Work Text:
Karen Page has had surprisingly few boyfriends, contrary to what she would say is popular belief. She fits the bill for someone who dates often: long blonde hair, blue eyes, slender frame. Attention from men has never been difficult for her to get and retain. Karen Page and boyfriends, though? The two are not nearly as axiomatic a pair as one might expect.
She has had exactly three boyfriends in her life.
Austin was sweet and older than her by a few years because, yes, she thought that was pretty sexy. Mature, she’d thought. Austin was mature in the way that older boys are. That is to say, not all that mature at all. Still he was gentle when he took her virginity under the big tree in his backyard: a blur of cool breezes, awkward but mostly amusing fumbling, a less than satisfying finish. That titillating romance came to an abrupt dissolution for a slew of reasons. She left him behind when she left Vermont and good fucking riddance.
She had never loved Austin.
Matt was…Matt. Handsome, charming, present. The illusion of her hopes and desires, the image of a life she could have if she wanted to be delusional about her own identity. Matthew Murdock had been safety and disarray and fantasy, one that didn’t last long enough to be worth its effort. He had also been her friend and, complicated as their relationship had been, he had been family. She misses him. She misses him every day. She had loved Matt. In love? She had never gotten there with him. She likely never could have given the amount of emotional acrobatics it took to see him and be seen by him. She did her own lying after all. She gets it now. Hindsight and twenty-twenty and all that good shit.
She loved Matt, loves him. Matt was and is family.
Labeling her current partner as a boyfriend is accurate because, sure, that’s what he is, if one wants to be technical about it all. Yet the terms is so paltry, so puerile. Frank Castle is the maverick of boyfriends. Karen Page is dating the Punisher. And, yeah, the furor that accompanies (or precedes) that particular moniker has lain dormant for a while now, but Karen is not given to such guilelessness as to believe that the Punisher is just gone. The Punisher sleeps with his face buried in her pillows, argues with her over mundane things because he likes seeing her worked up, and buys her flowers as much as Frank Castle and Pete Castiglione do. Being with Frank is so unlike anything she has ever experienced. Even so, there is a surprising sort of normality in their relationship that manages to exists laterally to the offbeat and mournful. She feels equipped to handle the shit that other couples never have to deal with–guns, conspiracy, tragedy.
It’s the "normal" stuff that does her in sometimes.
___
Anita Baker croons in her signature contralto from the speaker because Frank has a thing for jazz and soul. He says it reminds him of growing up when Ma (as he affectionately refers to her) would play her records and clean the house. This is the good stuff, Karen. Not that shit on the radio today. Disinclined to refute a relaxed Frank Castle, Karen just rolls her eyes and smiles. Okay, old man. It’s good. She teases him but she likes it too. It settles her in the ways she suspects it does for him.
Frank Castle, a man of many tastes, ladies and gentlemen.
A bottle of wine sits between them on the island as the dishes from dinner dry on the rack behind her. At some point, they had grown tired of the fluorescent kitchen light and opted for the warm glow of the string lights draping from her ceiling. Frank leans his forearms against the island, the fabric of his dark t-shirt stretching across his shoulders. She keeps her eyes on her notebook, hitting a nice rhythm in her brainstorming for her next article, but she can see him in her periphery. He watches her with a steady gaze for nearly five minutes and she pretends not to notice. She holds back a smile when his trigger finger taps out a restless rhythm against the counter. It goes on like that for a few minutes. Him tapping and thinking loudly. Her pretending not to notice, trying not to smile.
“Listen, I, uh, I need to tell you something.”
She smiles this time.
“Figured with the way that finger is going over there.”
The tapping stops. He gives her a look. She makes a show of sliding the notebook over to him before winking and hopping onto the counter. Beckoning him closer with her pointer finger, she smiles. He moves with the speed of a man already in trouble; he keeps his distance by placing his back against the island where she had just been instead of coming all the way to her. She arches an eyebrow.
“Really?”
He hums, takes her foot, runs his hand up and down her calf. Up and down again. She applies pressure in an attempt to draw him closer, but he resists her without taking his hands away.
