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She’s not exactly sure when Frank Castle became her partner in crime (read: journalistic pursuits).
Maybe that first night, when he’d popped up on one of her stake outs with two hot cups of coffee and climbed into her car. As if this was their world now.
Maybe it’d been when he’d started bringing her information, little bits and pieces he picks up from old friends and foes. He starts becoming a regular source in her articles – unnamed, of course – and then he tags along to her stake outs and interviews. Which is unexpected, but preferable to his previous habit of popping up in random places and scaring the shit out of interviewees from behind her back when she’s not looking.
But it gets to the point that when she manages to wrangle two tickets to some fancy charity dinner where a state senator she needs to interrogate will be in attendance, he’s the first person she thinks of. She texts, tells him – doesn’t ask – to be at her door at seven, dressed smart. She tilts her head to one side, then adds; bring a car.
--
At seven on the dot, there’s a knock on her door. She grabs her purse from the table and slips into her heels and opens the door to Frank Castle in black tie.
‘Oh my god,’ she starts to laugh – and then abruptly cuts off. Because he’s doing that odd blinking thing he does when he’s been surprised, and his eyes sweep over her and, abruptly, she wonders if this was a good idea. She’s dressed simply, all black, taller than Frank in her heels. She likes that he has to look up to speak to her now.
‘Jeez,’ he mutters, shaking his head, and she’s stuck between mortification and feeling distinctly pleased as he swipes a hand under his nose. ‘You scrub up alright, Page.’
‘You’re not so bad yourself.’
He looks…
Odd. Smart and clean-cut, yes – even with a few lingering bruises – but it feels as if the rumbling, vibrating, angry Frank she knows has been wrapped up and anchored by a tie and an ironed shirt.
It’s as if he’s tipped the world a little with his damn bowtie.
--
‘Where are you dragging my ass to this time then?’ He asks, holding the door open for her and snapping it shut behind the pair of them, waiting patiently for her to lock it.
‘Charity dinner function thing,’ she explains haphazardly, clarifying; ‘Senator Lipton’s gonna be there and I’ve got to ask him a couple of questions about some of the constituents he’s so thoroughly ignoring.’
Because her back is turned, busy fiddling with the lock, double-checking it, she doesn’t spot the way Frank’s face falls. Just a fraction, but it’s there. It’s enough.
‘Right. This a journo thing?’
‘Sure. Should be fun though.’
‘And what’s my function here, exactly?’
She shoots him a quizzical look, almost pausing in her hurry down the stairs. Frank drags a little further behind her, hesitant.
‘What do I usually keep you around for?’ She asks. She’s breezy today, light. He doesn’t wanna take that away. She laughs as she continues (teasing him, he thinks); ‘you’re the muscle.’
He raises an eyebrow, hurries to catch up in a few loping strides.
‘Good to see my ready source of information is so valued in this operation.’
‘Hey,’ she cuts in, bumping her shoulder against his with a grin, ‘I’m the brains of all this, what else were you gonna be?’
He considers the question for a while. Eventually lands on;
‘The wildcard.’
Karen crinkles her nose up, trying to gage if he’s being serious. He’s not.
‘You watch too much TV. Come on, idiot.’
--
He lets her drive, slipping smoothly through the streets of New York, the engine humming through her skin and blood and teeth.
‘Who’d you steal this from?’ She asks at a red light.
‘Didn’t steal,’ he clarifies. ‘Borrowed. I’m gonna take it back tomorrow.’ She’s still staring at him, expectant. ‘But if you must know, I stole it from some rich asshole who’s too cheap to pay for off-street parking.’
‘Of course.’
The red light trickles oddly against his cheekbones. Makes him look younger. She dismisses the thought immediately, just as she does every time she thinks about Frank’s cheekbones, or his lips, or the odd bump in his nose that she wants to run a fingertip across when he frowns.
--
The charity dinner is fine. Frank pretends to be her boyfriend and rests his hand on her lower back from time to time and saves her from dull conversations and gets her drinks and lurks menacingly in the background whilst she harangues Senator Lipton.
He’s perfect.
It’s fine.
On the way home, she lets him drive and sinks into the wracked feeling in her chest. Watches Frank as he drives, all square jawline and practiced motions. He’s singing along to a tape, husky and low and half out-of-tune. Something in her hums.
He drops her by her apartment, walks her to her door. He’d shucked off his jacket whilst they’d waited for the valet and popped it around her shoulders, even though it’s still warm out, and abruptly she’s sixteen, coming home from a date to the drive-in, wearing a borrowed letterman jacket and wondering whether she should kiss the boy on her stoop and wondering if her parents will be mad if she misses curfew and –
‘Page,’ Frank interrupts. ‘You alright? You forget your key?’
‘No, no, I got it –’ she mutters, shaking her head, pulling the key out of her bag. Frank leans against the brick, waiting, uncharacteristically relaxed as he tilts his head and watches the stars a little. She takes a breath, thinks about all the boys she never kissed.
‘You wanna come up for coffee?’ She asks.
He pauses. Considering her. Then;
‘Yeah. Coffee would be good.’
