hardboiled_undercover_homicide_blues werewolf He woke up to her kissing his neck, a slow unpredictable pattern. He tried to turn to her in passion, but it was no good, no damn good. He tried to muster the ardor with which he first forged her bond to him, but it just wasn't required of him, she bent in all the old familiar places, and he grew tired. He just wasn't shooting from the hip these days - too many thoughts were between him and her, he was blanketed in anxieties, cases left unsolved, his file in that world of dumb luck, justice, ingenuity and above all grit feeling closed too soon. He knew that without him, there'd still be the faces of the killer caught, in its smug and sad variety, there'd still be the crying mother, the fading photograph of a child holding a toy, that all was just the human heart beating on. He no longer deluded himself that he could stop those horrors entirely, but he'd save what he could, and also he knew now, it wasn't entirely about them, it was about him, his own energies, his own doubts, his own need to distance this world of feelings into numbers, into pieces of a puzzle. These thoughts kept him from her warm body, her good intentions. He needed to work again, he was a bad husband and father when he was always around. Plus, there was something about his life being on the line everyday which made the allowed vulnerability of sleeping next to her at night, his neck, arms, rising and falling stomach so prone, that much more precious. The keener awareness they shared if he was on a grisly case of the danger outside their bedroom made their bodies questioning of each other doubly intent, doubly intense when they made love. His only way to feel the urgency to love her was to endanger himself. 030110 ... Death of a Rose howling at the moon damn good, werewolf 031016 what's it to you? who go blather from