Author's webpage: http://www.twistedchick.org/original/

Author's disclaimer: Not mine, no. Unfortunately. But I can dream...

Author's notes: Something a little lighter than the last two stories, and not in a series. You might call it the product of overcaffeination and late nights.

Legs
by Kit Mason

Blame it all on ZZ Top. Man.

I was sitting in my office at Rainier, working on a lesson plan for an Anthro 202 class when I heard it. Charlie, down the hall, was the only one working after five along with me, and he had this addiction to oldies stations.

Don't get me wrong. Old music is good, sometimes. Except when it gets into your head and refuses to come out, refuses to do anything except play with parts of your mind that are not terribly useful when you're trying to figure out what to teach sixty sophomores about cross- cultural themes in pottery.

Well, there's this little offering bowl from ancient Egypt that has feet on it; it's the hieroglyph of "bring." But that's probably the only relevant pot I could think of, and it only had feet.

Anyway, the music made my mental train of thought jump the tracks, and all of a sudden I was thinking about legs. Long, elegant, shapely legs.

Jim Ellison's legs.

And therein lies the problem.

Oh, he's got 'em. Knows how to use 'em for running and standing and stretching out in front of the TV, and walking and towering over people. They even fold up well, when he's changing tires or getting in under the sink for emergency plumbing, or creeping along the side of a wall at a stakeout when the suspect has arrived and the only real shadow to protect him from discovery is two feet high.

They're just part of the Ellison Standard Equipment. Item: one pair of legs, very long, very well muscled, very easy to look at.

I guess it's leg envy. Mine aren't anything outstanding to stare at. They hold me up. They get me where I need to go. They're a bit more toned in the last year or so, since I started chasing Jim around crime scenes, dodging bullets and psychopaths and mad bombers, but they're still pretty ordinary compared to what I see every day tripping down the stairs from the upper bedroom.

Hmm. The Olmecs, or is that the Toltecs, had figurative pots with legs....

"Sandburg! Get down!"

"Right behind you, Jim."

The concrete floor looked cold and damp, the air moist and close in the warehouse office.

"Why didn't you stay in the truck? This is a shootout, f'godsake."

"Hey, you need me to be here, man. Okay, tune out the explosions and the lights, and concentrate on the movement. Over there. Can you smell him?"

"Got him."

And he was off again, dashing through the door to the bigger rooms, broken-field running at its finest, low to the ground like a jackal or a hyena skittering up to its prey. He dived flat out behind a stack of wooden pallets half-loaded with crates, and by then I was right with him, diving down behind him, one hand landing on his back harder than anticipated. Jim didn't even notice it.

"Two of them, Sandburg, one at 10 o'clock and one at 2:30. First one's armed, second is armed and wounded. Tell Simon."

"Right, Jim."

And before I could speed-dial Simon, Jim was up and running again, those long legs flashing, the ground-eating speed of his running taking away any advantage held by the opposition, and the suspect went down for the count as Simon and Brown and Rafe poured in the side door and took care of Mr. 2:30, who was wounded (a broken ankle) and armed (with a misfiring semi-automatic pistol that had jammed irreparably.)

And from the floor by the yellow-pine pallets I had a truly spectacular view of the long, elegantly trousered legs of the men of Major Crimes.

Leonardo's sketch is almost a cliche now, a few hundred years after he drew it. The man in the circle, the example of perfect proportion. I used to think it was a good shirtsleeve description of male beauty, except for the face of the sketch, which never did anything for me.

That was a few years ago. I've moved past that now. Maybe it was exposure to different standards of beauty in different societies. Maybe my tastes have just changed.

Leo, I've got news for you. Beauty isn't found in perfection. It's found in irregularities.

If I were to try to map Jim Ellison onto that sketch, it wouldn't work. Jim's legs are longer, his shoulders are more muscular, even his neck is larger than Leonardo's ideal. But it works. It all works, gracefully and beautifully, on Jim, whether he fits into that perfect circle or Golden Mean or not.

When I look at him, I see a different sort of proportion, an uncalculated mathematics that I can't scribe in abstruse characters to confuse future generations. The language I'd need hasn't been invented yet, nor the symbols of measurements. I see the proportion of the length of his legs to his long, muscular back, the T-shape of his shoulders offsetting their height above the ground, the finer bones of his wrists and hands balancing the strength of his arms.

