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“What happened?” Karen says softly, fingers reaching towards Frank.
He didn’t mean to end up here. He doesn’t like her to see him this way. He just didn’t have anywhere else to go.
Frank’s eyes fall to his boots. They’re dirty, scuffed, specked with blood. The bruises on his face are nothing compared to what he just left behind.
Karen’s fingertips graze over the tender skin around his eyes. Frank lets his eyes close, sinking into the sensation of Karen’s touch. He knows he doesn’t deserve it, but he wants it, craves it with every fiber of his being.
“Come in,” Karen says, and her hand falls away from his face. He opens his eyes and follows her into her apartment.
It looks much the same as he remembers it: simple, clean. He wishes things could be that way between them, but he’s complicated everything and he can’t just wipe that all away. Who he is, what he does, all of it makes it impossible to just be with her.
He realized, months ago, that that’s what he wants. He wants Karen. He needs Karen. But he also knows that he shouldn’t want that, shouldn’t want her. He can’t drag her down into the mud with him. She’s better than that. It’s why he stayed away, kept her out of this part of his life.
When Karen presses a bag of frozen peas into his hands, Frank is startled out of his thoughts.
“Here. For the bruising.” She says it with such conviction, such certainty. “Not my first rodeo, remember?”
He chuckles darkly, remembering that night. She’d poured her heart out to him, even as he picked at her, and then he’d used her as nothing more than bait. He knew it was wrong, even at the time, but he was desperate then.
He’s desperate now. In a different way, maybe, but the feeling is the same.
He presses the frozen peas to his face, sighing in relief at the cold seeping into his skin. Closing his eyes, Frank tries not to let guilt overwhelm him for coming here in the first place.
He knows better. He can do better.
He just sometimes doesn’t want to.
Karen’s hand closes over his, the warmth of her fighting against the cold and making him shiver.
“It’s good to see you,” she whispers, closer to him than he realized.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Karen swallows hard. “It’s always good to see you, Frank.”
Frank almost wonders if that’s true, but Karen doesn’t lie to him. She never has, even when he’s been at his worst. It’s one thing he can always count on, even when everything is upside down. Karen doesn’t lie. Not to him.
“I missed you,” she murmurs, almost too low to hear.
‘“I missed you, too,” Frank says, leaning his forehead against hers and letting the peas fall to his side.
“Then don’t stay away so long.” Karen’s long fingers trace along the purple bruise below Frank’s eye. The cold ebbs away, replaced with the heat of her skin. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
“Okay.” Frank is tired of fighting it. Maybe he should, but not when she’s so close, not when she’s touching him so gently.
“Okay?” He can feel Karen’s eyebrows rise, like she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing.
“Okay.”
And it is.
Or it will be.
He’s going to do whatever it takes to make sure it is.