Chapter Text
The air has been heavy with humidity since the early morning, but the rain they are all waiting for is slow to arrive.
By the time lunch rolls around, Kate is sweating inside her corset like a sausage in the frying pan, and her drawers are damp and chafing between her thighs. Her dancers, usually so graceful and exuberant, are shuffling around the stage, moaning and groaning like a heard of geriatric bears, and Kate ends the rehearsal early and tells them to go cool off somewhere if they can.
She herself desperately wants to go lie down in her darkened room and listen for the grumbling of thunder in the distance, but there is something else she needs to attend to first.
The door to Nathaniel’s room is closed, as expected, but that has never bothered her before. She raps her knuckles against the door lightly, more an announcement that she is coming rather than an actual knock, and pokes her head into the room.
The curtains are drawn, and only a small lamp on the desk is projecting a faint glow onto the floor, but she knows her way around the room well enough to find her way over to the bed.
She is relieved to see that at least Nathaniel has managed to take off his shoes before crawling onto the mattress and collapsing on top of the sheets, but he is still wearing his waistcoat, stretched out on his stomach on the bed, arms awkwardly by his side.
“This is a bad one, huh?” she says and kneels on the edge of the bed, setting one hand on Nathaniel’s back, between his shoulder blades.
Nathaniel sighs and breathes, but doesn’t move under her touch.
“I’ve taken as much laudanum and whiskey I possibly could without killing myself,” he mumbles into his pillow, and the way he is slurring his words tells her that he’s not exaggerating. “But the pain is still there.”
“Mhm,” she hums, just an acknowledgement, because dramatic displays of pity aren’t in her nature and Nathaniel wouldn’t appreciate them anyway.
Instead she sits up on the bed, swings one leg over Nathaniel’s waist as if she’s mounting a horse, trying to keep the weight in her knees so as not to put too much pressure on his spine. Then she sets her palms on his shoulders and gets to work.
She’s done this often enough to know the difficult spots, knows where to press and push and knead to get the knotted muscles under her hands to soften, though it’s trickier to do this through two layers of clothing. If he was feeling just a little better, she’d ask him to take off his shirt, break out the oil, but he’s too far gone tonight and, as much as she does not like to admit it, too heavy for her to manhandle on her own.
Underneath her, he makes a little sound, not quite a whelp, not really a groan, and if anyone else was listening in on them, they might very possibly make some assumptions. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone thinks that she is sleeping with him.
They are not like that, though. Have never been. Not that it hadn’t crossed her mind once or twice in the beginning, because she had gotten used to employing all the means at her disposal to protect her cover, and because Nathaniel Hagan is a charming, experienced man, the kind of showman who takes pleasure from entertaining others, on stage just as much as between the sheets.
So she had waited for him to signal his interest, slightly disconcerted at first when he never did, and by the time she understood that he wasn’t going to ask her, she’d already started to like him, genuinely like him, and at that point she figured it was much better this way.
Outside, lightning flashes, thunder grumbles, and in its wake, she finally hears the sound of heavy rain on the roof, the pitter-patter of fat drops over the background noise of rushing water pounding down on the little town.
She sighs in relief, already feels the heavy pressure lifting, just a little, that has been weighing on her chest all day.
“Listen, the storm,” she says quietly, happily, but Nathaniel doesn’t answer. When she bends forward to check on him, his breathing is deep and even, and with a jolt of fondness, she realizes that he has fallen asleep.
“So you don’t need me anymore, then,” she murmurs jokingly, to herself, and then, quickly, a little furtively, leans in and brushes a fleeting kiss against the back of his head before she extracts herself and slowly climbs off the bed, careful not to wake him.
Already in the doorway, she turns to look back into the darkened room. Tomorrow, she knows, Nathaniel will wake up sore, the sharp pain of the hangover just barely overshadowing the dull ache of his decade-old injuries, and he will reach for the half-empty whiskey bottle on the side table before getting ready for the day. But for tonight, at least, his body will rest easy, and she hopes that his dreams will be untroubled, too.
She closes the door behind herself quietly, then heads downstairs to go stand in the rain.