It's a little like having my own art gallery available all the time, with a masterpiece on display that constantly changes and is never boring. I'm not the curator; I might not even be the caretaker, in some ways. I'm just the most avid visitor that gallery has ever had.

It was muddy out.

Cascade has a dry season and a muddy season, but the dry season is only about eight days spread over what would be the summer somewhere else. The rest of the time, it's the rainy season. After about a month of rainy season, when the ground is totally saturated, it's the muddy season, and on this day it was the high center of the muddy season. Or maybe the deepest part of it; hard to tell.

Whatever it was, that's what we were running through.

Jim was ahead of me, bird-dogging the suspect through the park, directing Rafe and Simon to head him off at the pass, when the suspect decided to zig instead of zagging, turned a few corners way faster than the safe speed for the weather, and headed back toward us as if we weren't there.

I was running almost all out -- it's hard enough to keep up with Jim in good weather, and this time I'd left my backpack in the truck, so I had a little less weight to carry around, at least. Jim zigged along with the suspect, dodged back, and tripped on a rock or something under the mud that neither of us could see.

He skidded sideways toward the suspect, who, not being a total fool, headed the other way as Simon and Rafe were closing in from the sides. And he might have gotten away if Jim hadn't fallen like a Keystone Kop, legs splayed.

I had two options. I could keep running and fall over Jim and look really stupid, or I could take a Pete Rose dive for home plate, between his legs, and hope I wouldn't hurt him.

I dived. I slid on the tsunami of mud as if I was on the water slide in a theme park. Right between Jim's legs as he crumpled to one side with a pulled calf muscle. The mud was slick, with no traction whatsoever, and it felt as if I could keep sliding until I hit the Pacific, if I wasn't sliding on some of the Pacific already.

I body-surfed under Jim and swept the suspect's legs right out from under him.

Not that I could see what was happening that well with six acres of mud on my face and in my hair, but you get the picture. Rafe cuffed the suspect and read him his rights. Simon helped me up very carefully so slick muddy me wouldn't rub off on his new topcoat, and both of us helped Jim to his feet, and into the ambulance that was called to check out his leg injury.

Did I mention that I love the nurses at that hospital? They took one look at me, handed me a set of scrubs and pointed me toward the shower room so I could 'freshen up' while Jim was in the examining room. They know us pretty well; too well. Or maybe they just didn't want to have to mop the mud out of the entire emergency room suite after we left. Instead, it all went down the drain, except for the worst of what was on my jacket that I didn't want to wash out in the shower because I'd have to wear it home anyway.

By the time I got done in the interns' locker room, Jim's right leg was strapped up. It wasn't a pulled calf muscle, it was a pulled tendon, and he'd have to be careful with it for several weeks while it healed.

I think I've figured out leg warmers.

They didn't make sense for a long time. Ballet dancers wore them, then they were fashionable for a while among working women because they would protect legs in stockings from the cold and could be stripped off once women got to work without messing up the rest of the outfit. But I never could understand the look.

Now I've got it. It's a contrast thing. Extra wool here, extra skin there. Right. Just like with the brace on Jim's leg. It's bulky, functional and necessary, and it shows up the shape of his uninjured leg by contrast. It makes the good leg look more toned.

This is definitely not going into the dissertation. It's not even going into the official journal. I think I'll use these notes to start a fire one of these days soon, before Jim gets home, so he won't be able to read the writing on the charred ashes -- don't laugh, he can do that -- and get that look on his face of "I don't believe you're going there."

Maybe I have to get out more. It's not as if there aren't other people in the world with legs I can watch. At least 51 percent of the population, in fact, the women of the world, have legs that are worth watching and appreciating. So why am I getting hung up over the gams of my middleaged cop roommate?

Damned if I know. Let's classify it as artistic appreciation for the moment. It's the safest bet.

"Ow! Owwwww!"

"Okay, what did you do to yourself this time?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Dropped the keys and got a charlie horse when I leaned over to pick them up."

"Which leg?"

"Which do you think? The left one. Oh, fuck."

"Hey, hey, relax. Let me help you over to the couch and see what I can do about it."

"Thanks. You?"

"Sandburg Magic Fingers. Highly trained to relieve pain and give pleasure. Fully certified."

"Certified by who? Your girlfriend of the weekend?"

"Very funny, Jim. Really, I've got affadavits on them, if you want to see 'em."

"I'll pass. Ooof!"

