1 Feel You

The phone rang and she picked it up immediately.

A wicked voice said, " Inspector, still going to Sunny Apartments to look into a murder?".

Jane replied, with a small grin," Stop trying to joke about it. She was my best friend, idiot.".

She sighed heavy and paused. She checked if her hand was still shaking. It wasn't.

She said," Sorry. This case.... its.... you know."

David listened and said," Hey, no. You've been through enough. You don't need to say sorry. I should not be joking regarding this. I feel you. I just thought you might need a little dose of that laughter."

Jane was nervous. Her wounds inside were still healing and she needed a little time to fully grieve. Michelle was her one true friend from her childhood and losing her in an unfortunate incident such as murder was still a shock after a month. David found her in a coffee shop, trembling and barely able to hold her coffee cup. He came forward and told her to sit with him in a booth. They began to talk. Well, it was more of her talking, slowly and steadily and him listening, patiently. He didn't touch her hands to show sympathy, didn't ask her questions. He just listened. He walked her home. They exchanged numbers although he was a bit reluctant. And through the period of these three dark weeks, he was always there to listen.

She looked at the time. More three hours to go, she thought. It was going to be afternoon soon and she thought that she needed to get some shut eye before her car reached Michelle's apartment. She was ready to go into Michelle's room after three weeks of finding the courage to do this. Her captain was kind enough to give her the time to grieve and wait for her to get into the case once she was on her on feet.

She yawned and held her phone close. She said," If I reach back today. Will you stay the night with me? It'll be our first.".

There was a brief silence. David cleared his throat and spoke.

" If you reach back tonight. I won't ever have to leave again, maybe.", he said with a chuckle.

She looked out the window confused and laughing too.

She said," Okay. Weird way to cozy up to me, Mr. Romantic.". No reply again.

Instead of her listening to any other weirdly romantic lines from David, all she heard was David asking the same questions from when they first met.

He said," What if Michelle was indeed a bad person? Maybe you really should stay away from this case. Maybe you'll get to know about it by other means?."

She said the same thing she told him before.

"I can't run away from my problems. Even if lines are blurred and personal mixes up with the professional, it still falls onto me to see to it that she gets a proper investigation into her death.", she said.

She waited but no answer. She spoke into the phone. She spoke, with an enraged rush, " Lets just meet up today. We'll talk later, I've got to go. Bye.".

She didn't wait for it. She cut the call. David might have been there for her but he has no right to interfere her while she worked even if he was close to her and the case was a personal one.

She laid her head back sideways to look out the window into the passing trees and started thinking of the day she met David. How clad he looked. He had just finished one of his social speeches on 'Domestic abuse and social norms regarding reverse sexism'. He came down the small podium and looked around to find a Jane on the verge of mental-breakdown. How they connected or rather, she did with him. How he listened to her delineated explanation of her best friend's murder and understood it as if it happened in front of him. She poured her heart out to him for those three hours. She had explained to him how Michelle was good with everyone and how nobody would even think of hurting her. How they had grown up together and how the stab wound looked so cruel in her best friend's murder report in the police station when Jane's captain had been handing her the file. How she had looked tryingly into the report where it had stated that Michelle's cadaver had been lying in her apartment for five days before it was found and reported to the police. Then she felt someone was calling her name. "Jane, Ma'am. Ma'am.". Then it grew louder and louder. Then she woke up. She found the driver calling her name to wake her up. They had reached Sunny Apartments. She got out of her car and straightened her back. She walked up to the landlady's door and knocked. She was waiting for the door to open and then, slam!!!.

Jane heard the crashing of metallic door or something not very far away. She turned around and saw scores of people running towards a singular direction. She told her driver to wait by the car and rushed to where everyone in the lane was reaching up to. He saw a crowd forming around what she thought to see a broken roof of a car. People were gasping, squealing and dialing on their phones all around. Jane pushed through the crowd shoving her badge into people's faces. When she reached the semicircle's center, she was shocked to her core. Tears started running down her cheeks, as her knees gave way and she fell immediately to a badly bruised face of her own David.

She let go of her badge and started crying. She shouted around for help and held her David's hand, clutching it to make her believe it was all a bad dream and she would wake up any minute now. She held his hand so tight that after a minute when people gave way to the ambulance arriving she found herself wanting to reach into David's closed palm, wanting to hold onto him for as long as he was there with her. She opened his tight grip and found a page bloodied on one corner. She didn't care. She put the page into her jacket pocket and helped the medics carry his body onto a stretcher and all the while, crying her eyes out to absolute nothingness. When they put the masks on him and closed the ambulance doors on her face, she immediately ran to her car and told the driver to start following the ambulance. She got into her car and started reading the letter from her jacket as the vehicles started moving for the nearest hospital.

The letter read.....

"Jane,

I hope when you find this letter you have the courage to read to its end. I'm sorry that you have to see me like this. People have different layers, Jane. Michelle wasn't a great person. She had been cheating on me during the last year. I had once saw her with the guy and wanted to confront her when she reached home. That is when the problem started. She denied and things got heated between us. I wanted to end our relationship and she wanted to keep us together by sheer force. When I tried to back out after a week of mental torment, she started abusing me. She would threaten me with knifes and belts and would often try to actually hurt me with them. And then one night it happened. She had drunk-dialed me and told me to come to her apartment. I thought of paying one last visit before telling her it was all over between us. When I got in, she bolted the door behind me. She was drunk and had a knife in her hand. She was too close to my body, so when she struck, I held her and started yanking at the wrist. She dropped the knife and tried to grab it with her other hand. I grabbed it before her and and when I pushed her away, we both slipped and she fell onto the knife which my palm held then. I panicked and thought of covering it up. I cleared my prints off the handle of the knife. I tried to clean my prints off of her body and finally I cleared all my photos from her phone and any of my traces from her apartment, although I had moved out a couple of days before. After almost a week of bawling my brains out, I started to try and act normal and did what I had always been doing before. That is when I saw you. After what happened with her, I thought I had done nothing wrong but then I saw how I hurt you. I thought of taking my own life days earlier, but now I see it would be my absolute shame if you hanged around your best friend's murderer. I have loved you from the moment when we had our first coffee.....

Yours truly,

David."

A year later, she was sitting in their booth. A frappe in her hand. Some guy was giving speeches on animal cruelty in the podium where David used to give speeches. Looking at his picture in her phone and thinking of what had transpired in the last year, she waited hopelessly for him.

She said," I've fought for you in court, stayed beside you in the hospital even when you were in a fight for your life and now here I sit alone.". She sighed.

He saw this and limped in, with the crutch in his left hand.

He said," My god, woman! It was one time. I jumped from a roof one time!!"

She replied, making a sad-eyes expression, "Yet you are ten minutes later than usual. Which is rude considering what I did for you, you know...."

He let go of the crutch. He put his right hand into his jacket pocket.

He said," Well, ma'am...."

He got down on one knee, his good knee, took out a tiny ring casket from his jacket and held it out to her opened.