“Keeping my distance in case you decide to punch me.”
She clicks her tongue, a delightful habit she picked up from him.
“Oh boy,” she says with a smile, teasing him.
He sighs. His eyes settle heavy and unrelenting on her face for a few moments and this thing, whatever it is that he’s doing, becomes infinitely less endearing. She extracts her leg from his grip.
“Tell me.”
He folds his arms across his chest.
“Karen, I, uh, I got pretty close to the Lieberman family. Back when everything was happening with Bill and Rawlins.”
She feels the slight tension seeping from her shoulders. Immediately she knows where this is going. Call it intuition or just knowing Frank the way she does. It makes sense why he seems unsure, nervous even. This is new territory for them. Bullets, explosions, and military conspiracy? They had traversed that. Frank possibly being interested in another woman that was not Maria? Well. This is unprecedented. These are the sorts of conventions that feel routine to other couples and foreign to them.
She holds her hand out to him. His glance is cursory before he takes it and lets her pull him until he is standing between her legs. She presses her lips to the spot on his jaw. Kissing him here can get her just about anything if she asks nicely. Or not so nicely depending on his mood and what she’s asking for. Steely and lethal as he is, Frank Castle has a penchant for being bossed around sometimes.
“I’m listening,” she says.
“Sarah and I kissed.”
She smiles again. As if she can help herself at his point. His statement is straightforward the way she expects it to be, the only way Frank knows how to be really. He ducks his head for a second before he meets her gaze. For him, this is a moment when he has to meet her gaze and Karen knows it.
“That makes sense,” she says, voice even.
He blinks slowly. Once. Twice. When he blinks a third time she traps her lower lip between her teeth to keep from smiling. Again. His head tilts to the side in that way of his before he pulls away in confusion. Bewilderment so rarely graces his handsome face but when it does, it always has to do with her, she’s noticed. More than a little amused, she draws him back by his shirt and places a kiss to the bridge of his nose because she finds it cute when it scrunches up like this. He softens under her touch for a moment before she can feel his muscles tighten under her hands.
“It makes sense?”
She nods calmly.“It does.”
The look he gives her is familiar. Searching and unwavering. Like he has to figure her out, like she’s thrown him off balance. What did he expect when he was planning to tell her this? She asks him as much. The question fails to distract him from whatever emotion is building up.
“What do you mean it makes sense?” he asks.
She frowns when she recognizes the pitch in his voice. Confusion she had expected from him. She had definitely not accounted for the possibility that she would hurt him with her understanding. She runs her finger between his eyes to smooth the frown lines. She presses a pacifying kiss to his lips. He lets her and then rests his forehead on her shoulder for a bit.
“You’re upset,” she says.
He pulls away so he can look at her.
“Gotta be honest, Karen, I don’t know how to feel. You think I was just out there, shit, I don’t know, kissing women all the time or something?”
She absolutely does not think that. Six months. That’s how long it took him to kiss her once he was back in her life on a regular basis. What room could there have been for lingering, soft touches in his rage and war back then, back before he’d really dealt with Billy Russo? She thinks about the way he spoke of Maria, the way he still speaks of her, and she knows that Frank had zero capacity for another woman back then. Not in a way that would matter.
“I don’t think that, Frank.”
He sighs and completely disengages from her. It leaves her feeling cold, bereft. She recognizes the moment. Frank’s mind spins out away from him sometimes faster than either he or she can make sense of. He was vigilant about combating false narratives, particularly ones she feels like she hasn’t caught up to yet. Whether he has always been like this or if his trauma is the culprit, Karen doesn’t know. She knows for sure that a gunshot wound to the head isn’t doing him any favors.
He runs a hand through his hair and she can see the very slight tremor. She waits him out. He puts his back to the island and looks at her. She tilts her head as a way of prompting him.
“Look, I never saw a future where I was with any woman that wasn’t Maria. When I was with her I didn’t want to be with anyone else and even when she was gone I still didn’t want to be with anyone else—“
He pauses briefly to take a deep breath.