"Put the pillow behind you and shift over sideways on the couch so I can see -- oh, yeah. That's a charlie horse. Actually, that one's big enough to be called Charles. More dignified."

"You going to do something about it or just mock it to death?"

"A little levity isn't a bad thing, Jim. Relax. You want something to drink before I get started?"

"Yeah, a beer. Thanks. What do you know about this kind of injury that I don't know?"

"Probably nothing, man, but it's hard to massage your own charlie horse and get anywhere. And I did take a course in sports medicine from a soccer medic I dated as an undergrad. Learned a lot about rubbing out sore muscles."

"You dated a soccer medic?"

"Yeah. Micki. She coached the women's soccer team that beat the crap out of every other team in the division. And since I was dating her, I went to the games and she showed me how to work on legs....How's that?"

"Not bad. Uhh. You've got a good touch for it. Good. Oh, that really is helping."

"I'll get you another beer."

"I don't -- okay. Didn't realize I'd finished this one already."

"Told you I'm good."

"Magic fingers. I think I want to see those certificates, Chief."

"Why?"

"There's got to be a catch here somewhere."

"I've got certificates for advanced first aid, boating safety, sports medicine and swimming."

"How come you haven't said anything about them before?"

"Didn't want to embarrass you."

"Huh?"

"Your turf, man. You're the medic. You've done all that Ranger stuff. I learned things, but I haven't always been able to keep up on them."

"Yeah, well, I haven't done a lot of that for a while anyway."

"Sure, like last week"

"Last week?"

"When you came up behind Simon so quietly that he didn't hear you, and just as he was about to yell for you to come into his office you said something in his ear that made him drop his cigar in his coffee."

"Oh, yeah."

"What did you say?"

"Here, sir."

"See? You're still using covert ops skills. You're just doing them a little less covertly."

"Right, Chief."

A long time ago, I dated a girl who was a hand model. She had absolutely beautiful hands, perfect manicure, long slender elegant fingers, and an appropriate amount of hand strength. And about sixty pairs of gloves so that she wouldn't get any cuts or scratches that would keep her out of work.

Jim could be a leg model, if they didn't mind touching up the scars from bullets and barbed-wire fences and knife fights, or the skid marks from falling on concrete. Most of the scars have faded, and since he's fairly pale anyway they wouldn't show much.

I haven't thought of Sarie in years. I used to think of her every time I saw old-fashioned women's gloves, the ones from the Forties when a properly dressed lady always wore gloves and a hat. The best present I ever found for her -- the one she said was better than anything she'd ever been given -- was a box of vintage and antique gloves that I found at a yard sale. It had everything from little lace mitts to over-the-elbow kidskin, and she was so thrilled that she put the kidskin ones on and used them on me when we made love. It was amazingly more sensual than it sounds on paper.

I might get Jim interesting socks, if I could find some that wouldn't make him itch. I don't think I could find anything that could dress his legs up, the way those gloves dressed up Sarie's hands, and I'm not sure I'd want to even if I could. He's not the legging type. He's the undecorated sort of man, the kind that doesn't see a need or a reason for jewelry or anything that will make him look different than he already looks. The look doesn't need enhancement.

"What're you doing over there, Chief?"

"Nothing much. Watching the game from here."

"I noticed. What's with the scratching?"

"Scratching?"

"Something on paper. Don't make me get up to find out."

"Um..."

"Yeah?"

"Um... I'm sketching you."

"You're what?"

"Sketching you, sitting on the couch with one leg on the coffee table."

"Why?"

"Why not? I have to keep in practice."

"Didn't know you were an artist, Chief."

"Hey, you have to be able to sketch artifacts when you find them. I haven't been out on a dig in a while and I don't want the skills to get rusty."

"Gotcha. So, you going to show me this sketch when you get done?"

"I don't know. It's sort of private."

"You're drawing me, Chief. How's that private for you?"

"Well, a man's sketchbook is his castle."

"You want me to get a warrant or something?"

"Yeah. See if you can find a judge who'll let you invade my castle."

"Not worth the effort. How long are you planning to be scratching there, anyway?"

"A while. Turn the hearing down if it's bothering you. I'm just using a soft pencil."

"Must be the paper, then."

"You can hear it that well over the game? Maybe we should do some more hearing tests."

"Forget I said anything, Sandburg. Go ahead and scratch."

"Sketch."

"Whatever."

