Also fixed to make more sense - Aug 4th
Link to part one
Nicotine and Spice
Part Two: Discovery of the Murder
Only trouble is he never learned to shoot the same gun twice.
Adrién had his head in his hands, his whole body shaking with anxiety and shame. This had been such a bad idea, such a horribly bad idea. He had loved Jaice, oh yes, somewhere along the line. That guy could have you figured out before you knew what was happening, added you up and subtracted you, pressed you to the wall in a kiss so obscene and breaking it was hardly a kiss at all. He had swept Adrién up with him, sitting in that office so demure and embarrassingly American, hardly speaking a word of French, while hidden beneath was a damage so deep it made his eyes dark and, Adrién thought, so much more beautiful. He got by through sign language and whatever English the French guys there had learned through computer code, but Adrién had dug out his English language school books and learned it all again, just for him while Jaice had never bothered, preferring to live off tourist-English, something which he had never explained. They had spent days and nights together, popping pills and fucking, leaning over each other suggestively at the office correcting each others’ work. They had conversations in a garbled mixture of French and English, wrapped in each others’ arms, punctuated with kisses. It had lasted a year and a half until it had fallen apart, Jaice lost the job and something in him had ripped or shattered. Now that he wasn’t at work anymore he wasn’t communicating or staying awake more than a few hours at a time, he stopped cleaning up, stopped talking. And with that the kisses stopped. Adrién had gone through months of fury, months of asking endless questions that gained monotone, monosyllabic answers, until he had given up. The depression had fallen, stuck its claws in and held. Nothing he could say changed the look in Jaice’s eyes, and he still couldn’t explain it. Somehow he wished he had tried harder, done more to fix him back when the habits weren’t so ingrained, when the love was still lingering and familiar. He stayed, eyes closed, lost in remembrance and regret, until he was awakened from his thoughts by a soft knocking at the door. Tightness welled in his chest; somehow he knew who this would be. Grabbing a pen he scribbled a note on the paper on the table in front of him, his hands shaking. Maybe Jaice would find it, even hidden from the dripping figure he knew was outside the door, save himself. Fix what he had done.
----
When Jaice woke it was mid-afternoon; somehow he had slept dreamlessly and naturally, the quiet soothing. He remained in bed, basking in the softness of the cotton against his skin. There was no sound in the apartment, he assumed that Adrién had gone out, maybe to work – what day was it? He had some vague recollection that it should be a weekend, but he could be wrong, and Adrién wasn’t a person opposed to working on the weekend. He worked all the time, which was the reason he could afford such nice sheets. Jaice eventually convinced himself to stagger to the pristine kitchen and make himself a coffee. In the empty rooms he felt like a trespasser. Rain was running down the kitchen window, he could see the roofs of the city dyed almost black by the water, a dripping grey sky overhanging soaked streets and houses. It made him feel tired again; the very colour of it got into his head and made his eyes feel hot and prickly. He drank the coffee leaning against the counter, eyes flickering shut with misplaced fatigue and then open again, caffeine fuelled. He carried the hot mug through to the living room, holding it with exaggerated care in both hands, afraid to drop it on the beautifully pale carpet. The first thing that he noticed was that the room smelled of cigarettes and that the chair Adrién had sat in listening to his music last night was out of place, turned around to face the window. Maybe he’d stayed up and watched the city fill with water when Jaice had still been asleep, smoked one or two. Did he smoke now? Jaice didn’t know. By the door a set of wet footprints dented the carpet, followed by more leading into the room, getting slowly less visible as they dried out. Adrién must have been out in the rain that morning. Jaice sat on the sofa, regretting the coffee already. He felt strung out, like taking uppers and downers at once, as though his body was rebelling against him. He shivered involuntarily, pulled his knees up to his chest, protecting against the sudden feeling of cold.
