While You Sleep

"Why would Carmella have to worry?" I asked. "She's already fucking him. She's already won."

"Mill, don't start something with the guy unless you really like him. And I mean really like him. From what Patty told us, he's already had a hard enough time with women. Like you said, he's vulnerable. Maybe that's why he throws himself so deeply into his job. And there's something else that's been eating at me. I don't have any proof, but I think Carmella lied to you. I mean we were all there. She came in with bite marks all over her big old titties and she smelled like somebody had plowed her field, but how do you know it was him?"

"She had his badge," I said.

"No she had A badge," said Liz. "Every single one of the ten secret service agents here has one. I think she's playing with your head. When we came in last night, she was drunk and talking out of the side of her head. He was standing there on guard and she spoke to him. It didn't seem important then but today it seems to be. Her exact words to him were, "Don't forget our rain-check." That doesn't sound like they did anything. And he just looked at her like he wasn't at all concerned with anything she had to say. Another thing is that I stared at him after she'd spoken to him and the look in his eyes wasn't like you'd expect from a guy who'd been caught sticking his business in her. He just looked back at her like she was crazy."

"Yeah but at least the two of them are talking," I said. "We know that for certain. So I am definitely losing this game or battle or whatever it is."

"You're only losing it because you aren't playing it," said Liz. "You said it yourself, this one is important to you. So maybe this time you're going to have to get out there and be the one doing the chasing instead of having the guy chase you."

"So what are you proposing I do?" I asked. "Do what she did?"

"Well, maybe not to that extreme," she said. "But you're known for being pretty outrageous yourself."

As I started to think about it, I felt better. I didn't know if I was going to spend the rest of life with Rick or just the rest of this trip, but at least I'd know that I'd gone after him and not gotten chased off like a rabbit.

I felt even better about it as I planned out what I'd do. Then the entire game changed when Patty came in.

"Ma'am, I need to tell you something," she said.

"Patty, I think we're past the ma'am stage," I said. "It just seems silly especially with you being older than I am."

"Okay," she smiled. "Carmella is definitely playing with your head. The two of them sat in a bar together for about fifteen minutes yesterday and then he got up and left. Until she came in, he'd just been sitting there drinking a coke and writing in that notebook of his. They did not leave together. In fact, she got up and left him sitting there. And then there's this..." she said. She placed a crumpled piece of paper on the bed next to me.

I opened it and found a few lines scrawled on it. "I hope he shoots better than his penmanship," I quipped.

As I read it, my heart melted.

"Girl, there's no moon out tonight, just your window light."

"The night holds nothing you should fear, cause I'll stand guard out here."

I looked at Patty in shock. "Is this a poem?" I asked.

"I think so," she said. I read more of it.

"Every day I look away when we meet. Every night I'm walking up and down your street."

"I'm standing here outside your window. It's driving me mad I can't let go."

"Do you think he wrote this about me?" I asked.

"Uhm Duh?" she said.

"I'm driving him mad?" I said. "Me?"

"Duh?" she repeated. I looked back at the paper.

"You'll never even see. This lonely watch I keep. While you sleep."

"You do realize that he's probably only talking about his God damned job, right?" I said.

"Did you read the part about him being driven mad?" she asked. "And that second part. Shit, if he wasn't crazy about you it would be pretty fucking creepy." I looked at the paper again to see what she meant.

"Don't even think your dreams, are private as they seem."

"Cause I, know every move you make. From midnight till you wake. While you sleep."

"Okay," I said. "That part lets me know that this is definitely about me because he does watch over me from midnight until 8 a.m. I still don't know why Mr. May assigned him to watch over me while I'm asleep. It seems like he's pissed at both of us. The only chance I have to get close to him is when I'm asleep. But that also doesn't prove that his interest in me is anything more than professional."

"Ma'am...I mean Miss Cameron," began Patty.

"Just call me Millie," I said. "But don't put, "the model," after it. People get fired for that," I laughed.

