Extreme Sensitivity… as a merciless source of agitation. – A Women’s Murder Club Series, part 13

TITLE: Extreme Sensitivity… as a merciless source of agitation. (13/?)
PAIRING: Lindsay/Cindy
DISCLAIMER: Women’s Murder Club does not belong to me. The characters do not belong to me. They are the property of James Patterson, 20th Century Fox Television and ABC. (Well, not anymore. Jackasses.) I have no problems with that as long as I can borrow them for short bursts and use them in pursuit of my own enjoyment. I am not trying to infringe. Though, I don’t know why anyone has a problem with fan fic. After all, it really is a compliment. If anyone wants to write fan fiction about my book, feel free.

(Lindsay’s POV)

She couldn’t read the menu.

All of the words were just floating letters that didn’t really go together and made absolutely no sense.

The lighting was dim, but not too dim to see. The lettering was small, but not too small to be legible. And the restaurant was Japanese, but the menu was in English… she was pretty sure. At least, it had been when she first opened it.

But about three seconds after the waiter handed them those leather-bound tomes and left to fill their drink order, Cindy determined touching necessary and Lindsay jumped as her calf was stroked by a shoeless, contact-seeking foot. Surprised, she’d glanced across the table at the rather satisfied smirk on Cindy’s face, and Cindy just continued to peruse her menu without acknowledgement as if her toes weren’t trekking unhurriedly up and down the length of Lindsay’s lower leg.

So now Lindsay was sidetracked and seemingly illiterate, and not only did she have no idea what she wanted to eat, she wasn’t even sure what her options were. She was desperately aware of only two things:

Cindy’s ruthlessly tantalizing appendage –
– and her body’s absurdly powerful reaction to it.

Everything else seemed drastically unimportant.

When the waiter returned some minutes later and stood at the edge of the table, she thought then that Cindy would stop.

But Cindy didn’t.

Instead, the foot moved higher, sliding past Lindsay’s knee to the inside of her thigh where it rested in a completely naughty, completely engrossing way, and Lindsay could only close her menu and avoid looking at the waiter as he engaged in small talk with Cindy, small talk of which she personally had not a moment’s comprehension.

As if sexual torment was her latest hobby, Cindy’s foot began to move along Lindsay’s thigh again, and by the time the waiter’s attention finally turned to her, Lindsay knew very well that any attempts on her part to string together more than a few words would result in infantile babbling.

“For you, ma’am?”

Reminding herself that she was a homicide inspector who had faced far worse, Lindsay turned her eyes up and cleared her throat, flushing with the unlikely notion that the waiter could sense just how far up on her thigh Cindy’s foot had progressed.

“I’ll having what she be have.”

She cringed. Well, at least now she just sounded like English was a second language for her.

A burst of laughter from the other side of the table accompanied the stilling of Cindy’s foot against her thigh. When Lindsay’s eyes swung her way, Cindy was valiantly attempting to keep body-shaking giggles in check. Warm brown eyes that regarded her with a slightly guilty glint didn’t help Lindsay’s sense of control any. Instead, ridiculously dreamy notions involving the redhead seemed to infiltrate her brain out of nowhere.

“Linds, I haven’t ordered yet.”

Face going instantly hotter, Lindsay dropped her gaze to her menu, wanting very much to crawl beneath the table and take up residence. Mortification giving her a sudden burst of brain power, and gaze averted, she handed the menu off to the waiter.

“I trust her judgment.”

Cindy took the cue and ordered for them, but Lindsay’s mind followed the retreat of Cindy’s toes back down her extremely sensitive leg, and she still had no idea what she would be eating.

Both profoundly relieved and intensely disappointed, there was at least easier breathing and some mental clarity when the waiter left them alone and Cindy’s foot finally fell away from her ankle.

“I’m sorry,” Cindy offered, and it might have been believable if she didn’t say it with a chuckle.

Lindsay tried to muster up some of that old annoyance from back when they were inspector and meddling reporter, before they were Lindsay and Cindy, before they were friends, before they were this, but could drum up only fond regard and the knowledge that she was way more turned on than was appropriate in their current setting.

Why had they left the apartment again?

Oh yeah. She was determined to prove to Cindy that this wasn’t just some highly combustible chemical thing. Though it was clearly that too. There was something else going on though, something beyond the physical that was considerably more significant, infinitely more frightening, and that took a lot longer. If she’d just wanted to make it with Cindy, she could have ripped her clothes off, laid her on the floor, and been in and out, quite literally, in less than thirty minutes.

The fact that she had made the decision not to jump that gun earlier, when she was in roughly the same state she was in right now, felt like cause for serious self-congratulation. Because right now all she wanted was Cindy, a bed, candlelight, Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing, and a never-ending supply of energy.

“I guess I kind of had it coming after the stairs.”

“So you were doing that on purpose!”

Face cracking into a broad smile, Lindsay caught Cindy’s eye across the table. With a small shake of her head, Cindy smiled back at her. A nervous kind of energy moved between them. As thoroughly as they knew each other, it was rather unexpected and kind of intriguing.

“This place is nice. I’ve never been here,” Lindsay forced her eyes to roam the room.

“Really?” Cindy seemed surprised. “I’ve brought my last five dates here.”

Oddly affected in a not so good way by the statement, Lindsay’s smile faded, her eyes dropping to the table, where she picked at a warp in the tablecloth that she found suddenly fascinating.

“Linds?”

Trying to look more blasé than she felt, Lindsay glanced up at Cindy. The uncommonly sweet smile she got in return was all the reminder she needed as to why she felt it necessary to date Cindy before they moved onto a more physical type of bonding.

“I’m kidding,” Cindy disclosed softly. “But the food critic at The Register highly recommends it.”

A hushed sigh of relief accompanied Lindsay’s countering grin.

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this, Lois Lane.”

“More than you know,” Cindy murmured.

A warm tingle infused Lindsay at the admission. How was it that ten minutes after getting to the restaurant, she could say with some certainty that, barring any kind of unlikely happening, a crime or the apocalypse for instance, this was the best date she had ever been on?

The restaurant was great, but it wasn’t that phenomenal.

It had to be the person.

Letting the shoe drop from her healthy foot and that foot float across the distance between them, Lindsay smiled at Cindy’s startled jump as it landed.