It's Still Raining for ozmissage
Title: It's Still Raining
Author: norgbelulah
Fandom: Justified
Gift for: ozmissage
Characters/Pairing:Raylan Givens/Carol Johnson, Boyd Crowder/Ava Crowder, Raylan/Boyd/Ava UST
Rating: M
Word Count: ~6,300
Disclaimer: Raylan Givens is Elmore Leonard's creation and Justified belongs to Graham Yost and not me.
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers through S3. Rating is for language only.
Summary: Anyone who knows Raylan knows he's not exactly the vacationing type, but a fiery red-head can be pretty persuasive. Though, of course, things don't exactly turn out according to plan. What was supposed to be a quiet getaway weekend turns into one, long, rainy night when a mix up gets Boyd and Ava Crowder involved.
Author’s Note: So, I'm having a hard time writing post-S3 fic as anything other than incredibly angsty and sad. I hope this little character introspective is to your liking, darling, despite the fact that's it doesn't really turn out as fun as I wanted it to.
It's Still Raining
Six months after Raylan leaves Carol Johnson on the side of the road, forgotten in the wake of Loretta McCready and Mags Bennett and Boyd fucking Crowder, he gets a phone call, sitting at the bar under which he lives and ruminating on the various shambles his life has become.
“I’m coming back through Lexington, Marshal,” Ms. Johnson says over the line. Her voice is brassy confidence and low smoulder. “Would you like to get together for a drink?”
“I can’t believe you kept this number,” he says.
He hears her laugh and, though he can really only remember hearing it clearly once or twice in the days he spent with her, it sounds familiar, almost welcome. “That’s the thing about me and numbers,” she says. “Once I got yours, I don’t let go, honey.”
He’s not really surprised when they screw the first time.
She doesn’t say anything about his living situation. She’s a suitcase kind of woman anyway. She understands the temporary, the transitional.
He’s very surprised that she takes his call two nights later and comes to pull him upstairs when he doesn’t want the pretty bartender to do it.
She finally comments on the sonogram on the bathroom mirror. She says, “You got, what, four, five months to pull yourself out of this, darlin’, or you won’t ever be able to look that child in the face. Better start now.”
“Out of what?” he mumbles into his hands. His head is aching and he’s got work in the morning.
“Your sad sack, pity party. She won’t stay with you. Boo hoo, Raylan. Move on. That baby’s waitin’ in the wings. And a baby don’t understand a broken heart.” She looks at him long for a minute after that and says, “Black Pike is blowing the top off that mountain in Laurel County. There isn’t any Mags Bennett to throw a wrench in this time around. I’m gonna be here for a while, honey.”
He looks up at her and asks her to stay.
She does. But not for long. She’s in and out as much as he is and he likes it that way. They text each other things like, “Home tonight?” or “Can’t,” and “Maybe.” Or they just call and exchange light banter and make simple plans that include take out dinner and oral sex.
She starts to call him “Man” when they’re together and he rolls his eyes and lets her do it because he likes that smile. He calls her “Red” and she loves that, so he only does it sometimes.
They fight on occasion, because he remembers what she does and she remembers that he hates it, but then they remember what they’re there for and the screw it out, and leave each other panting and too exhausted to think too hard about it.
Raylan doesn’t set foot in Harlan.
It could be Art is keeping him out. It could be Carol’s a significant enough distraction. It could be he’s finally had enough.
He doesn’t think too hard about it until she complains to him one night that the high-ups are making her take a vacation. She tells him she doesn’t want to go far and shows him this website on her phone, where you can book cabins and shit that people rent out all over the world. There’s one in Williamsburg, past Corbin. It’s got a hot tub. She only needs to take a weekend.
He just looks at her until she smiles, and asks, “You want to come with me?”
He doesn’t want to go down there, really, usually hates vacations, but he does want to have her to himself for more than an evening.
“I’ll talk to Art,” he says.
“He still mad we’re fucking?” she asks, taking a long sip of her red wine.
Raylan shrugs. “He thinks I’m goin’ through some kind of thing. On account of the baby.”
“What kind of thing?”
“He thinks I’m feeling... unmoored. Got that same look when I mentioned you.”
“Huh,” she says and he notices she doesn’t disagree with the statement. It’s not as though he cares. Art, as usual, is probably right, but Raylan’s not in the habit of thinking hard enough about his deeper motivations in order to change them. “So, I’ll book this if he gives you the weekend?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
They screw on the couch that night because neither of them feel particularly like moving. He half-carries her to bed while she’s laughing low in his ear and she’s gone when he wakes.
She never leaves a note.
Later, he texts her, “got the weekend. this one, not next. sorry short notice. can you still get it?” and ten minutes later receives, “booked. this meeting is boring as fuck.”
He smirks at his phone and catches Art frowning at him when he looks up, right after he returns, “same.”
It’s not a long drive and Raylan is glad they don’t have to fly anywhere. Flying is the last thing he ever wants to do, particularly on vacation, particularly in the past decade and she laughs when he says so. If they flew anywhere, they’d take the corporate jet. “Like hell, I would,” he tells her and she looks out the window. He never takes her money.
The rain starts pouring about an hour out and it doesn’t let up. They cross a bridge where the water is high and Carol’s looking hard at the map, making sure they’re on the right road, grumbling about no GPS signals and Deliverance. He reminds her this was her idea.
The cabin is hidden away in a deep holler, hard to drive down to without skidding on the sodden roads. The place is a decent-sized, two-storey, wood shingled affair, nestled next to a stream and surrounded by trees. They park the car and Raylan eyes a familiar-looking blue pick-up also in the drive. Carol tells him it’s probably the owner’s, used for maintenance.
