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When Meryl Stryfe wakes up to the sound of Nicholas D. Wolfwood groaning in pain as he rolls away from her, she knows she’s about to be in for a difficult morning.
Difficult for her, and difficult for Nick, too, evidenced by the particular type of groan that crawls out of his reconstructed chest and up his throat and right into Milly’s ear as he flops over into her side. He’s got three main groans Meryl can identify, and this is the one she fears hearing the most. His annoyed-by-the-tribulations groan, a noise that Meryl often accompanies with her own heavy sigh of irritation, since their gut reactions to the trials and tribulations tend to go hand-in-hand; his grumbly-soft groan, the one he makes when he’s being bashful but in a good way, and when he can’t make it too obvious that he’s being tickled pink; and his genuine groan, the too-pained one, the one that Meryl knows he’d rather stifle in its crib but just can’t seem to engage the right muscles in time to keep it down and hidden away. Meryl doesn’t like hearing him groan like that. Because it never, ever, means that he’s about to allow it to become their problem.
Meryl meet’s Milly’s fully-awake blue-green eyes in their bedroom’s half-light. Her partner peeks out over the mop of Nick’s crown nestled under her chin, worry creasing her brows, and Meryl’s heart aches for her. She purses her lips as Milly scratches the longer, unkempt hair at the base of Wolfwood’s neck—not quite a mullet, not quite a bob, but long enough for protecting his neck from the sun and for Milly to play with.
“…I’ll go get his heating pad,” Meryl says softly, pushing back the duvet. Milly nods at her.
The sliver of light she can see struggling to shine out from underneath their blackout blinds is gray and muted. The air feels thick to breathe. Even Meryl’s head throbs as she sits up. All signs of a dreary, cloudy day, harbingers of a pre-storm’s low pressure system—all things that are bad for aches and old pains, especially of the Nicholas D. Wolfwood variety.
“And the tiger balm, please. For his neck,” Milly says, wrapping her arms around Nick’s shoulders. She’s wearing the new pajamas Vash brought back for her a few weeks ago, pink and yellow and studded with embroidered sunflowers. They’ve started to try growing those outside of November in the university’s biotesting facilities, where the Earthmen have begun experimenting with Terran plants they think might be capable of adapting to Gunsmoke’s environment. Milly likes how happy they look. Vash likes making her happy.
A flapping, floppy hand, held up loosely at the wrist interrupts them. Both Meryl and Milly jump.
“Don’t,” groans the tortured voice of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, and the edge to it sets Meryl on edge. “Lie back down ri’now.” It’s harsh; it’s clipped, cut, and annoyed before they can even begin. It’s too much of Groan 1’s flavoring with Groan 3’s context. Meryl can see Wolfwood’s bloodshot eyes glaring out from between Milly’s crossed sleeves as she starts to move again, and he adds, “Ay mean it, Stryfe. Don’t bother.”
“And you don’t be ridiculous. It’ll just take me two minutes. I know where it is downstairs.” To placate him, Meryl crawls closer and plants a silly wet kiss on his bare trap. “I’ll be right back.”
And Nick—up and fucking harrumphs at her, a muttered “hmph” of distaste that doesn’t sound right coming from him. Meryl shares a baffled expression with Milly, though Milly’s look leans more towards sympathy than anything indignant like Meryl.
“Lie back down, little lady,” he snaps.
“No,” Meryl says, “I’d really like to get this for you, Nick.”
Wolfwood pushes himself up on his forearms. “Don’t need it. I’m gunna shower in a sec.”
“Then I’ll get something else for you,” Meryl pushes back with her words. His eyes are closed—more like screwed shut—and she chews her lip while watching his expression. Downturned, angled at the bed, as if it would hide how he’s grinding his jaw and how the cords of his neck tremble with the effort of hauling himself out of bed too quickly. “Food? Water? Painkillers?” The prompting is necessary, if not unpleasant. But it’s Nick; Meryl can’t just sit back when she could be doing something, even if that “something” would get her defined as a damn nuisance. Contemplating her options, she says, “Maybe all of the above. Food, then painkillers, then water. They’ll go down easier that way.”
“I’m a little hungry,” Milly adds helpfully. Milly likes Meryl when she’s a damn nuisance, even if Meryl isn’t always good at being a nuisance for her in the right way. It takes a special kind of person to coax Milly Thompson into sharing her burdens on somebody else’s time; Meryl’s still working on that front. Milly forgives her for struggling to know when to act sometimes. “I’d like it if you brought me some apple slices, ma’am.”
