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The tail has been on her for a while.
At first, she thinks it’s Rio. That’s the justification she uses when she doesn’t call him, even though this is definitely his department. But it’s a nondescript beige sedan, not his style, and while maybe he has a guy on her…
At a certain point, she’s sure it’s not Rio and still doesn’t call him. How stupid would she look if it were nothing? She doesn’t see it everywhere--maybe it’s a new neighbor. Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe she’s paranoid. Maybe it’s another test. Maybe it’s the feds. She doesn’t tell Ruby or Annie, either. What she does do is go on about her life. It’s not as if she doesn’t have enough to distract her, so it’s not much of a hardship, but she can’t help but notice that it doesn’t go away.
There’s something else, though, in her insistence at not calling Rio. It’s embarrassing to have to ask for his help--it’s more embarrassing to have to convince him to let her handle it even after she’s told him about a situation. If she’s gonna play boss bitch, she might as well be able to deal with someone with nothing better to do than stalk her without having to phone in her--her business partner .
So, she goes about her business. She catches sight of the sedan from time to time. She keeps to her schedule, and things run smoothly.
For about a month.
It all comes to a head late one night--she’s waiting for Ruby in a little Ford outside of a tall, dark apartment building. She only has half her attention on her mirrors, waiting to see headlights, and the other half is firmly on her phone--Annie is embarrassingly bad at Words With Friends, she has no idea why she puts them both through this. She lays down C-A-O-S around the H in the word BATH her sister just played, and she's just ended her turn when there's a rap at her window.
If pressed, Beth would have guessed that the guy tailing her would’ve looked a little more… intimidating. This guy looks like a bad caricature of an ambulance chaser, but she can see the glint of metal against the glass in the dim glow of the nearest street light. Swallowing, she steels herself and looks into the man’s light eyes--he waves the gun in a get on with it gesture, and she unbuckles her seatbelt. He steps back and straightens as she opens the door with ice in her veins.
“You’re not my Uber driver,” she says, voice steady and throat dry.
“No,” the man replies easily. “But I am gonna take you on a ride.”
Ew.
“I don’t think so,” she says, firm as her chin tips up. “I think I’ll wait here.” She’s already running through options in her head--Ruby said she’d be here in fifteen minutes six minutes ago, can she stall him for nine? Can she outrun him in heels?
As if he can see her thoughts in a bubble over her head, he sighs, “Listen, lady, we don’t even want you, we want your boss. You come with me, we get him, you go home to that pretty family of yours, right? Have you home by morning.”
It takes everything she has not to laugh--they want Rio? Oh, this is the wrong way to go about it. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s that he won’t come and she’ll be dead by morning because of it. There’s a chance she’s regretting not telling him beforehand, though.
She hears footsteps and realizes just how very out of time she is. “I don’t think so,” she repeats. “I don’t know who you think I am--I just own a car dealership, and I’d really like to get home to my family, so--”
Everything happens very fast--someone grabs the back of her coat and she jerks her elbow back, connects, hears a gruff bitch , and surges forward, fist clenched. It’s probably that the guy doesn’t expect her to fight--he can’t know she’s basically immune to having a gun waved in her face at this point--because she catches him across the cheekbone and pain explodes in her hand and the absurd thought that flashes across her mind is, Ow, shit, I should’ve been the one taking Krav Maga classes . He stumbles back, and she starts to run--something catches her by her hair, firm right against her scalp, and yanks her back, and she has a moment to think that the quarter panel of the car is getting really close before everything goes black.
Her face stings when she wakes up laying across a couch that smells like pot and mold, and her vision swims when her eyes crack open, and she’s overcome by nausea and the light makes pain ricochet through her skull. Someone--not the guy who picked her up--smacks her cheek a couple more times before she groans and swats him away with a hissed, “What?”
“Oh, you are feisty,” he laughs. He doesn’t have the accent, but he’s got distinctly Soprano hair. “Well, you know what they say about redheads.”
