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It starts slowly, which Frank can attest is uncharacteristic of all events unfolding in his life. Even more puzzling, there's no grand design — it's soft and simple, the way she carves out a spot inside his heart. He runs into her every day on his evening run, and every day he gets more unsettled by the thought of danger lurking in the shadows of alleys and bridges, just waiting to swallow her up. It's not because of any budding affection that he feels, at least not at this point. He doesn't even know her name. What he knows is how he was raised, and if anyone condemns him for being old-fashioned in his views, then so be it. He can't bear knowing she's out there past ten at night, wandering the streets of a shitty New York neighborhood in the name of cardio.
It's a progression of these thoughts that leads him to do the unthinkable and introduce himself one day, and the way he goes about it would make for good nightmare fuel, were he not already stocked up on that.
He pretends to trip and falls on his face. He's tried a version of this before with Sarah Lieberman, and back then just as well as now, he knew there was no other way. You don't just approach a woman who's outside at this time of night, especially if she wants to triple the danger for herself and wear those stupid noise-cancelling headphones. He'd expect someone his own age to have more sense than that, and sometimes he wonders if she's not just looking for trouble on purpose.
His assumption is rather quickly disproven, because nobody who speaks in the manner she does could ever be brazen enough to start a fight. No — she's all softness and kind eyes, and the gravel in his palms stops stinging the moment she pins him down with a concerned look and a soft hand around his wrist. It's a minute or two before she's got him following her to her private practice just a block away, because apparently he's a little too good at faking accidents. The nasty cut she stitches up for him with quiet precision and a rambling mouth doesn't even hurt, not when he's so focused on whatever's in her voice that he finds so familiar. She speaks in a way he can't seem to shake, like there's something there that his own mind knows intimately yet remains secretive about.
He should've said no to grabbing coffee the next day. He really should've refused, because now that he knows what her laugh sounds like, he's in real trouble. And he fights it, at first. He gives it his goddamn best. But a man like him knows when he's done for, despite all the bravado and all the willpower. He knew it the moment she looked away from him and stared into her black coffee, quietly telling him she was glad he let her help him, that he was going to say yes to the next coffee they'd grab together. And the next. And the next.
And eventually, his own rambling mouth — a novelty exclusive to her presence — reveals things it really shouldn't, like a first and last name he's supposed to have buried and forgotten, along with an identity he's sure will ruin dinner. The information falls on deaf ears. Not because she isn't paying attention; she seems to look at and see only him as he moves between the stove and the counter inside her kitchen, prepping his mother's old pasta recipe. No, Frank has a feeling she isn't just listening. Her gaze is as soft as always, yet this time there's a spark that finds him trapped, frozen in place in the middle of the kitchen while she raises one delicate eyebrow and says two baffling words: I know. Then, even more perplexing: I was waiting for you to be comfortable.
Comfortable. What does it mean for him to be comfortable? Is that what he was when he opened his mouth and revealed the truth? Or was he just compelled by attentive eyes and an openness that hurt to be in the presence of while he was still hiding his true self? He doesn't deserve her acceptance. He's not even sure he wants it. He's been past wanting things for years, just waiting for life to happen as he crawls along, fragments of what could've been fighting to quell his breath on each new day bestowed upon him. He's got nothing to want. Nothing to hope for.
So why doesn't he move when she approaches him, slowly, fearlessly, in the way one might a startled creature? Why does his chest tighten and expand all at once when she greets him tenderly, a whisper of his real name falling from her lips? Most importantly of all, why does she keep worming her way further inside his gut, and why doesn't it burn like he knows it should?
Maybe it's because she does it at a glacial pace, which a famously impatient man can't help but respect her for, at the same time that he fears the place from which that tenacity springs forth. A restoration project of his magnitude isn't just daunting — it's straight up dreadful, rotten floorboards and black mold eating away at every inch of a once proudly robust construction. It's not smooth sailing as the months dissolve away, but she perseveres. He has bad days and worse nights, and every time they bid each other farewell once the clock strikes eleven and their run ends, Frank's mind is left to stew in words and gestures that make no goddamn sense — his and hers both.
For one, he's smiling what feels like all the fucking time. What he's so happy about when his life is what it is, only God may know. What he knows is that there's no possible way to keep his lips flat and his chest empty when she tells him stories of long nights in the emergency room spent removing dubious objects from places they really shouldn't be. One too many phallic contraptions was what it took for her to finally quit hospital work and open a private practice. Frank tries and fails to keep a straight face while asking her to describe the experience. She, on the other hand, meets his challenge head-on, attempting to draw a diagram of the witty invention on the napkin resting by her coffee — thus, a weird game of pictionary unfolds between them, and they have to stuff their pockets with no less than eight scandalous napkins each before leaving a generous tip for giggling like lunatics the entire time.