"Do you know who is always telling me that he knows everything I'm going to do? The only person I can think of who thinks he knows every thought in my head is my husband. And he thinks that because he spends so much time with me and so much time thinking about me that he thinks he's in my head. Doesn't that sound like he spends a little bit of time thinking about you? And probably not in a professional way either."

"But, what about, "him and Carmella?" I asked.

"In the first place, we don't know that there is a, "him and Carmella," she said. "Liz doesn't think anything happened between the two of them. And I don't either. And actually, that gives you a reason to ask him for an off the record conversation. You've already heard her version of what happened. So you ask him for his."

"Right," said Liz. "And even if something did happen between them, which we all doubt, take him away from the bitch. Didn't you say yesterday that he was yours? No one takes anything away from Millicent Cameron right?"

"Right," I said smiling.

"Polly, is there any place in town that I can get a T-shirt printed quickly?"

* * * * * *

Rick

I woke up and felt weird from the start. My head wasn't in the game from the time my eyes opened. I was beginning to feel like the way the other guys appeared to me. It felt more like we were on vacation than on the job.

As I dressed, I looked at each piece of clothing as if they were new. The clothes, my dark suit, seemed out of place when I had hours before I'd be on duty. I didn't wear it. I put on jeans and a loose leather jacket. Even on a day when it wasn't chilly, I needed the jacket to cover my gear.

My Sig Sauer P229, .357 caliber pistol was almost a part of me so I wore it under the jacket. I'd slept for a good eight hours and awakened on my own. I also took my ID and badge.

I checked my messages on the phone beside the bed and found out that I had the same shift I'd had the day before. I'd fallen asleep at about ten in the morning so it was barely six p.m. I could check and find out Miss Cameron's schedule and whereabouts in about four hours which would leave me plenty of time before I had to go on duty.

I decided to go back to the same little bar I'd been to the day before. I remembered that they served food there too. I was hoping that maybe the BBBB wouldn't show up but then she was probably still recovering from her hangover and getting ready to go out again. It always amazed me that women could hold that much liquor and then still party just as hard the next night. Shit, I'm only twenty eight and I couldn't do it.

But then, I guess I'm different from them. Carmella and Millicent were hard partying socialites. They were born and raised to party and raise hell. I'm more of a family type. I'll bet in her prime, Danielle could have held her own with them...

Just thinking about Danielle brought back all of the pain she'd caused me. I still didn't understand how someone who'd claimed to love me as much as she did, for as long as she did, could have hurt me that badly. It was as if the woman I'd fallen in love with had, never from the start, been what she claimed. She had just lain in wait and ripped out my heart. And while she did it, she snatched away my balls at the same time. And for the past three years, she'd been doing it again and again, every God damned time she thought about it.

The scene from a few days ago wasn't even the worst, it was just the latest. The worst had been the first time. When I'd come home and found Danielle fucking one of our neighbors. I had simply snapped and beaten him senseless. I called the cops myself. With me being a fed, they just took him in.

I'm not sure anyone understands just how stressful risking your life on a daily basis can be. Only cops, soldiers and others in the protection business or the military, really get it. When you're on the job, all you constantly think about is making it home to the ones you love. It consumes you and gives you both the motivation to make it through and the strength to execute what you have to do.

For me, all I thought about was being with my beautiful wife again. I dreamed of a day when we'd grow old together. When I opened that door and saw Danielle's leg's spread wide open while the guy next door pumped his boney ass back and forth inside of her, something snapped in my head.

I don't think I ever came out of it until it was too late. My superiors never found out about it. The guy next door made up a whole story about being robbed and beaten. He didn't want his wife to find out about it either. He called me down to the hospital as soon as he could get a phone. It was him who begged me not to say a word even after what I'd done to him.

"Okay, you beat the fuck out of me," he said. "I deserved it. But why does my wife have to suffer. Why should you suffer? Do you really want to lose your job over this?" he asked. And truthfully I didn't.

Back then I was living with a four part structure to my life. There were four things my life was built on. They were Danielle, our then, five year old daughter, my job and my Mustang. I'd already lost Danielle. My time with my daughter would probably be a lot less. Losing the job too would just be too much to handle so I agreed. He also got to keep his marriage which was good thing for him since his wife was the one who worked and she loved him like crazy.

