Truth Comes Out (1/3) – WMC Fic

PAIRING: Lindsay/Cindy
DISCLAIMER: Characters, not mine. Story, mine.

Lindsay was sitting at her desk. Cindy had a feeling she would find her there. Given the circumstances, there was nowhere else she could be, and it certainly wasn’t by choice; which meant that Lindsay wasn’t going to be in a particularly good mood; which meant that Cindy should probably stay away from her and give her time to cool off. But that wasn’t about to happen.

The sharp click-clack of Lindsay pecking at the laptop on her desk confirmed the whole bad mood hypothesis and slowed Cindy’s stride by a half-step, but still she approached with caution. When she reached the desk, she turned and leaned against it, so that she was looking down at Lindsay, but Lindsay just continued to punch the keys, one at a time, with a prominent pause between each one. If Cindy had given it any thought, she would have guessed that Lindsay didn’t know how to type, but this didn’t seem the best time to bring up the observation.

“Whatcha doin’?” she asked with badly forced casualness.

“What does it look like I’m doing? Apparently, it seemed a fine day for me to catch up on my paperwork. And everyone else’s. Tom even loaned me his laptop. Isn’t that sweet?” She hit the keyboard so hard the backspace button popped out and landed on the desk. “That’s so coming out of my next check.”

Cindy wisely chose to remain as quiet as possible as she watched Lindsay pick up the button and attempt to reattach it to its proper place on the keyboard, managing to erase everything she’d already typed in the process.

“Son of a bitch!”

Lindsay stared at the blank screen and slumped back in her seat. The exclamation seemed to expel some of the fury from her and she just looked defeated.

“What do you think of me?” she asked without looking up.

It was a loaded question, even though Cindy knew exactly where it was coming from. She was there earlier in the day, standing on the side-lines of a crime scene, just where she’d been told to stay by a certain tall, brunette detective, and she’d witnessed the whole thing. She didn’t hear what started it, but once the yelling started it was a little hard to miss the fight. Lindsay and Tom were getting into it about some secret Lindsay had kept from him. It was pretty heated, his side being that she shouldn’t have kept something like that from him and her side being that she thought he wouldn’t want to know. It culminated with Tom shouting in front of the whole crew that Lindsay was a cold, heartless bitch, and everyone knew it.

“Well I don’t think you are a cold, heartless bitch,” Cindy responded, just sticking to the topic of the day. “At least not to me. Not anymore.”

When Lindsay looked up at her, she really wished that she had added only the first amendment to her statement. The second one clearly pierced like an arrow.

“So then you did think it,” Lindsay muttered and turned her attention to the keyboard button she was twirling in her fingers.

“No!” Cindy launched into damage control mode instantly. “Not exactly.”

Lindsay glanced up with a look of utter skepticism, and Cindy was shocked to see tears in her eyes. She knew that the other woman would never let them fall, but the idea of them alone was enough to momentarily stun her.

“Honestly, never,” Cindy asserted when she found her voice again. “But you can be off-putting, distant. I know you know that.”

She wasn’t sure Lindsay would actually hear the last part, because she decided it was a good time to try replacing the computer button again, and apparently had determined sometime in the midst of their conversation that brute force was the way to go.

“I don’t mean to be,” she said, between hammers of her fist on the computer. “It’s not like I pushed you away.”

“You mean, like telling me not to be seen with you, not to talk to you in front of people, not to come around,” Cindy replied instantly.

Each example was punctuated by a loud hit to the groaning keyboard, and Cindy put her arm out and blocked Lindsay’s hands before she destroyed the thing completely.

“Could I do that for you please? You’re giving me a panic attack by proxy.”

She expected some sort of debate about it, but Lindsay just got up and held the button out to her. She put her palm beneath Lindsay’s and accepted it.

“Thank you,” she said, sliding into the vacated seat.

The button was already cracked on one side from Lindsay’s abuse, but she had no intention of being so hard on it. Not everything required such a heavy-hand. There were times when finesse was more effective than might.

“That wasn’t really a hard push,” Lindsay’s voice came from right behind her. “It was said with amusement. I was trying for playful banter.”

Lindsay’s hip brushed her shoulder for the third time since she sat down, which Cindy blamed fully for her inability to get the backspace key back into its proper position. This was a task she had to do regularly at the newspaper office, and usually accomplished rather quickly.

“Okay. For argument’s sake, and only for argument’s sake,” she said, trying to concentrate on the mission at hand at the same time, let’s say you weren’t really pushing me away. You weren’t exactly pulling me close either.”

Even distracted as she was by the stubborn keyboard, Cindy didn’t take the lack of response as a good sign. Lindsay must have been extra annoyed, if she had no sharp retort in wait. When she finally did speak, it was barely audible.

“Is that what you want?”

Cindy stopped fighting with the keyboard to process what had just come out of her own mouth. She didn’t do two things well at once. One of them usually ended up a disaster. When she realized what she’d said, it occurred to her that she really could have found better phrasing for that particular point. In regards to Lindsay’s question, lying was probably the best bet, but, since it was already out there, telling the truth came more easily than coming up with an obvious lie.

“Yeah. It’s what I want.”

The words must have possessed magic powers, because the backspace button suddenly popped back into place as if Cindy had done something differently this time than she had on her twenty previous attempts.

“There. I got it,” she told Lindsay, and got up to give her back her chair.

But Lindsay didn’t sit down. She just stood there. Cindy could feel her gaze like a fifty pound weight on the top of her head.

“Lindsay, get in here,” Tom barked from the door of his office.

Cindy looked over just in time to see him disappearing back inside. She glanced at Lindsay, who apparently hadn’t found Tom’s sudden appearance particularly interesting, because she hadn’t changed the focus of her stare at all. Upon the discovery that she was still under such extreme scrutiny, Cindy dropped her gaze to the floor.

“Tom needs you,” she said, as if Lindsay could have somehow missed the loud demand.

“Tom waits very well,” Lindsay responded.

They stood there for well over a minute. It took until about the sixty second mark for Cindy to finally steel her courage and look up. She couldn’t say anything, and Lindsay didn’t put her out of her misery by speaking first.

“Lindsay!”

This time, Lindsay turned her attention to Tom in the doorway, just to show him how irritated she was. She held up one finger for him to hold on, but it was very clear that it wasn’t the finger she really wanted to use.

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. There was no humor in his tone. “Do you not like working here?”

He disappeared into his office again, knowing this time he’d given her no choice but to follow. Lindsay sighed hard and looked back at Cindy.

“Come over tonight. We’re going to talk about this.” Somehow she’d managed to make her voice sound no way near as angry as Cindy knew she was.

“We really don’t have to.”

“We’re going to talk about this,” Lindsay repeated, with both a look and a tone of voice that said there was no getting out of it.

Cindy swallowed and nodded.

“I’ll see you later,” Lindsay reasserted and walked off.

Cindy watched her step into Tom’s office and push the door closed behind her. When it came to Lindsay, if there was one thing Cindy had perfected, it was getting herself into trouble with very little effort.