Thirst
by Leigh 57

It was always something.

Once it was the spectacularly awful rhymes of a love song he had heard driving back from the lake house in the misty pre-dawn fog. Last time it had been pomegranate body spray.

This time it was a voice.

At a few minutes past eleven on a Wednesday night, Jerry Jacks sat at a bar in Munich, a pint of warm beer in his left hand and a battered copy of Newsweek in his right. Intent on his reading, he paid no attention to the scattered remnants of conversation that swirled around the room and occasionally drifted his way.

But then he heard the voice, slicing through the ambient noise. American. Female. Strident. Low. Angry. Amused. You can be as charming as you want, but I’m not going to Paris with you. So why don’t you take your omnipresent Blackberry to check stock quotes at another table and let me finish my beer in peace? The shape of the consonants, the assurance packed into each word.

It sounded like her.

He knew it was impossible, that he was mistaken. His overactive imagination and bottomless capacity for self-torture ganging up on him again. Still, he shifted his eyes in the direction of the sound. When his gaze landed on a thirty-something blonde with short hair and green eyes, he shook his head at his own idiocy.

Jerry took another long sip of beer and glanced down at the display on his cell. For the thousandth time -- hell maybe the millionth -- his mind drifted back to the uncharacteristically cold November night almost six months ago now, the night when he had last seen her. Time and overuse had smudged the clarity of the images. The scene reminded him now of a newspaper clipping you save in order to commemorate something but eventually destroy by handling it too frequently.

Jerry quietly pushed open the door to her room, arresting its movement before it emitted the predictable squeak. Alexis was deeply asleep. The logical part of his brain shouted that he should do this immediately and get the hell out of there, but impulse temporarily prevailed.

He paused for a few seconds to watch her.

She wore a burgundy silk pajama top; her down quilt had slipped to her waist. He grinned, because he didn’t have to move the blanket at all to know that she wasn’t wearing the matching bottom half. She couldn’t stand to sleep with anything on her legs. Her hair was spread out over the pillow; he closed his hand into a fist to keep from sliding his fingers through the brown strands. Full knowledge of what it felt like to do so made resistance even trickier. The sliver of light that filtered in from the hall slanted across her face, and he sighed when he realized how exhausted she looked. Forcing himself to move, he walked to the bed and gently sat down beside her.

The moment his body weight depressed the edge of her mattress, Alexis bolted upright, her eyes wide and confused. He watched the split second it took for her expression to move from terror to recognition, slightly comforted by the knowledge that whatever emotional cocktail she was sipping at the moment, he could at least safely say she wasn’t frightened of him.

“It’s just me. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Goddamnit, Jerry. Why the hell are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?”

“Because I didn’t have time for a fifteen minute argument over whether I could come in or not.”

“You would’ve lost,” she muttered grumpily.

He smiled sadly, watching the way her fingers toyed with the flannel sheet in her lap. “I know. That’s why I picked the lock. I’ve got maybe an hour to be on my way out of the country and I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye.”

“What?” She rubbed her hands over her eyes as if the motion might clarify things.

Taking a chance, Jerry reached for her hand, his cool fingers closing over her soft, warm palm. She didn’t squeeze his hand in return, but she didn’t pull away either.

“Alexis, I can’t fill you in on all the details without negating the entire purpose of my departure, but the short version of the story is that Karpov and I have reached an agreement. If I disappear and in so doing make it clear that I was the one behind the counterfeit drugs, he rescinds the hit on you.” He cleared his throat. “So I’m going.”

She was shaking her head before he even stopped speaking. “That’s ridiculous. I know you and Karpov are in bed on this one, and I’m not backing off him just because you skip town.”

“Oh, you’ll have no choice, darling. It’s all arranged. You can’t prosecute the man without any evidence, and all the evidence will point to me.”

“Well, if you’ve incriminated yourself that nicely, I should call the cops and have them pick you up right now.”

“Go ahead. Do you want my phone?”

She opened her mouth and drew in a sharp breath but closed it without speaking, biting into her lip. As silence began to stretch in the room, a rubber band waiting to be snapped, she asked abruptly, “What did Jax say?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“You came here instead of going to him?”

Jerry swallowed, fighting the sensation that his throat was closing. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“He’ll call me. You won’t.” He released her hand and reached into the front pocket of his shirt, extracting a tiny slip of paper. “I can be reached at this number. Memorize it or don’t, but please give it to Jax and tell him to burn it.”

She accepted the paper, studying it for a few moments, the jagged edges white against her skin. When she lifted her eyes to meet his again, they glistened in the darkness, shiny with tears he knew she was too proud to let fall. Unable to control the compulsion, Jerry reached for her face.

He did his best to sear the next few seconds into his memory. Her skin soft against his hands. The way she sucked in a panicky breath when his lips touched hers. His body tightening as her tongue gently traced the tip of his, then made its way across the roof of his mouth. The familiar smell of her skin and the fragrance of her hair as he breathed her in, wishing he could distill everything about this tiny fragment of time.

The buzzing of his cell pulled Jerry reluctantly back into the present. He assumed that it was Jax (as no one else would be calling so late in the evening), but he shot a glance at the display anyway, just to verify which language he ought to be speaking when he answered.

His stomach somersaulted and lurched sideways when he read the number printed under “incoming call” on the LCD. His fingers, clumsy and disobedient, fumbled as he tried to flip the phone open. “Alexis?”

There was no response, but he could hear her breathing, and he wondered fleetingly how he could ever have thought that anyone sounded remotely like she did. His voice hoarse, he said all in a fractured torrent of words, “You don’t have to say anything. Just don’t hang up. Please. Don’t hang up.” Don’t hang up. He saw the words inside his mind as if someone were printing them on a blackboard.

“I’m not going to hang up.”

The sound of her voice reminded him of walking downstairs as a child on Christmas morning, the arrival of the actual event implausibly superior to anything his imagination had managed to conjure.

“Good.” He thanked whichever deity was on duty that even one syllable had made it past his constricted vocal cords.

“You left your coat.” He could hear the laughter in her voice. After a pause, she murmured softly, “I miss you.”

He relaxed the death grip he had on his beer and felt the smile he had never learned to suppress in her presence wash over his face. “Likewise.”

THE END