“Call me a goddamn romantic or a sap or traditional, but I ain’t ever been interested in a whole bunch of women. Just not built that way. There was Maria and there was never gonna be anybody else and then there was you.”
“Frank, you don’t—“
“Look, I gotta say this, alright?”
His voice is rough and her chest always gets a little tight when he talks about Maria. It’s never in jealousy. It couldn’t be. She loves him so much that some days she wishes Maria would walk in through that door. She would hand him over and figure out how to put herself back together later.
He doesn’t have to do this, convince her that he loves her this way. Does he not understand that she knows that she can only ever be his second choice?
He walks back to her and brackets her body with his arms. By now her gaze has fallen to the floor in thought and he ducks his head to meet her eyes.
“Hey, look at me.”
She does. She makes sure her gaze is steady because she has some things she needs him to understand too. Shrinking under the truth of them is never something she’s willing to do. She gets it. She accepted it when she decided to be with him.
For now, she’ll let him finish.
“It’s just you, Karen. Nobody else. You came and fucked my shit up and it’s just you. I’m not sitting around wishing you were Sarah or Maria. I miss her every day. I do. I always will, but you don’t need to contend with that. You don’t. You’re Karen and I love the fuck out of Karen, you got that?”
Words aren’t enough in the moment so she kisses him, afraid he won’t understand otherwise. She means for it be quick and communicative. Frank needs something else apparently. He pulls her closer to the edge of the counter and holds her there as he wraps one arm around her back. His kiss is languid and deep until he’s pressing shorter kisses to her mouth as if he can’t seem to stop.
She loves this man. She does.
Eventually she puts a hand on his chest to halt his next advance. He makes a noise of disapproval and, charmed, she leans forward to kiss him quickly and then pulls away to look at him. His beard is soft in her hand when she reaches up to stroke it, smiling softy at him.
“I’ll address what you just said before I tell you what I meant earlier,” she says.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Frank, it never occurred to me that you were running around New York playing Casanova. Never even crossed my mind, though that is a very fascinating image. I know how much you loved Maria, how much you still love her. I know you love me. I also know it’ll never be like it was with Maria and that’s just what I signed up for when I said yes to being with you.”
He shakes his head and pulls away from her again in frustration. She blinks in confusion. What did she say this time to set him off? How could her attempts to be diplomatic, understanding, reasonable, be going so spectacularly wrong?
“Fuck, Karen, you’re not understanding me.”
“What am I not understanding, Frank?”
“Jesus. How I feel about you.”
“I do understand.”
He shakes his head.
“No, you obviously don’t. Because somehow it makes sense to you that I kissed Sarah as if I wasn’t fucking halfway in love with you already back then. And that shit you just said about me never loving you like I did Maria.”
“I will never ask you to love me that way.”
He groans deeply and she gets it. Her own frustration is mounting with every exchange in this conversation. She slides off the counter and moves past him into the living room. Frank is on her heels. She crosses her arms because this conversation makes her feel so goddamn vulnerable and she just wants him to understand that she wants him and it’s okay that it’s complicated for him.
“I’m saying you never have to ask me to love you that way because I already do, Karen. How do you not know that? Take away all the shit about replacing her because I know you ain’t ever trying to do that. I know that alright?”
Tears brim on her eyelids and she nods because she doesn’t know what to say. He’s looking at her the he way he looked at her in the elevator, plaintive and yearning. She had been doing so well. Not a single damn tear. She diverts her eyes to the ceiling to stave the tears off.
“Hear me when I say that, and hear me when I say that I love you with all I got. I don’t know another way to love, Kare. I don’t. It was the same with Maria. There isn’t shit I would have done for her that I won’t do for you. That’s what I’m trying to say. There was her and there wasn’t supposed to be anyone else, but then there was. Do you understand what I’m saying to you? Please fucking tell me you do.”