There were papers strewn over the coffee table in front of him that he hadn’t noticed until now, his eyes resting absently on them unconsciously. They certainly hadn’t been there last night. Curious, he flicked a page, reading a few lines idly. They looked like work papers. There were a few names there he recognised from back when he had worked for the city with Adrién and then – his stomach twisted – his own name as well, and highlighted with a neat line of green ink. Biting his lip, he tried to read the information there, but it was all in French. He could get by here, asking for groceries and such, as well as knowing a few choice words of an obscene nature, but this was business French. A lot of the words had capital letters and long underlined headings. It was just a lot of letters on a page, meaningless. Feeling rattled he dropped the papers back onto the table, but his aim was bad. They slid to the floor, loose sheets cascading into a mess beneath the table. He scrambled to pick them up again, guilt and paranoia flooding his head, what if Adrién walked in now and found him snooping through his stuff? As if he didn’t have a low enough opinion of him anyway.
The caffeine going to his head made him dizzy as he tipped his head upside down, trying to tug a sheet from beneath the sofa. Lifting it up, he noticed some of it was written in English, not in neat typed script like the others, but handwritten in the same green ink that had been used as a highlighter.
Trop loin dedans maintenant? N’a jamais prévu pour payer. Je suis trop tard.
Non. This was underlined, twice, the biro head had pressed hard into the paper leaving it scarred.
Que feront-ils maintenant?
Then much lower down the page, the handwriting now nothing but a scrawl:
Read me! Someone’s here.
Les noms – montrez-les à... Here the last word had become just a curl of ink, incomprehensible.
I’m so sorry J.
----
Jaice could feel the back of his neck prickling, hairs rising on his arms and thighs. What was this? He shuddered, letting the final paper drop from his fingers onto the table. Sudden sickness stabbed at him, his stomach shuddered and he dived for the bathroom. He vomited coffee until the retching subsided and he was left shivering and gripping the toilet bowl for support. It was only then that he noticed the running water, a persistent drip and swirl from behind him. He stiffened, utterly on edge, his mind buzzing with paranoia. He swivelled slowly, glanced, then flung himself back and threw up again, nothing but bile that left bitterness and burning in his mouth. Somehow he found himself standing again; the panic had made everything so fast and so unreal that thoughts hardly registered. The shower, a cubicle of frosted glass, was leaking pink water that formed a puddle. Jaice’s white socks were stained by it, the coldness registered somewhere and he stared down at his feet, at the water that had tainted the sparkling white tiles with diluted red, an expanding cloud. The water was almost a quarter of the way up the glass, the shower still running. And pressed against the far side a figure, obscured by fog and frost, a blur of grey and red. He pressed his fingers, trembling horribly, into the gap between the shower door and wall, pulling until it shifted free. The stored up water tumbled out, a wave against his knees that made him stagger a few steps back and horror lifted in his chest. Behind him dirty water flowed across the tiles and seeped into carpeted hallway, the stains now redundant. He was there, head thrown back with an expression of almost ecstasy, Adrién with his beauty twisted into the grotesque - eyes open and blind, mouth an ‘o’ shape gone slack, shoulders pressed back and arms curled around himself; wet clothes stuck to him, white shirt turned red at the chest and neck, pink all over. Jaice found himself on his knees, choking again, only this time not only with nausea but also with sobs that shook him from deeper than he could have imagined. He pressed his wet hands to his face until there was no telling if tears fell or not and broke unselfconsciously for an interminable amount of time. He was aware of Adrién’s dark hair, wet against his face, of his own fingers dried and painful from tangling and disentangling with Adrién’s sodden, bloody shirt. He knew that somehow he pulled away, staggering drunkenly out of that terrible room, the smell in his nose too awful to bear. Old water and new blood, regurgitated coffee, bleach, soap and nicotine.
---
He was pressed against cotton sheets face down and blinking, still shivering with cold and horror, memories blank and hazy with panic. His eyes could focus only on his hand in front of him, the white sheet dyed pink at his fingertips, and behind that the red alarm clock lights blinking 2:01. It seemed to Jaice that it couldn’t possibly be day, despite the time, despite the light from the window. Daytime was too normal, too comforting. He lay there for almost an hour, his mind a fog and empty. He had to do something, but his body wouldn’t free him from the stillness, as though it was afraid that any action would trigger images again of veins open and red, of water dripping from strands of hair into eyes so wide and white and lifeless. It took him all his effort to move, to sit and then stand, to find Adrién’s mobile phone and dial the police, stammer hopelessly into the handset. Aidez-moi.
