Work Text:
Already it’s half-past two when he packs up his post and stumbles off, leaving the sun-soaked alley to its rats.
The moment he pushes up off the littered ground, his leg prickles, a thousand and one spiders scattering around inside until he nearly succumbs beneath the pressure of standing. No surprise there. Frank’s kept it pressed up against the brick wall fencing him in undetected an hour too many. One moment more and it’ll threaten to take up arms in union with his throbbing forehead, a revolt against the stationary. He casts an arm out to the side and grabs hold of a slippery dumpster’s lid, stretching and flexing until the feeling squirrels itself away. He sways there a moment, a seesaw in the wind, moored to ground on one solitary limb and the rest of him flapping about on unstable grip. The rain falling in a thin sheet isn’t helping matters; where it should’ve broken the unrelenting blaze of summer, it’s only moistened her heat. Inescapable, pervasive with the pungent odor of wet asphalt. In the air he may as well be swimming.
A puddle splashes underfoot, spraying enough mud and cigarette ash onto his boots to send a scourge of mosquitos swarming.
Last night, with sleep a distant fancy, the idea had seemed simple enough. A welcome distraction. Camp out by the piers for a few hours, catch if any idiot kids decide to show up for another exchange. Maybe see if they brought any idiot adults with them this time, then head home for a quick shower.
He’d forgone the shower. Mind too alight with promises and admissions and the fear of at last coming right out with it, he’d forgone going home.
Instead, the bakery up the alley had employees filing out the service entry for smoke breaks every hour on the hour from the crack of dawn, and he’d managed to get himself holed up all night in a rainstorm with nothing to show but a suspiciously silent view of the Hudson, one wet jacket, and the crick in his neck.
Guilt creeps up it now, hot and flush against his skin until it turns clammy.
Those kids weren’t his primary concern, not truly. Dumbass teenagers with bags of bricks for brains. If they’d shown, he’d half a mind to step out of the shadows and scare them half to death, tell them off for being out so early where they’ll be getting themselves mixed up in things bigger than their britches, staining their lives before there’s no going back, nowhere safe. But they hadn’t, so he hadn’t. No, it’s the gangs he’s after. The same old ones he’s been hearing about for the better half of what takes the shape of a lifetime now, who’ve been tearing up the streets longer than Frank’s been on them and who will only breed more violence long after he’s gone, no matter how many nights he pulls to take them off for good.
Frank flips the safety back in place on his handgun and tucks it into the waistband of his jeans. The rainjacket he slips on like a dripping shroud covers the handle well enough. Even in this damp July, he’s seen morning joggers and commuters bustling past in their own bright neon coats.
The nylon fabric of its hood brushes against his neck.
It’s not Heaven sent remorse coming for his salvation at long last. Ridding the world of those bringing nothing but harm and its promise of repetition, wrapping everyone in their webs, promising death and danger and nothing more, isn’t something he’s looking to repent from. Someone's got to do it. Frank thinks, sometimes, that he might want to forever. The guilt takes up residence, then, when he packs his things away, the ever-present plague of its death and danger hot on his heels to her door, always a truth more spoken between them than the one that’s been gnawing at him for weeks, months, years. The words he lies in bed dreaming of saying. Dreaming and dreading.
He weaves his way up the alley to the front door of the bakery, slow on the leg still half-asleep. It’s a small shop with little traffic, at least front-facing, and when he pulls open the door, a bell rings to announce his arrival.
The over-eager girl at the counter looks up from her phone. “Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” says Frank, shuffling his weight from one foot to the other, coughing from the disuse of his voice. “You got tiramisu?”
“Sure—one piece or two?”
Karen, alone in her apartment, waiting on him. Always waiting. It’s dinner and a movie, like they’d agreed on. The excuse to exist together—they’ve been agreeing on that for some time now. He’s promised this and so much more, if only in his mind. How to say it?
“How much for the whole thing?”
And maybe a part of him—the part that licks old wounds with a selfish tongue—craves it like a dog to the hunt. The thrill, the fight, the only lasting justice some will ever get, delivered swift and sure. It’s that wicked part of him everyone keeps insisting he’s better than. Karen, for one, is of the mind that he can be more. That beyond this veil, Frank Castle could be someone who loves again. Only that life is incompatible with this one like oil to a fire, devouring all. He can feel his flesh burn with it. He can feel his neck brush against the rainjacket.
