Chapter Text
Touch was such an important sense to Matt.
When he first became blind, before he understood what his other senses could do for him, he had a love-hate relationship with touch. When his dad put his hand on Matt's shoulder to reassure him, Matt felt like he could feel his dad's love and faith in him, through his fingertips. But other people's touch - the doctors and nurses, the teachers - made him cringe. He hated that their touch felt pitying or even, in the case of some of his schoolmates, malicious.
After Stick, after Matt really understood how he could thrive without his eyesight, touch became much less uncomfortable for him. He was able to predict when someone was about to touch him, which took away the feelings he'd had of hungry ghosts grabbing at him in the dark.
When he'd gotten older, old enough to be interested in girls and have their interest in return, touch became his favorite thing above all else. Foggy had been right when he'd once said that the girls must love the blind, handsome thing. Matt had never taken advantage of it, but, when it brought attention his way, he didn't complain.
Elektra had changed all of that for him. She had taken advantage. She showed him everything that intimate touch could be, and for the first time since he'd developed his heightened senses, he was allowed to be honest with himself about just what touch meant to him... because for the first time he hadn't had to hide from everyone else how he experienced the world.
He never made that mistake again. After their relationship had crashed and burned, after Foggy helped him get his life back on track, he kept his liaisons more casual. Foggy sometimes asked why things hadn't worked out with this woman, or that one, but when Matt made his excuses, Foggy never pushed it.
Karen was something else all together.
She was never shy about touching Matt, and it never failed to make his heart beat faster. She often took his hand and brought it to her elbow so that she could 'lead' him as they walked somewhere. She'd gotten into the habit of adjusting his tie whenever he was about to meet a client in their offices. Sometimes she even ran her fingers through his hair to, in her words, 'make him more presentable'.
Her touch had always thrilled him, but in recent weeks his emotional response to her had been beyond anything he'd ever experienced. His memories of her from two summers ago when they'd briefly dated, before he'd made a series of the worst decisions of his life, would appear to him at all times of the day and night, a touch or a smell bringing them directly into the forefront of his mind. Work sometimes took him twice as long because he had such a hard time ignoring her vitality as she worked in her office next to his... the thoughts of what could have been between them an exquisite torture.
And it wasn't just the potential for her touch that pulled him from his bed in the morning, sometimes after only a few hours of exhausted, painful sleep. It was her thoughtfulness and compassion, her intelligence... and her voice.
He loved her voice. Not just the way it sounded, which he found soothing, but the magical way that she had of describing the world around her.
He loved being somewhere with her, anywhere that there was something worth seeing, because she had a way of narrating things for him, of describing what she was seeing, for his benefit, that made his heart tighten. It happened on their first date, all those lifetimes ago. She'd said, 'I wish you could see this place,' and he'd answered, 'I can, if you describe it to me,'... and that had been the beginning of seeing the world through Karen's eyes... through the sound of her voice.
Even now, after all of their ups and downs, from the end of Nelson and Murdock, to the beginning of Nelson, Murdock, and Page, Karen never denied Matt the chance to see the world as she saw it. And what he'd realized that morning, pressed into that booth alongside Karen, listening to her describe the restaurant, the people, their food, and their friends, was that he wanted to spend the rest of his life seeing the world through her eyes.
And he thought there was a real chance. They went out together often, socially. They had found any easy rhythm of sharing meals - lunches at work most days, a couple of dinners a week, eating out, or in, as the mood suited them, and brunches on Sundays with Foggy and Marci. Matt couldn't hide how happy he was when he was with Karen, and she didn't seem to either.
The only thing stopping him from asking her on an official, labeled date, was the unofficial understanding they'd arrived at a few months earlier. Matt had apologized for the millionth time that he'd lied to her, but for the first time he added, and ruined their chance to be more than friends.
Karen had given him a long look before she'd answered that it wouldn't have worked then, with them both hiding so much from each other. He caught an ever so slight emphasis on the word then, as she spoke it, and he had to focus all of his energy on stopping his heart from beating out of his chest.
They weren't hiding anything from each other now - hadn't for a long time. Their friendship had survived the lies, and secrets, and was stronger than ever. She knew the truth about who he was and how he experienced the world. She knew him better than even Elektra had, but he knew Karen would never take advantage of him... would never use him and throw him away. He felt utterly safe to have Karen know him completely.
Matt thought he could detect similar feelings in Karen, for him, but sensing changes to her vital signs when they were together was not a green light to assume that she wanted the same things he did. He would need her to tell him how she felt.
So that was where he'd found himself... smack dab in the middle of loving Karen Page, and doing everything he could to show her.