OOM: Sometimes, there are other women

[the_gene_genie]

 

He’d met her in Soho in the course of an investigation; an armed robbery in the sex shop she worked in.  She wasn’t a suspect, just a witness. A victim, really, seeing as she’d been smacked over the head with the butt of the toerag’s sawn-off as he left. Her name was Charley and she was blond, with big tits that overflowed from the tiny top she squeezed them into.

Of course he was going to notice.

She was questioned in the shop and was helpful, one of the few people they’d ever come across in Soho to not answer their questions with he was tall, you pig, and had a balaclava on if you must know, you scummy bastards. Gonna catch him then, filth, are ya?

It’s safe to say that the police aren’t well-loved in this area and they’d all been ready for some of the above from the people they were trying to help. And they got it too. But not from her. Ray had laughed and said the bang on her head must’ve loosened the brain’s connection to her tongue and therefore she was the perfect woman. He agreed too, all the while ignoring the withering look from Drake’s direction.  But it was him laughing when Charley pointedly ignored Ray’s advances and spoke to him instead, blue eyes wide and all faux-innocence as she blinked up at him.

He ignored it and questioned her like everyone else. The robber turned up the next day and he called her in to pick him out of a line-up. Identification confirmed, scumbag charged, all done and dusted before lunch. Lovely. And, as it happened, he found her phone number being written on his hand in the corridor outside the interview room. He let her, almost bemused with himself, and wondered afterwards if it was because he knew Drake could see them from her desk in CID.

He’d had no intention of calling it. The girl was...well, she was a girl, for a start. Probably about twenty three, which is only just on the right side of wrong, for him. Automatically it made her too young to be interesting but old enough for a shag which is, in truth, all he’s looking for. Too young for it to be a good shag either, but better than nothing.

No intention of calling it. None at all.

It was a Thursday night and pissing down with rain. There’d been another row, this time about his physical methods of interrogation which is one they haven’t been through for a while. It seems she’d thought he’d ‘grown up’, while he thought she’d stopped thinking like a nancy when it came to the most hardened scum off London’s streets. Both assumptions were wrong and it had ended with him telling her to get out of his sight and then watching her run across the road to Luigi’s in the pouring rain, her white shirt sticking to her back as she’d left without her coat. And for once, he doesn’t contemplate going over there because he just wants an evening away from all of them. So he drinks about four Scotch’s and picks up the phone.

Yes, Charley is home. Yes, I’ll go fetch her. Hello? ...who? Oh hello. Didn’t think you were going to ring...et cetera.

He didn’t let himself dwell on how her number found its way on to a piece of paper rather than being scrubbed off in the gents. He just asked her out for a drink the night after and she said yes. So. That was that.

And now they’re in a pub, leaning on the bar. He smokes and drinks and eyes her up and down, she bats her lashes and sips her Babycham and lets him look. For Chris’sake, she’s wearing a leopard print top. And wearing it tighter than anyone with tits that size has a right to, though he can’t stop himself wanting to get in amongst them. She’s talking about the sex shop and how she wants to be a page three girl, which is good because it affords him the perfect opportunity to stare at her chest and tell her she’s definitely built for it. She’s even quite good fun, in a totally uncomplicated kind of way. Which is good. Uncomplicated is what he wants. He’s had enough of complicated, had his fill of it for a lifetime. And she can witter on and he can let his mind wander back to that afternoon, where he’d...probably not been as classy as he could have been.

He knew she’d been watching. He did try to save the preparations until late so if she’d left at the normal time she wouldn’t have seen anything. But there’s a case she’s got a bee in her bonnet about so she’d stayed on and if he’s honest with himself, he knows that it felt good, seeing her watch him get ready to meet someone else. Just a bit of a dig, after what she'd said at Christmas. Showing her that he’s not about to sit around and mope and pine. He has a life. He’s not leaving. So he has to get on with it and if that means meeting a bimbo for a drink and hopefully a shag at the end of it, well, that’s the way of the world.

He tells Charley a story of some crim they caught knocking over brothels in Soho and beating up the whores. She is suitably impressed and he hopes she also got the other meaning, the subtle warning to not end up in a place like that because it’s not safe. Doubts it, though. She doesn’t have much between the ears, this one, and he’s wondering when he became so boring that he’s concerned with putting sense into tart’s heads rather than concentrating on getting something else into them, and not in their heads either.

Drake had seen him come back from the gents with slicked-back and tidy hair, he knows she saw him with his electric razor. Perhaps she caught a whiff of the toothpaste and aftershave when he walked by her desk, or saw him giving his boots a quick spit-and-polish before brushing off his coat and pulling it on. Maybe he’s just hoping she did. He’s not sure. He’s not sure why it matters, if he’s put her behind him. He’s respecting her decision to accept that no is no, even after she kissed him that way at New Years. And he really wishes he’d drunk enough that night to have forgotten it but apparently there isn’t enough whiskey in the world.

Charley’s saying something about a hair salon and hoping the hit she took off the blagger won’t scar her face. He points out that it’s not her face that readers of The Sun will be looking at, which makes her grin and push a bit closer to him. His hand comes to rest comfortably on her round backside as he orders them another drink and she doesn’t tell him to move it so that’s it. Done deal.

...even if Alex hadn’t noticed him getting ready, she couldn’t have failed to hear Ray asking if he was coming for a pint and him saying no. He hadn’t disclosed where he was going but the simple smirk at the smut-laden innuendos thrown his way would have taken care of that. He’s wondering, as he leans down and kisses Charley, whether he should have looked over at her to see what her response was but he thought it’d seem a bit like gloating. Or maybe he didn’t want to look over and see her not caring, which would be worse. He had glanced at her as he swept down the corridor towards reception but only the back of her head is visible from that angle so it hadn’t given anything away.

Her place? No, she lives with her parents and there’s no way he’s taking her back to his. Car then. As he adjusts the passenger seat and lies back, it strikes him – not for the first time – that as brilliant as the Quattro is, he sometimes misses the four doors of the Cortina. Much easier to do this in the backseat but Charley’s small anyway – as it turns out, in every way, resulting in a much better shag than he’d anticipated – so they fit alright like this. And she’s obliging with her teeth when he suggests a mark or two does it for him, somewhere that’ll only just be visible above the always-open collar of his shirt, or on the throat.

Childish, definitely. But he can live with that. It’s not indiscreet if you don’t come out and say ‘I shagged a blonde slag in my car last night’; if the evidence is there to be noticed then it’s hardly his fault. And Drake’s a detective, he’d be bloody put out if she failed to notice the whopping big lump this bird takes out of him, making him grit his teeth in a not-good way as she thumps her head on the roof above him and gives the suspension a damn good work out.

It’s early when he drops her home and ignores her suggestion that they meet up again the week after, though it occurs to him that it hasn’t been an unpleasant evening. So, maybe. It’s not important at the moment, he’s more concerned with checking his watch as he peels away from the curb and wondering if there’s time for a swift one or two back at Luigi’s. Yeah, there is. And if she’s not there, well, the bruises’ll still be around on Monday.