“Have a good one,” says the bakery cashier, handing him that sickly sweet sentiment, tucking it lengthways in a paper bag and watching as he leaves the way he came, doorbell ringing in his wake as he steps back into the drizzling streets.
When he finally arrives at the stoop of her building it’s with screaming feet and a fresh coat of rainwater licking his soles, clinging to the mud from earlier, softening it back to slippery life. He scuffs his boots once, twice, three times against the welcome mat, dirtying its fibers and managing only to smear it around uselessly like some self-aggrandizing exhibit at one of those pompous modern art museums uptown—city-mud brown on black steeltoe. He grimaces.
Bending over with the jacket in hand only does so much—his head spins on a spit at the motion, dipping and swirling with the sewer drains. The fabric is too waterproof to soak any of it up.
(It isn’t a date, not really, Frank reminds himself. Because he hasn’t told her yet. It’s just the two of them spending time together, in Karen’s apartment, at a predetermined time, with dinner. Restaurants are always going to be an unnecessary risk.)
Scraping his feet against the brickwork and the sidewalk will have to do. From the street there’s an unencumbered view to her window, open a crack to let the fresh air in. A testament to the summer’s day, and to the waning life of her building’s AC. He takes out the spare key she gave him—for emergencies on both ends—and begins the trek up to her.
You matter to me is what comes to him on the first flight of narrow, winding stairs, the bag of melting tiramisu knocking rhythmically against his calf. It’s woefully inadequate and lands far from expressing what he thinks of her and of them. Anyone can matter. Many have mattered to Frank.
care about you. Another flight, another sentiment. He can feel the clock ticking down now, mocking him for not writing it out to make a script of the whole thing. And to think he’d done this once. His eyelids are burning.
He knocks to let her know before sliding in the key.
“Karen?”
There’s a light on in the bathroom, shining through the crack at the bottom of its door.
Rummaging around in her cabinets brings him to an empty vase, a translucent green one that billows out wide at the top, into which he slips the bouquet he’d snagged from a street vendor. Lilacs and roses and a few baby’s breaths because that’s all there was to choose from. He hasn’t a clue if she likes those kind.
It’s just dinner and a movie. Nothing revolutionary. Yet here he goes, making it…
His face feels like a rock in lava, suddenly. The flowers don’t fill out the vase, sparse and water-starved as they are. On the walk over they appear to have wilted; the rose petals crumble onto the counter below with every shift he makes to fluff them out.
“What’s all this?”
There’s Karen, tossing her hairbrush to the couch to size up his mangling of nature. Always sneaking up on him.
“Uh—flowers. Old lady a couple blocks down was selling ‘em awful cheap, so I thought—” He clears his throat with another cough, this one thick and wet. “Well, I noticed you were out.”
She raises her eyebrow.
“In the window.”
“Oh.” Karen whips her attention between the drifting breeze and him, quick as always. Her smile, blinding and gone in the same flash, may as well be a summer’s rose. “I hope that doesn’t mean you’re planning on my needing them again.”
The memory of going away like that—of pushing her out again—finds the color paling from his face.
“Not really—not the kind of flowers to keep up long enough.” He tries for a joke, nodding down to the sad state of his arrangement.
She takes up a petal between her fingers. “No, I don’t think so.”
It’s all pulled taut between them again. Karen twirls the bits of dead, broken rose and glances up at him like the mess of it says something indisputable. Like it’s not just a poor attempt at bridging the gap between what is said and what folds in on itself between his teeth. She sets down that fragile petal so gently and shakes her head, hair curtaining her expression from view.
“Thank you,” is all that comes out when she’s surfaced again, and then she’s pulling him into a hug, tight and cool against her.
I care about you.
He opens his mouth only to mumble out something unintelligible. It’s a miracle he’d ever managed to say it before, in that other life. A baffling eighth wonder of the world that he’d gotten this far with it. Behind her, Frank clenches a fist.
“I—”
But Karen pulls back with a frown. “You’re burning up,” she says, one hand wrapping across her body to prop up her elbow, the other resting flat beneath her chin. It’s her thinking face, and it’s never a good sign. She glances down at his boots where the evidence makes no attempt to obscure itself. “Did you walk here? How long were you out?”