Meryl smiles. “I can do that for you, Milly.”
“I am goin’,” Nick says between them, “to shower. Don’t waste yer time.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with what I just said,” Meryl huffs. It does; if she went and got the tiger balm right now, and if Milly massaged it into his aching shoulders, it would just be washed off if he went to shower. But they could also massage him after; they have all the afters in the world they could want right now, and Meryl knows that Nicholas still tends to struggle to believe that. “And is that even a good idea right now? You could slip and fall and hurt yourself.”
“Ah, Meryl…” Milly murmurs. It’s a warning. Meryl knows.
Nicholas glowers at her. Really glowers, like Meryl had just kicked a kitten in front of him and cackled about it like some madlady on the loose. And Nick likes cats a lot more than he likes dogs. Kicking a dog, sure, he’d be angry, but a cat, and a little one at that? Oh, he’s mad. Meryl can tell he’s mad mad. It’s not even eight in the morning yet and he’s mad.
(Frustrated. Angry. The kind of knot in the chest that makes the corners of your eyes burn and the reaching parts of yourself coil a little closer because you don’t want their sharper edges to snag on somebody else. Meryl knows how he’s mad—and she thinks it just might be a bit more important than why he’s mad right now. How she understands it, more than anyone else might right now. Because it means she also knows how to handle those coils with her years of personal experience, how to wrap them into neat little loops, and how to hand them back to Nick as one big, but manageable bundle of string she’s put together for him. Still frustrated, yes, but no longer at himself—at the cost of himself. He’d still call it the worst gift she’s ever given him, just to be a dunce.)
Meryl raises both hands. “Okay,” she says. “You want to shower. Okay.” Again, she repeats it. “We’ll make that happen.”
—And then she flops over on the bed right next to him limply so that their bodies run parallel, and her head can lean sideways into the mattress as Nick watches her through the gaps in his bangs. She can see Milly smiling over his shoulder. Meryl widens her eyes as far as they can go and simply stares.
“…Don’t see much happenin’ happening,” Nick snorts after a moment, settling back down next to her. His hackles are lowered. It’s a little hard to keep your hackles up while your head’s pillowed on Milly Thompson, but Meryl still thinks this is a definite improvement. He knows they’re not going to coddle him, even if Meryl desperately wants to. She doesn’t, though—because she knows he doesn’t want it.
“Woo,” Meryl says flatly, raising a mockery of a cheering fist, “go Nick, go turn on that shower. You’re doing great.”
Milly takes the hint with ease, the other half of Meryl’s brain taken cute flesh and sweetly smiles. “Yay, Mister Priest, you can do it,” she says, attempting the same flatness but failing miserably. Or unmiserably; Milly only fails to make her voice flat because she ends up giggling out the “yay” and her “you can do it!” sounds like genuine encouragement.
Nick gives her a look that’s somewhere between disbelieving and Groan 2. “Yer not gonna insist ya go turn on the water fer me or somethin’?” he asks. “Wash my hair? Hold my hand an’ make sure I don’t keel over?” And then he shakes his head, tsking a note of doubt. “Yer crazy, woman. Never let me off this easy in my life.”
“Okay.” Meryl pops up from the bed abruptly. “I can do some of that.”
Nicholas chokes. His face tells her he’s realized his mistake, but his body language says he’s not about to just lie down and accept that fate. “Wh-hey.” Nick reaches out to snag her wrist and pull her back, but Meryl evades him with ease. “Don’t you go getting any fancy ideas. I’m not askin’ you t—”
“—Lalalala,” Meryl says, the pinnacle of maturity and manners, as she plugs her ears.
“Stryfe,” Nick whines. Pleads, more like it; he looks at her with those sad, soggy eyes, perched on the back of his hands and emphasizing the downturn of his brows. Like those could stop her once she’s gotten started.
“La,” Meryl struts to the room’s attached bathroom, “lala,” opens the door, “la,” and shuts it with a backwards kick and a sing-song, “ la.” She then opens it again to add, “Milly, be a dear and see if we’ve got any fresh towels? These ones reek of somebody’s after-workout sweat.”
“Of course, honey!” Milly beams, springing up as well.
Nick’s forehead drops to the mattress, and Meryl listens as he invents a new groan before she closes the door: Groan number 4, capitulation. Add just one more and they’ve got his five stages of groan-grief all mapped out.