“Do they say they’re gonna puke?” she asks, squinting around and trying to get the world to stop spinning. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to puke,” she says, even as Soprano yanks her arm until she’s sitting up.
In spite of her warning, the guy seems surprised when she lurches forward and heaves her dinner all over his aggressively-shined shoes. Her laugh makes another wave of pain rock through her pounding head, but he skitters backward with a curse. It’s short lived, anyway, because he’s crouched right back in front of her with bruising fingers on her jaw.
“Do that again and I’ll make you eat it,” he growls.
If she makes it out of this alive, she’s gonna wonder what the hell was wrong with her when she decided the best response would be to rake her nails across his face--she’s thinking she’s going to die anyway. She’s thinking she might as well try to cake DNA evidence under her nails. She’s thinking her kids may never know that Mommy even died, that she’ll just be another missing person. She’s thinking she wants to hurt him--that she’s so unbelievably pissed at herself and him and Rio and Dean and everything that brought her to this point and she wants someone to hurt for it.
Of course, she doesn’t notice the gun in his hand until she sees him draw it back, and she’s out again.
There’s blood on her teeth when she wakes up again and she’s slumped painfully over her knees with her hands behind her back. She’s pretty sure that she read somewhere that head trauma to the point of unconsciousness is actually really bad, but she’s having a hard time grasping onto that thought. She spits the blood onto the floor next to a poorly-scrubbed stain and tries to straighten against the ache in her shoulders.
“That was stupid,” a voice says.
“You are not wrong,” she mumbles, words feeling like marbles in her mouth. Her head feels like it’s stuffed with gravel and cotton, and everything is made of pain--her hand, her wrists, her shoulders, her head, her neck.
“We just want your boss.”
“So your--yeah, your associate said,” she replies, finding it hard to get her eyes to focus even when she can look back up at him. He’s standing in a dingy kitchenette--so, they’re in an apartment or a particularly shitty extended stay hotel, which doesn’t help her get her bearings. The room’s too empty to be a hotel, she realizes after a moment; the only furniture seems to be the couch she’s on and a chair in the corner where the man from earlier is sitting. There's something like smug satisfaction welling in her chest when she sees the swelling under his eye. The thought to correct him--Rio’s not her boss, no matter what he seems to think--crosses her mind, but she’s not sure if that’d help her cause more than hurt it. “I suggest you call him.”
Soprano wiggles what she realizes is her phone in the air and says, “Thought it’d be easier to wait for you to wake up than it would be to go through your contacts.”
Closing her eyes, she fights the wave of desolation that hits her because now she’s going to have to listen to this, and then she’s going to die. She’s going to die, and then Dean’s going to do something stupid that’s going to end in him getting killed instead of just robbed, and her kids are going to grow up without parents because they were both so stupid . Tears burn her eyes but they don’t fall, and she takes a long breath before looking back up at him.
“He’s saved under Boland Motors,” she says at length. She thinks, He’s gonna be mad I’m calling him this late. She doesn’t know how late this late is, but it was past eleven when she went to do the drop.
True to form, the line rings twice--and damn that guy for putting him on speaker--before she hears his familiar voice, sleep-rough in a way she’s never heard before, “You better have a damn good reason for calling me at 2AM.”
“Pretty good, I’d say,” he responds coolly. Out of the corner of her eye, Beth sees the other guy stand and step closer, and Soprano says, “I found something of yours,” as the guy gets close enough to grab her injured hand and wrench and her throat feels raw before she realizes she shouts.
There’s a pause and Beth stares at the stain on the floor in front of her, heart thrumming in her throat. She thinks she can feel the blood moving through her brain. She thinks she might be sick again.
Then she hears, “You got the wrong number, I didn’t lose anything.”
Eyebrows jumping, the guy bobs his head as he catches her eye. “So, no problem with me just putting a bullet in her head?”
“Man, I don’t give a shit what you do,” he answers immediately.