He shrugs. “The night.”
“What’s that mean? All night?”
“Had a stakeout. Relax, nothing happened but rain.”
“Frank,”she sighs in that exasperated tone, the one to say she understands why he does it but doesn’t approve of the way it’s done.
“I’m all fine.”
He tries to slink past her and that pathetic bundle of dying flora into the kitchen where there’s a candle burning already, but she snags his wrist as he rounds the corner, their arms outstretched like a telephone wire above the little island-road between them.
“What, can’t I put this in the freezer before it starts leaking all over your floors?” he asks, raising the bag. She doesn’t take her hand off his, so hers goes flying up with the motion, too.
“Put that on the counter. I’ll get it later.”
“It’ll only take—”
She shakes her head, insistent. For a moment he thinks she might demand he lay down on her couch here and now, dessert be damned, but then she crosses the distance, snatches the bag from him and shoves the whole of it into her freezer. She whirls on her heel and seizes him once more, fingers threaded through his, locked in an iron grip that leaves him choiceless. He’s tugged behind her like a child’s rowboat, winding around her furniture and into the shallow alcove of her apartment’s hall. There’s precious little time for protest or thinking at all before she’s thrusting open the door to her bedroom and pulling him through the threshold, stopping half in a huff just before her bed.
It’s the part of her place he’s… never been in.
“Look,” says Karen, in the efficacious tone one might use on warring foreign dignitaries or toddlers overdue for a nap. “Clearly you don’t feel well—don’t try to deny it, you look like hell—so why don’t you just take a nap before dinner and we’ll catch up later, yeah?”
He stares at the bed, all made up with the sheets folded snug against the headboard. Of course she’s the type to tuck her covers over the pillows.
“I’m good, Karen. Just a long day, that’s all. No need to put off a hot meal.”
When he makes to back out of her room, she catches him again—this time by the belt loop.
“Dinner won’t be done for a couple hours,” she states, intentions firm. “And you’re sick, Frank. Your temperature’s hotter than the air’s been all week, even with my windows shut. Don’t think I didn’t hear the way your voice sounded, or that I don’t want you—” She purses her lips and lets go of his loop. “All I was going to do while we waited was put on a movie. You need rest. I can wait.”
“Watching a movie’s rest enough.”
But she’s throwing back one side of her pristinely made bed and pointing at the empty space as if to say this is yours. Across the room, their eyes bore into each other’s souls. Frank can feel his own heartbeat reverberating out to his fingertips, nerves alight. It seems to hit her, now, as she stands in front of her bed with the sheets exposed, with him on the verge of crossing the length of her most private space, that this is where most men and women of their age would’ve wound up long ago. Except for them, it’s his raging fever that’s gone and tipped the scales. Everything remains insatiably unspoken; Frank’s tongue smolders with the truth of it.
She looks away.
“I’ll, um, be back with medicine in a bit.” Karen runs a hand through her hair. “You lay down. Try to sleep, pills will still be here when you wake.”
Through the doorway he watches her leave. She pulls it nearly shut behind her, only a small gap remaining, begging him to act. Close or open, invite or revoke. The story of it all laid out, painted wood and metal doorknob.
You matter to me.
Alone for now, Frank scrubs at his jaw, massaging the ache growing more prominent by the minute. His eyes track the length of the room.
Her room is sparse—a dresser, a desk overflowing, the sliding closet door, a lone side table, and a bookshelf stuffed full enough he’s not confident it won’t fall over. The walls are just a shade off from white and covered in newspaper clippings and print-outs of article pages, sticky-notes and torn pages of notebooks. Above her bed is a framed front page with her first ever published piece in the Bulletin—somehow, he doubts she did that herself. It’s all so intrinsically Karen he almost feels he’s seen it before. Yet there’s patches of her—the other Karen, the one buried in that desolate past she never quite broaches—sporadically peppered throughout that offset it. Pieces of a puzzle serving to remind him of how little he truly knows. That gap he could close between them or the door he could open wide, if courage ever managed to rear its ugly head.