It wasn't a bad sketch. I managed to catch the relaxed attitude of his left leg in contrast with the stiffly braced right leg, and the loose, boneless drape of the rest of his frame over the couch as he watched sports. He's never so far into the televised game these days that he tightens muscles when a player makes a shot, which is good for his recovery and good for my sketching.

I did a few more sketches over the week, so it wouldn't look like he was the only model. I sat on the balcony and did a slow architectural study of the buildings on the street, and a contour line drawing of the mountains and trees in the distance over the skyline. I played with shading and line on a sketch of one of the tribal masks, and it came out better than I expected. It hadn't been a lie, not even an obfuscation; I did have to know how to sketch if I worked on a dig. The obfuscation, the thing Jim missed pretty much entirely, is that I'm not an archeologist, I'm a cultural anthropologist, and we deal with the living a lot more than with the dead. Well, those of us who aren't partnered with police detectives deal with the living all the time; I tend to deal with the dead more than I like, but it's not like it's a comfortable relationship.

Now that Jim's got the brace off, Simon has him out on the street again instead of just behind the desk doing backup and paperwork. I've kept up with the sketching; it's a good way to defuse tension when the studies get to be too much. Jim's gotten used to me bringing the sketchbook along on stakeouts, along with the usual homework or lesson plans or research notes. I make sure to draw the stakeout scene first, before I do anything else, and then I draw Jim. Jim's face, profiled against the darker night. Jim's hands on the steering wheel or touching his forehead or chin. Jim's long legs are pretty hard to see in the dark, but I can make an educated guess at where they are.

I'm getting better at catching a scene in a few lines. I got a carpenter's pencil at the bookstore, and after I played with it a bit to get used to the chisel point, I started to use it on stakeouts. The two great advantages are that it's flat, so it won't roll away, and it will give thick and thin lines just by turning it different ways.

The other day I drew Jim as he was cuffing a suspect at a crime scene, over by a house. I could do his legs with two strokes of the carpenter's pencil. Fast, efficient, accurate. And elegant.

"Jim, we've got a problem. There's a serious discrepancy between your report and the suspect's interview and the photos of the crime scene."

"That's not a problem, sir."

"It's not?"

"No. We can use Sandburg's sketch to back up our report."

"Sandburg's sketch? You're an artist?"

"The ability to sketch is required for my field of study. When you find an artifact, you don't always have a camera available."

"Hmph. Let me see this sketch."

"See, Captain, this is where he was, and this is where I arrested him, and here's where -- "

"You're right. Sandburg, may we have this sketch?"

"Sure. No problem."

"Just sign it and date it, so there's no question about it, and we'll get it entered into the record."

"Fine."

"Thank you for clearing that up, gentlemen. And Sandburg?"

"Yes?"

"Good work. Keep the sketchbook."

"Thanks, Simon."

"That's captain, to you."

"Right, Captain."

Lately, I'm still sketching whenever I can. It's hard to fit it in, between classes I'm teaching and the one course I'm still finishing that I couldn't fit into my schedule until now -- it's an advanced seminar on mesoamerican languages, which should come in handy somewhere and is interesting as hell besides -- and the work at the station with Jim. Not to mention what's left of my life besides all of that. But I'm still doing it.

I think I'm starting to see where it's all going. I mean, look around at all the other guys in the bullpen, all of them tall and good-looking. All of them with legs that come up to my waist, or higher; Simon's practically the Empire State Building. I've seen all of them in shorts at one time or another, in a pick-up basketball game or baseball game in the summer, or in the station exercise room after work, and there's not a bad set of legs among them. Several, in fact, would probably have made Leonardo drool. Hell, they'd have made Michelangelo break out the mallet and chisels and head back up into the hills for more marble, to give good ol' David something for competition.

Even so, the only ones I want to look at are Jim's.

Probably because they are Jim's, and nobody else's.

So I've got this fixation on my housemate/partner/dissertation subject/friend.

I tend to be a bit obsessive when I find something I'm interested in. So what else is new?

It doesn't mean the subject of my obsession has to know, or obsess back. I can still be the most avid visitor at the gallery. I can also supply the art, now that I've figured out the inspiration.

In fact, it gives me a kind of a goal. I've always been goal-oriented; ask any woman I've dated in the past eight years and she'll be able to tell you inside of a second what the goal was. Okay, it's not the same goal now. That's a good thing. It's a, well, different kind of goal, an aesthetic goal.

At least, that's where I'll start. Where it will go from there isn't up to me.