She loved him so much that they moved away from the neighborhood within days of his recovering from the incident. Danielle had breathed a sigh of relief. I guess that in her mind, since our neighbor's marriage had survived, ours would too. I think that she really believed that it would; all the way until she saw me packing to move out.

We got into a big argument then and I left anyway. Since then, Danielle and I have never really spoken very much. We only talk about Katrina and the divorce. Nothing else that she has to say interests me. I heard from mutual friends for the first few months after I left, that she missed me and she loved me. They told me that more than anything else, she wanted to sit down and talk to me. According to them, for all of the time that we'd been together and all of the time that we'd been married, I owed her that much.

Her actions and the things that she said proved that like everything else she'd ever told me, those words were lies. I had given Danielle and our marriage everything I had to give and it simply hadn't been enough. So, Danielle wanted to talk to me; so fucking what. Did I feel like a coward for walking away from my marriage without ever trying to save it or work out our problems? No, I didn't. There are all kinds of bravery. I made my living defending important people. One of the things I learned in both training and experience is to know your enemy and know when you're outmatched. You should always know when to fight and when to run. I loved Danielle with all of my heart. That made me weak. She couldn't love me nearly as much as I loved her and still did what she had. That gave her an over whelming advantage over me. I was the weaker person in that situation. I would and had done anything and everything I could to support her and make her happy. I loved Danielle more than I loved myself. I could never cheat on her.

On the other hand, she'd gone out and fucked one of our neighbors and even told me that if I went on another assignment, she'd do it again. There is no way that she could love me even a little bit and do that to me. I could not win, so in that situation there was no cowardice in walking away. I simply had to pick my battles and that was one I could never win.

I wasn't a coward but I had been a fool. Since the first time I'd seen her, I had this impression of Danielle being some kind of fairy princess. She was all mine and mine alone, or so I thought. The reality that she was actually only mine in my mind alone changed things. From that point on, I couldn't stand to look at Danielle. Just the thought that I'd had sex and made a baby with that whore shocked me.

I refused any and all overtures towards any type of reconciliation. Every time I thought about the way Danielle had treated me, it made me angry at women in general.

I headed towards the bar and got there when it was still fairly quiet and empty. I got my usual five dollar Coke and even lightened up enough to accept the challenge from one of the locals to play against him on the bar's ancient pinball machine. I'd grown up playing pinball and video games, so I was in my element. With two balls left out of the three given by the game, I was more than halfway to the machine's high score.

I'd just shot my second ball and as it arced across the top of the machine and hit the bumpers and lit the lights, I noticed two manicured hands place themselves on the glass beside mine. I noticed the trench coat and thought at first that it was the troublesome English woman again. I never took my eyes off of the ball until I heard her voice telling someone that she'd be okay. I looked up into her eyes for the first time and then out of reflex looked away.

Unfortunately, as I did my ball dropped between the paddles. It actually landed on one of them and I simply didn't react. My opponent took over with a smile on his face.

"You shouldn't be here without your protection detail Ma'am," I said. "It's against proto..."

"I have you here," she said. "And I came here to have a talk with you."

"Why do you need to talk to me?" I asked. "Did I do something wrong?"

"You tell me?" she said. "But let's go to a table. I 'm sure the pinball wizard here doesn't care about our conversation." I dropped a five on the machine and he accepted it quickly, by smiling and showing me a mouthful of rotten teeth.

I picked a booth in the back, with my back to the wall and a view of the door, so I could see everyone who came and went.

"Did you sit in this same booth yesterday?" she asked.

"No," I said. "What does, me doing something wrong have to do with where I sat yesterday?"

"I never said that you did something wrong," she said. "Look, this is all going wrong. This shouldn't be this hard. Did you act this way with Carmella yesterday?"

I just looked at her crazily. "This shouldn't be this hard," she said again.

"Miss Cameron, what is this all about?" I asked. She looked around the bar nervously and then opened her trench coat.