Atop her dresser lies a shoebox, old and yellowed with the sands of time. He takes out the gun still lodged in his waistband and rests it beside the box, careful not to disturb her things. The image of it sears his vision with red.
He stares instead at the box. The desire to open it and find out more of this mysterious other Karen, the one she keeps locked up with the key hidden, is strong. For all the intimate details she knows about him, his horrid actions and lingering past and virtually everything that makes up the pitiful remainder, he knows little and less of her. The Karen in his heart is the Karen of Now. The Karen of Then lives on in the details of this room, relegated here like a vault. A childhood pink and red patchwork quilt peaks out from a storage bin beneath her bed; a dusty lamp illuminates the room in a brilliant orange glow. To keep all of those remnants of a life sequestered away confirms his suspicions, if only slightly. It’s still just one piece.
A cabinet shuts in the kitchen and he can hear the tap of her sink turn on.
Making slow work of a quick task, Frank lays on the bed as she ordered, shoes discarded by the door so he doesn’t track grime all over. Her sheets smell musty, as if she left them sitting in the wash too long. Probably too distracted by a break in her research to remember until it was too late.
(It feels… wrong, almost, to pull the comforter over himself. A sealing-in of sorts. He’s slept in other beds before, but never Karen’s. And there should be a reverence to that.)
The coolness of her pillows against the bare skin of his neck is certainly a welcome comfort. It threatens to lull him into a state of relaxation, nearly enough to drift away within. And that brings about a wholly new fear only tangentially in connection with Karen’s bed.
Frank’s slept in places that aren’t his home. Hotel rooms, barracks, safe houses, the backseat of a truck, Curtis’ lumpy couch, the ground itself. It’s more common an occurrence in his life than for most others, he’s sure. But those places are rarely a comfort. When they are, they’re solitary, with no one around to hear his restless dreams. Certainly not Karen.
That line of vulnerability. Despite everything, neither have quite managed the task of crossing it. The intention of the night, at one point, had been to try. How he feels about her isn’t easily mistaken, and yet those three simple words dissolve on his tongue at every imperfect opportunity. In so many words he’d meant to say it, and in so many words he’d failed.
Her footsteps in the hall give him no time for revising. She’s pushing the door back open, hair swept smoothly to one side, looking moderately more composed than when they parted.
“Here,” Karen says, handing him two off-brand ibuprofens and the glass of water. He downs the pills dry and pushes the cup back to her—she must be thirsty herself, in this heat.
She doesn’t drink it, just sets it on the side table. Then the comforter is tossed over him in one swift motion, its weight pressing him down into her mattress, preventing his escape. “You’re not asleep,” she observes.
She’s broken out a thermometer; he opens his mouth, rolls his eyes.
“102. Told you.”
He shuts his eyes for a moment, willing the pounding headache to take leave, and when he opens them again, there she is—lying on the bed beside him, head propped up on her elbow. Watching.
“How come?”
He thinks for a moment. Darts his eyes away from hers when the thinking goes a little far. Darts them back when he catches the tiniest of smirks in his peripheral, and away again when that means staring at her lips.
“Bed’s too soft,” Frank complains, and the weight of the lie sits heavy as a stone in his stomach. He’s always been truthful with her. They don’t keep secrets; them’s the rules.
Except for this one… thing, which neither of them seem able to admit out loud, so they’ve settled for dancing around it, tip-toeing like it’s an IED primed to go off at the first wrong move. Every time he tries, his throat closes up.
Karen hums. She shifts around on the mattress, nuzzling her feet under the covers. It’s still bright outside and there’s cars honking on the street beyond her place. He’s not sure how much rest this will give him, so he settles instead for watching her face, soft but solid, fierce but tranquil. She spends some time staring at the ceiling, contemplating its textured finish. Over the pillow, her hair falls in fine golden waves.
They don’t say anything for a while. The silence is comfortable, companionable. Even if the bed is too eager to please, Frank thinks he might be worn enough to let it try. Even shut, his eyes burn like a fire’s been lit behind them. The breeze sends Karen’s curtains billowing in rhythm with the rise and fall of her chest…
He feels the beginnings of sleep’s siren call pulling him under for half a moment before he’s jerked back up from the depths with an explosion in his ear. Somewhere off to his left, by Karen. His eyes snap open and his legs twitch, fingers grasping at nothing.