--
He looks so handsome and so abnormal all at once in his shirt and suit trousers, sleeves rolled up to his elbows to reveal vast valleys of tanned skin. Now, in the amber light of his apartment, a scowl on his face and a beer in his hand (they’d moved past coffee fast, chasing the buzz the free champagne had induced, both of them settled on her floor, backs up against the sofa) he’s become this odd, grappling meeting of two worlds, throwing off sparks. There’s the Punisher, printed into the lines of his glare, the bruises stamped across his cheekbone. But then there’s Frank Castle in the pout of his lower lip, the crinkle of his eyes when she manages to force a laugh out of him. It’s like a strange, half-shadow has slipped into a tuxedo and taken her on some whirl-wind choose your own adventure, and now she has to make a decision:
Does she let the story end, or does she turn the next page?
Does she send him home, or does she ask him to stay?
A car passes by outsides, headlights seeping in through the curtains and tracking across the ceiling – then down to her arms, flicking through the odd mish-mash of shadows on Frank’s face, before it disappears. She spots Frank watching it too, beer momentarily forgotten.
‘I used to watch the car headlights go across my ceiling at night, when I was a kid,’ she comments, out of the blue.
Frank raises an eyebrow.
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah,’ she murmurs back. ‘When it was hot, I would sleep with the windows open and the curtains pulled back, so I could hear all the people walking past, and the crickets and the cars. It felt like – it felt like being on holiday. Like this whole different world, just for me.’
She’s aware that she’s drunk, and her words aren’t really making any sense. She’s aware that Frank has gotten closer, somehow, and something in her aches for that dry heat of summer, windows thrown wide, heat and lights and voices spooling in, drowning out the buzz of the tv set and her parents arguing.
‘Sometimes I wish I could go back,’ she tells him, hanging her head so that her hair slips over her face, covering the way her cheeks are burning and, incomprehensibly, she thinks she might cry.
Touches of Frank remind her of back home. Just every so often the slant of his head, or the way he calls her ma’am, the little rumbling noises he makes low in his chest when she’s about to do something dumb and dangerous – it reminds her of the boys back home. Reminds her of dry summer heat and fall leaves and her walk to school every morning, rattling her hand across all the railings, and pistachio ice cream with her mom on Saturdays, and –
She tilts her head – maybe to tell him that – but he’s getting up. Embarrassment crawls up to her throat and settles there. So she just watches instead. Watches as Frank opens the windows and the curtains. Watches as he grabs a cushion or two off the sofa. Watches as he lies down next to her, hands rested on his stomach, staring up at the ceiling. Waiting.
For her to join him, she realises with a start.
Laid down on the floor next to him, cushion tucked under her head, she closes her eyes for a moment. A car engine rumbles.
‘Open your eyes,’ Frank murmurs. She does. They watch the car headlights rolling across the ceiling, delicate like gossamer.
Frank’s knuckle brushes against hers.
She rolls over and kisses him.
It’s messy and their noses bump and she expects Frank to smile and pull away, to tell her that she’s drunk, tell her go to sleep Page. To take the bad decision away from her before she even has the chance to make it.
Instead, he pauses, rests his forehead against hers. Presses a kiss to her cheekbone and exhales a breath in a flutter against her neck. Runs his lips across her jaw. When he blinks she feels the soft tickle of his eyelashes against her cheek – than he’s back to her lips, tiny butterfly kisses that have her pulling him up and over her.
He pauses above her again, lets her run her fingers along the curve of his neck, lets her card her fingers through his hair and bring him in for a kiss.
It’s like nothing she’s ever had before. Nothing like kisses in the rain, or under rust trees in Vermont. It is singularly, determinedly Frank. He rumbles out a little noise and it reverberates around his chest and she takes him to bed, lets him bury his face in the crook of her neck and lets him moan into her skin and returns the sounds in kind.
Afterwards, Frank kisses the spot where her skin meets her hairline, and a bruise that’s just beginning to fade on her cheekbone, and the place where her collar bone presses most sharply up against her skin. Abruptly, they are her most intimate spaces. Then he sleeps, and she watches him. Breathes all of him.
He won’t be here in the morning, she reminds herself. Takes a breath, tries to burn every inch of him like this, sleeping and achingly, painfully vulnerable, to memory. She steels herself. Digs her fingernails into the palm of her hand. He won’t be here in the morning.
--
He’s still there in the morning.
She wakes up with a dead weight across her stomach, and it takes a moment for her to realise that it’s his arm, looped around her waist, and that he’d slept with his forehead pressed to her shoulder blade, legs tangled with hers, sweat sticking them together.
She’s so relieved she could cry.
She feels him stirring and forces herself to turn, to confront him in the morning light. He’s softer, blurrier, somehow, even as he awakes into a frown, confused for a moment – until he spots her. Smiles a fraction, eyes flickering away sheepishly.
‘Morning sunshine,’ she murmurs, teasing. He cards his hand through her hair, watches it spool through his fingers.
‘Mornin’,’ he rumbles. Crinkles up his face and throws his arm over his eyes, blocking out the light for a moment. ‘You want coffee?’
She pauses. Considering him. Then;
‘Yeah. Coffee would be good.’