At that, she can’t help but deflate, hunching over her knees until her nose is just short of touching and ignoring the searing pain in her shoulders. Of all the ways she’s imagined she’d die, at the hands of some dick who looks like an HBO knockoff wasn’t exactly at the top of the list. Rio being involved in her death isn’t a surprise, she’d just assumed he’d take a more active role. The silence stretches and she counts her breaths, and she thinks about how if she dies like this, Kenny’s acting out is only going to get worse, and how Judith has no idea how to raise girls and Emma and Jane are going to be worse off than she and Annie were, and how easily Danny could get lost in the fray. Her throat hurts and her eyes burn and the throbbing in her head only gets worse, but she can’t--she can’t cry in front of these guys. She won’t cry or beg, it won’t get her anywhere, and sometimes hollow victories are all you get.
This goes on for a few minutes before she hears one of the guys--the light-eyed one, she thinks, but it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish them and she’s starting to think getting knocked out twice has serious consequences--ask, “You guys want Chinese? I think China Gate on twelfth is still open.”
“Uh, what?” she asks, head popping up so fast she has to fight vertigo.
“Chinese? I could go for some kung pao chicken,” he responds.
After a pause, Beth says, “I’m good. Thank you.”
That doesn’t feel quite real, but she watches blearily as Soprano rattles off an order she doesn’t quite follow but that the other guy must get because he leaves them alone a moment later. For a few minutes, she tries to find a way to sit that doesn’t make some part of her protest, and she eventually settles on leaning gingerly against the back of the couch. She’s so tired and heavy and in spite of the pain she feels like she could sleep--she’s pretty sure she’s not supposed to, but she definitely could. Definitely might . Even closes her eyes, but she’s thinking too hard, trying to work out why her and why now and how the hell she’s supposed to get out of all of this alive.
For that matter…
“Why’m I still alive?” she asks, looking up and focusing hard on getting the words out even somewhat coherently.
“No use to me dead,” the man answers simply. “All else fails, I could always cut you up a little for a nice little video for your boss .” She’s so weirdly fixated on the implication-heavy way he refers to Rio, she barely spares a thought for the fact that he’s talking plainly about torturing her. While she’s working through that, he stands and goes to the little kitchen, mostly within her line of sight. There’s some noise, plastic on plastic, and he comes back with a couple bottles of water. When he offers her one, she shrugs pointedly and barely winces. “I’ll turn you loose, but you try anything like that stunt you pulled earlier and I’ll mail your fingers to your family.”
“Duly noted,” she replies, leaning forward as he pulls a knife out of his pocket and wondering about the intelligence at trusting a man like him with a knife behind her back. For a moment, he's close enough that she can see the tacky scratches across one cheek, blood dry and flaking at the edges.
It’s a relief when he cuts through the zip tie holding her wrists together, and she bites down on a hiss as she brings her hands in front of her. Her right hand is already swollen and starting to bruise--she flexes her fingers as much as she can, but the pinky on that hand doesn’t want to move, which is fine by her because even small movements hurt like hell . The bottle cap cracks when he twists one open, and she finds herself thanking one of her literal captors again for the second time tonight.
Her mother would be so proud.
She sips at the water and thinks and thinks and thinks past the cotton in her brain and asks, “What’s your name?”
“C’mon,” he scoffs.
“‘C’mon,’” she repeats with her best effort at a sly smile. “I’ve seen your face. And your colleague’s. This night doesn’t end with me going home to my family, does it?” She tilts her head to the side and tries not to let on that it makes her feel a little like she’s on a ship on stormy seas. “So, what’s your name?”
“Lonnie,” he says. Even though he doesn’t address the other part, and it really only confirms what she knew already--Rio’s coming or not coming didn’t really impact that the plan was never to let her go. “My, uh, colleague is Bruiser.”
“Criminals and their nicknames,” she mutters without thinking, and it comes out strangely fond in the same sort of misguided tone people use for boys will be boys .