“You okay?” she asks, attention stolen away from the popcorn ceiling. Her voice is tight with this sudden worry. Being an arm’s reach away, it’d be impossible for her not to notice, and yet still he hopes.
Frank blinks to keep her firm in his view. “Yeah. Happens sometimes.”
Exploding head syndrome, Curtis calls it. Got a name for everything these days. To Frank it’s better known as an annoyance.
“Often?”
He shrugs with one shoulder. “Depends.”
Mostly when he’s stressed or tired or otherwise having a notably sour day. Occasionally when nothing applies, or when he’s wrapped up in his mind about things. Used to happen when he was fresh back from deployment, unable to relax in bed. He’d tried to keep it from Maria at first and that did nothing for either of their sanities, but the last thing he’d wanted was for her to worry, and…
The irony’s not lost. Karen’s still watching, her eyes tracking up and down the crooked, broken, poorly healed bridge of his nose.
“Anything I can do to help?” she asks quietly after a few seconds of mutual staring.
He shakes his head with a sardonic twist to his mouth. Never was anything Maria could do either, other than just being there. It’s what Karen’s already doing even without him asking. Laying down, sharing her bed with him. Her home and her time and whatever this thing between them is attempting to become despite his poor efforts.
It should scare him how easily he conflates the two in his mind’s eye. Maria and Karen. Karen and Maria. Their names occupy the same wavelength of life, separated by the thin wall of time.
Karen reaches across the mattress and brushes her fingers against his bruised knuckles where they lie clenched in the scratchy old fabric of her pillowcase. Her throat bobs with some unuttered secret—Frank has one of those, too. And then she’s following the curve of his body, her hand traveling up to his shoulder, never once leaving the skin’s surface. Can she feel the goosebumps her touch leaves behind, sprouting up like roots in a garden, sowing some great metamorphosis? He fails to suppress the shiver and figures he can blame that on the fever, too.
At this close distance, he can see the specks of white and gray in her blue eyes. And the freckles on the length of her nose, faint but entrancing if you squint. She rubs the sore muscle of his deltoid with her thumb and it’s not soothing, exactly, but it’s grounding enough that he can let his eyes close again, slow and reluctant as they are to leave her.
It’s not often they look at each other like this, with the time and space to organize their thoughts beyond a base understanding of the string tying them ever tighter, and maybe that’s his own fault. Maybe he should tell her, but he can feel exhaustion tugging him down again, and he left the energy to fight it off at her door.
“I don’t care if I get sick,” she whispers, so low he’s not sure he’s meant to hear it at all. And then the sensation of her lips pressing against his forehead. First above his eyebrow, then upon the eyelid. Sealing them shut, guiding him to sleep.
“Goodnight, Frank.”
The park is loud with laughter and children playing carefree on the swings. Lisa pushes Frankie higher, much to his squealing delight. They’re on the slides at the same time, racing each other down. And the rock wall, racing up. Always racing. Always moving. He can’t keep track of them; his head spins the course of the playground to keep the blur of them in his sights.
“Relax,” Maria chastises, lounging on the red picnic blanket sprawled out upon the greenest green in all New York. It’s this picture-perfect outing. Her in a flowing white sundress, the kids in their nicer playclothes. A spread of sandwiches and watermelon between them. They never did this as much as they should’ve.
“Can’t,” says Frank. “Gotta keep an eye out.”
“They’re fine, it’s just a park. They’re living. You should try it, you know.”
She’s still got the same blinding radiance he remembers of her, the kind that lights up the soul. Frank wants to take her advice—the kids are playing and she’s here and he should live a little, too. Just enough to try.
But when Frank looks down, he’s not in a button-up or a nice casual pair of khakis. He’s not dressed for a picnic in suburbia at all, nor a walk in the park. No. His chest is plastered with a skull dripping white on black. He tries to scrub it off, but the spray paint only bleeds onto his hands, red and vicious like the pit growing inside. He wipes it on his pant legs, on his thighs, on his chest, but it spreads and stains, ruining them all in turn. He looks up to Maria, ashamed, begging for a rescue.
In her eyes there is no judgement, only understanding. Perhaps more than he has himself. She always did know better.