Meryl hums as she turns on the water faucet, setting the temperature to warm up and putting her expensive shampoo and conditioner easily within his reach. She unrolls the shower mat and fluffs the bath mat. There isn’t a third mat for her to prep, so she stands and waits. Milly appears after a few minutes to place a neatly-folded stack of towels on the toilet seat; one for the body, one for the hands, and one for the face. Satisfied, she surveys her work with her hands on her hips to the sound of water hitting the tiles. She turns on the bathroom fan for good measure.
“All ready,” she says once she’s back in the bedroom. Wolfwood’s still petulantly face-down on the mattress. Taking Milly’s hand, Meryl says over her shoulder to him, “We’ll be downstairs, Nick. You can come join us for breakfast once you finish.”
Nick flashes her a half-hearted thumbs-up that quickly rotates into a full-hearted flash of his middle finger.
Milly follows after her without comment. But Meryl knows from her posture, and the way that she’s hovering right over Meryl’s shoulder as they descend the stairs, that she’s got something serious to say. Something she wants some time to put into the right words. An evaluation; a Milly-insight. Something that Meryl would never, ever dismiss. Meryl allows her to stew in her thoughts without feeling the need to prompt her—and Milly stews for a while, still thinking by the time Meryl sits them both down on the couch with mugs of warm tea in their hands and a pot of broth for Nick simmering on the stove.
“Honey?” Meryl finally asks, joining their hands again.
Milly intertwines their fingers and rests their conjoined hands on her knee. She brushes her thumb over the back of Meryl’s knuckles, pressing on the indents between the bones. “Meryl,” she says softly, at long last speaking her carefully-constructed thought, “do you think it’s such a good idea to… you know. Push him like that?”
Meryl swallows guiltily. “Was it too much?” She asks.
Too much teasing? Too heavy? Too lighthearted? Too direct? Not direct enough? Actions and the feelings that accompany them sometimes end up as a swirl of indecipherable noise to Meryl, a storm that she opts to power through in her quest to make sense of it. It makes her decisive, but it also leads to an immense number of small little regrets left on the wayside. The expectation that she’ll understand the bigger picture once she’s at the top of the hill doesn’t always come true in reality. Sometimes, she thinks she should’ve stopped to take careful note of what stood in her path instead of fixating on the end goal. She's always thinking about how she should’ve handled a situation differently; it’s only in the afters (that they have so many of) that she’s cognizant of the details she’d skimmed over and packed away in the heat of the moment. You find people in the paths. You find hearts in the wayside. She’s thorough, but she’s not always patient.
(Patience isn’t a perfect, faultless thing, though. Sometimes, patience breeds complacency. Meryl would hate more than anything to be seen as someone happy in complacency. More afters mean more opportunities for joy. They also mean more opportunities for mistakes.)
“I don’t mean to imply that you are…” Milly pauses and takes a sip of her tea. “…Well, yes, I do mean to imply that. But I don’t want it to reflect on how you think I think about you. It’s one of my favorite traits of yours—how you care the darndest about everything.”
“I know, Milly,” Meryl reassures her. “I don’t think it will. Or won’t—I won’t take it badly if you’re honest with me.” She rubs Milly’s knuckles back, a mirror of the soothing action. “I’d never believe that what you say is meant to hurt me.”
Milly’s head finds her shoulder. It’s awkward, with how much taller she is than Meryl, but it’s also one of her favorite places right alongside her favorite trait of Meryl’s inability to quit. Sometimes, Milly’s favorite things aren’t always the most comfortable for anybody else, but they’re what Milly loves—and nobody would dare deny her what she loves. She loves vulture-wams despite coming from a family of farmers, because they sing a lovely song in the evening. She loves pudding, even though most restaurants can’t afford to make it with regular sugar, so they end up substituting some terrifying ingredients that most sane people are too scared to risk. She loves having her forehead kissed even though Meryl always struggles to reach. She loves washing windows and sweeping sand off of their porch. She loves Meryl Stryfe, Nicholas D. Wolfwood, and Vash the Stampede.
“I just don’t know if pushing him so much like that when he’s in so much pain is a,” Milly hesitates, “well, all that effective.”
Meryl licks her lips. Quietly, she asks, “What else should we have done?”