They run into the porch, Carol ringing out her hair as Raylan opens the door, their overnight bags in his hand and under his arm, and he comes face to face with Boyd Crowder.
Boyd was obviously coming from the sofa, situated in the room adjacent from the entryway, where Ava is sitting. They all stare at each other, frozen, Boyd half in motion to the door, Ava craning her neck to see them, and Carol, still dripping water at his elbow.
No one speaks until Raylan takes a breath and announces, “All right, we’re leaving.”
“Raylan,” Boyd says, gathering himself.
But Raylan cuts him off. “Nope. Don’t even need to say hello, or goodbye, or fuck you, Boyd. We’re just gonna go. Enjoy it.”
“Just got a call,” Ava says from the sofa, though she’s moving to stand, “that bridge, ‘bout three miles back, got swallowed by the creek. Nobody’s going anywhere, Raylan.” She doesn’t look too pleased at the prospect either. She’s looking right at Carol, who pulls Raylan inside.
He drops their shit and looks at Boyd. “How, in the name of all that is Holy, Boyd, did this happen? Can you tell me?”
Boyd glances at Carol and, ignoring Raylan’s question, says, “Didn’t think to see you in these parts again, Ms. Johnson.”
Carol smiles. “That’s not a very polite greeting, Boyd. It’s nice to see you too. You look good,” she takes him in up and down and settles on his face. “Lean.” Her eyes are sharp, Raylan thinks, this Boyd is a far cry from the man she thought she was dealing with when she was last in Kentucky. “Miss Ava,” she says, too sweet, and Raylan thinks Ava might bare her teeth at them.
“We booked this place, Boyd,” Raylan tries again, “for the weekend. Why are you here?”
“Johnny knows somebody from the service, whose family owns this place. Said it was free for the weekend,” Boyd replies then smiles, but Raylan thinks it’s the one he uses to mask displeasure. “What we have here, I think, is a communication breakdown, and not of our own making.”
Carol laughs and all other eyes in the room are on her. She laughs longer than Raylan wishes she would then speaks, dabbing at her eyes, “Boyd Crowder, even though you screwed me royally and I hate the place and people for which you stand, damn boy, I have missed the way those words fall off your tongue. Would you like to read me the phone book later? Feel free to add whatever elaboration you please.”
Ava makes a huffing sound at that and Raylan wipes his hand across his dripping brow. “Come on, Red,” he says impatiently, getting twin looks of surprise from both Ava and Boyd.
He doesn’t wait for them to ask about her, grabbing her by the arm and picking up their shit again. “There’s two rooms in this place right? Enough for four?”
“There surely is, Raylan,” Boyd said, not really smiling. “We’re in the bigger one, to the left from the top of the stairs.”
“We’ll take the other.” Raylan pushes Carol forward past the two of them, saying, “We’ll just stay up there ‘til we hear about the goddamn bridge. Then we’re gone.”
He catches Ava frowning and he’s about to bite out something not particularly nice about staying out of her hair when she says, “But you gotta eat.”
“Ava--” Boyd breaks off when she glares at him.
Carol tilts her head over her shoulder, smirking like it’s her job, and says, “You’re cookin’?”
Ava makes a face like she’s swallowed something nasty and replies, “Boyd is. We brought food for a few nights, probably more than we need.”
“We brought some, too,” Raylan says. “It’s still in the car.” He smiles at her tentatively, wonderstruck all over again by how she can move beyond the past, not like it never happened, but like it barely compares in importance to being a decent human being.
She hates Carol, and he’s not at the top of her list either, he knows that, but she’ll feed them anyway. Or make Boyd do it.
“Go on, get dried off, changed,” Boyd says with a sigh, rubbing at the back of his neck in a resigned gesture Raylan hasn’t seen in more than twenty years. He grimaces when he catches Raylan staring. “I’ll have it ready when you come back down.”
Carol laughs again. “I’m not sure I can trust whatever he--”
“Come on, Red,” Raylan warns again, pushing her further up the stairs, “Be nice.”
“No one here was ever nice to me,” she grumbles, never serious.
“You reap what you sow, honey. And I’m very nice to you.”
He pretends not to hear Ava stifling a laugh behind them.
When they get up to the room, which is decked out in two hideously clashing floral patterns, Carol turns to him and says, “We could just stay up here. Not come down, lock our door ‘til they call the all clear.”
Raylan finds himself shaking his head. “Ava asked us to eat. She didn’t have to do that.”
“She didn’t want to either,” she insists.
“But she did anyway. You don’t shove that kind of thing back in people’s faces. Or at least I don’t. Not after what I put that woman through.” Raylan clamps his mouth shut at the look she gives him. She wouldn’t know about that and he’d forgotten he’d never mentioned it before.
Carol’s frowning at him, calculating. “What did you put her through?”
He sighs and rubs at the back on his head. “I might’ve slept with her...regularly, when I came back into town, after she shot Boyd’s brother, who was her husband. It might also be the case, ‘cause of our entanglement, Boyd got himself out of prison early, years early. And, through circumstances not of my making, though directly correlating to her relationship with me, she was kidnapped and shot at a few times. In between those kidnappings, I cheated on her with my ex.”
Carol’s eyes are wide and near disbelief. “And now she’s with Boyd, your former best friend, who’s saved your life more than once, and they’re running whatever Harlan County crime shit you refuse to talk to me about?”