"You still scratching that itch, Chief?"

"If you mean sketching, the answer is yes."

"Isn't this a bit much for just keeping in practice?"

I shook my head. "Practice makes perfect."

"Ah, but what are you trying to perfect?" He tried, ever so subtly, to edge around me and see what I was drawing, but in the loft his version of subtle isn't.

"You invading my castle? You don't even have coconuts. Or a swallow."

He looked at me as if he'd finally figured out that I really had lost all my marbles out the back of the school bus, including the ones holding my brain together. "Castle. Coconuts. Swallow."

"You're kidding me, right? You never saw that movie?"

"What movie, Chief?"

Now he was starting to be intrigued, as if I might just be going somewhere. Good. Maybe I could use movie trivia to obfuscate him away from what I was working on.

"C'mon. I may have been six years old when it came out, but I still remember brave Sir Robin, and the Knights That Say Ni and demand a shrubbery, and the debate about European or African swallows carrying coconuts. How old were you, eighteen or so? You're telling me you never saw 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' not even once?"

His eyes snapped off to the side for a second -- a clear indication that his mind's searching the really old data files in the rusted file cabinets -- and I knew I had him sidelined. Sentinel or not, cop or not, he never got the academic mindset and ability to multitrack his thinking. He'd be stuck on this until he got it sorted out, and by then I'd be able to find something else to distract him.

"Wait a minute...wasn't there something about a cow and a trebuchet in it? Or was that a catapult?"

It figured that he'd remember the weaponry more than anything else, I guess.

"And a ... shrubbery?"

"And John Cleese with an incredibly bad French accent. That's the one."

"So what does this have to do with your castle?" He was grinning now, thinking he had me pinned.

"Just that when I want you to invade it, I'll float an electric Holy Grail sign over the top so there won't be any mistake. And that's not now, okay?"

He got an odd look on his face, as if he was retrieving something out of one of those rusted file cabinets again and the drawer squeaked really loudly. "I take it this means that somewhere along the line you'll let me see what you're doing."

"Yes. Somewhere. Not now."

"Okay." And he turned away, but not without a background glance that had me stewing for days. It was too complex and open to interpretation to come from someone whose basic response to life is fairly simple: find what needs fixing, fix it, relax, find something else that needs fixing. Oh, in there with relaxing comes enjoying himself, loosening up at poker or basketball games, but generally that's his pattern. That's why he's a cop; that's his pattern, find something that's wrong in the world that he can do something about and make that sucker work right, whether it's chasing down a murder or a smuggler or putting a wrench to the leaky pipe under the sink.

I didn't trust that look, though. I've seen him look like that just before cracking a big case, and it meant he'd bend the rules if he thought he had to.

Sleeping with that notepad became a good idea. I mean, I wasn't dating anyone, and it was just as well with the schedule I had. I needed a little down time, and the sketching gave me that breath of air to rest my mind. It was the only nonverbal activity I could count on, other than stakeouts with Jim when he didn't feel like talking, but those were more meditative than nonverbal lately. There were probably words there, they just weren't said out loud. I didn't always know which ones they were, either; I needed to update the Jimspeak Lexicon, and sketching wasn't the worst way to do that, either, since I could concentrate on gesture and symbol and deal with content later.

I still did a sketch of the stakeout scene first thing, with as much useful detail as I could manage and small marginal notes in case it wasn't clear, and often as not the sketch did make it into the file as additional evidence. Once in a while it came in very handy, and Simon even smiled at me and handed me a cup of his good coffee and said, "Thanks, Sandburg." and "Good job, Sandburg," and I felt good about doing something helpful that nobody else had thought of.

But after the routine stakeout sketch was done, I was back to working on this little project I'd started, that had gotten a lot more complicated with my realization of why I was working on it in the first place.

Immortality. Not mine, his. I wanted, somehow, to preserve the beauty I saw, whether or not anyone else ever saw it the same way I did. Whether or not anyone else ever saw what I'd done, in fact.

I didn't do the basic sketches while I was in the truck with him; I did them after he jumped out, while he was frisking the suspect or cuffing him, or dealing with some situation where he had plenty of backup from Rafe and Brown and Taggart and I would've been in the way. Usually all I had time to get onto paper was a fast outline of form and movement, but it was enough to give me something to work with the next day in my office, where I kept the good work that I wanted to finish before the whole thing blew up.

Because, in my experience, anything that can blow up, will. Ask Joel.