For a while, they're both silent. Somehow, this is different from any of the other times her life was in danger. It's not just that she's lacking the mental power to grasp for some leverage--the thing is, whenever Rio threatened her, he was angry, and she had always been able to bluff her way through or at least promise to make it right again. Even with the dubby incident, she could appeal to their wallets. She doesn't know what these guys want beyond wanting Rio--and, probably more specifically, Rio dead--and Lonnie speaks a little too comfortably about what he's willing to do to her. Threats plainly spoken sound more like promises than any of Rio's implications. There's a certainty in his tone--as if he's explaining a simple concept. Cause and effect. You do X and I'll do Y. While she never doubted Rio would kill her, even hurt her, when he threatened it, while there was a time when the very sight of him terrified her, it was never so bone-chilling in its delivery.
The other guy-- Bruiser, ugh --comes back and the grease-heavy smell of bad after-midnight Chinese food makes her stomach lurch. As she watches him unpack everything on the counters in the little kitchen, she finds herself breathing shallowly through her mouth until she feels less queasy. Lonnie drags the chair to sit in front of her, balances a takeout container on his knee, and asks her a question she doesn’t catch.
After a moment, he repeats, “Do you want my egg roll?”
“I’m f--” she’s cut off by a wax paper bag soaring into her chest. “Okay.” Then, without thinking, she blurts, “This is the weirdest kidnapping I’ve ever been involved in.”
“How’s a housewife end up with enough experience to be able to say something like that?” he asks, amused.
Instead of responding--he knows how, after all--she hums and lifts one shoulder half an inch. It doesn’t hurt as much, now that her hands are free. Another thought occurs, and she figures since they’re playing honesty hour and since she’s going to die either way, she asks, “Why me?”
It would have made more sense months ago. Maybe his information is out of date.
“Huh?” he stops, chopsticks halfway to his mouth as he stares at her, and she can almost see gears churning in his head. There’s the light of understanding in his eyes as his brows shoot up and he laughs, “Oh, that’s the saddest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.” He looks over his shoulder and waves in her direction, demanding, “Isn’t that the saddest goddamn thing you ever heard?”
There’s an uncomfortable pull at the back of her eyes when she looks between them, and there’s something there that she’s not quite getting. What she does get is that she’s being pitied by a man who’s threatened to mail her body parts to her family, which hits a little harder than she expected. She thinks about asking what he means, but she doesn't think she'll get a real answer and she feels a little too shitty to willingly subject herself to being laughed at much more.
“Is there a bathroom?” she asks instead, holding up her empty water bottle.
When Lonnie gestures disinterestedly with his chopsticks over her right shoulder, she starts to stand and realizes very quickly that heels were a bad decision. Tennis shoes , she thinks numbly, wobbling as she straightens and blinking until there’s not three of him, Wear tennis shoes when doing crime. The thought to sit back down and take them off occurs to her, but somehow she knows she’d regret going barefoot here. While she wishes the ginger, tentative way she makes her way to the dark hall is intentional to make them believe she really won't try anything else, it’s mostly the broken hand and traumatic head injury. The word hall is a little generous, since it’s barely enough space for her to turn around in, but there’s a door on either side. The first one she tries is the right one--she doesn’t flip the switch until she’s inside, and the light drills into her eyes with enough force to make her take a step back into the door.
It takes a few moments of blinking to be able to see again. The bathroom is as small and unimpressive as the rest of the apartment. It also happens to be an interior room.
With no windows.
Well, she thinks, stepping up to the vanity and squinting at her reflection, You weren’t seriously thinking about going through a window, were you? She doesn’t even know what floor they’re on. Anyway, she’d have had to be extraordinarily lucky to have found a window and to have been on a floor with a survivable fall--and if this night tells her anything, it’s that she’s not that lucky. As she prods gingerly at the knot on her forehead, around the edges of the cut at the center, at the bruise across her cheek, she tries to think of anything she can do. There’s two guys that she knows of--Bruiser was the one she spoke to at the car, right? And someone else was there, but she didn’t see their face. Best case scenario, it’s just the two of them, no other guys outside, no one keeping watch, waiting for--
So, even being optimistic, there are two mostly uninjured men on the other side of that door who are more than capable of taking her. She could just make a run for it, rush them and hope she surprises them enough to get past the door. Then what? she thinks, but her brain won’t work with her that far in the future. Then what? Then she gets shot in the back, she assumes. She can’t fight with this hand, isn’t sure she could land a punch with her left, doesn’t know that she can actually run or walk reliably in a straight line.
