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He never really expected to have to put his fists up after taking off the mask.
The second he walked through the door of his apartment a low but audible crash came from the washroom, nearly causing him to flinch. With the rooster mask still clenched tightly in his hand he instinctively made his way across the hallway and kicked open the door.
Jacket felt his adrenaline retreat after confronting what was a most unfamiliar sight to him. The woman he had picked up the previous night was standing before him in his washroom, the back of her shirt raised and a nauseatingly fresh wound oozing a concerning amount of blood just below her left scapula. At her feet was a first aid kit-rather, the contents of a first aid kit that was spilled in various directions on his tiled washroom floor as the actual case lay open on it’s side. He dropped the mask.
“Uh,” The woman quickly began, somewhat shaken from his sudden burst into the small room “c-could use a bit’a help if you don’t mind….” The words quietly escaped from her lips, taking an uncertain shaky form with threads of assertiveness beneath.
Jacket ushered the woman(as well as whatever he could carry from the first aid box) over and onto his couch and seated himself behind her. Truthfully, the blonde man did not know much about first aid beyond what was shown in films or basic Boy Scouts safety but it certainly wasn’t time - or even the least bit appropriate considering who they were - to call for professional intervention. With the back of her shirt still raised he grabbed a damp cloth and decided it would probably be best to clean the area around the wound first. Squeezing the cloth of any excess moisture, he immediately got to work.
“Ngh!”
The first dab against her skin was met with the arching of her back followed by the jolted movement of her hips forward and away from him.
Though he could not see her face he could practically feel her gritting her teeth. He had seen this kind of painful contortion before in the bodies of unsuspecting mobsters who hadn’t paid enough attention to their backsides when he rolled around. When she had finished slowly reclining back into her seated position he took the damp cloth once more and, this time gradually, approached her skin. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead as he watched intensely for her movements. With great precision, Jacket gently pressed against and dotted a thin layer of blood just shy of drying up off her back. As he peeled the cloth away the blonde man felt his wrist shake as the cloth hovered above the woman’s skin and retracted his presence immediately. When he noticed that his companion was not withering in pain he repeated the act until all that remained was a pink gash with small pools of red sitting between two walls of open skin.
As he put the cloth away he looked at his muscular, defined hands and realized he had never used tenderness against human flesh before.
With the wound cleaned Jacket noticed a small stitching just at the end of it. With slightly more consideration than his application of the cloth he touched it lightly with his fingers and traced it to where the threads diverged and the gash began, making an effort not to enter the territory of the torn skin itself. The stitching was neatly uniform and almost masterful, but the condition it was in indicated that it was implemented recently. He figured that this was the reason he found his first aid kit in shambles. For someone who should have been in agonizing pain from just the night before, he was impressed that she could manage this level of craftsmanship. Without being fully aware of it, Jacket let out a pleasantly entertained “Hmph.”
With his fingers still on her back Jacket could feel a quiet chuckle. “Always wanted ta’ be a nurse; never had the money though.” The woman began. Her unexpected response caught him off guard. “Still, when you work on the streets you gotta know how ta’ take care of yourself ‘cause it’s not like anyone else will, y’know?”. Easing into the feeling of her presence, Jacket gave a shallow “’Guess so.” in response, not entirely sure how to approach the woman, let alone comfort her.
“Names’ Hooker by the way.” She said embarrassedly. “Well, ‘guess it’s not my birth name or anything but it’s what most people call me. It’s not really as bad as you think.”
“Jacket.” He was in no place to judge anyway.
The woman made a perplexing yet not visibly negative noise. “A Jacket for a Hooker. Huh. Woulda’ been more fitting if you had picked me up in winter.” She laughed at her own joke. He sat in silence.
Realizing that they were straying from the task at hand, Jacket quickly scooped up a sterilized needle and some thread. The wound still had fizzles of blood that could easily break through the thin layers of membrane beneath her skin. After he managed to tie the thread through the hoop he gently pressed one hand against her back for leverage while the needle approached her with the other.
The first prick was not bad at all. The needle crossed over the bloody canyon and with another quick prick pierced the other side. As he made his way back over to the first side he suddenly wondered how the thread constantly ripping through her and tying her down felt. He paused for a moment and gazed at the back of her head, watching for something -anything- to indicate if he needed to change his approach. In other situations his anxiety and restraint could be solved with warm blood on his baseball bat over a limp body and adrenaline rushing through his veins but here—
“Don’t worry about it. I’m used to worse stuff than this- when I got all twitchy at the start it’s ‘cause you took me by surprise is all. I’m fine now.”