“I never said Boyd was my best friend. And yes, it’s very likely that’s what she’s doin’.”
She throws her hands up in the air and flops on the bed, smack between their unopened suitcases. “Who the hell are you people?”
Raylan doesn’t say anything. He just opens his bag and pulls out a dry shirt. He can feel her eyes on him.
“I bet you she ain’t that mad anymore, Raylan,” she says. “About what you did.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She loves him. I saw that when I met her the first time. I don’t even think she knew back then. She can’t be mad if you and her brought him into her house, however much you didn’t mean to.” Her hands were above her head and her eyes were now on the ceiling.
Raylan remembers in broken flashes when he realized those two were together, standing together at the front of her house, armed and guilty, with Helen’s blood so close to their hands. He’d been so angry. It’s still hard to separate, to think about the way he knows she looks at him and to see the fire in Boyd’s eyes when he talks about her.
Raylan knows Boyd, thinks back to a time when he would say a woman wasn’t anything compared to a controlled burst of firepower. Boyd waited a lifetime to love someone the way he loves Ava and it makes Raylan sick to think he’ll ruin her with it.
“I can still be sorry,” he murmurs.
“She’s a big girl, honey.”
“Funny,” Raylan says, buttoning his shirt, “she said the same thing, and it didn’t change my mind either.” He looks at her then and she’s still looking up. “How could you tell, anyway? That she loved him, I mean.”
She turns her head and smiles at him, sweeter than usual. “Just because I’m not a romantic, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a love story. You read enough books, you know what to look for.”
“Heaving breasts on the cover and all that?” he asks, smiling.
“The Brontes, baby,” she returns with a wink.
Dinner is a quiet disaster. Like a slow moving, muted tornado of minced words and weird looks and choked, bitter laughter.
The only solace Raylan finds in it is two healthy glasses of bourbon.
Carol and Boyd trade quips and barbs and Ava stares at her food. Raylan resists the urge to pour another, not wanting to look so desperate.
“So, you back in Kentucky to blow the top of somebody else’s mountain, Ms. Johnson?” Boyd asks from behind his drink.
Carol smiles a challenge. “Sure am. You’re so fond of blowing shit up, Boyd, you wanna come help me?”
Boyd’s teeth look sharp and hungry for something, but before he can reply Ava looks up from her food and stares at Raylan point blank, murmuring, “Looks like you got all the help you need, Ms. Johnson.”
Carol laughs and answers before Raylan can open his mouth. “Only insofar as a good screw every few days helps me, Miss Ava.” She glances at Raylan and her voice doesn’t quite hide her annoyance. “The Deputy doesn’t like to talk about my work. I can’t really imagine him watchin’ my men scrape the coal off that mountain.”
Raylan really doesn’t want to fight with her just then and he sees something twitch in Boyd’s expression. They both have a soft spot for the hills and Carol fucking knows about it. He won’t tell her to be nice again, that will just make her spitting mad.
“I don’t really like to talk about any work but my own,” he says with as self deprecating a smile as he can manage. “I’m selfish that way.”
All three of them immediately make some kind of noise of agreement then blink at each other.
Raylan gets up from the table as they begin to laugh. At least now no one’s got a knife in their hand or blood on their teeth.
He insists that he and Carol do the dishes, since the other couple provided the food and cooked the damn meal. He has to resort to using his lawman tone on Boyd, who stares at him for a second, then smirks and pushes Ava into the other room.
Raylan hears them talking low and laughing before he turns the faucet on. Carol is pouting at him because, living in and out of hotels, she both hates and has little concept of the idea of actual housework.
As he washes and she dries, she glances sidelong at him and says, very low, “You think they’d go for a foursome?”
Raylan breaks a glass.
He shouts that they are fine when Ava calls asking, and then turns very stiffly to Carol and grinds out, “No, they would not.”
She only smiles at him like she still thinks they might and helps him throw away the broken pieces. He gets another drink before they join Ava and Boyd in the living room and ignores her raised eyebrows at his glass.
The rain hasn’t let up, so they settle into the living room. The couches are comfortable and Raylan feels himself sinking lower into his seat next to Carol with each turn of the conversation.
Apparently, she never mentioned to Boyd that she was a literature major before things went the way of the mines. Raylan is surprised because she never shuts up about it to him.
They trade opinions about long dead writers and their works and Raylan only knows about half the names tossed around. Ava listens and smiles, but her eyes are only for Boyd, his animated face, his too-smart smirk, his hands moving with emphasis. Raylan watches her watch him and he can’t quite get the frown off his face.
It’s not jealousy. He’s sure everyone in the room is aware he was the one fucked himself over with Ava. He was never as sorry as he wanted to be about it, either.
He just can’t get it out of his head, the idea that he put her on this path of loving Boyd and it’s going to kill her in one way or another. She already caught one bullet and even if he’s the one goes down first, or gets locked away, she’ll still carry a wound, a deep one.
He feels responsible.
It’s unreasonable really, and unwanted by both her and Boyd. He has no right at this point to feel protective of her. He relinquished that long ago, yet still, it lingers. He can’t shake it and the guilt, the disturbance he feels, simmers just underneath his surface, the longer he looks at her, just smiling at him.
He gets up for another drink and nearly trips over his chair. He right himself readily enough and smiles at their looks of concern or confusion. Carol glares and he smiles wider at her. He winks and she huffs.
He brings the bottle back with him.