“That’ll be tough to get out in the wash,” she says with a smile. Her hand moves against his and it passes right through to the ground, impermeable. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Why don’t you ask her to help?”
Who, Frank thinks, Lisa? There’s no other her besides Maria, and she’s the one who’s said it. But one backward glance confirms Lisa is nowhere in sight. The playground structures are void of children, the laughter echoing against the swings that jingle in the breeze. The seesaw is an empty pendulum. She and her brother have gone off somewhere, together. He hadn’t been watching.
“Not Lisa,” Maria says. “Not me.” She’s sitting up now and nodding her head to the lakeside where a woman strolls along, feeding the ducks. Her blonde hair is bright enough to reflect the sunshine off calm waters.
Karen, Frank realizes with a jolt. He hasn’t seen her stubborn eyes or the delicate curve of her jaw, but somehow he knows it’s Karen all the same, walking farther and further too with each step. He can catch up with her if he sprints, but that would mean leaving the picnic behind—leaving Maria alone here, the children lost wherever they’ve run off. Frank’s head swivels like an office chair, round and round, orbiting the two worlds. He’s not in either of them, really. He’s his own planet, set apart from the rest with an ocean’s worth of white paint on his chest gushing down across him. Maria, ever intangible, sits unscathed in the epicenter.
It floods out and around, engulfing the swingset and slides, swallowing the trees and bushes and muddying the waters of the lake like some great greedy flood sent from Heaven, some broken covenant back to destroy and consume. He tries to call out to her but his mouth is bound and gagged. He tries to run to her but his feet are glued to the spot.
Maria smiles. It’s everything he’s spent so long wanting, here. “It’s okay to move on,” she says. “It isn’t leaving us if we’ve already left you first.”
But she doesn’t understand this. How can she, when she’s already moved on herself to where he can’t follow. She starts gushing red, too, blood pouring down into his, mixing in that alchemical union once more. It doesn’t spread as far. It doesn’t go and reach Karen, which is what Frank’s is doing. What he does is going to drown her.
“Karen!” he yells at last, and she twists her head to meet him.
When he wakes, it’s to the simmering smell of barbeque sauce and steamed potatoes wafting in from the crack in the door.
Frank breathes in deep, his face pressed up against a pillow. It still holds a lingering scent of vanilla and lavender and days-old must despite the food’s best attempt to win out. This is Karen, splayed out on the laundry.
Except when he opens his eyes—no longer a Herculean effort thanks to the pills she gave him—Karen is nowhere to be found. The space beside him is empty, the covers pushed away and the sheets rumpled. He’s got the throw blanket over him, another heavy layer atop her comforter, and the lamp’s been turned off, curtains drawn. The only light is the steady blink of the humidifier in the room’s corner.
For how long did she stay with him? He doesn’t remember falling asleep, just the act of watching her watch him. Then her hand upon his, snaking up his arm. Her lips, gentle on his brow. He must have rolled over onto his stomach at some point and drifted off.
The emptiness shouldn’t bother him so much, but he can’t take his eyes off the soft dent in her pillow.
He pushes himself up, leaning his back against her headboard, running a hand through his hair to get the knots out. Scrubbing at his face only does so much. It still feels hot to touch, but not as clammy as when he’d laid down. There’s sweat on his forehead enough to warrant a shower. Maybe later.
For now, Frank touches his feet to the floor, soothingly cool through his socks, and crosses to the door. His head swims with the sudden movement. He looks to the side table. She’s left the glass of water there, ice cubes melted completely and a couple cough drops deposited beside. One goes on his tongue to soothe the soreness in his throat, another in his pocket for later. He gulps down the water. Even lukewarm, it’s a balm.
In the hall is a low humming. There’s little flashes of light upon the linoleum floor—reflections of her television, no doubt. She’s still here.
Of course. It’s her home.
Frank straightens his shirt, adjusts the set of his shoulders. The disorientation of waking washes away when he realizes with the full force of a punch to the gut that she’s out there—and before that, in here. With him, asleep. Might be that she even fell asleep, too, for a fleeting moment. That sliver of consciousness between dreaming where souls collide. A blonde woman in the park.
“Everything alright?” she calls from the living room. The colors stall, frozen in their hallway waltz. He’s only just rested his hand on her bedroom door.