Still, it’s the only thing she can think of. She gives her reflection one last, bracing look--there’s a swell of anger up under her chest at the blooming bruises she can see and there’s something fortifying about that, familiar in a way she can’t analyze right now--before going to leave. When the door opens, there’s a gun in her face and there’s something wrong with her because she doesn’t even flinch.
“Do we really have to do this?” she asks, raising her hands limply, exasperated and resigned all at once.
“I think we do,” Lonnie says.
Beth opens her mouth to respond when there’s a knock at the door and the room suddenly goes cold. Moving more quickly than she expects, Lonnie gets an arm around her neck and drags her in front of him, cold muzzle of the gun to her temple, and she should be scared now, she knows she should, but there’s still fire in her chest. She doesn’t see him do it, but Lonnie must give Bruiser a signal to open the door, because he does--it seems to go in slow motion, reaching for the doorknob alone seems to take minutes rather than seconds, and it feels like there’s an endless pause during which no one breathes or moves or speaks.
Guns with silencers don’t sound like they do in movies--it’s a crack, and it’s unmistakable after all this time. She can’t help the way she jerks at the noise, and Lonnie tightens his arm around her neck as Bruiser thuds to the floor with a grunt. The door swings open fully and reveals Rio with a couple guys behind him and the thought drama queen pops into her head before anything else.
“See, I told you he’d show,” Lonnie says in her ear, mockingly elated, “Can you believe she didn’t think you’d show?”
“That hurts me, Elizabeth,” Rio tells her, hand on his chest, “Right here.”
Lips twitching unwillingly, she grips the forearm across her throat and grunts, “I’m sorry, I’ll keep that in mind for the next abduction.” His grin widens and she can’t help but think that if she makes it out of this alive she’s going to kill him for enjoying this so much. The muzzle of the gun bites into her skin and she says, “Could you--do you think you could lower that? If you kill me now, you lose your human shield, and it would be really undignified to die because of an accidental discharge.”
The seconds tick by, she can feel Lonnie thinking about what she’s said, and her eyes stay on Rio’s. She can’t tell what he’s thinking, his smile has faded to a smirk, but for all Lonnie’s got a gun on her, his attention is centered totally on her. Eventually, though, the metal pressed into her skin falls away and something in her loosens a little. An idea hits her--suddenly, she’s glad she kept her shoes on--and it’s stupid but it’s sort of all she’s got. Swallowing, she looks as far to her right as she can, can’t see the gun anywhere, and turns her gaze back to Rio as if trying to impart his part of this plan telepathically. The only change in his expression is one eyebrow twitching upward, barely noticeable at all, she could just be seeing things.
Now or never, she thinks, inching her foot to one side until she feels the inside of Lonnie’s. Before she can think better of it, she lifts her foot high and brings her heel down hard --the effect is immediate, Lonnie shouts and shoves her away, and she catches herself on her left palm, jarring all the way up her arm.
Another crack, another thud.
She doesn’t look at Lonnie or at Bruiser, she doesn’t look at anything. For a full minute, she stares at the carpet in front of her until sneakers step into her line of sight and her eyes raise, up his legs to his empty hands to the T-shirt he’s wearing, the one with the neck that’s stretched-out and looks impossibly soft which is a weird thing to fixate on but she’s willing to blame the head injury--finally, finally she looks up at his face, and that’s when he crouches down. His hand comes up, and he pushes her hair back as one thumb traces underneath the bump on her forehead.