She does. It makes her heart thump wildly and her skin flush because she understands. She feels dizzy with the intensity of his affection, his love, for her. He repeats his question because Frank is nothing if not thorough and she nods slowly again. Hand outstretched, he calls her to him. She walks on unsteady legs into his arms. He kisses her face, her jaw, her hair, her lips. He murmurs things she can barely hear and so she just kisses him. She wraps her arms around his neck the way she did the first time he had been in her apartment. They sway together for a while before she pulls away with another kiss to his jaw. She directs him to sit down and she rolls her eyes when he raises an eyebrow. She just looks pointedly at the couch until he does. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees as she comes to stand in front of him.
“Why did you tell me about Sarah now?”
He looks up at her but he seems far more subdued than he had been a few minutes ago. The change feels like a victory.
“David made some joke about buying her peonies and the time I kissed her cause he’s an asshole.”
She nods even though there are evidently pieces of the story she lacks context for.
“Why didn’t you tell me before today?”
“At first, it was because we weren’t, uh, together. We were something so I probably should have told you before. Then by the time we were I hadn’t thought about it because it just wasn’t a thing. I wasn’t purposefully hiding it from you, Karen.”
“I know.”
He watches her for a bit.
“You don’t want to know what happened?”
She shrugs. “I have three questions.”
This seems to surprise him. She wonders not for the first time what fights with Maria had been like. From what he’s shared in passing before, they might have been a bit rowdier than what they’re doing now. Not that some of their own fights lacked heat or passion. He could incite her irritation like nothing else some days. He angles his head in curiosity before he leans back against the couch. She sits on the coffee table in front of him.
“Three questions, huh?”
“Mhm.”
He nods. “Okay.”
She watches him now, and he doesn’t look away. She rests her chin in her hand.
“Are you and David okay? About the kiss, I mean.”
His eyebrows go up in surprise. Not what he was expecting then.
“Yeah. It was awkward as shit though.”
“I bet.”
She smirks and he gives her that lopsided grin that she likes.
“Does she still want to kiss you?”
Frank scoffs. He shakes his head and his smile grows fond, respectful even.
“No. Hell, she didn’t even really want to kiss me then. She didn’t want me. She just missed David, the fucking asshole, and I was there.”
“With flowers, apparently.”
“Needed an excuse to be at her house. Thought she and the kids might be in trouble.”
She smiles.“So you show up to her house with that jawline and flowers, Frank? You’re a fucking idiot.”
He rubs a hand over his jaw with a shy smile.“You like my jawline, huh?”
She reaches out to run a her finger across it. “Obviously.”
The shy smile morphs into a satisfied one. Then it becomes a bit mischievous, but he just waits for her next question. She takes a deep dramatic breath just to make him squirm. She laughs at the slight concern visible on his face. He rolls his eyes and reaches forward to gently swat her thigh.
“Stop being an asshole, Karen.”
“Do you want to kiss her now?” she asks.
“No. It wasn’t like that. It wasn't. Don’t want anyone that ain’t you.”
“Then you and I are fine.”
He sighs. “You can yell at me if you want.”
“You want me to?”
“Kinda,” he says with a shrug.
“You’re such a masochist.”
“That mean you’re gonna yell at me?”
She shakes her head. She moves to settle on top of him. He immediately receives her, wrapping his arms around her torso. She places a slow trail of kisses on his jaw and he hums. He likes it when she presses her lips to this spot.
“Don’t kiss anyone else, Frank.”
He leans back so she can see his face.“I won’t.”
“Okay.”
She kisses him again and suggests some ways he can make it up to her, not that he really has anything to make up for. The look he gives her makes her skin buzz with warmth and he stands with his arms full of her. He carries her to her bed as she attaches her lips to his. She smiles when he tosses her down and she lands with a bounce. She wakes later in the middle of the night with Frank sprawled next to her with his face buried in a pillow and arm thrown over her. She shifts slightly to get more comfortable. She watches his back rise and fall as he breathes. She turns to run her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck and he grumbles with contentment. A thought takes shape and she chuckles.
“What?” he asks without looking up. His voice is muffled by sleep and the pillow.
“Maybe I should kiss David to make us even. He does have such beautiful, curly hair.” She emphasizes the point by pulling a little on his curls.
He groans and looks up to glare at her.
“Much rather you punch me."
“I bet you would.”