Next, and maybe this one's all in his head, but she's on a frequency his stubbornness can't find fault with. She gives him space when he needs it. Sometimes they don't see each other for days, despite living less than five blocks apart, and never does she push for contact. She doesn't ask him what he does during that time away, maybe because she knows or maybe for the same reason she didn't tell him she knew who he was. Maybe she's waiting for him to confess how he still spends a good deal of his nights, despite not needing the confirmation. She lets him come to her and he does it without fail each time, though his little I'm sorry for my radio silence apology tokens don't hold a lot of variety. She likes flowers, coffee and whatever baked goods he can get his hands on, so now Frank is a regular at the neighborhood florist and a fancy bakery on 51st knows his order.
Most of all, he's baffled by how little needs to be said between them for a world of knowledge to be exchanged. She gently coaxes one or two sentences from him that leave a lot to be desired in the way of details, but then she meets his eyes as they sit next to each other on her couch. And finally, he tells her — not with words, but with his own eyes, blinking rapidly or not at all, dry as the desert one moment and the next suddenly flooding. He tells her about a little girl he had, one whose body would have only been identified by prints or dentals. He weeps over his baby boy without so much as a cry, because he too left the world a worse place for his departure. And where he used to mutter it to himself repeatedly, Frank says his wife's name only once— he says it with the same reverence as always, and he hopes she won't begrudge him the comfort he receives from another woman.
He knows Maria wouldn't blame him, but he's not so sure he isn't blaming himself. Whatever he's doing here, it needs to stop. Whatever he tells himself her soft touches mean, or those looks, or that smile — he can't be right. This isn't meant for him. He shouldn't have this. There should be no one he looks forward to seeing, no one he thinks about before the thundering fall of hammer on concrete and after the laying of his body down to rest. There shouldn't be anyone to stay his hand and extinguish his anger. Only rage should exist, because rage is the only thing he really has. He doesn't know what he is if not this, and he makes the mistake of telling her as much while she stitches up the first real wound he's gotten in a long time. Neither of them pretends not to know what the result of a knife fight looks like, and he doesn't tell her how it went down because she doesn't ask. It's a good thing, because every time he closes his eyes and sees that woman's face as she was held at knifepoint, his mind superimposes different features onto it and his blood boils over. All he saw in that moment was her. All the cops are going to see at the scene will be scattered fingers and a leaking skull.
Frank himself doesn't feel very put together as he fights sleep under her caress, a hug he didn't ask for suddenly enveloping him whole and quieting the one-track mind winding him up repeatedly. He was late for their run tonight. That could've been her. His fault, his fault, his fault. The words disappear when she finds the nape of his neck with a gentle touch, drawing him into her chest and resting her cheek atop his head when he finally relaxes. His own hands grasp at the plush edges of her exam table, mimicking her gestures almost subconsciously but not daring to reciprocate on actual flesh. Seconds pass, and then minutes.
My sister died because of me.
The words startle him like a shot went off right by his ear, when in fact they were barely whispered. Frank, however, doesn't move when frightened. He's learned this about himself: he can never twitch a muscle in any of his nightmares, can never stop what he knows is coming. He can't stall the tragedy any more than he can avoid feeling its effects.
I used to run with her. That was our thing. I got mad about something… something petty, I'm sure. And I didn't go one night. Just one time. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was dangerous. Should've told her not to go, but I didn't. Cops were at my door the next morning. She was stabbed four times. The thing is, she would've survived, if she'd had someone to help her. Someone who knows their way around first aid.
He can feel her shaking from their closeness, can infer what she's thinking by the slight change in her voice. She's all blame, that's what it is. That's what it was when she first spoke to him all those months ago, and he latched onto it without even knowing, pulled in by soft eyes that glimmered in understanding. He thought it was unending kindness that he glimpsed in there, and in part, that was still true. But there was something else that lingered, something that seemed to inform her approach with him over the better part of a year. That frequency he stupidly thought she was on didn't happen by magic, or by fate. They didn't click because of some grand plan. It was simply life in all of its unfairness, dealing out blows to whoever it found with their guard down, deserving or not.
She doesn't deserve this. Frank knows it, and his chest puffs up in defiance of the pain in her voice as she tells him about the night they met from her perspective. It was a few short weeks after her sister's death. That evening run had become a ritual of a different nature, and he realizes with some horror what it was she'd been trying to do. The headphones made sense now, not as a tool of the careless, but of a person who cared too much. Cared enough to try to invite danger inside, scope it out and lure it back from the shadows in the hopes that she might look upon it herself. Confront it herself.
