It was a perfect morning.
All good things must come to an end, though, as they say. Eventually, we had to broach the subject and deal with what was really going on in our world.
Dom broke the barrier of happy good times when he dug out the external hard drive from his jacket pocket from the night before. Looking at me warily, he powered up his computer, connected the drive with a cable, and sat himself in front of the monitor.
He hadn’t mentioned it to me at any point last night or earlier in the day, but I could tell from his face that this was something he found at that sick bastard’s house.
My mind jumped to the possibility that there could have been digital evidence on that drive—something that could put Fielding together with Ronn’s pornos, or with other nefarious activity, possibly even with Tania’s death, though I shuddered to think of a recording of that. However, a recording of that was precisely the point of that, so it stood to reason that Fielding kept a recording on hand somewhere. I just didn’t think I could handle seeing it. Dom clearly had the same thoughts rolling through his mind, as he did not invite me to join him at the monitor.
I kept my seat on the couch, my face pointing to the open pages of a book I had picked up, one of those military-spy-mystery-adventure novels that so many guys love. I had no idea what the words were in front of me. They swam around while I tried to keep my breathing even and not freak out about what Dom was finding.
He didn’t say a word for a number of minutes, just kept clicking his mouse, leaning toward the screen, the fingers of one hand lightly covering his lips. Focused, but I could tell he was in search mode and had not yet hit pay dirt with anything.
As the minutes passed by, the tension in the air around us thickened. At one point, he dug out a set of mini earphones and plugged them into the computer and his ears, and I knew there were videos he was going to watch. I kept my eyes away and took a deep breath.
There were times when I’d known that he had found something. He’d stop clicking, his eyes scanning the screen, or sometimes even closed as he listened to whatever was happening. I moved myself to the mini breakfast bar between the living room and the kitchen, with my back turned to him so I could no longer see his reactions or watch his every movement. The book, however, continued to fail to engage me.
I felt like there was a screaming silence in the room, and I needed a much stronger distraction. I dug out my smartphone and the earphones I always kept in my handbag, and turned up the volume on Eddie Vedder. I went back into Dom’s bedroom and curled up on the armchair by the window, no longer attempting to read. I just listened to Pearl Jam and watched the clouds drift in the afternoon sky.
That was probably a poor choice; Tan and I had shared huge childhood crushes on Eddie (though really, I think hers was only a copycat of my own). But listening to him kept her with me in those endless minutes at Dom’s place. Still, I didn’t look for a different artist; Tan had every right to be there. I needed her there; she was there.
Finally, after what felt like ages and ages of purgatory, I felt a tug at my ear, and Dom was there, pulling out my earphones and pulling me up into his big strong arms, burying his face in my neck. I just hugged him back, not saying anything, letting him tell me what he needed to when he was ready.
“Got him. We got him, baby.”
I lost it. I did. I just cried. He held me, and I cried.
# # #
Dom called his Pres to give him the update and let him know about the party and the hard drive with the evidence he found. I overheard him speak of the video of “the girl,” and I knew he was talking about Tania.
After a few more minutes, Dom hung up the phone and turned to me. “Hey, babe, I gotta run out. Pres is callin’ church. That’s a MC meetin’ for all the brothers, so I gotta be there. You okay here? Might take me a couple hours, maybe more, maybe less. Okay?”
“Yeah, Dom. I’m okay. You go. Ride safe, okay?”
“Always do. Listen, I put a copy of the video on the computer, so if you don’t want to see it, don’t look at the ‘sick bastards’ folder, okay? But there was other stuff, too, in there; I’m bringin’ it all to the meetin’. But I wanted to have a backup copy of everythin’, too. Just don’t look in that folder, babe.”
“Okay, thanks. I won’t. You go. I’ll be fine.”
He kissed me, hard and quick, and held my eyes a moment. Then he grabbed his stuff and took off.
In his absence, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I wandered around his space for many minutes, unsettled, kind of bored and antsy.