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You’re still not sure what he does for a living, but his hours are long and the walls are thin and you have some idea what he does to decompress because it’s not that much different from your own coping strategies. Over the next few months, an easy friendship evolves.
There was the night he found himself sitting at your kitchen table in an adrenaline-induced haze after a bust gone wrong and with whiskey on his breath he’s apologizing for dripping blood on your floor. You just wave it off and press a fresh glass into his good hand. You know better than to notice the dark circles under his eyes or ask what the other guy looks like. He watches your gentle fingers at work cleaning and bandaging the gash on his knuckles with smooth ease like you’ve done this a thousand times. So mesmerized by your soothing touch, he forgets the whiskey altogether until he sees you reach for his hand. His brain takes too long to realize you’re reaching for the booze, not his hand. You down it in one gulp and refill the glass for him, ripping open a box of butterfly stitches. His eyes are on the smudge of lipstick on the edge of his glass, the shape of your bottom lip left behind. Dregs of whiskey blur down the side and he wants to taste it.
And he’s not talking about the whiskey.
You give him a frozen bag of peas to help the swelling over his cheekbone and he does as he’s told, wondering why your first aid stash contains eight bottles of a hemostatic agent and is that fishing line… wondering how you know what kind of whiskey he drinks, wondering why you care about him like this.
Fast forward a couple more weeks…
He knows you had a date tonight with that accountant again.
Fourth date this month if he was counting.
Which he’s not.
So he definitely wasn’t expecting to hear you climbing the stairs by yourself at such an early hour.
And he has no right to the sheer relief that settles over him. But the pang of his misguided heart is getting harder to ignore when he’s wishing it was his fourth date with you instead, so he washes the sting of it down with something equally harsh. He doesn’t worry about you when you go out no matter how plain and boring your dates are with their polo shirts and obnoxiously expensive shoes. But the pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray on his coffee table tells a different story.
Then he hears your apartment door slam louder than usual. judging by your cursing, cupboard doors echoing in your kitchen, the evening didn’t go well and he’s off his couch and across the hall without even realizing it.
You’re standing there on the other side of the threshold, barefoot, in a dress he’s never seen before, the glass in your hand is half full and it’s not the cheap stuff. The furious storm in your eyes had already spilled over at some point and smeared your mascara.
There’s a special place in hell for anyone that makes you cry, he thinks, eyes darting across your features, sweeping for any other indicator that might require a little interference in a certain accountant’s affairs. Javi comes up short and he can’t decide if that’s good for him or not.
Once again his chest floods with the overwhelming need to protect you like you’re his.
He steps into your space, and it’s all the coaxing you need. Your face crumbles and he slips the glass from your hand, setting it down on the tiny hall table before gathering you in his arms, soothing your shuddering breaths against his chest.
you don’t see the seething rage darkening his eyes, trembling just underneath the surface.
‘What did he do?’
‘He had a wife.’