She must have heard the creak of the floor under his weight.
His breathing picks up as he rounds the corner towards her; perched on the couch, remote in hand, pointing it at the TV in an arrested sort of motion. And looking right at him, eyes wide and imploring.
“Yeah,” he says, but when his voice comes out it’s scratchy, foreign to his ears. He coughs to clear his throat, hand fisting in the pocket of his uncomfortable jeans. “Yeah, didn’t want to spook you is all.”
They stare at each other for a moment. Him there in the hall, her all curled up against nothing. The two of them behind these four walls with a world of troubles locked away. All that remains is this greater, larger being. The decision whether or not to bring what’d transpired in the bedroom, and in all the years before, into the rest of the apartment. It looms over the room like a cumulonimbus. Frank sways, his hand clenching the yellowing trim. He can hear her clock ticking a hole into the wall behind him.
There’s a towel on the floor by the door where his muddy footprints would have been.
“Did you sleep well?” she asks, after a beat where he maybe should’ve been the one to speak.
“Little bit.” He shrugs and taps his finger. There’s something clawing at his chest, begging to get out. As if still in that dream, he steps toward her.
Karen clears a place for him, the pillow she’d had pressed against her a barrier that taunts. He lowers himself with an inch or two of a gap between them—the excuse of not wanting to get her sick feels hollow in his throat.
At this close distance, she narrows her eyes. Studying, must be. She reaches out a hand to his forehead, pressing it flush against his skin. Whatever she’s searching for in his eyes, in his posture, she doesn’t seem to like.
“Hm. Still warm.” Karen twists her head backward, over the couch cushions and island. The clock on her microwave blinks a steady 9:28 and the view from out the window over her sink is dark. “About time for another dose.”
“How long was I out for?” he asks, following her into the kitchen where she starts throwing open cabinets.
She rifles through various bottles of discount drugstore hauls. It’s a surprising stash. Only a couple orange prescription bottles that Frank can’t make out against the dim lighting—has she turned down all the lights in the apartment?—and the rest are painkillers, headache relievers, sinus pills. The works.
“Here,” she says, cracking open a bottle where she doles out the same ibuprofens from earlier, motioning for him to hold out his hand. Obediently, he does. “About six hours, give or take… Took a minute for you to fall asleep, though.”
She pours him another glass. There’s a passing moment where Karen doesn’t seem all too sure what to do with it. She nearly makes to hand it over directly, her fingertips brushing his, but then she tilts back to the counter and places it down in neutral territory. She leans against the lip of the sink, her nails biting into the water-warped wood.
Frank downs the pills and water in one swoop.
“You already eat?”
She gestures to the crockpot’s keep warm setting. “No. Been waiting for you.”
Now it’s Frank’s turn to hesitate. He loiters in the middle of her kitchen, empty glass in hand. Her eyes are dancing about the whole room. One second on the floor, then the fridge, then the counter where he should probably return the glass out of respect for her terms and conditions. Whereas she’d just been able to reach out and touch him to take his temperature, she now can’t meet his gaze, much less feel the heat of his skin on hers. This is their game, isn’t it? Hiding acts of devotion behind furtive glances, hoping the other won’t dare speak to make it real?
What he’d had in mind to say to her comes crashing back into his chest like a bullet-train. A snapshot of the subway at midday. Destination announced. Journey boarded. Doors shut on the retreat. He’d planned to make it real.
Issue is there’s no easy way to say it. Once plentiful and overflowing, the words for this terrifying feeling have dried up somewhere between his walk and the nap on her bed. Or maybe they’d been used up in that dream, the one she doesn’t know about starting.
“I’ve been thinking about cutting my hair,” Karen says to bat away the silence. She grabs two bowls from her cupboard and lays them out on her little one-person kitchen table. Does she never have friends over?
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Been long for a while.”
I like your long hair is what he wants to say. Instead he bites down on his tongue and shuffles his feet in her cramped kitchen as she reaches to the counter behind him for a ladle.
It’s not a kitchen built for two. He’s in the way just standing here.