They all eye it, but say nothing. He wouldn’t expect the Harlan contingent to do any such thing at any rate, but Carol keeps her mouth shut as well. Raylan knows he’s walking a fine line here, especially with her lately, but tonight--because of particular company--he’s prepared, even excited to over-do things.
And anyway, it’s his fucking vacation too.
Carol watches Raylan stare at them and brood for like an hour.
It’s actually kind of a funny triangle of intense looks: Ava, listening attentively to Boyd as he talks, Raylan, watching Ava and probably pondering her early demise by Crowder misadventure, and Boyd, whose eyes seem irresistibly drawn back to Raylan, even though Carol is the one doing all the conversing.
She feels like some kind of fifth wheel, even though there’s only four of them, but she’s too interested in the mystery of what exactly is going on here to be very put out about it.
She still can’t believe Raylan broke that glass. He must want them so badly, but so deep down he doesn’t even know.
Boyd says something almost profound about found families and searching and homes. They’d been talking about Dickens, whom Carol admitted she’d never really loved until she powered through Bleak House while staying in a particularly boring corner of Tennessee once. Raylan makes a disgusted noise into his glass and Ava gets this set to her jaw, like she’s biting hard on her tongue. Boyd just looks sad.
“All right, Raylan,” Ava says in the next moment, standing and crossing to where he’s practically laying in his chair. “You need some air. Come outside with me while I smoke.” Her hands are on his shoulder, pulling him up with the kind of attitude that says she’s done this before with him--Carol wouldn’t be surprised.
He rises unsteadily and mumbles something about how she shouldn’t be smoking and thought she’d quit. His voice has caught that surly tone he gets when he’s going deeper, like a pissed off teenager, angry at the world but confused about it too.
“Thought I quit drinkin’ too,” she says with humor. “Turns out quittin’ things is tough, honey.”
Carol almost laughs, but the look on Boyd’s face stops her.
She’s not upset Ava stepped in before she could, as Carol isn’t one to offer help unless it’s asked for, or patently obvious, and then only when the least amount of embarrassment or attention would be drawn. She and Raylan are similar that way.
She pulls out her phone as the two of them stumble away and considers how to approach this without sound curious as hell while Boyd stares moodily into his drink.
He could be a slightly distorted image of Raylan about two hours before. She almost hopes he is, then maybe she’ll get something out of at least one of them.
"I don't remember Raylan hating you so much the last time I was here,” she says casually, flicking through the pages on her blackberry. “What happened to your love story?"
Boyd tilts his head at her, looking very different than when she first met him, though not so different from the last time she saw him. He smiles, remembering what she said in the courtroom the day she hired him. He’d taken that one with a little more grace than Raylan had and she’d always wondered if maybe he thought it was a little bit true himself.
“Raylan didn’t tell you?” He tries to sound puzzled, but she doesn’t buy it.
She shrugs. “Raylan doesn’t tell me much of anything he thinks I don’t need to know. Granted, I usually don’t mind. But this, I’m curious about.” She sets her phone on the couch. “He doesn't usually get so smashed this early in the evening. And he used to smile at you like he liked you.”
Boyd looks away. “Raylan’s led a difficult life,” he says looking out the window, where Ava’s silhouette is clear next to a dark lump that must be Raylan either thinking about getting sick or already there. “It has complications. More than just the ones I’ve made for him.”
“You mean his ex?”
He frowns. “That, I don’t know much about.” He doesn’t elaborate.
“You mean his father, then.” It’s like pulling teeth with these two. But she’s not ready to show her impatience. He won’t talk if he thinks she won’t sit for it. He was like that before, too. “Raylan mentioned the man’s in jail now.”
He doesn’t say anything for about a minute, sipping slow at his drink. “I know Raylan has often wished he hadn’t come back to this place. He’ll tell you all about it if you ask, but you can see it in his face, too, when he looks at...people. Like they’re the last person on his list of those with whom he wants to converse.”
He sounds sorrowful, like he wishes that weren’t the case, so she doesn’t really know what to say. A moment later he says, as if answering a question she hasn’t even thought of yet. “Raylan can love things from a distance. I have never been able to do that.”
She frowns deeply at him, mildly pissed that she has more questions now than when they began this conversation, and says, “Boyd, what the hell did you do to him?”
He looks at her long and she grows uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “Do you really care for him, or are you just here to satisfy your libido?”
She laughs, a small burst of mirth that she tries to cover quickly, though she can’t lose the humor in her voice before answering, “You think I’m so great a monster that I’ll regularly fuck a man I have no warm feelings for? I’m almost flattered.” She sits herself up and straightens her shoulders, looking at him head on to fully assuage his doubts. “I like Raylan, Boyd. I wouldn’t have asked him to come with me on my employer-mandated weekend-vacation if all I wanted from him was a few orgasms. Sure, we ain’t in love. But not all of us are so lucky as you.”
He covers his mouth with one hand, as though giving serious thought to her words, then he turns his eyes to his glass. It’s nearly empty and all the ice has melted.
”I have done many things to Raylan Givens over the years that I’ve known him,” Boyd says, in a speech echoing the one Raylan gave her in that Lexington courtroom. “He’s done things to me as well, but only ever actions that I provoked from him. Most recently, I told Raylan something I shouldn’t have.”
“What?”
He shakes his head. “It’s doesn’t matter. I meant it at the time, still might today, if he asked me. But it wasn’t something he needed to know. It only twisted the knife and I have never meant to be that sort of friend to him.”
She leans back and picks up her own drink, only half finished, but diluted and warm now. She drinks it anyway, having been raised not to be wasteful. “What sort of friend did you mean to be?”