And even Joel might not be able to keep this from detonating if Jim took it the wrong way.

This didn't mean I was going to stop what I was doing, of course.

Okay, I knew I wasn't Leonardo, or Raphael or Michelangelo, though his touch with really muscular men would have come in handy at times. I spent a fair amount of time staring at a book of his enormously sculptural Sistine Chapel paintings one week because I was having trouble with the way some of the muscles wrapped around the bones from certain angles, and it helped a lot to know he'd already worked it out and all I had to do was notice the answers. But I'm not in their league. Not Picasso, either; my area of art was definitely figurative, realistic, representative, all those things that the Modernists decided weren't that important any more.

I'm not arguing with the Modernists or the Cubists. I'm not an artist, I'm an anthropologist, making a record of a subject of a study taking place at a certain time and place, setting that subject into its historical, social and anthropological niches so it can be appreciated as it deserves.

Bullshit. But good bullshit, actually. Maybe I should remember that line for the next time I have to meet with one of the profs about my dissertation.

Even so, I think it's starting to look pretty good.

The weather turned the corner, headed for spring. When I sat on the balcony, or looked out the window at the Rainier office, people were taking their time outdoors, sitting in the rare sunshine or relaxing a little as they moved between buildings. Even the rain was a little warmer.

I wasn't able to finish what I wanted before Christmas for him; finals were more of a hell week than usual. I wanted the work to be complete, so I waited and worked on it in January and February on the days when he didn't need me at the station, and occasionally during late nights at Rainier as a break from everything else.

It's not as though he couldn't smell charcoal or graphite on my hands. What does charcoal smell like, anyway? Graphite smells to me a little like old metal coat hangers, not that that makes any sense at all. But while I was finishing up with ink at Rainier I scrubbed it off my hands with something I got from an art supply store, then rewashed them with Ivory soap so the faint rosemary scent would be all he'd pick up. Or almost all. I'm never sure.

And when they were done I put them aside for a while, so I could look at them and make sure everything was what I wanted it to be, before I gave them away.

Maybe this leg fetish was just going too far. I couldn't seem to stop drawing pictures with Jim's legs in them. I tried to make a break by doing a head-and-shoulders-study, with a hand up to his face as he concentrated, and it went fine, but afterward I had to draw two pages of legs before I could just let go of the pictures in my mind. The last legs I drew, I went all out -- I decided to make them tribal or ethnically significant or something, and filled them in with jaguar markings, darkened so they could have been from a black jaguar.

It didn't look too bad, either. At least it didn't look like Simon in some weird '60s pantyhose.

Whoa. That's way too weird. I'm not going there at all.

I started wondering if there was a Leg Fetish Anonymous in the phone book. Maybe I could find some of those little Mexican milagros, the medals shaped like whatever body part you wanted to have prayed for, little silver pieces like hands and feet and arms that would be left at the shrine of a saint to petition for healing. Would I have felt better if I had a string of milagros that looked like legs to play with? Or would it have felt like Naomi's old charm bracelet? If something needed prayer in this situation, it wasn't Jim's legs, but it might be my eyes, or maybe my mind.

Or maybe my heart.

"Jim, I don't want you coming down from there with your eyes open."

"Chief, I'm not going to fall down those stairs blindfolded. I'd prefer not to have a broken leg for a birthday present."

"Just give me a minute, and I'll be right up there to guide you down."

"Right. Seeing-eye Chief, the wonder guide."

"That's me. Okay, Jim, take it easy ... one more step. And over this way."

"You're taking me to the kitchen table?"

"Now you can take off the blindfold."

I'd expected surprise, but this open-mouthed awe thrilled me. Jim's eyes went dark almost instantly, like dark sapphires holding the light instead of giving it back, glowing. He reached a hand toward the three bigger sketches in the middle, and swept it past the half-dozen smaller ones that surrounded them.

"Chief, I -- I'm stunned. Wha -- when?"

"Over the last six or eight months, when I had time. Would you like me to tell you about them or do you want to tell me what you see?"

His mouth quirked. "This better not be a test."

"It isn't." I put a hand on his back, and felt the muscles moving easily under my fingers, not tight at all for a change. "I wanted you to see what I see when I look at you." "Show me." It was barely a whisper of anticipation, and I felt my heart pound. "Please."