“You didn’t think I’d come?” he asks gently, so quietly only she can hear, and she frowns.
“Please,” she scoffs, taking his hand with her left when he offers it and letting him pull her to her feet. “Of course I knew you’d come. You can’t do this without me.”
His eyes narrow, and she knows he knows she’s full of shit, but the adrenaline has worn off and her pain has ramped up from a four to a seven and she’s having trouble seeing less than two of him with the force of it. With both hands this time, he cradles her face, and she doesn’t really ever know what to do with him handling her like this, and he asks, “How do you feel?”
“Tired,” she mumbles, and that’s the truth. “Concussed.” Also a truth. “Like a couple thugs who wanted you dead beat the stuffing out of me.” She means it to come out accusatory, but one of the hits to her head must have broken something because it sounds too warm, and they’re too close because when he huffs it feels like it’s right next to her ear. “Are you going to take me home now? I think I’d like to go home now. My bed…”
“Hospital first,” he orders, gingerly taking both of her hands to look at them.
With a snort, she watches anxiously, but he seems to see enough without any prodding. Somehow, she ends up with an arm around his shoulders and one of his around her waist as he helps her out of the apartment. “Since when do you take people to the hospital?” she asks, eyelids drooping. “You left a gunshot victim in my child’s bed!”
“I know gunshot wounds,” he responds in a tone that clearly indicates he is humoring her. “I don’t know head injuries. You got enough wrong with you up there.”
“Rude.”
They get to an elevator that looks like it’s seen better decades, leaving his boys to, she supposes, clean up the mess of bodies they left behind, and she’s happy to blame everything she’s been through tonight for leaning too heavily into his side. The elevator creaks and groans its way to the ground level--she’s not sure how long it takes, she lets her eyes fall shut and lets her head loll onto his shoulder until he jostles her and says, “Hey, hey, hey, ma, no sleeping.”
“Even more rude,” she mumbles, rubbing at her eyes with the heels of her palms.
Nothing that happens next feels quite real--not the walk through the small lobby or through the double doors leading outside, certainly not seeing her sister’s car out front. He must hear her unasked question, because he explains as he leads her to it, “She called me, like, thirty seconds after Lon did. You missed your ride, the mommy brigade got worried, guess I’m first on the call tree.”
Annie’s face is ghostly white when Rio helps her into the car, but what she says is, “You look like shit.”
“Well, I feel great,” Beth replies without venom, adding when he fastens her seatbelt, “I’m not a child .”
“I know,” he says, quiet, but then he looks at Annie. “Take her to Henry Ford, make sure she doesn’t sleep.”
“McLaren is closer,” Annie protests.
“Yeah, but you should take her to Henry Ford,” he responds, and it sure sounds like a friendly suggestion on the surface. Then, dismissively-- rude, she thinks--he looks back to Beth to the total exclusion of Annie, and she feels his fingers against her jaw and sees his eyes flicker over her face, and for a moment it’s like he wants to say something.
Then he’s gone, shutting the door behind him.
“So,” Annie says at length, ten minutes down the road, “What the hell happened?”
“I guess I got kidnapped?” She yawns.
“‘I guess.’” After a few more minutes of silence, she mumbles grudgingly, “This is a much cooler Auntie-Fucked-Up story than that time I got arrested.”
It takes a few moments for that to sink in and she demands, “I’m sorry, are you jealous that I got kidnapped? Because you can totally have next.”
“Psh, as if they’d ever kidnap me ,” she snorts. “Gang boss isn’t in love with me .”
Deciding she doesn’t have to dignify that with a response, Beth keeps her mouth shut and glares out the window against the too-bright streetlights. It doesn’t seem like very long before they’re pulling up to the ER and she’s squinting against even brighter lights, even more sound, and she can’t really focus against the cacophony to tell the nurse at the desk what’s wrong, but that’s why she has Annie--distantly, she can hear her say something like my sister got mugged and can’t you see she’s got, like, a concussion?! She’s going to be embarrassed about it later, but that coupled with the fact that Beth feels (and probably looks ) about four seconds and a stiff wind from passing out gets her taken to the back with relative urgency. It doesn’t get much easier from there, it’s just that she can sit now--there are questions she has to answer and she only barely manages to stick with the I was mugged storyline, and the MRI, and the X-rays of her hand.
