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‘Karen?’
She wakes to a touch on her arm and her face is wet. She scrabbles, blindly, for a moment, hand out-stretched. It’s caught, fingers round her wrist, a warm trace on the thin skin there and –
‘Frank.’
She breathes out his name. Reality sinks in, the dream bleeding out, so fast she can barely remember it. He’s so close to her, like this, an arm on the bed to steady himself, and she can smell his aftershave. Sharp and unnameable. The light is scant and in the darkness she seeks out his gaze, those huge eyes, as he frowns down at her.
‘You were dreaming,’ he tells her, softly. She nods, wipes the tears from her face.
‘It was Fisk,’ she mumbles into her arm, twisting. Away from him. It’s always Fisk.
‘Go back to sleep,’ he murmurs, but she’s already drifting, and the last thing she’s aware of before she fades is a touch at her temple.
Frank’s been staying with her ever since Fisk got out of prison and a price appeared on her head.
Her apartment is too small for the both of them. Frank stays on the sofa and she in the bed, separated by a sliding wall that she leaves open at night. He doesn’t sleep much but there’s comfort to the way he pads around the apartment in the dim light, bare feet on floorboards, and she’ll watch him from her bed. He must be aware of it – he must see. But he doesn’t seem to mind. Just carries on with whatever he’s doing. Sometimes she’ll wake up in the middle of the night and all the lights will be off, finally, and there’ll be a glass of water on her bedside table.
She thinks Frank must sleep in the day, whilst she works. Sometimes she’ll come home to a perfectly folded blanket, all sharp right-angles, and his boots at the foot of the sofa. He’ll be sat there, reading maybe, but he always looks rested and clean. Other times she’ll be in the office and the prickling sensation of being watched creeps over the back of her neck. She can never see him, on whatever distant rooftop he’s perched on, but on those days she makes sure to ask when she gets home. Were you there, today? At the office? And he’ll nod, and she’ll know it’s him, keeping an eye on her. No monsters lurking in the shadows. Just Frank.
She was screaming this time. She knows because she wakes alone to the darkness with a raw throat and when she looks out to the sofa Frank’s not there.
He’s outside, on the fire escape. His feet are bare and it must be forty degrees, his skin cold to the touch.
‘Frank. It’s okay.’ Her voice is picked up by the wind and carried away, far over the sleepy lights of the city. He doesn’t move. ‘Come inside, it’s freezing.’
He pulls his knees tighter in on himself. It’s a full moon and she can’t believe how bright it is, milky turns of light spooling out across the planes of Frank’s face, the oddly delicate bones of his wrists, the set of his jaw.
She gets two blankets, one for each of them, and sits out there with him until the sun rises.
On a Monday, as she dresses for work and as he politely stares down at his knees, he asks why Fisk would put a price on her head.
‘Because I worked at Nelson and Murdock,’ she tells him over her shoulder. Easy. It comes out simple and fluid, just like she practiced. Her voice doesn’t even snag.
‘Pretty big price, Karen.’ Frank’s voice is a husk, run ragged by god know’s what. She hates to hear him scream out a nightmare as much as he hates it from her, the two of them bowing out from one another’s pain. Too much. Like holding up a mirror.
She shrugs.
She wrestles with death, hands on her arms, holding her down, a gun in her mouth and she’s screaming around the metal as a thumb clicks off the safety – Wesley holds the gun, then Fisk, then Frank, then Matt, then Kevin –
‘Karen, hey, hey –’ she’s wrestling, still wrestling, and her scream wrecks through the apartment. Her hand scrambles under the pillow, nails scratching against the sheets, and when her fingers meet metal she pulls, victorious, and –
Frank, the other side of the room, hands up. She drops the gun on the bed sheets like it burned her.
Frank’s breath swoops in and out. She listens to the jagged sound of it, tries to compress her own sob into her hands.
She wrenches away when Frank comes to her, gentle touch on her wrist, but he insists, tucks her into his chest, lets her scream into the thin cotton of his t-shirt. Lets her shake apart in his arms. Her little bedroom, with the sketch of the river on the wall and a framed photo on the bedside table, wallows in inky darkness. The springs in her mattress creak and Frank’s arms envelope her. Consume her. He eats her whole with one definitive bite and she allows herself to float inside him, skating along the darkness.
‘Have you let him think that you are good, all this time?’
Fisk’s voice is broad and operatic and this one, this has to be a dream. She has to be able to wake up. This can’t be real, Frank tied to a chair and she, woozy with whatever they injected into her, both of them drenched in blood. She bleeds from everywhere, it’s slick on her shirt, and every breath she takes rattles with it, a horrible crackling wheeze. She can’t blink, can’t move, just stares and stares as Frank screams at Fisk.
When Fisk hits her and she goes, scattered to the floor, like so many bowling pins bouncing against hardwood, Frank howls. Animal and enraged.
She listens from the floor, ears ringing, as Fisk tells Frank the story. Seven bullets. He quiets, for only a moment.
That’s the worst of it, then, she thinks. All this time, she’d thought she was scared of Fisk hurting her, of killing her – but really it was this. It was being turned inside out, all her nastiness and evil unpeeled for Frank to survey, to decide if she was really worth his investment in her goodness. And it’s done now. Out of her hands. Now she can rest. Can dream.
A shot rings out. Someone heavy falls to the floor. She’s distant, now, floating above the room, up through the ceiling and four floors and way out to the roof, where a November sky waits for her. She lets her eyes flicker shut. She hopes, absently, at a disconnect with the shrieking panic buried at the core of her chest, that it was Fisk and not Frank.
She wakes in her apartment. Everything hurts.
When she sits up, she finds she can barely move, but she forces her legs to take one step, and then another. The floorboards are freezing; all the windows in the apartment are flung wide open. She had expected it to be night time but the sun is low in the sky, filling her kitchen with sticky amber light, and when she reaches the counter she studies her hands. Streaks of russet brown. As if someone had tried to clean the blood off and decided there was too much of it to deal with.
When she climbs through the fire escape, Frank helps her, though he is weak himself. The two of them sway and rest on each other and finally she’s out there with him, sat, all her skin and blood bared to the world.
‘Do you hate me?’ She asks. Her voice cracks down the middle.
‘No.’ It’s instant.
‘Do you think I’m a bad person?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think I did a bad thing?’
‘No.’
She remembers the apostle Peter, denying Jesus three times. Her eyes flicker shut to the sun and when they open again she forces herself to look at him.
He’s so close to her. Broad arms and broad hands and broad shoulders and so ready to let her rest on him and when he leans close it makes sense but she ducks her head anyway, suddenly shy, suddenly unsure of all of this – this overwhelming everything burning through her. It consumes, so that the only thing left is the dark softness behind her eyelids, and Frank.
He presses a kiss to her cheek, and when she doesn’t move he shifts, lips at her jaw, her mouth, and when he moves back up he asks her, into the soft shell of her ear and the curve of her neck and the column of her throat, do you love me?
Yes, she replies. And again, yes, and again. Yes.