Chapter 7: Awakening Need
Teresa woke to an absence.
It wasn’t the sudden, jolting awareness of being alone, but a slow, groggy seeping in of silence. The space beside her in the bed was cool, the sheets flat. No warmth, no weight, no soft sound of another person’s breath. She lay still for a long moment, listening to the empty hum of her own apartment. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed a soft blue: 5:00 AM.
She pushed herself up on her elbows, a full-body ache greeting the movement—a deep, muscular soreness that was specific and humiliatingly intimate. She cataloged it: the tender pull in her inner thighs, the raw, used feeling between her legs, a faint, lingering twinge deeper inside. She was a crime scene of her own unraveling.
But the burning was gone.
The thought arrived cleanly, like a shaft of light. The frantic, chemical need that had felt like a swarm of ants under her skin had quieted. Her mind felt… clear. Hazy with sleep, heavy with exhaustion, but her own. She wasn’t gripping the sheets to stop herself from touching herself. She wasn’t calculating how many seconds she could endure before begging. She was just Teresa Lisbon, waking up at an ungodly hour, alone and incredibly sore.
The relief was so profound it brought a prickling heat to her eyes. She swallowed it down, hard.
She swung her legs out of bed, the floorboards cool under her bare feet. The room was a mess. The gray comforter was half on the floor. The crisp, military-green blanket from the foot of the bed was tangled in a heap. On the nightstand, next to the clock, sat an empty glass and a plastic bottle of the neon-blue electrolyte solution. And beside that, a single sheet of her own notebook paper, folded in half.
Her name was written on the outside in Patrick’s neat, slanting script.
A jolt, different from the hunger but just as potent, went through her. She picked it up, the paper crisp under her fingers. She unfolded it.
Teresa,
You’ve been asleep for hours. I left at 11 pm, once I was almost certain the siege had lifted. I’m nearby. If you need me, just text. Don’t think about it, just do it.
I know you’ll need space to find your footing again. I’ve spoken to Bertram, and I have taken the rest of this week and all of next week off.
My only request: if anything new breaks on Red John, you call me. Immediately. Everything else can wait.
I sent Cho a text from your phone saying you need one more day. He’ll cover for you. Stop glaring at the paper. You know you need it.
I know you. You’ll want to ignore all of this, pretend it was a fever dream, and march right back into the bullpen by noon. You’ll want to get back to normal.
But when I get back, we need to talk.
– Patrick
She read it twice. Then a third time, her eyes snagging on specific phrases. ‘The siege had lifted.’ ‘Don’t glare at the paper.’ ‘We need to talk.’
A strange, hollow feeling opened in her chest. Part of it was gratitude, so fierce it hurt. He had done all this. He had managed Bertram, handled Cho, stood watch while she slept. He had seen her through the worst humiliation of her life and was now, characteristically, managing the aftermath with a terrifying efficiency.
The other part was a sharp, lonely ache. The empty space in the bed felt vast. She could still smell him on the pillowcase—a faint trace of his shampoo, the unique scent of his skin. She remembered the solid weight of his arm around her waist in the dark, the only anchor in a storm of sensation. She had slept through his departure. He had watched her sleep, decided she was safe, and left without waking her. It was the considerate thing to do. The professional thing. It felt like a withdrawal, a cold glass wall sliding down between the world of the last two days and whatever came next.
Back to normal.
She stood, the note crumpling slightly in her hand, and walked to the window. She nudged the blinds aside with one finger. The city below was still dark, a smattering of lonely office lights punctuating the deep blue pre-dawn. The world was carrying on. Cases were waiting. Red John was out there. Her team needed her.
She let the blind fall closed.
Normal. What was that? Was it the woman who meticulously organized case files on her sterile metal desk? Or was it the woman who, forty-eight hours ago, had begged on her knees in a hallway for release? Which version was the aberration?
Her body answered with a twinge, a reminder that the physical evidence of the latter was still very much present. She walked to the bathroom, flicking on the light. The woman in the mirror was familiar, yet fundamentally altered. Her hair was a wild tangle. Dark smudges of exhaustion lived under her eyes, but the frantic, hunted look was gone. Her lips were slightly swollen. There was a faint, purpling bruise on the inside of her arm where she’d gripped herself during one of the onslaughts. She looked… used. And impossibly well-rested.
She turned on the shower, as hot as she could stand it. The water needled her skin, washing away the sweat and salt and phantom feelings. She scrubbed herself with a loofah until her skin was pink, trying to scour the memory of his hands, his mouth, the invasive toys, the shocking, degrading pleasures. The soap, lavender-scented, filled the steam. It didn’t help. The memories weren’t on her skin; they were in her muscles, in the deep, sore places, in the new neural pathways he’d carved with relentless patience.
She stepped out, wrapping herself in a towel. The silence of the apartment was oppressive. She was used to solitude, cherished it even. Now it felt like a vacuum. She dressed in soft, worn cotton—sweatpants and an old CBI t-shirt. Normal clothes.
In the kitchen, she made coffee. The routine was grounding. Grind the beans, boil the water, the slow pour-over. The rich, bitter smell was a declaration of routine. She leaned against the counter, waiting, and her gaze fell on the small pharmacy bag still sitting there, crumpled and empty. A relic. She snatched it up, crushed it into a tight ball, and threw it into the trash under the sink. She slammed the cupboard door shut.
The coffee was good. She sipped it, staring at the clean, empty surface of her kitchen table. The note lay there, where she’d smoothed it out. We need to talk.
About what? The weather? The intricate mechanics of her multiple, shuddering climaxes? The way he’d looked at her when she was broken open and begging? The guilt and shame and terrible, unwelcome gratitude that was currently curdling in her stomach?