He lifts his eyes to hers and smiles softly. “Raylan doesn’t make friends easy, you might have noticed. I counted myself lucky when we were young, but I’ve squandered my second and third chances. Not all the circumstances were within the realm of my own control, but I lost what little I had when I made some hard choices since you last met us, Ms. Johnson.” He looks down again and says, “I can’t see a road back to where we once were.”
“Seems to me, according to Raylan, you weren’t really anywhere at all.”
Boyd huffs a short laugh. “What Raylan says and what Raylan thinks and feels are very different things. He don’t even know half the time what’s inside him.”
Carol tilts her head. She’s realized that about Raylan the longer she’s been with him. She thinks it’s sort of endearing, in a boyish kind of way. If she was in love with him, it would drive her up the wall, but she’s not, so she likes it.
She wonders though, so much, how it is that Boyd knows.
“How drunk do I have to get you to tell me the whole story?” Carol asks, leaning forward on her knees.
“Ms. Johnson,” he says, backhandedly polite, as ever. “You get me that drunk, I’m liable to forget what’s truth and what’s a lie, or my own imagination.”
“Would that be so bad?” she returns sweetly.
He just shakes his head and stands. “I’m going to bring them inside. It’s gotten late.”
Carol glances outside to where the rain still hasn’t let up. “We should get him to bed,” she says. When he looks at her she smirks and adds, “You think I’ll be able to do it myself?”
He doesn’t respond, turning to the door silently and stepping out into the middle of Raylan and Ava’s rain-soaked, alcohol-doused conversation.
“An’ Boyd?” Raylan is asking, though Carol didn’t hear in response to what.
Ava laughs softly. His head is in her lap and one of her hands is in his hair, the other has about a quarter inch of a cigarette left between her fingers. “A little more than him, maybe,” she says, looking up as they come out. She smiles softly at Boyd, who only has eyes for Raylan.
He twists in her grasp, but only slightly. He rubs a hand across his eyes and replies like the words pain him, “He ne’er changes.” He’s slurring and dropping his g’s like she’s never heard before. “I tried t’ tell myself he had, ‘n’ not for the better. Make myself feel good, or right, or--He’s always the same, he lets you see ’neath his skin.”
Boyd bends down beside him and offers the an insufferable smile. He carefully places his hand across the back of Raylan’s neck and Carol sees him stiffen momentarily, his heavy-lidded eyes widen, then relax. She pulls a hand back to grab at the door frame.
“I’m glad you noticed, Raylan,” Boyd says, and pulls him up and off the bench.
There’s a fateful moment when it looks as though Raylan might throw up or pass out or do both simultaneously, but it passes as he clings to Boyd, his feet steady enough if they keep moving forward. “Fuck you,” he mumbles and his head lolls onto Boyd’s shoulder. Carol steps out of the way.
Ava tosses her butt out into the rain and looks over at Carol.
“You’re not going to tell me either, are you?” Carol asks as the boys limp through the door and up the stairs.
Ava looks at her with pursed lips, brows creased delicately in the dim light. “You an’ me,” she says, “I suppose we have some things in common now, you being in roughly the same position as me with him.”
“And that is?” Carol asks dubiously.
“Raylan stays with what he likes, unless he finds somethin’ he loves, though he don’t really think he deserves either,” she tilts her head and smiles wryly. “Difference is, you don’t mind it like I did.”
Carol nods slightly and swallows some kind of apology. She knows it’s not welcome or necessary, but she feels an old guilt for being the kind of woman who can keep a distance, who can let go when she has to. It’s bullshit and it’s her own reaction that makes her tighten her jaw and turn away.
She remembers Raylan asking her in the car on the way out of town the first time, “You really don’t care about them at all, do you?”
She didn’t, doesn’t, but sometimes it’s hard anyway.
She climbs the stairs after the boys, pressed together, their steps moving in a jarring kind of sync. Boyd is clutching Raylan’s hand where his arm is draped over his shoulder and his fingers are sunk deep around Raylan’s waist. He’s speaking softly to him, “One more step, Raylan, that’s right.”
Raylan tells him to shut up.
Ava touches Carol’s arm from behind her. “Why do you want to know so much, if you’re just gonna leave him anyway?”
It’s on the tip of Carol’s tongue to say, because he loves you both and you are all beautiful together and deserve all the happiness you were taught that you don’t because even if they see it in each other, none of them see it in themselves. But it’s still raining and she might have to spend another day here with that in Ava’s head and maybe Boyd’s and then she really would be an extra wheel on their tricycle.
Besides, she’s not quite ready to let go of Raylan yet anyway.
So she says, “It’s like watching a movie, or solving a puzzle. Could be a beautiful thing, Miss Ava, if I only had all the pieces.”
Ava’s expression shutters in, closes down, her smile fades and her brows rise. “Goodnight, Miss Johnson,” she says coldly.
When she comes into the room she and Raylan had taken earlier, Boyd’s just laid her man down on the bed, between where they had left their suitcases. She crosses quickly to pick them up and shove them across the floor while Boyd tries to leverage himself away from Raylan, who doesn’t seem to want him to do so.
Raylan tries to sit up again, not speaking, but his fingers wrap hard around Boyd’s elbow. Boyd raises his other hand to push Raylan back down at his shoulder. It’s not an ease of movement, of touch between them, that betrays some past intimacy as Carol had suspected, but there is something in it, something old and something new and something so so fond it pains her.