"This is you as Burton's Sentinel." I'd redone the old photograph from the book as Jim, loincloth, spear and all. He looked noble but remote, removed from modern life. "And this is the Sentinel of the Chopec." In the second sketch he wore the military garb he'd had on when he returned from Peru, but not the lost, painful expression; his face looked open, sensing but not overwhelmed as he had been before returning to American life. "And this is the Sentinel of Cascade."

Originally I'd thought of doing a composite sketch -- many Jims, one Sentinel -- but as I worked on it the one image emerged strongest: Jim in his comfortable sweater and slacks, his ordinary everyday work clothes, with his head up and that expression on his face that says his senses are open and working and in control, and that he knows what to do. He was armed but the pistol was still in its holster; he was still in the midst of motion; he was ready to go.

The last thing I'd done was to sketch in, very lightly, a shape behind him -- myself, with one hand out on the back of his shoulder, guiding him. I hadn't given myself anywhere near the amount of detail I'd given him, just enough to indicate that he wasn't alone.

Jim touched the edge of the third picture. "There's not enough of you in this one, Chief," he whispered. "You're a lot more real to me than this."

"Sure there is. It's me looking at you, but it's about you, not me. It's harder for me to see myself than it is to see you."

He stood still a moment, breathing a little harder than usual, letting this sink in. It took a while for his eyes to come back down to their usual clear blue; they'd gone dark and intense, and I hoped I hadn't made the biggest mistake of my life by doing this, by laying it all out on the table for him to see so clearly. But he blinked, and he came back to being the Jim I knew again, and he waved a hand at the other, smaller sketches. "What are these? Sentinel at rest?"

"Well ... they're just sketches of you that I liked a lot, so I redid them and spent more time on them. They're you being you, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah." His eyes went dark again, and his voice was soft. "Tell me about them."

I pointed at them as I went around the table. "This one is from when you were sidelined by the mud, and you were watching tv."

"I remember that. I gave you grief about drawing me, didn't I?"

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

He looked a little ashamed. "I'm sorry. I get to be such a grumpy bastard sometimes."

"Tell me about it. But you get over it." I went to the next one. "Here you're waiting in the truck on a stakeout. Actually, on a lot of stakeouts. In this one, you're jogging down in the park."

"When did you take the sketchbook to the park, Chief? I don't remember it."

"I didn't. But I had a camera with me when you ran that 6K charity race last year, and I dug out those photos."

"I'm going to have to keep an eye on that camera," he murmured. "Go on. I suppose you used photos for these others as well?"

"No, I used the stakeout sketches for this one." I pointed to a sketch of Jim standing on the counter, touching up the kitchen cabinets. "It's the way you were standing, the same as at the scene of the Darby bust. And I borrowed a photo Darryl took on the fishing trip for this one." 'This one' was Jim up to his thighs in a trout stream, smiling as he made a cast.

The last small sketch was a three-quarter pose study of him, sitting at the table, one arm folded, the other hand out in a gesture asking for explanation, listening to what someone unseen was saying. I'd seen that gesture almost daily as we talked over breakfast or dinner. Perhaps the picture could be the explanation, or some of it at least.

He stared at all of them for a long time, longer than I expected, and I felt the luna moths hatching in my stomach. "If you don't like any of them, I can --"

"Don't change a thing. Please." Jim's voice was still so quiet. He brought his head up and looked at me, straight on, and his eyes were still dark sapphires, his breathing deeper than usual as if he'd just come in from a run around the park. He glanced down again to the third sketch, touched a finger to it cautiously as if it were on fire, and his eyes came back up again, a little more slowly. "They're wonderful."

I nodded. Where had that lump in my throat come from? "I'm glad you like them."

"Like's a real mild word." He took a step toward me, cautiously, and another, as if I had a shield wall around me that he had to negotiate, or as if he did. "Nobody's ever looked at me like that before. Nobody who's looked at me has seen me. Only you."

"It's --" I had to get it out before he reached me. "They're not part of the --"

"I know."

He was there, one step ahead of me, and moving into my space, almost on top of me.

My heartbeat raced, and he turned into a statue. His eyes held me in a blue tractor beam stronger than anything that ever came out of the Enterprise. One hand came up to touch my face like a feather. "That's a lot of time to concentrate on a gruff old cop."

"Buff old cop," came out of my mouth before my head went into gear.

"I noticed you weren't going out much the last few months. Thought things were busy over at Rainier."

The hand traced my cheekbone and jawline and the edge of my ear. I couldn't breathe.