“Maybe,” Milly says, putting a finger to her chin, “helped without making too much of a fuss out of it? We can just prepare things for him before he needs to ask for them.” She then shakes her head, scowling with a pout on her lips. “Ah, but we tried that… and he didn’t want us to do that.”
“I wouldn’t be comfortable not helping in some way.” Meryl shrugs helplessly, and Milly’s head follows the movement, glued to her shoulder like a limpet. “Even in a little way like heating up the shower.” She takes a sip of her tea, too; a warm honey chamomile, because it’s Saturday and she doesn’t have to do any work until 2 P.M.. She can take her morning slow and sleepy as she’d like. Slow and sleepiness does not stop her from admitting to something plaguing her, though: “Maybe that’s selfish of me.”
Milly squeezes her hand. “I don’t think it is. Because if that’s true, then I’m selfish, too.”
Meryl exhales a relieved breath. Carefully, she thinks of how she wants to put her next sentence with the same effort that Milly put into hers. “Though I admit I don’t always know when to draw the line,” Meryl says, “I think that I try to help him in the way I would want to be helped.” She herself isn’t good at asking for help. She herself is better at offering it. But isn’t everyone? Being human is a constant battle with the self; because being human is being a burden, and taking on someone’s burdens back. What people like Meryl and Milly and Nicholas and especially Vash—even if he isn’t necessarily “human”—have to do is reorient their thinking. Knowing that doesn’t make the conscious effort any easier. Meryl squeezes Milly’s hand back when she says, “We aren’t the same person, obviously, but sometimes it feels like he responds best to the things that I know I’d respond best to.”
“…Getting tricked into taking a break?” Milly giggles.
“We’re not very good at asking for things,” Meryl chuckles ruefully, “but being guessed at until something sticks—it isn’t so bad. Because it didn’t require us to ask for anything in the first place. If it’s just done for us, but it’s still something we wanted done, so it’s not a waste in the other way that makes us feel bad.” Meryl then balks, realizing how that sentence might come across. Like she isn’t grateful for kindness she didn’t ask for. Like she doesn’t appreciate what other people are willing to do for her, before she even knows she needs it. “…I’m sorry, Milly, that really does sound bad. But does it make sense?”
Her partner’s shoulders shake with a second round of giggles, softly bumping against Meryl’s side. Not taken personally; just like Meryl said she’d do for Milly. “Yeah,” Milly says, “I think it does. It’s hardest for him when it…”
“…Matters,” Meryl finishes for her. When it gets a little too real. When it’s a need that takes and not a maybe that would be nice to have, if they’re willing to share. Milly hums.
“Is it the same for you too, ma’am?”
(It’s easier to ask for something when being told no won’t hurt. It’s easier to reach out when you know for certain that the other person is willing and able to reach back. The hardest thing for people like Meryl and Nicholas is to ask for help they need from someone they’re afraid will give it to them without hesitation—without consideration of their needs before attending to Meryl and Nicholas’.)
“It depends.” Meryl would prefer to give her a concrete example, but she can’t think of any right now. “But I’m sure that could be said about anything, really.”
Heavier things. Lighter things. Things that matter, and things that don't. What matters or doesn’t matter could be changed easily by the presence of it depends. It’s a powerful, universal phrase. Meryl prefers to use it sparingly, nonspecific as it is.
“…You can be pushy, ma’am, depending on the situation,” Milly concludes. She says it like it’s a universal truth—and as far as Meryl’s concerned, any evaluation that comes out of Milly Thompson’s mouth might as well be. “But I can help you be pushy in a good way, ‘cause I’ll watch to see when you should stop. I’m good at that.” She tilts her chin up to look at Meryl with those big blue eyes, creased at the corners with her smile. “We can be a pushy-pully team.”
Meryl kisses her forehead. It’s hard not to, with it being right there and everything for the kissing. “Now, Milly, I might end up running with that far beyond your wildest dreams,” Meryl says with a laugh.
“I like to enable you, Meryl,” Milly tells her honestly. “You’re at your best when you’re making those dreams real.”
And Meryl kisses her lips after that, soft and gentle as a promise she intends to keep. It’s even harder not to, after receiving a declaration like that spoken with such genuine love and care. Her other half; the completion of her soul. Her weaknesses covered by Milly’s insights; Milly’s weaknesses covered by Meryl’s strengths. It makes Meryl feel like she could take on the whole universe and come out the other side still swinging with the energy of a burning star. Milly purrs into her mouth when Meryl’s hands tilt up her head to fit their noses together. She still smells like Meryl’s expensive shampoo.
