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Damn it, Duke, thinks Audrey, punching viciously and randomly at the vending machine buttons. Damn it, Damn it, Damn it. With each internal repetition she pokes her finger at the lighted buttons, watching the electronic messages scroll past -- INSERT CARD THEN ENTER CODE INSERT CARD THEN ENTER CODE -- E7, M4, I9 -- jab, jab, jab.
She can taste him, still, chasing exhaustion and confusion and fear across her tongue, the tang of cheap beer no match for the desire that burns at the back of her throat. She should have known better than to --
It had been a mistake to bring Duke to Colorado, after all, she thinks. Damn it.
She’d let herself be distracted by the certainty she couldn’t be alone with Nathan, not right now. They had no time. Twenty days. How could she and Nathan untangle who they were to each other in twenty goddamn days. Who they were to one another, separate from who they were to Haven; what they wanted unraveled from Troubles and mysteries and lies, from whatever had brought them here and was now taking her away again.
It was Nathan she’d felt responsible for protecting, in danger of wounding too much and too deeply. Nathan she’s fought to keep far enough away so that when she stumbles, when she fails, when this twisted nightmare catches up with her and she crumbles into dust and blows away on the wind, maybe, just maybe, Nathan won’t be destroyed.
So that maybe, just maybe, he and Duke can repair whatever is broken between them.
And then maybe, just maybe, she’ll find her way back.
But if she doesn’t, at least she’ll have that.
It’s what she’s been telling herself.
Audrey realizes now she never worried about Duke this way. She’s always trusted his will to survive. Trusts that if she walks into that fucking barn and disappears for the next twenty-seven fucking years it’ll be Duke alone who has any chance of holding Nathan together.
It’ll be Duke who makes sure they don’t simply hold their breath waiting for her to return.
She’d forgotten what it would mean, in the intimacy of a shared hotel room far from home, to have that ferocity of spirit and generosity of heart turned toward her. He’s always been there, an arm’s length away, ready to catch her, ready for her to reach out and touch, pull him closer, give him permission to be part of this, give him permission to stay.
In the same way, she thinks, he waits for Nathan to notice why he came back to Haven.
And tonight, just now, she’d let down her guard and nearly said: Don’t let me go.
Damn it, Duke. You sneaky bastard.
She squeezes her eyes shut against exhausted tears, resting her forehead on the cool glass of the vending machine window. The slight thunk of her movement dislodges a packet of Skittles into the retrieval trough.
C2.
* * *
She returns to the room with the Skittles and two packs of Oreos. She underhands a packet of cookies toward Duke, who’s still sitting cross-legged on the bed, rolling an empty beer bottle between his palms. He watches her entrance but doesn’t speak, waiting to see what her opening move will be.
The night air hasn’t cleared her head like she’d hoped, just made everything seem all the more raw and terrifying, but Audrey doesn’t believe she’s ever been a woman to walk away from her nightmares.
So maybe she shouldn’t be walking away from her desires either.
“Twenty days.” She says, tearing open her own pack and stuffing the first two Oreos in her mouth. Because fuck that. She has twenty days left and is therefore entitled to eat her feels. She’s also pacing because she can’t keep still, she can’t muscle through this with anything approaching Duke-like zen. “Twenty goddamn days, Duke. You know what scares me more than screwing it up? Getting it right.” She shakes a finger at him. “Getting it right, Duke. You. Me. Nathan--” (he stills at that, and the part of her brain that’s always observing takes note that he’s surprised, but she’s on a cookie-fueled righteous roll now) “--What if we get this right and then we can’t fix the Troubles any other way? What if twenty days is all I get? I can’t-- I shouldn’t do that to you. Or Nathan. It’s cruel. It’s selfish, it’s--”
“Audrey.”
“--You. You were the one who said--” Another shake of her finger before she extracts a second Oreo from the package and bites into it, emphatically.
“Audrey.” Duke unfolds himself from the bed, dropping the beer bottle on the bedside table, and closes the distance between them. He grabs her by the shoulders so she has to stop moving and look at him, “Can you just please -- stop. Just stop. Please -- can you hit ‘pause’ a minute here?”
Duke’s here, now. His hands on her shoulders warm, and sure. He’s done waiting, she thinks. She swallows, refusing to look up; she knows if they make eye contact she’s just gonna start crying. She hates crying. She studies the middle button on Duke’s shirt instead, resolutely ignoring how easy it would be to unbutton. How easy it would be to unbutton the next, and the next.
“You said me and Nathan.” Duke’s voice is carefully neutral, that tone he uses when he wants everyone to think he doesn’t care when, in fact, he very much does.
Hope, she thinks. We’re both done waiting.
“Yeah.” She clears her throat. “Yeah. You. And Nathan. You think I don’t know I’m not getting one of you without the other?” She coughs. Not crying.”You think I want one of you without the other?”