No one speaks as Boyd pulls away finally and Raylan turns his head as though he’s been rebuffed. Boyd meets her eyes and she puts her hands on her hips, quirking a lip into a half-smile, half-smirk. “What do you think I should do with him?” she asks in a low voice.
Boyd steps toward her as as he passes, leans in to speak even lower in her ear, “You got a smile like I got a grin, Carol Johnson. You’ve never fooled me.”
She stiffens and he walks through the door, closing it lightly behind him. “Fuck you, Boyd Crowder,” she mutters and hears Raylan laugh into his pillow.
She takes a minute to step out of her jeans and lip off her bra, then climbs onto the bed next to Raylan. “Come here, Man,” she murmurs and pulls his head onto her lap. He’s not even under the covers yet. She won’t bother to take off his clothes.
He grunts and settles himself against her and she pulls her hands into his hair, the way she saw Ava had done it. “What happened?” she asks him. She doesn’t elaborate, she just wants him to talk.
He shakes his head, but still speaks, “Ava said, Arlo called Boyd by my name.” There’s a note of disgust hidden deep in his exhaustion. His eyes are closed and all his limbs loose and relaxed. He’s frowning and he’s going to have such a headache.
Carol licks her lips, searching for some way to keep him talking. “He's old, honey. Is that really so bad?”
Raylan huffs and turns his face into her lap. She’s never seen him so gone.
“But what did Boyd do, Raylan?” she insists.
“He let him,” Raylan says and it sounds like someone really is twisting a knife.
He curls further around her and she rubs a hand across his back. He makes no further sound and she can’t bring herself to question him again.
She swears she must have only got three hours of sleep before Raylan starts awake beside her. He stiffens fast and groans, not loudly, but enough to make it clear he’s in pain. She rolls over and sighs, thinking he’ll drink the glass of water she put next to the bed and go back to sleep.
She must have fallen asleep again, but it couldn’t have been very long before he’s shaking her. “Ugh, what?” she mumbles.
“It stopped raining,” he says quietly.
“Good for it,” Carol groans and sticks her face into the pillow.
“We should go,” he tells her. She tells herself she did not hear him say that, but he shakes her again then moves to turn on the light.
As the fluorescent rays burst through her eyelids, burning orange and painful into her retinas, she curses loudly. “Get up, Red,” he says, tone tight and stilted. “We’re leaving now.”
“Jesus, are you serious?” she asks and finally opens her eyes to see that he is.
He looks terrible. Pale and drawn, his hands are shaking minutely, like there’s no strength left in them. He’s stuffing their shit into the suitcases. “Put on some goddamn pants,” he tells her.
She sits up in the bed, legs tangled up in the sheets and considers him. He probably doesn’t remember exactly what he did and did not say to certain people the previous night, but he probably does have the sense that what happened was something personal, something hurtful and raw.
He doesn’t want to look them in the face again. Not so soon, and not so they’ll have to actually talk or resolve anything.
“What if the bridge is still out?” she asks him.
“We wait,” he says curtly. “In the goddamn car.”
She gets up and pulls on her jeans.
They are out the door in three minutes, walking softly, saying nothing. Every time Raylan closes his eyes, even to blink, she can practically feel the pain and nausea coming off him. He didn’t get enough sleep. He needs to eat something, drink another glass of water.
She knows he won’t listen to her.
“Do you think you’re okay to drive?” she finally asks when they get the shit into the car.
He only glares at her and pulls open the driver’s side door.
Carol turns her head to look back at the house as he drives away, white knuckled and staring straight ahead. She frowns, surprised she’s actually feeling a little sad she probably won’t ever speak to Boyd or Ava Crowder again.
She can’t imagine Raylan will bring himself down to Harlan again for months. It’s not as if he’d bring her if he did, but by then, she’ll be gone anyway.
“Next time you see them,” she says as she faces forward again, “tell ’em I said to be careful.”
~End~
Author: norgbelulah
Fandom: Justified
Gift for: ozmissage
Characters/Pairing:Raylan Givens/Carol Johnson, Boyd Crowder/Ava Crowder, Raylan/Boyd/Ava UST
Rating: M
Word Count: ~6,300
Disclaimer: Raylan Givens is Elmore Leonard's creation and Justified belongs to Graham Yost and not me.
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers through S3. Rating is for language only.
Summary: Anyone who knows Raylan knows he's not exactly the vacationing type, but a fiery red-head can be pretty persuasive. Though, of course, things don't exactly turn out according to plan. What was supposed to be a quiet getaway weekend turns into one, long, rainy night when a mix up gets Boyd and Ava Crowder involved.
Author’s Note: So, I'm having a hard time writing post-S3 fic as anything other than incredibly angsty and sad. I hope this little character introspective is to your liking, darling, despite the fact that's it doesn't really turn out as fun as I wanted it to.
It's Still Raining
Six months after Raylan leaves Carol Johnson on the side of the road, forgotten in the wake of Loretta McCready and Mags Bennett and Boyd fucking Crowder, he gets a phone call, sitting at the bar under which he lives and ruminating on the various shambles his life has become.
“I’m coming back through Lexington, Marshal,” Ms. Johnson says over the line. Her voice is brassy confidence and low smoulder. “Would you like to get together for a drink?”
“I can’t believe you kept this number,” he says.
He hears her laugh and, though he can really only remember hearing it clearly once or twice in the days he spent with her, it sounds familiar, almost welcome. “That’s the thing about me and numbers,” she says. “Once I got yours, I don’t let go, honey.”
He’s not really surprised when they screw the first time.