“Long hair’s not so bad.” Frank grabs the other glass from her so she doesn’t have to cross over him. There’s one of those filtering pitchers in her fridge in attempt to keep the water cold enough to break through the heatwave. He grabs it and fills them both with room to spare for ice, and somehow when he drops the cubes in they still manage to crack in half. “I thought you liked it long.”
“Well,” Karen shrugs, “I do. Just thought… might be time for a change. Here, watch out, I need to grab a—”
“Potholder? Got it.”
“Thanks.”
Her smile lights up the room for a moment, that blazing, blinding light. She ducks her head and the hair she’s considering chopping off falls over her eyes, a sheet cut straight from the sun.
It nearly leaps off his tongue. You matter to me. I care about you. I love, I love, I love. A headache forms where the words can’t and he’s reaching up to rub at his temple, at the spot where a bullet once lodged itself and dislodged itself and somewhere along the line of dislodging Frank became a different Frank, a version the same but changed, altered, heightened, diminished. A Frank who can’t say three simple words, not just for the price of admission but for the capability of it entirely. To love is to be loved and Frank isn’t sure he can swallow that anymore, though he yearns for it with every stolen glance her way. Their eyes meet, just another meeting in an unending series with no satisfactory conclusion in sight, and he wants only her in that way he’s wanted so little in the past few years of precious, stilted life.
You make me want to change.
Because that’s the reality of it, isn’t it? Wanting her—wanting to be with her, that is, not to possess but to be joined with—is something he can only truly embrace if he’s altered again. To be loved is to be changed.
He’s metamorphosed before. Changing again—that’s another formation of him. Leaving behind the old one, he used to think, except the dream didn’t see it that way. More like… adding another layer. He wants to change for her because this Frank of Now is perhaps incompatible with love. Not that he can’t feel it. No, Frank feels love as strong as he feels the tile beneath his feet, the brush of her fingers against his own. But loving Karen and putting her in danger do mix. They come together like a boxed set, like hammer and nail, and the sum of their parts is bright and frightening. It’s that blood red deluge. A promise of pain and loss and annihilation that will always catch up to him, dragging him kicking and screaming into the dark. If he doesn’t change, this will catch up to her, inevitably. Pushing her away—that isn’t a solution, just a plea. A dam. She’s stubborn; she doesn’t take his shit. Either she will persist… or accept the distance for what it is, and wash away.
That thought may frighten him more than the change itself.
Eating dinner at her small table passes time quick and silent. Her chicken has cooked to the point of falling apart, so they switch halfway through to eating with spoons, not forks, but neither mind. It’s a good meal. Hot enough it opens his sinuses, too.
She’s almost wiped her plate clean of roasted potatoes when she switches on the television and contorts in her seat to face it like an acrobat at the chiropractor. Casablanca, he realizes. That’s another thing he’s learned about the Karen of Now in these days of showing up for not-dates in her apartment because restaurants and theaters are too risky still. She likes the classics. Bogart, Grant, Hepburn, Fonda, Hepburn, Bacall. She once admitted to him that she watched His Girl Friday a dozen times in the span of one month. With the way she’s angled to the screen, knees drawn up to her chest, he wonders if the Karen of Then liked those, too. Yes, Frank thinks, she would have, wouldn’t she? Fate is funny like that; he likes them, too.
When they finish their meal proper and he thanks her for the cooking and Sam is playing As Time Goes By in a nightclub in the north of Africa, they make their way to her couch again with generous slices of tiramisu.
If his headache has fled with the warm meal, then the frozen tiramisu puts it on ice for good measure. Karen’s attention is stolen by the flashes of black and white over the room, watching it like a great event. A normal couple would have gone out somewhere nice and seen a new release in the theater. Or this old one or any old one, if that’s what she’d choose. But they wouldn’t have to hide themselves away as fugitives. The crime and its accessory. He could give her more.
Ingrid Bergman’s saying something about love, or trying to. It’s all coming out upside down.
“Karen?”
“Hm?”
I love, I love, I love.
“Sorry I slept so long.”
She rolls her eyes, smile edging through. Humphrey Bogart seems to understand, anyway.
When Frank looks down, he finds the pillow from earlier has fallen to the floor. He reaches over across that great chasm of Then and Now and grasps her hand in his, squeezing. She squeezes back.
Somewhere in the wide world behind them, rose petals have stopped falling onto her counter.