“What … what exactly do you know about me and Nathan?”
She snorts gently: “Don’t worry, Nathan hasn’t tattled. Can you imagine? Nathan talking about his feelings? I just -- I see things. Detective, remember?” She eats another Oreo, even though they’re starting to feel dry in her mouth, sickly sweet, and tosses the package on top of her luggage. She stabs a thumb at her chest. “Me. I’m observant, Duke. The fact that you two have a history together? A complicated history, one a lot of people in Haven don’t see the whole of? Is something you’re either way shittier at hiding than you think you are, or you don’t guard yourselves around me like you do around the others. I mean, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out but--”
“He touches you, Duke.” Her eyes flutter closed and she swallows against the physical immediacy of memory, moments she wasn’t precisely meant to see. Admitting she’s taken note makes her flush, unexpectedly, somehow flays her open; the confession a whispered intimacy between them.
“Sometimes -- sometimes he touches you like he’s entitled to touch you. Men don’t touch other men, not like that, unless they’re--”
“--lovers, yeah.” He rubs a hand across his eyes, squeezes thumb and forefinger into the bridge of his nose. Then, with heartbreaking defeat: “It’s been awhile.”
“I thought maybe.” She reaches up to caress his cheek, trying to pull some of the sadness out of his eyes. She draws a hand down the open collar of his shirt and then, to stop herself from undoing his placket, drapes her arms loosely around Duke’s neck, presses her forehead against the jut of his collarbone. Probably a bad idea, given the way touching him quiets all of her internal arguments against touching him, against choosing this moment to say Yes to what is between them.
But he’s so comfortable, familiar, and he doesn’t pull away.
She waits, knowing it’s past time the story was shared between them.
“It was -- it was a fight with me that triggered his Trouble,” Duke says against the crown of her head, half cradling half clutching her against his chest. “I wanted us to leave Haven but he wouldn’t abandon the Chief, wouldn’t tell him about us, wouldn’t talk about any of it.” He sighs. “He wanted me on his side of the law, but my side was the only ticket I saw out of town.” She feels the gather and release of muscles as he gives a shrug. “We were both younger and angrier -- if you can imagine Nathan with even more repressed rage than he has now --” Audrey huffs a laugh against Duke’s shoulder -- “Yeah, see? It kept getting worse and nothing I did, was willing to do, made it better. So finally I left.” He pauses. “I don’t think Nathan’s forgiven me for leaving him. Every time he looks at me, I can see the accusation in the back of his eyes.”
“You ever tried apologizing?” She smiles to herself, picturing the conversation.
“Thing is, Audrey, the worse things got between us the worse his Trouble got. Started he couldn’t feel me. Then it was anytime I was near him. Soon, he couldn’t feel anything. Can you imagine what that was like? We knew what was happening, but neither of us could do a damn thing to reverse it.” She presses closer, offering comfort through touch in response to the bleak resignation in his voice. Memories that couldn’t be rewritten.
“I finally left because I thought -- I thought maybe if I left Haven he’d get better. I thought maybe -- I convinced myself for years that I’d moved on and if I’d moved on maybe he’d move on. When he told me that you--”
His voice catches and he stops.
“He hasn’t.” She’s surprised by how certain she is about this; it’s a truth that comes from a place deep inside she’s learning to trust. “He loves you, Duke. I see it in the way he moves around you, the way he looks at you -- even when he’s angry at you -- when he thinks you aren’t paying attention. Hell, it’s even in the way he’s angry at you.”
“Funny; I could say the same thing about the way he’s angry at you.”
She let’s herself rub her face against his shirt, listens to his heart and the way his breathing is a little short, a little ragged in her ear. She remembers the press of his mouth, feels the way her hips crowd the space between them. Feels him crowding back, his palms spread wide along the curve of her spine.
“What are we doing here, Audrey?” He whispers against her hair, tentative. She wishes she had the courage to confess I’ve fucked myself to the thought of you two, together. She wishes she could say, All those times I’ve known where you are in a room, even before I’ve seen you standing there. She wishes there were a way to promise him I’ll heal all your wounds, I’ll close every rift, I’ll kiss every scar. To say: You, me, Nathan, we’ll never have to be lonely again.
Instead she says: “I’m scared, Duke.” It comes out softer, more hollow than she’d wanted it to. Not really an answer to his question. “I’m scared of hurting people, hurting you and I’m scared of going away and I’m scared of not being me any more. That feels more hollow and vicious than death. Who are these people, who just go and rob a person of everything that matters to them?”
Duke’s silent for a handful of heartbeats, just holding her.