"Her boobs are bigger but mine are nice too," she said.

She was wearing a T-shirt. It wasn't split like the British woman's had been and it wasn't anywhere near as thin. She also had a bra on and a very tight but relatively long skirt on. But the message on the shirt was what shocked me.

Like the English woman's shirt her had two lines printed on it. It wasn't quite as blunt but the message was equally clear.

The first line read: I came here to drink and fuck. The word fuck was bigger than the others.

The second line read: I'm almost done drinking.

I quickly leaned over the table and pulled her coat closed while looking around to make sure no one had seen her.

"Why'd you do that?" she spat. "You didn't do that to Carmella."

"How do you know what I did to Carmella?" I asked.

"Because she told me that you fucked her," she said loudly. She looked like she was on the verge of tears.

"She lied," I said quickly, trying to quiet things down.

"Bullshit," she snapped. "She showed me your badge and she still has it near her bed. Why can't you just admit you fucked her so we can move on? I don't care about what happened before now. I'll forgive you just don't do it again."

"I didn't..." I began again.

"Before you say that, I want you to know that I hate liars," she said. "More than anything else, I hate liars. It's why I sometimes don't get along with my dad when he promises one thing and then either can't get congress to pass it or he just goes back on it and says some cute political truism like, "It wasn't really in the best interest of the majority of the country."

"I hate liars too," I spat. I pulled out my pocket recorder and played back the end of the tape I still had of my conversation with Carmella the previous day. Her eyes got bigger as she heard.

"Oh, I'm always willing," she smiled. "Like now; your place or mine?"

"Both," I said.

"Ooh, I love a man with STAMINA," she squealed. "Shall we?"

"I meant you in your place... and me in mine," I said. "The opening ceremonies of the festival are about to begin in an hour or so and I'm probably going to be there whether I'm working or not. So I need to shower and get presentable. So can we say, some other time perhaps?"

"So you didn't leave here with her?" she asked. "You turned her down, big tits and all?" I nodded my head and pushed the rewind button.

"You should probably hear this too," I said. As the tape started, she heard Carmella's question.

"Let's make it an easy one," she said. "If I was your woman, would you let me go to a party dresses like this?"

"If you were someone else's woman, I'd love the view," I said. "If you were mine, I'd let you dress like that all the time when we were at home, but in public, I don't think so."

She squeezed the coat even closer around her and tears started to roll down her cheeks.

"There's one more thing that you need to know about," I said. I opened my jacket up and pulled out my ID folder and badge. "Whoever she took a badge from, it wasn't me. I don't know what's going on between the two of you. But there's nothing going on with her and me. There never has been and never will be."

She sat back in the booth. "Okay, I'm sorry I insinuated that you were lying," she said. "So can I ask you about this?" She placed a piece of paper down onto the table. It was no longer crumpled. It had been smoothed out. I recognized it as the piece of paper I'd torn from my notebook.

I looked at my watch. "Shouldn't we get you back to the bungalow so you can get ready to go out with your friends? I'm starting to see people out in the street getting ready for the festival."

She laughed and her voice sounded like music. I could see why lots of men across the country threw themselves at her.

She smiled and it was like the sun coming out after a cloudy day. "Not prepared for that question huh?" she said. "Well, I did skip out on the festival last night. I am suddenly in the mood to party, within limits. And you keep yourself within limits too. Do you have a vehicle handy or are you going to walk me home?"

We ended up walking the four blocks back to the palace.

"I'm going to give you the time you need to come up with an answer to my question," she smirked. "I'm going to make sure to get back to the bungalow early. I don't want you to have to discuss personal things while you're on duty. So at eleven thirty, maybe even eleven o clock, you should have an answer, right?" she smiled. I just nodded nervously.

We were no more than fifty yards away from the palace compound and the bungalow when I suddenly held up my arm and blocked her path. All I did was stuck out my arm horizontally, but she took it a different way.

"I don't mind you grabbing my tits," she said. "I'd much rather have you playing with mine than Carmella's but I like them handled a bit more gently; at least at first."