Her phone, charging on the counter, buzzed. She flinched, sloshing coffee onto her hand. It was a text from Cho.
‘Got your text. Take the time you need. Rigsby’s lead on the Schumann forgery was a bust. Walker is handling the arraignment for the Diaz case. All quiet. Call if you need anything. – Cho’
Short. Professional. Unquestioning. Patrick had been right; Cho had already covered for her. The team was a well-oiled machine, and for a moment, she felt a surge of panic at being outside of it. She was the conductor. The machine shouldn’t be able to hum along without her.
She typed back, her fingers stiff. ‘Thanks. Back tomorrow.’
She sent it before she could think. Back to normal.
But as she stood there, the empty apartment seeming to press in on her, the echo of Patrick’s final sentence in the note was the only thing that felt real. It wasn’t an invitation. It was a checkpoint. A conversation waiting in the future that she could no more avoid than she could have avoided the hunger. He had seen everything. He knew everything. And he would want to discuss it.
The burning may have stopped, but a new kind of heat was spreading through her—a slow, dreading anxiety about what came after the storm. The silence wasn’t peace. It was the pause between the lightning strike and the thunder.
She finished her coffee, washed the cup, and placed it precisely in the drying rack. Each movement was a small act of reclamation. She walked to her desk in the living room, the neat stacks of files a siren call to the woman she used to be. She could lose herself in work. She could.
She sat down, opened the top file. The words blurred. All she could do see was his handwriting. We need to talk.
She closed the file. She picked up her phone. Her thumb hovered over his name in her contacts. She didn’t tap it. She just held it, a tiny icon representing the man who had held her together when she shattered, waiting for the courage to either call him or somehow find a way to live in the quiet, unbearable space he had left behind.
She dropped the phone onto the desk. It clattered against the wood. She wouldn't call. Not today. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction, or herself the humiliation, of needing his reassurance that the quiet was real. The siege had lifted. Those were his words, clinical and precise. She clung to them.
She forced herself back into the file. It was a background check for a witness in a low-level fraud case, mind-numbingly tedious.Perfect. She filled out forms, cross-referenced addresses, typed notes into the system. Her handwriting was steady. Her mind cataloged details without drifting. For two hours, she was Agent Lisbon again, the professional, the unflappable. The coffee cooled in her favourite mug.
She reached for it without looking, her eyes on a discrepancy in a billing statement. Her elbow knocked the handle. The mug tipped in slow motion, a dark arc of coffee splashing across the keyboard, the open file, the completed forms. It soaked into the paper with a sickening immediacy, blurring ink, staining everything a spreading, ugly brown.
She sat perfectly still. Her hands rested on the edge of the desk. She watched the liquid pool, then drip onto her sweatpants. The warmth seeped through the cotton. The form she’d just finished—the neat rows of her writing—was now a ruined Rorschach test. Her fault.
A cold detachment settled over her. How could she be so stupid? Clumsy. Distracted. A laugh, sharp and brittle, escaped her. It wasn't just the coffee. The thought arrived not as a whisper but as a kick to the ribs.
It was the entire situation. The cascading failure of the last week replayed in the ruined paperwork. She saw the interview room with Henry Vollman, the carnival barker with the too-calm eyes. She'd gotten too close, trying to read him. He’d been tapping a pen, a steady, metronomic beat. Just background noise until it wasn't. Until her thoughts had gone soft at the edges and his suggestions—to relax, to trust him, to forget certain details—had slipped in like smoke. She’d been hypnotized. Compromised once.
Then her undercover work. A date with, Carl Reeves, starting in that stale-smelling motel room and moving to the tavern. A pinprick in her neck she’d dismissed before they went to dinner. The manic, chemical fire igniting in her veins hours later. Compromised twice. Drugged. Violated on a cellular level.
A good agent would have seen it. A competent agent wouldn't have gotten that close. She wasn't either. She was a vessel that had been opened and poured full of other people’s commands and chemicals. She’d been turned into a frantic, begging animal in her own hallway. She’d sobbed into her pillow while a man she loved finger-fucked her ass to give her relief from a torture she’d been too stupid to avoid.
The rage arrived then. It was white and silent and total. It vaporized the cold detachment. It was her fault. All of it. Every humiliating second.
Her hand closed around the empty mug. In one fluid, violent motion, she stood and hurled it at the blank living room wall. It didn’t shatter so much as explode. A sharp, ceramic crack echoed through the apartment, followed by a rain of jagged fragments.
She stood, breathing hard, her chest heaving. Her knuckles were white. Brown coffee dripped from the desk onto the floor. Shards of her favourite mug glittered like teeth on the hardwood. It was a perfect snapshot of her interior state.
It was Jane’s fault too. The thought was a fresh toxin. Not Patrick. Patrick was the one who had stayed. Patrick was the one who had held her, who had orchestrated her brutal releases with a strategist’s cold grace. That man was gone. He’d left a note and vanished. Jane was the consultant. The puppet master. He’d given her "space" because he knew the mess that was left was hers alone to clean up. He’d withdrawn back behind his charming, enigmatic wall, leaving her here in the wreckage with the echo of his prowess and the silence he called a courtesy.
Space. She didn’t need space. She needed her goddamn job back. She needed not to feel the ghost of a vibrator inside her when she saw a pen tapping. She needed the memory of his tongue on her, in her, to not be the most vivid thing in her head. She needed to not be a problem he had solved and filed away. She heaved another breath, the anger curdling into a corrosive, isolating despair. It was her job to be unbreakable. And she’d broken so completely she’d needed him to put her back together in the most obscene way possible. Now she was supposed to just… function. Because he’d decreed the siege was over.
She stared at the wall. She didn't move. She just stood amidst the dual wreckage of her desk and her living room, the acid of her fury burning a hollow in her chest where the hunger used to live.