She doesn’t say anything about his living situation. She’s a suitcase kind of woman anyway. She understands the temporary, the transitional.
He’s very surprised that she takes his call two nights later and comes to pull him upstairs when he doesn’t want the pretty bartender to do it.
She finally comments on the sonogram on the bathroom mirror. She says, “You got, what, four, five months to pull yourself out of this, darlin’, or you won’t ever be able to look that child in the face. Better start now.”
“Out of what?” he mumbles into his hands. His head is aching and he’s got work in the morning.
“Your sad sack, pity party. She won’t stay with you. Boo hoo, Raylan. Move on. That baby’s waitin’ in the wings. And a baby don’t understand a broken heart.” She looks at him long for a minute after that and says, “Black Pike is blowing the top off that mountain in Laurel County. There isn’t any Mags Bennett to throw a wrench in this time around. I’m gonna be here for a while, honey.”
He looks up at her and asks her to stay.
She does. But not for long. She’s in and out as much as he is and he likes it that way. They text each other things like, “Home tonight?” or “Can’t,” and “Maybe.” Or they just call and exchange light banter and make simple plans that include take out dinner and oral sex.
She starts to call him “Man” when they’re together and he rolls his eyes and lets her do it because he likes that smile. He calls her “Red” and she loves that, so he only does it sometimes.
They fight on occasion, because he remembers what she does and she remembers that he hates it, but then they remember what they’re there for and the screw it out, and leave each other panting and too exhausted to think too hard about it.
Raylan doesn’t set foot in Harlan.
It could be Art is keeping him out. It could be Carol’s a significant enough distraction. It could be he’s finally had enough.
He doesn’t think too hard about it until she complains to him one night that the high-ups are making her take a vacation. She tells him she doesn’t want to go far and shows him this website on her phone, where you can book cabins and shit that people rent out all over the world. There’s one in Williamsburg, past Corbin. It’s got a hot tub. She only needs to take a weekend.
He just looks at her until she smiles, and asks, “You want to come with me?”
He doesn’t want to go down there, really, usually hates vacations, but he does want to have her to himself for more than an evening.
“I’ll talk to Art,” he says.
“He still mad we’re fucking?” she asks, taking a long sip of her red wine.
Raylan shrugs. “He thinks I’m goin’ through some kind of thing. On account of the baby.”
“What kind of thing?”
“He thinks I’m feeling... unmoored. Got that same look when I mentioned you.”
“Huh,” she says and he notices she doesn’t disagree with the statement. It’s not as though he cares. Art, as usual, is probably right, but Raylan’s not in the habit of thinking hard enough about his deeper motivations in order to change them. “So, I’ll book this if he gives you the weekend?”
“Yeah, I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
They screw on the couch that night because neither of them feel particularly like moving. He half-carries her to bed while she’s laughing low in his ear and she’s gone when he wakes.
She never leaves a note.
Later, he texts her, “got the weekend. this one, not next. sorry short notice. can you still get it?” and ten minutes later receives, “booked. this meeting is boring as fuck.”
He smirks at his phone and catches Art frowning at him when he looks up, right after he returns, “same.”
It’s not a long drive and Raylan is glad they don’t have to fly anywhere. Flying is the last thing he ever wants to do, particularly on vacation, particularly in the past decade and she laughs when he says so. If they flew anywhere, they’d take the corporate jet. “Like hell, I would,” he tells her and she looks out the window. He never takes her money.
The rain starts pouring about an hour out and it doesn’t let up. They cross a bridge where the water is high and Carol’s looking hard at the map, making sure they’re on the right road, grumbling about no GPS signals and Deliverance. He reminds her this was her idea.
The cabin is hidden away in a deep holler, hard to drive down to without skidding on the sodden roads. The place is a decent-sized, two-storey, wood shingled affair, nestled next to a stream and surrounded by trees. They park the car and Raylan eyes a familiar-looking blue pick-up also in the drive. Carol tells him it’s probably the owner’s, used for maintenance.
They run into the porch, Carol ringing out her hair as Raylan opens the door, their overnight bags in his hand and under his arm, and he comes face to face with Boyd Crowder.
Boyd was obviously coming from the sofa, situated in the room adjacent from the entryway, where Ava is sitting. They all stare at each other, frozen, Boyd half in motion to the door, Ava craning her neck to see them, and Carol, still dripping water at his elbow.
No one speaks until Raylan takes a breath and announces, “All right, we’re leaving.”
“Raylan,” Boyd says, gathering himself.
But Raylan cuts him off. “Nope. Don’t even need to say hello, or goodbye, or fuck you, Boyd. We’re just gonna go. Enjoy it.”
“Just got a call,” Ava says from the sofa, though she’s moving to stand, “that bridge, ‘bout three miles back, got swallowed by the creek. Nobody’s going anywhere, Raylan.” She doesn’t look too pleased at the prospect either. She’s looking right at Carol, who pulls Raylan inside.
He drops their shit and looks at Boyd. “How, in the name of all that is Holy, Boyd, did this happen? Can you tell me?”
Boyd glances at Carol and, ignoring Raylan’s question, says, “Didn’t think to see you in these parts again, Ms. Johnson.”
Carol smiles. “That’s not a very polite greeting, Boyd. It’s nice to see you too. You look good,” she takes him in up and down and settles on his face. “Lean.” Her eyes are sharp, Raylan thinks, this Boyd is a far cry from the man she thought she was dealing with when she was last in Kentucky. “Miss Ava,” she says, too sweet, and Raylan thinks Ava might bare her teeth at them.