The concussion, the cast, the inevitable call to the police.
The police ends up being James Turner, which is as annoying as a gnat buzzing around her oversized head right now, and she can’t suppress her quietly irritated, “Since when is a little armed robbery and simple assault FBI business?”
“Oh, I think you know since when,” he smiles. “You wanna tell me what really happened?”
Bringing forward every bit of self-pitying I’m just a simple mother of four and I was just the victim of a senseless violent crime she can muster, she says, “James, I told the truth. You don’t believe me?”
“Not even a little.”
“Then maybe I should make my report with someone from Detroit PD,” she offers simply.
His smile goes a little caustic, and she wonders when this adversarial thing she has with an actual federal agent became so much fun. Sure, she’s kind of miserable right now and she’s been awake for too long, but this weird cat-and-mouse, spy novel, dramatic back-and-forth really is more fun than anything else in her day-to-day life. What kind of person has she become if she looks forward to it?
Once he’s gone, Annie comes in just after the doctor lets her know that she’ll be good to be discharged in a little bit and holds up her phone, “Thought you’d be overjoyed to know that Deansie got the kids to school and is now at the dealership, so you will have the house to yourself for a few hours. Except that I’m also going to be there. So technically we’ll have the house to ourselves for a few hours.”
Blinking against the flood of words, Beth takes a few moments to absorb what she’s said before, “It’s already time for school?”
“Oh, Bethie, yes, it’s already time for school.”
Maybe it’s the lack of sleep or the head injury or both, but suddenly Beth feels like crying--either from delayed pain response or frustration or the reality of everything that’s happened over the past several hours. She’s tired and she wants to go home and she wants a bath and to sleep for a very long time and maybe, maybe , after all of that, she’ll be up to trying to figure out the Rio thing.
She gets discharged. They give her a painkiller that makes her feel a little fuzzy and makes everything quiet to a dull throb and it makes the long ride home a little more bearable. It’s not until they get to her house that she notices that Annie probably hasn’t slept either. Her right hand, covered in a cast as it is, feels too heavy and it hangs limply at her side as she stares her sister down.
“ You look like shit,” she says finally, grinning at Annie’s laugh.
“Yeah, I’m gonna need to crash on your couch for a while,” she replies, dropping onto the couch as she speaks and flinging her limbs out.
“‘Kay,” Beth yawns, “Need anything?”
“I need you to go the hell to bed,” she says with all the force of a sleepy kitten, jabbing a finger in her direction.
“You got it,” she nods, wincing at the throb in her head as she does.
For all her grand notions of a bath before she goes to bed--objectively speaking, she’s gross, and she’s got blood that’s not hers under her nails, blood that is hers on her face, and a mix she doesn’t even want to think about on her clothes--Beth finds it’s about all she can do to to get undressed. The effort of that alone makes her feel dizzy at the exertion, and she pulls on a tank top and pajama pants--the idea of trying to button up a real pajama top seems a little advanced for her just now--and collapses, aching, into bed.
She sleeps--if you can call it that--fitfully for about an hour before she starts awake, eyes gritty and mouth sour and sore all over with a wet, pulsing ache in her skull and she groans, rolling onto her belly to bury her face in her pillow against the daylight filtering in past her gauzy curtains which she’s regretting so much right now. Her bed dips and her chest clenches in a moment of panic, but nothing happens for a few moments and it subsides pretty quickly. When she works up the strength to turn her head even slightly, she sees Rio, face clouded as he scowls at her cast. After a while, he seems to realize she’s watching him, or he realizes his glare isn’t going to affect the thing, and he meets her gaze. Sighing, she wriggles until she’s curled on one side so her face isn’t half-mashed into the pillow and asks, “How do you keep getting in here?”
