Chapter Text
And okay.
If the look on Rio’s face is anything to go by, she really needs to pull herself together.
“You’re enjoyin’ this,” he tells her, eyebrows furrowed and jaw locked, and well, Beth thinks. Yes, but she’s not sure admitting to that is going to end in anything other than a fight right now.
“Of course not,” she replies, reaching for another one of the trays of ice she’d brought in earlier. She turns it over in her hands, cracks the plastic until the cubes tumble out into the tea towel she’d laid out on her bedside table, joining all their half-melted brothers. “You know I don’t like seeing you hurt.”
The words are enough to make Rio grumble, even as he shifts forwards on the edge of their bed, twisting so that he doesn’t have to watch Beth carefully wrap the tea towel back up, laying a firm knot in the end, before scooting back onto the bed to spoon behind him. She takes in his bare back, her gaze fixing on his red, swollen shoulder (while carefully avoiding that new, familiar mark on it), before pressing the makeshift icepack gently against the muscle, biting back a grin as he hisses in a breath between his teeth.
She really wasn’t lying. She doesn’t like seeing him hurt, but, y’know - -
She also likes being right.
“Just maybe next time you’ll listen to me,” she hums, and she probably should’ve predicted Rio’s grunt as he rolls himself off the bed, swiping the icepack from her hands to hold it against his shoulder himself, which is frankly ridiculous, Beth thinks, because it’s not like he can reach it in his state. She huffs, grinning a little as she props herself up on her elbow, watching as Rio glares down at her.
“It ain’t nothin’,” he tells her, and Beth rolls her eyes.
“Nothing serious, sure,” she replies dryly. “If you aren’t going to lie down, I can run you a bath. Throw in some Epsom salts.”
“He just hit it at an angle.”
“Mmhmm, or maybe you’re getting too old to be roughhousing with teenage boys. And Jane.”
If Rio had levelled her with that look ten years ago, it might’ve given her pause, but all it does now is make her smile a little too sweetly, prop herself better up on the bed, smooth a hand down the sheets beside her, patting it for him to come back.
The thing is, it really had been an accident.
With Kenny going away to college in a few weeks and Emma about to start highschool, and Marcus and Jane about to start their last year of middle school, the energy in the house had been fraught to say the least. A mess of chatter and activity and packing and organising and god, so much shopping, whether that be for Kenny’s dorm room, or for school supplies, or a hockey stick for Jane or new ballet slippers for Emma or the cream to try and get Danny’s eczema under control, or that ridiculous shampoo that Marcus likes - -
It had just been exhausting.
Even the sound of their five voices bickering and worrying and yelling over video games and clothes and pantry snacks had started driving her and Rio both to despair.
So when Rio had suggested they burn some of that energy off with an impromptu game of backyard football, Beth had only briefly hesitated.
It had only been six months ago after all that Rio had had the incident with Orion, the one that had laid him up in hospital for three weeks and had Beth close to despair, but he’d recovered, she promised herself. He had, and what was the worse that could happen? Still, she’d told him to be careful, which she knew was basically the equivalent of telling Jane to sit still, but anyway.
She didn’t imagine being leapt on by five-foot-four of 13-year-old Marcus would quite floor him in the way that it had.
(And okay, maybe her heart had leapt in her throat when she’d seen it through the kitchen window, when she’d heard Emma’s gasp, seen Kenny run over, Marcus’ face pale as he’d tugged him off him, as Kenny and Danny had helped Rio up).
“Carmen did say it would take a while for your shoulder to heal,” she adds, voice a little softer now, and Rio huffs out a breath, but this time when Beth pats the bed beside her, he sits back down, awkwardly adjusting the icepack until she takes over. It’s too easy then to lift it off, to see the skin red from the cold, to feel her chest twist as her eyes lock on to the deep, jagged knife wound in the back of his shoulder, the scar gnarled, twisted, jaggy.
She presses a kiss to it, feels the cool, damp of his skin, feels him exhale beneath her lips. Raising her hand, she presses gentle, massaging fingers into the muscles around it, hears him hiss again, but doesn’t revel in it this time.
“You should lie down,” she tells him. “Relax. Let me take care of you.”
He doesn’t look at her right away, his body contorted, and Beth sighs when she feels his good arm wrap behind him to grip her thigh, to use her body to leverage back better onto the bed, to sink into her touch, his back pressing into her chest.
“Yeah?” he asks, peering back over his shoulder, eyes dark, a playful spark in them even if it is a little shadowed, a little further away than she’d like it. “How you gonna do that?”
He lets his eyes drip down to the neck of her robe, to where there’s the barest hint of cleavage visible, and Beth arches an eyebrow innocently, before promptly pressing the icepack to his shoulder again, just to hear him grunt.