She confirms as much when she tells him they still haven't found the killer.
She made herself an easy target so she could look a murderer in the eye, and with that thought, he does finally recoil. He wants to argue. Wants to refute the notion. He can't. He can't, because to take that truth away from her would be to take it away from himself. She did what she thought she had to do. The difference is, she still has all her humanity left, yet the blame can't seem to leave. It eats away at the light inside her eyes, and despite that she's not bitter. She doesn't recoil from company or people in general, and she doesn't abandon everything she knows in favor of oblivion and a corner to waste away in. It's unfair. It's not right to live with it and still have to function. It's not right to have to get up and be a good person in a world of shit. It's not right… and she does it anyway. For a man who sees only one kind of injustice, the realization is almost enough to demolish him. That's life — you can be riddled with guilt and still unflinchingly gracious.
It's just never that simple, Frank muses quietly, until it is. It's never this quiet in his mind, unless she's somewhere near.
For the first time ever, he wishes she wouldn't wait for him to move or speak. He can see it in her face, what she needs, but much like him, she won't ask for it. He wishes she knew that there's nothing she can't ask of him, but since she doesn't, he's gonna have to make that clear. And if he has to move at a glacial pace too, then so be it. He'll worm his way in just like she did, and he hopes she won't begrudge him the same tenacity she showed. By the way she leans her cheek into his palm, he doesn't think she will.
It's a little easier after that, as more months melt away, to stop questioning everything they do together and its meaning. When they laugh together, it doesn't feel foreign or undeserved. When he has bad days, he doesn't hide any place beyond her apartment, doesn't stray much farther than her sheets and doesn't utter many words besides praise for how she moves and feels around him. When she has bad days, which he's come to learn the look of, he unearths the meaning of devotion to something other than rage. He's not known desperation like this for longer than he can remember, because it takes a while to figure out what she needs and how to help. He thought he could see it clearly, but all he'd really been looking at was another one of those injustices. Frank turned his grief into anger. She's unfairly burying hers inside and watching it lay waste with a careful eye, never cowardly enough to admit to what she really wants. She's so brave, this woman. His.
He almost can't believe he's thinking it. Frank's role as protector ended with the last breath his family took. He didn't think it could ever be born again, but with the first tears to fall from her eyes, a brief moment sees him meeting a different type of rage. It scalds, but doesn't leave him empty. That's how it used to feel when he was all consumed with it just a few years ago. Instead, it's just a means to an end now. So he starts going out again, looking for the shadows that haunt her, because the only thing that will help her is the thing only he can provide. Kisses help. Hushed promises soothe. True healing, and he knows this in his bones, can only come after an end, and that's what she never got. She graciously gifted him a fledgling second life, but he won't start living it until she meets him halfway.
You did it for me. Let me do it for you.
He doesn't try to lie to her — it doesn't even occur to him. He tells her the truth and his plan in full as she sits on the couch and he paces her living room restlessly, now and then chancing a look at her. At first, there's silence. It stretches unbearably, and when she speaks, the tide breaks.
I don't know what hurts more. The fact that she's gone, or that it's my fault.
Hey—
No matter what, that won't change. I've thought about it. Killing the man who did it won't make it any less my fault or her any less dead. Frank, I—
Sweetheart—
It's you. You're… the only part of this equation I didn't see coming. You're the only thing that makes a difference. When I have bad days, I don't think about the man I want to see dead. I think about the one that makes me feel alive.
She says things like this sometimes — things that yank his heart straight from his chest and stomp on it until it comes apart at the seams. He's practically vibrating with it, this need to say something in return, but nothing rises to the magnitude of her confession. At least, nothing that he thinks he's earned the right to say to another person again. But his girl… She knows. He can see it in her eyes that she knows, because he's on her knees in front of her, holding her face in both his hands. Frank has done so much with them throughout his life. He's taken more than he's given. He's hurt more than he's comforted, ripped apart more than he's put together. What he now uses them for is as sacred as a thing can be, because if he won't speak it with his lips, he'll press it into her skin with his fingers. If the words won't form in his mouth, he'll use it to adorn her body with the reverence of a man who has found and lost and found again.
In the end, as his hands rewire themselves for holding and forget all else, he stops questioning it entirely. Whether by accident or by design, what's been given to them both is not something to make sense of. It's something to cherish, a devotion to each other that consumes not, but instead nurtures. He knows now the answer to that most important question: if she wormed his way inside his heart and the path she trailed doesn't burn, it's because she belonged there all along.