiled bigger. “You love me.”

“Now that might be pushing it a little.” He smiled back at her, but it wasn’t a happy smile. It didn’t reach his eyes. Not even close. He sat up straighter and held his beer bottle loose in his hands, lazily spinning it on the table. “How’s Eugene doing?”

“Ok, health-wise, but he’s going a little crazy in the hospital. He wants to come home.”

“I know how he feels.”

“How could you possibly know how he feels?”

He watched his bottle spin another rotation, then lifted it to his lips and took a drink. He held the beer in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. Without looking at her, he said, “Because I had a long stay in the hospital once.”

“Oh.”

“It would drive anybody crazy,” Clete said.

“Yeah. Especially my dad.” Olivia nodded absentmindedly. “What were you in the hospital for?”

“Nothing.” He looked past Olivia and said, “It was a long time ago and not a big deal.”

“How long ago?”

“A few years.”

“If it was a long stay then it was a big deal. Were you sick?”

“No.”

“Car accident?”

“No.”

“You get shot or something?”

When Clete didn’t answer she let out an “
Oh!
” of horror. Man, she felt like an idiot for suggesting he take a bullet for her. She wished she had a filter that could stop every moronic thing that popped into her head from spewing out of her mouth like diarrhea.

“What happened?”

“I took a bullet for some crazy girl.” He’d said it with a joking tone, but Olivia could tell he didn’t find it funny, and neither did she.

“What really happened?” she asked.

He shook his head a bit and shifted his eyes to look at her.

“We got a call about a domestic disturbance, and when we got there, this guy was tweaking on meth, holding his sister hostage in their parents’ basement. Both of them were just kids. Teenagers. The parents weren’t home. There were about seven other teenagers down there, half of them high, but the brother was completely out of it, incoherent, screaming and ranting, waving a gun around. The girl was about fourteen years old, scared to death, cowering back deep in the corner. I tried to talk the guy down, tried to keep him distracted while my partner worked his way around the room to the girl. It all happened so fast… Shots were fired. I got hit. So did one of the other kids down in the basement. My partner lunged for the girl, and the brother turned the gun on himself… Two kids died that night. I got lucky.”

“I wouldn’t call getting shot lucky.”

“I’m not dead,” Clete said simply.

Olivia placed her hand on top of Clete’s. She wanted to lean over the table and give him a hug, but he looked like even her touching his hand was too much, so she didn’t. But she didn’t let go of his hand, and he didn’t pull it away.

“How could you stand to go back to work?” she asked. It was crazy because she barely knew the guy, but she worried about him. A lot. The idea of him out on the street, intentionally chasing down the evil that comprised her nightmares awakened a maternal instinct deep down inside her soul that she never knew she possessed. The guy was stout and strong, and could probably bench-press a rhinoceros, but she had this overwhelming desire to wrap him up in bubble wrap and cradle him safe against her breast. “Weren’t you scared?”

“No.” He shrugged. “It was hard, but I love my job.”

“But what about Allie?” Olivia asked.

Clete ripped his hand away. “What about her?”

Wow. She’d pushed a
huge
button with him on that one. “Don’t you worry how your job affects her?”

“I do what I do because of Allie.”

“But—”

“End of discussion.”

Clete pushed his chair back and wandered over to the jukebox to ensure the conversation ended, but Olivia wasn’t easily deterred. If she gave up every time someone wanted her to stop talking, she’d never utter another word again. She followed him and tried a different approach, one that she hoped would net the same result—that he would see the foolhardiness of his ways and find a safer, saner way to make a living.

“Is your job the reason you and your wife got divorced?” she asked. It seemed like an obvious ‘yes’ to her. Batman was single for a reason, and Olivia was pretty certain it had to do with the danger-level of his job and not his skills in the bedroom. But, then again, he couldn’t dance worth a crap…

“No,” he answered in a short bark and turned away from her.

“Oh.” And here she’d thought she’d had him figured out.

He looked at the clock on the wall and then toward the front door with longing. With a sigh, he turned to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Seriously?”

He shrugged.

“I thought you didn’t want to dance with me.”

“Not that crazy club dancing you and George were doing. Real dancing… like a grownup.”

Olivia huffed. “George and I dance like grownups.”