“I love you too,” Milly says with a little laugh, because it’s always come easier to her than anyone else. Her teeth clack with Meryl’s when Meryl presses back into her.
“…Love you,” Meryl murmurs, because it’s easier to say than the whole phrase.
—And then there’s a gentle hand in her hair, and Meryl utters an “Ack!” as she’s pulled off of Milly and somebody else’s lips are planted against her own over the back of the couch.
Nick’s wet hair drips water on her face, and his hands cup her cheeks with the obvious intent to squeeze teasingly once he’s done being sweet. He’s still warm from the shower. The calluses on his palms are new, resulting from the loss of his hyperregeneration; they tickle Meryl’s face like scratchy cat tongues as Nick passes his thumbs under her eyes. He kisses her, upside down, for a beat of three and one—and then pulls away as quickly as he’d appeared, groaning Numbers 1 and 2 as he slithers over the couch to curl up on the cushions beside her.
Milly immediately passes Meryl the blanket folded up on the arm of the couch, and Meryl drapes it over his shrimped form.
“How are you feeling?” Meryl asks, leaning over him to tuck the blanket snugly under his sides. She lets her hands linger for longer than strictly necessary, keeping her arms encircled around his middle and her chin on his shoulder. She can feel Milly shifting on the couch and leaning over her to check on him, too.
“Sore,” Nicholas mutters with his nosed wrinkling and his eyes shut. Better— because he’s telling her now. “Lower back.”
Meryl digs her knuckle deep into his spine and Nicholas exhales a huge “whumph” of satisfaction. He rolls halfway onto his front, keeping his legs hanging over the edge of the couch but his torso flat so she can access his back. Meryl adds her second hand to the mix and Nick all but moans as he drags one of the throw pillows under his chest and hugs it like a kid. Little fingers like Meryl’s make for very pointed deep pressure therapy, good for knots and bumps in the spine. Bigger, broader hands like Milly’s are better for the neck and strained muscles that need to be encircled and smoothed out. Meryl pokes and prods at the essential points right above Wolfwood’s tailbone in one-two bursts, like she’s firing her Derringers into his old wounds.
Focused as she’d been on her task, Meryl hadn’t noticed Milly disappearing into the kitchen until she reappears with a steaming mug in her hand.
“Soup?” Milly asks, crouching down in front of Nick.
Nick cracks open one hopeful eye. “Soy broth?”
Milly nods, giggling, “With the stock cubes from Miss Gloria’s gift basket.”
“Damn,” Wolfwood says, “maybe I should let’er court Melanie.”
“She does make your favorite soy broth cubes, Mister Priest,” Milly says. “That’s quite the bargaining chip if I do say so myself.”
Nick hauls himself to a seated position with that. Shamelessly, he’s still eating up Meryl’s personal space like his damned life depends upon it; he drapes one thick forearm over her lap, bending at the elbow to cup her knee in his hand. His shoulder shimmies underneath hers. Meryl sticks out her tongue at him jostling her tea and her very comfortable position on the couch, but it doesn’t take long for her to accommodate him, happy that at last he’s eating.
Milly’s smile is nothing short of a beam as she watches them and hands over the mug of soup. “I’ll go get one for you too, ma’am,” she says, catching Nick’s eye and winking. Nick grumbles into his broth. “I’ll be right back.”
“Thank you, Milly,” Meryl says.
Meryl sips her tea. Nicholas sips his broth. They sit in comfortable, achy silence, and Meryl finds herself sinking back into him, too. He’s not as solid as he used to be; the amount of times that Meryl got a chance to touch Nicholas D. Wolfwood before the world promptly ended were few and far between, but she knows for certain that she always remembered him like something akin to a brick wall. There were chips in the mortar, sure, but no human could topple him without tools or a hammer or at very least some gear to climb. She saw him less as “Nick” and more as “the man named Wolfwood” before she ever had the chance to get to know him. He smelled like smoke. She didn’t know the color of his eyes behind those sunglasses. He was his crisp black suit and his crisp black suit was him; he was shaped like an indentation in reality, bent by the weight of his Punisher cross, instead of a person that filled it. Back then, Meryl was under the impression he preferred it that way.
