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They have to relearn a lot of things once they get over trying to kill each other.
It’s weird. Somewhere over the last (five or) six years, something about the spark that had been between them when they first met in Bogata and danced in the rain, had totally fizzled out with the slow encroach of domesticity. Not that being the “happy housewife” hadn’t had its own sort of charm, for a minute; Jane had killed a lot of people. It was nothing personal, just a job, and they usually deserved it. But sometimes it was nice to pretend for a minute that she was just Mrs. Jane Smith who had dinner ready at seven every night and who worked a boring I-Temp job.
Jane had found comfort in her routines, for a while. The happy homemaker. The perfect wife. But that role brought on its own sort of pressure, and it was the much less fun kind than being in a high-intensity shootout with a warlord in Eastern Europe, for example. It became stifling to be stuck in it. And so she had rebelled in little ways — changing the curtains, cooking green beans even though she knows he hates them, making sure she is always the first to pull out of the driveway. Little things to make her feel in control in an environment that bred monotony.
The epic three-day fight between them is the most alive that Jane has felt in years. It reminds her of all of the things that she has always loved about John, that got buried in suburbia and taxes and golf tournaments and newspapers. (She wonders if it is normal, to feel the most alive when her husband is actively trying to kill her.) Everything leads up to the fight at the house, and then what happens after the fight (it’s the best sex they’ve had in years), and then the morning after like old times. Sure, there’s a bit more broken glass and bullet holes, but the sentiment is the same; Jane has never stopped being in love since that first “hiya stranger”, and it’s that man she is eating breakfast with and drinking orange juice out of the bottoms of broken glasses.
There’s the fight, and what happens after the fight, and then there’s now. Sitting on the floor dressed in his bloodstained dress shirt, swapping truths like candies.
“You never wondered why we never had any alerts on our security system?”
John raises an eyebrow at her. “I just assumed that we were really, really intimidating,” he deadpans. “It didn’t occur to me that the system wasn’t real.”
Jane shrugs a shoulder. It hurts — they had banged each other up pretty good both during and after the fight, and she is definitely going to be feeling this for days to come — but that’s not important right now. “Who needs an alarm system when you have an arsenal hidden underneath your oven?”
“So that’s where your stash was.” John bumps his head back against the wall, wincing and chuckling at the same time. (He will definitely be feeling this too.) “But I guess it’s fair. You know poker night with Jack Taylor? Never happened.”
“What?” She throws an almond at him — somehow half a bag of assorted nuts had escaped the shooting gallery last night. “You went there every Tuesday for over a year. Don’t tell me you had some sort of… I don’t know, standing hit?”
John grins. “Nah, nothing like that. It was fight club.”
“Well at least tell me you won.”
“Eh… about fifty-fifty. It takes some of the leverage out of it when you’re not allowed to shoot your opponent. And besides, Eddie was my coach.” He makes a face.
That's fair, she will give him that.
“Hm. How many times have you been shot?”
John smirks at her, and a part of her wants to kiss it off his face. “You first.”
“Fine.” She has to think about this. Not that she doesn’t know the answer — she can count the scars without even thinking about them — but there’s the ones that scarred and the ones that didn’t, and the ones that didn’t even hit. It’s kind of a long list. “Four that left scars,” she says finally, sliding down until she’s lying on the floor instead of leaning. It’s less work when she’s having to think. “You know my chicken pox scar?” She bites her lip. “Never had the chicken pox.”
“Damn.” John shakes his head. “And here I was feeling sorry for you.”
“And you feel less sorry that I’ve been shot?”
“I mean, I dunno. Girls who survive getting shot are pretty sexy.” John leans over her to press a kiss against her lips. He tastes like orange juice with a hint of blood, and the combination is oddly appealing. She decides it is important to explore whether or not it really tastes that good, and pulls him closer.
The next five or ten minutes are devoted to careful “research”.
“What about you?” she gasps when they finally come up for air. It’s an unfortunate necessity; so much fun could be had if there wasn’t that silly need to breathe. “How many times have you been shot?”
John opens his mouth to answer, but stops himself, frowns thoughtfully. “Domestic or international?” he asks.
She can’t help but laugh at that; it’s such an odd question, but also it makes such stupid, perfect sense in the context of their lives. “Does it matter?”
“Hey we’re going truth-for-truth here, right? You only told me how many left scars, not how many times you’ve been hit. So we’re going in stages for this.”
That… is both a weak argument (he should just be answering her questions instead of BS-ing his way around them), and a strong argument (she is upset that he called her out for doing the same). In the end it all balances out, or at least it seems like it might, to Jane. She rolls her eyes. “Fine. Domestic.”
“Seven that scarred.”
Seven? “And international?”
Silence, for a minute, as John thinks. Jane can hear the faucet dripping in the kitchen. “Five or six,” he says finally. And damn, that’s a lot; she wonders how she never noticed all of these scars and made the connection that they were from bullets. It’s a very distinctive type of mark. And Jane is usually very observant, so something like that should have been kind of hard to miss.
She doesn’t say that, though. Instead she twists her swollen lips, smirking at him. “So twelve or thirteen times? You seem really bad at this.”
“Hey!” John makes a half-hearted swipe at her knee. “I survived, didn’t I?”
“Sure you did, baby.”
“I totally survived! I’m still here after you tried to shoot me up, right? Not to mention trying to run me over with a car.”
Jane shrugs carelessly. “You shot at me first.”
“It was an accident, dammit! But that’s a woman for you I guess, huh? Always blowing everything out of proportion, always making me out to be the bad guy…”
“John.” She kicks his hip lightly to make sure she has his attention, and grins when he catches her ankle. They both freeze there for a minute, locked into each other’s eyes. “I’m glad that you’re good at dodging bullets,” she whispers finally.
There is warmth and passion in his eyes now, more than she has ever seen even that first evening together back where everything had started. He is hot desert nights and Scotch on the rocks and blood and sweat and bullseyes; he has never been more beautiful. “Back atcha.”
They don’t talk for a while after that; that’s fine. Mr. and Mrs. Smith have better things to catch up on than conversation.