"It wasn't just being busy," I admitted quietly. I drew a slow breath before the touch of those fingers killed me.

"You know, you should be the model, not me. There's a Renaissance statue that looks like you."

His hand settled on my shoulder and drew me into his arms. A hug. I could handle a hug. I could live through a hug. I might even be able to hug back and live through it, as long as my heart didn't pound all the way out of my chest.

"A Renaissance statue? Since when do you pay attention to art, Jim?"

He was cradling my head on his shoulder, his hand woven into my hair. "Since I took a course in art appreciation as part of my bachelor's degree a few years ago. Donatello, I think the sculptor was. It was a version of David, leaning on his sword, with Goliath's head at his feet. Always did remind me of you, Chief, charging into the middle of things."

"I'm not charging anywhere right now, Jim." His heart was beating hard just a little above mine, almost the same tempo. I couldn't take much more of this. I'd had two years of it already. "Is there a question that needs answering?"

"Maybe one." His voice rumbled through his chest; I could feel the vibrations under my cheek. "Do you ever do drawings from life?"

"I haven't." I pulled my head up so I could see his face. "Not in a very long time."

"Would you like to ... after?"

There it was, the 24-karat solid gold question. No electric Holy Grail sign needed. I knew the answer from his expression, that little smile at the corner of his mouth that said he'd already gotten past the alibis and added up the evidence and had the results all in order. He'd always been a good detective.

"Sure. Any particular medium you'd be interested in? Charcoal, ink, pencil ?"

"I thought we might start with braille. Or body paint."

The first kiss touched the browbone above my eye, and the second blissed across my cheekbone. It was the third one that touched down lightly on my lips, and made itself at home, and stayed.

I lost count somewhere around the tenth kiss, when we'd thrown clothing all over the floor -- but specifically not at the table with the sketches -- and had made it to the couch without collapsing. By the twenty-third kiss we were catching our breaths again, locked in each other's arms, a little messy, a little clumsy, and absolutely beyond words.

Jim wouldn't let me take the pictures to the frame shop in the next block. He insisted on making the frames for them himself, from antique wood mouldings he'd found years ago when he bought the loft and had put aside for a later project. Most of them went up in a grouping on the wall across from his bed -- the three Sentinel pictures in the center, the smaller ones on one side. The one of him in the kitchen went in the kitchen. The sketch of him watching television with his knee in a cast went on the wall in the living room, close enough to the TV that he could catch it out of the corner of his eye.

"Why there?" I asked him as he adjusted it on the wall. "Why not with the others?"

"Because when I'm being a grumpy bastard, I'm usually sitting here, Chief. Maybe I need something to remind me not to be that way, okay?" He leaned toward me for a quick kiss. "I need to remember that just because I'm having a bad day it doesn't mean you have to."

The other sketch, the small portrait, went to work with him, to sit next to the computer, where he could see any time he wanted. My signature was on it, in tiny letters half inside the frame, but we both knew it was there.

"Another reminder, Jim?"

He nodded. "If I remember how you see me, it makes the day better."

Hey, anything that makes his day better is fine with me. We do well enough with the late afternoons and nights and early mornings; I wouldn't want the rest of the day to be left out.

"God, Sandburg, that tickles. And it's cold. Couldn't you warm it up a little?"

"Complaints, complaints. It shouldn't be that cold up there; you're sitting on a towel." I leaned back to check my work. "If I heated it up, it'd run and I'd have to lick it off you and start all over." He reached toward the microwave, and I smacked his hand. "Later, big guy. For now, you hold still."

He straightened again, his face a bit crunched up as he tried not to laugh. "C'mon. How long does it take to do this?" The leg I was working on wiggled a little. Maybe having him sit on the kitchen island for this wasn't the best idea, but it meant I could do the front of his legs without much trouble -- if he'd quit moving.

"Well, if we were doing full tattoos, it would take a hell of a lot longer than body paint. Will you hold still!" I licked a smear off his knee, dried the area with the side of my arm, and touched it up again. He grinned. "Don't forget, you get to paint me when I'm done."

"Like I'd forget that?" His finger snaked down into the bowl, and he touched dots onto my nose and cheeks.

You know, it's really hard to finger-paint jaguar spots on a moving Sentinel with chocolate frosting.

But let me tell you, if you ever get the chance to do it (with a different Sentinel, please, as this one's spoken for) it's a lot of fun.

The End