His thoughts immediately dissolved. “Right, right.”
As he pricked her skin again he turned his attention to the hand he was using as leverage. His fingers were spread out across the right side of her back(oh how small she was) and his thumb brushed against the closest notches of her spine. He could feel how her thin skin practically clung to the shape of her bones and how the patches of discoloration (who knows how she got them) decorated parts of her body like abstract tattoos. As he progressed further up the opening one stitch at a time he noticed how carefully it curved. Like a whip, almost, trailing against her back; wrongfully disrupting that natural alignment of flesh no matter how uncommon said flesh may look. He furrowed his brow thinking about how old this particular mark on her body must have been among all the others that painted her from the neck down.
When he had closed the final stitch, Jacket found himself in an odd position. It was quite evident from the form of the stitching where Hooker’s work had ended and his began. While Jacket’s threading certainly demonstrated precision and care to actually close the wound, it quite evidently also depicted a lack of uniform skill that her’s had. Jacket ran his fingers up the stitching, feeling how the rough, bumpy material entwined with her much softer skin.
When his fingers met the end of the curved scar he couldn’t help but notice how close the thin, thin edge of the stroke of that composed her new stitches came to almost graze the vertebrae of her spine. He placed a finger between the flat, clean flesh that was unrifled by neither scar tissue nor the protrusions of her bones. The space was slight. His brow twitched with disgust, not even entertaining the thought of what could have happened to her if whatever caused that gash moved not even an inch to the right.
The strength of her frail body was foreign to him.
The night he picked her up-rather the events that transpired on the night he picked her up did not deviate from at all from his normal night out. The Miami air filtered through his rubber mask as men wrapped in white were just standing around and waiting for some red to burst out below and stain their uniforms. A fresh sheet of paper begging to be pierced with some tools and filled with color. They were a meticulously organized house of cards and he was a child eagerly needing to tip it over. Flesh is just so easy to rip and tear with even the slightest touch when your blood is on fire and your hands are grappling for whatever it is in front of you that has the audacity to even think it’s entitled to stop you. The night had gone down with an uzi in his hand, then a crowbar, then a baseball bat and then last but not least a shotgun saved for that son of a bitch at the end. When the fire inside of him had been extinguished and he picked up Hooker with his cold hands, the only thing that managed to get them back to the car was her lukewarm body pumping heat back into his. If there was any uniformity in Jacket’s life up until that point, it was how quickly flesh fell apart by his hand.
Without thinking he leaned his head forward and found his temple pressing against the back of her shoulder. The beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead not too long beforehand had found a home in the greasiness of Hooker’s skin. There was quite clearly a trace of dried up sweat on her(had she been nervous?) but she was not smelly-in fact there was even a bit of a pleasant scented tinge to her. It was not along the lines of perfume or fresh fruit but it had a sense of earnest familiarity to it that made it pleasant to be in. Or maybe it was just a better alternative to smell of his cigarette ridden apartment. Either way, he was comforted by it and closed his eyes.
Hooker sat unmovingly as he limply pressed himself against her. He was much warmer than the night before (where she had dully noted to herself that he felt like the walking dead) and his body felt light-restrained almost- yet natural. She slightly glanced back and(while not being able to exactly see his face) watched him rise and lower to the rhythm of her breathing against her back. Men had slept atop of her before but she couldn’t even recall a man who leaned on her for comfort. Hooker felt perplexed by the nature of her introverted hero, but if she was sure of anything it was that she certainly didn’t dislike him.
When Jacket noticed what he had been doing he immediately peeled himself off of her and jumped off the couch.
“Christ! What am I-Sorry?.” He practically stammered while looking for the right words, not exactly understanding the motivations behind what he had done himself, or even if he needed to apologize.
“S’alright.” Hooker shrugged “Better than being fucked raw by a buncha animals masquerading in human skin, y’know?” In spite of her indifference Jacket couldn’t quite exhale his apprehension and walked off to the kitchen in an attempt to regain his composure. When he confronted his cupboard he extended a shaky hand and clumsily whipped out two bowls, a practically empty jug of milk and some semi-stale cereal. When he returned with their late night snack, Jacket found himself at the mercy of another curveball by this woman.
“You really are a big softy.”
Silence.
He handed her the only bowl with milk before collapsing in the seat next to her on the couch.