Chapter six

The atmosphere inside of the car as they drove to Jillian's house was exceedingly awkward, the cloying silence only rarely being broken by the announcements that periodically burst out from the car's police radio. Eventually Briggs couldn't take it anymore and he shut off the the radio and tried to make conversation.

"So, how are you feeling Ms Reed?"

Jillian was a very solitary person. The silence might have been cloying and awkward for Briggs but for Jillian it was perfectly normal, in fact she sometimes spent entire afternoons doing nothing but sitting down in absolute silence just thinking about some things. Jillian was comfortable in the silence and so she wasn't used to making inane conversation because she felt that it served no purpose. Ultimately Jillian was judged to be awkward, unfriendly and antisocial with her strange behavioral quirks but deep inside she was a very kind hearted and polite person so she tried to smile without grimacing in pain and answered, "I'm feeling much better Detective Briggs. Thanks again for taking me to the hospital."

Briggs almost sighed in relief when he saw that Jillian was trying to be sociable. Jillian was famous in the station for being a no nonsense kind of woman. She had been asked out by many of the cops but she had flatly rejected all of them. Eventually they even started a betting pool to see who would bag 'the frigid crusader' as she was known in the station, last time he heard that the pot had reached thirty three grand without showing any sign of being collected anytime soon. Jillian was always professional to the point of being standoffish, flattery rolled off her without phasing her, trying to flirt with her would only result in her tilting her head and looking at you like you were speaking in a foreign language. She was unattainable which made her even more attractive. Briggs imagined what would happen if they found out exactly how devastatingly sexy she was when she wasn't hiding her body and he couldn't help but shiver when he envisioned the frenzy it would cause. His eyes involuntarily peeked towards Jillian whose body had once again been wrapped in layers of clothing and he remembered exactly how she looked with only a thin layer of cloth covering her. The image was almost literally seared into his mind, he knew that those ridiculous curves that would give any formula one racer a headache were going to keep him up for many a night.

Eventually he realized that he hadn't looked at the road for a dangerously long period of time so he hurriedly shifted his attention back to driving and spoke while trying to give the off the impression that he wasn't flustered and that he was as cool as a cucumber,"I'm not really working right now, please call me Ed."

Jillian didn't know what was going through Brigg's mind. She did know that some people found her attractive but she had never understood such things. Sure she understood the underlying biological ,psychological, and physiological principles underlying the whole reproduction thing but she never believed in "falling in love". She does find some men sexually attractive but that was about it. She also knew that her attitude probably stemmed from the fact that her father had abandoned her mother making it difficult for her to trust men in that way but she did want to fix her attitude. She didn't even see it as a problem. To her, love and romance were unnecessary. She got sexual urges now and then but she could take care of those on her own with the help of the appropriate equipment. Jillian had long discarded useless things that had to do with male female relations so she didn't realize that Briggs was trying to get more familiar with her by getting on a first name basis. When he asked her to call him Ed , she responded without thinking, "Alright Ed, you can call me Jill."

She had automatically wanted to extend the same courtesy he was extending her and thought that it was the polite thing to do so she didn't understand why Briggs had a big grin on his face for the remainder of the trip.