Now, he’s in a sweater that doesn’t belong to him—Milly’s, big and green and complimenting his gunmetal gray irises—and his flanks are soft with a layer of age he didn’t expect to live and sun-warmed skin. He doesn’t take a whetstone to the edge of his person every morning in the name of survival. Hunger doesn’t pang him anymore. Grief still bows his shoulders. Two and a half pairs of hands willing to hold up his chest when he’s struck by how tired he is help with the weight.
“…Hey,” Nick says at last. “Stryfe—Meryl.”
“Hi, Nicholas,” Meryl responds, beat for beat, name for name. She says it quietly, because he said it quietly, too. She hears him lick the salt and soy off of his lips.
“You do good,” Nicholas says. It comes out as a cough. “What you do—yer real good at it.” The rumble in his voice is distinctly embarrassed, but weighty; Meryl finds herself inhaling sharply. “I hope ya know I don’t meanta make ya think you aren’t.”
Meryl drops her face into his hair so that he can’t see the way her brows are pulling closer together, inch by shaken inch. The crease in her forehead is only a coincidence. No correlation that could ever be proven in a court of law. “I know you don’t,” says Meryl, clutching her tea. “I never thought about it that way, Nick—but thank you for telling me.” We’re both far too good at blaming ourselves for that, she does not say.
She can feel Nicholas’ chuckle through her body, though the actual noise he makes is hardly above hearing range. “Prod me all ya want, little lady,” he says. “I’m still gunna whine about it. But it helps.”
“I’d be more worried if you didn’t whine,” Meryl admits. Nick utters an “oof.”
“And I’d be more worried if ya didn’t hassle me,” Nick agrees, “so—keep doin’ it. Somebody’s gotta do it, and I’d prefer if it’s you.”
(Somebody like me, to know how to do it; somebody that understands what words they’d prefer to hear so they don’t feel so hard to swallow. Someone telling you that it’s okay to ask for help doesn’t go down as easily as one might hope, even when the words are logical and meant to soothe. Sometimes, it feels like being told that there’s something wrong with you; that you’re the one that should be doing the heavy-lifting, so that someone else can then swoop in and fit into the slot of your savior.
You’re making it hard for them to help you, Meryl thinks, is one of the worst phrases you can say.
And damn, she’s heard it before—that she hurt them by hurting herself in her misguided attempt to not hurt them. If Meryl wasn’t so stubborn. If she’d just let somebody else have the run of the place. She doesn’t have to dictate all the time, she can let somebody else hold the map, she can sit back and relax as somebody else answers the questions for her. It isn’t comforting in the way it might be for someone else; it makes her twitchy, nervous, and prone to irrational self-flagellation. God forbid she lets somebody else carry something that she’s perfectly capable of carrying on her own. How dare she take a rest. How dare she let somebody else take the blame.
She’s pretty sure it’s exactly the same for Wolfwood.)
“You’re lucky I like quizzes,” Meryl says to him, nosing into his crown. “And you’re lucky you’re cute.”
“Oi, I’m cute? Just cute?” Nick tickles her collarbone with another harrumph. This one isn’t angry. This one isn’t on edge. It’s all loose limbs and charmed smiles and the burning sensation Meryl can feel on the tips of her ears.
“On some days,” Meryl agrees. “Though not on all of them.”
Wolfwood rolls his eyes. “Sheesh, woman. Yer so technical.”
“You’ve seen nothing of how technical I can be, Mister Priest,” Meryl says, stealing Milly’s petname for him. She taps the side of her head, indicating her big and memorable brain. “You’ve only scratched the surface of what I keep in here.” With a gleam in her eye, she begins to recite: “For example: Tuesday, March 17th. Nicholas D. Wolfwood looked especially cute on this day, because he fell asleep with a cigarette in his mouth and Milly replaced it with one of her chocolate-coffee wafers, which he promptly ate in his sleep. While this raises concerns about how he disposes of his cigarettes when we are not keeping an eye on him, it was very sweet to watch him—”
Nicholas slaps a hand over her mouth, and then for good measure, grabs her around the neck and noogies her. Meryl shrieks with laughter, but there’s also a twinge of relief—that he’s feeling better, or distracted enough, or so intensely loved that it just doesn’t matter right now how bad the morning started out and how rough around the edges he felt waking up.
And Nicholas D. Wolfwood can surely hear that relief, because he pulls Meryl into his lap and kisses her with something Meryl thinks might be gratitude. Before biting her, of course, just to be a dunce.
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