“Hide-a-key isn’t very well-hidden.”
It’s not something she’d ever considered because it was too easy, too mundane. She honestly thought it more likely that he just picked the lock every time. Something of what she’s thinking must show on her face because his shoulders shake with quiet laughter and his head drops, and maybe it’s the various injuries and lack of sleep but she feels at liberty to bring one knee up the extra couple inches to push at his hip. It’s too close, too friendly for what they are after everything, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Or maybe he’s just as aware of the fact that tonight happened because they wanted him as she could be.
Which brings to mind a thought.
“Hey,” she says, quietly, waiting until he looks up, smile going lopsided. “What happened tonight?”
“You lost your memory or something?” he asks, eyebrows shooting up.
“Not what I mean,” she grumbles. With another heavy breath, she pushes herself upright and back until she’s sitting up against the headboard, and he twists to face her and seems to just wait . “Why me?”
His hand comes up, finger brushing down the side of her face, and it’s so achingly familiar she can’t breathe , and his eyes lower and all she can focus on are his long, long lashes. “It had to be you ,” he says eventually, eyes lifting. “I wouldn’t’ve come for anyone else.”
It’s a little bit more of an admission than she thinks she was prepared for, but she presses anyway, “ Why?” The twist of his lips goes wry and he shakes his head, like he can’t believe her right now. She leans forward and mirrors the way he’s stroked her face before with her left hand, a little tremulously, as she says, “Tell me what this means.”
For a moment, she doesn’t think she’ll get any kind of answer because he just stares at her, mouth slightly open, and she starts to feel hot, itchy with embarrassment at having asked at all, but then he’s moving, slowly-- deliberately , she realizes. He pauses a few inches from her, eyelids fluttering as he looks from her eyes to her lips, and the thought that he’s going to kiss her gets caught up in the sticky-cotton feeling in her head right alongside the thought that she hasn’t brushed her teeth and that she still has Lonnie’s blood on her. But then he closes that short distance, and his lips brush hers--it’s soft, and chaste, and not at all what she expected. She can’t help the catch in her breath as she fists her hand in the front of his shirt--it’s just as soft as it looked and she can focus on that later --and she exhales slowly as he pulls back and drags a thumb over her bruised cheekbone.
“That fuckin’ baby blanket,” he mutters ruefully, close enough she can feel each word on her lips.
“Seriously?” she gasps, stomach flipping. “That was…”
“Yeah.”
Dragging her teeth over her lower lip, she looks from him, to the curtains, to the closed bedroom door, back to him. She feels like her brain’s working overtime with very little fuel, and eventually she relents and flattens her hand against his chest and asks, “Can you stay?”
“For a while,” he nods.
“Good,” she says, covering her mouth against another yawn. “Take off your shoes.”
He grunts and stands, and she watches him go to the end of her bed and toe off his shoes there as she wriggles back down into the covers and settles against the pillows. After what seems to be a moment’s thought, he unbuckles his belt, undoes his jeans, and drapes them across the bench at the foot of her bed. Even after having him here naked , it seems strange and weirdly intimate to have him here in his underwear and socks. There’s a frisson of anxiety just before she turns back one corner of the blanket, but then he climbs in next to her, and it’s awkward for a moment because she doesn’t quite know where either of them should be. Then, figuring she’s allowed this too, she boldly curls into him, head and cast on his chest, tense until his hand comes up to the base of her neck.
Her eyes slide shut and his thumb swipes slow arcs across her skin, and she’s nearly out when she hears, “You were right, I can’t do this without you.”
“Liar,” she breathes, pressing her cheek against his chest. “Did it before me.”
“Fine,” he huffs. “I don’t wanna do this without you.”
She thinks she mumbles something like me too but she’s warm and exhausted and as comfortable as she’s been in a long time, and her lips curl as she drifts off.