Audrey likes his silences. They’re not like Nathan’s silences, which are so loud, a cacophony of rage and repression and loneliness. Duke’s silences are quiet and contemplative, if sometimes bereft. He’s patient and watchful, alert, waiting for the moment when it’s necessary he re-enter the stream of action or discussion.
As a woman who thinks out loud, Audrey appreciates Duke’s ability to listen and actually hear.
“You shouldn’t take this decision away from us, Audrey. You shouldn’t decide for us whether we’re better or worse off, having had you for just twenty days or none at all.”
She realizes her words had been an answer to his question, after all, and Duke had listened carefully enough to know that -- even when she had not.
“I don’t know if I--”
“I’ve been watching you pushing him away, Audrey. I tried that too, once, and look how well it worked. I know the story you’re telling yourself because it’s the story I tried telling myself: If you leave, if you do what they say and the Troubles vanish, Nathan will have his life back, he’ll have me back. And the fact you’re gone won’t matter; that maybe we’ll be better off for it. That the self-sacrifice will be worth the price you pay for the person -- the people -- you love.”
She pulls away to look up into Duke’s face, trying to read the tangle of emotions laced through his dogged words: frustration, worry, pain, longing. She takes a step back and finds herself leaning against the wooden slats of their rustic cabin door. She feels herself giving way, knows Duke can see it, but he doesn’t stop the torrent of words, words that need to be laid out between them.
“You don’t get to do that, Audrey. You don’t get to insist on not mattering. From the minute you arrived in Haven you mattered -- and no, I’m not talking about the way you stop peoples’ Troubles or whatever shit self-sacrificial alchemy your handlers have in mind for you. I’m talking about you, mattering. You matter to Nathan, and you matter to me. Whatever you do twenty days from now, Audrey, whatever fucking heroics you pull, you do not get to convince yourself that Nathan and I will be better off without you, or better off never having--”
Which is when Audrey decides she’s just done with fighting and kisses him for the second time that evening.
She’s been listening to his words, she really has, but she’s also been reaching for that part of herself beyond fear and self-doubt, beyond the voices of other people who are telling her what she must do, that part of herself she’s beginning to suspect reaches back further than anyone in Haven knows.
And that part of her is saying Yes.
Duke stutters against her mouth, caught mid-inhale. He’s still buzzed on the ale and as jet-lagged as she is. They’re both slightly heady with arousal borne of the relief of truth and press of time. Together they’re clumsy, greedy. He’s shifts against her, pushing her up against the cabin door, mouth opening against her lips, inviting her, begging her to lick her way inside.
He makes a sound, soft and needy, in the back of this throat, that only encourages her as she grabs for his ass, wraps her leg around the back of his knee, slides a hand up under the hem of his thin cotton shirt.
“Duke--” she gasps, coming up for air, and it’s Yes and I’m sorry and Yes and Perfect and Yes and Please let this not be the wrong thing to do--
He pulls back, scattering kisses at the corners of her mouth, cups a shaking hand against the side of her cheek, the chocolate of his eyes flecked with a gold that’s the opposite of Troubled silver, a steady shimmering light that says love and wonder and joy.
Done waiting. Except--
“I’d like--” Duke hesitates, seeming to surprise himself with a thought, “We should to wait until we’re with Nathan, for this.” He takes a deep breath and smiles, a smile that dances through his eyes. He affirms the request with a glide of his hands from shoulder to hips, where they settle and stay, gentle and proprietary. He’s asking to pause, not pulling away. Not moving forward, or back, from where they have come.
“Yeah.” It comes out breathless and Audrey feels herself returning the smile, feeling the accelerated beat of his heart against her palms. She doesn’t remove them from where they press against his flesh. Mine.
“Yeah, we should. You’re right; damn it.” She stretches to kiss him once more, a promise.
“Damn it,” he agrees. And the grin is all Crocker.
They brush their teeth after that, and crawl into bed in unspoken agreement. It’s approaching one o’clock in the morning Mountain Time which means where Nathan is it’s nearly sunrise. Where Nathan is. Where, soon, they will be. Duke folds himself around Audrey and she feels him, half hard, against her ass. A promise.
She’s not going to say anything about it, though, and neither is he. Just like she’s not gonna talk about the sweet ache in her clit, the ache that pulses once, twice, when Duke slides a gentle hand around to cup her breast in his palm. She doesn’t remember, in this life or any other, ever just sleeping with someone the first time they shared a bed -- at least, not if that someone was a someone she planned to eventually fuck.
It's startlingly familiar and more than right.
Against the cool expanse of pillow in front of her, she opens her palm against the night, feeling the ghosting curve of Nathan’s cheek across her overheated skin. At the back of her neck, Duke sighs into sleep.
Back in Haven, Nathan will soon be waking. Maybe for the last time alone.
Nineteen days.
Time for her and Duke to make their way home.