“We booked this place, Boyd,” Raylan tries again, “for the weekend. Why are you here?”
“Johnny knows somebody from the service, whose family owns this place. Said it was free for the weekend,” Boyd replies then smiles, but Raylan thinks it’s the one he uses to mask displeasure. “What we have here, I think, is a communication breakdown, and not of our own making.”
Carol laughs and all other eyes in the room are on her. She laughs longer than Raylan wishes she would then speaks, dabbing at her eyes, “Boyd Crowder, even though you screwed me royally and I hate the place and people for which you stand, damn boy, I have missed the way those words fall off your tongue. Would you like to read me the phone book later? Feel free to add whatever elaboration you please.”
Ava makes a huffing sound at that and Raylan wipes his hand across his dripping brow. “Come on, Red,” he says impatiently, getting twin looks of surprise from both Ava and Boyd.
He doesn’t wait for them to ask about her, grabbing her by the arm and picking up their shit again. “There’s two rooms in this place right? Enough for four?”
“There surely is, Raylan,” Boyd said, not really smiling. “We’re in the bigger one, to the left from the top of the stairs.”
“We’ll take the other.” Raylan pushes Carol forward past the two of them, saying, “We’ll just stay up there ‘til we hear about the goddamn bridge. Then we’re gone.”
He catches Ava frowning and he’s about to bite out something not particularly nice about staying out of her hair when she says, “But you gotta eat.”
“Ava--” Boyd breaks off when she glares at him.
Carol tilts her head over her shoulder, smirking like it’s her job, and says, “You’re cookin’?”
Ava makes a face like she’s swallowed something nasty and replies, “Boyd is. We brought food for a few nights, probably more than we need.”
“We brought some, too,” Raylan says. “It’s still in the car.” He smiles at her tentatively, wonderstruck all over again by how she can move beyond the past, not like it never happened, but like it barely compares in importance to being a decent human being.
She hates Carol, and he’s not at the top of her list either, he knows that, but she’ll feed them anyway. Or make Boyd do it.
“Go on, get dried off, changed,” Boyd says with a sigh, rubbing at the back of his neck in a resigned gesture Raylan hasn’t seen in more than twenty years. He grimaces when he catches Raylan staring. “I’ll have it ready when you come back down.”
Carol laughs again. “I’m not sure I can trust whatever he--”
“Come on, Red,” Raylan warns again, pushing her further up the stairs, “Be nice.”
“No one here was ever nice to me,” she grumbles, never serious.
“You reap what you sow, honey. And I’m very nice to you.”
He pretends not to hear Ava stifling a laugh behind them.
When they get up to the room, which is decked out in two hideously clashing floral patterns, Carol turns to him and says, “We could just stay up here. Not come down, lock our door ‘til they call the all clear.”
Raylan finds himself shaking his head. “Ava asked us to eat. She didn’t have to do that.”
“She didn’t want to either,” she insists.
“But she did anyway. You don’t shove that kind of thing back in people’s faces. Or at least I don’t. Not after what I put that woman through.” Raylan clamps his mouth shut at the look she gives him. She wouldn’t know about that and he’d forgotten he’d never mentioned it before.
Carol’s frowning at him, calculating. “What did you put her through?”
He sighs and rubs at the back on his head. “I might’ve slept with her...regularly, when I came back into town, after she shot Boyd’s brother, who was her husband. It might also be the case, ‘cause of our entanglement, Boyd got himself out of prison early, years early. And, through circumstances not of my making, though directly correlating to her relationship with me, she was kidnapped and shot at a few times. In between those kidnappings, I cheated on her with my ex.”
Carol’s eyes are wide and near disbelief. “And now she’s with Boyd, your former best friend, who’s saved your life more than once, and they’re running whatever Harlan County crime shit you refuse to talk to me about?”
“I never said Boyd was my best friend. And yes, it’s very likely that’s what she’s doin’.”
She throws her hands up in the air and flops on the bed, smack between their unopened suitcases. “Who the hell are you people?”
Raylan doesn’t say anything. He just opens his bag and pulls out a dry shirt. He can feel her eyes on him.
“I bet you she ain’t that mad anymore, Raylan,” she says. “About what you did.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She loves him. I saw that when I met her the first time. I don’t even think she knew back then. She can’t be mad if you and her brought him into her house, however much you didn’t mean to.” Her hands were above her head and her eyes were now on the ceiling.
Raylan remembers in broken flashes when he realized those two were together, standing together at the front of her house, armed and guilty, with Helen’s blood so close to their hands. He’d been so angry. It’s still hard to separate, to think about the way he knows she looks at him and to see the fire in Boyd’s eyes when he talks about her.
Raylan knows Boyd, thinks back to a time when he would say a woman wasn’t anything compared to a controlled burst of firepower. Boyd waited a lifetime to love someone the way he loves Ava and it makes Raylan sick to think he’ll ruin her with it.
“I can still be sorry,” he murmurs.
“She’s a big girl, honey.”
“Funny,” Raylan says, buttoning his shirt, “she said the same thing, and it didn’t change my mind either.” He looks at her then and she’s still looking up. “How could you tell, anyway? That she loved him, I mean.”
She turns her head and smiles at him, sweeter than usual. “Just because I’m not a romantic, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a love story. You read enough books, you know what to look for.”
“Heaving breasts on the cover and all that?” he asks, smiling.
“The Brontes, baby,” she returns with a wink.
Dinner is a quiet disaster. Like a slow moving, muted tornado of minced words and weird looks and choked, bitter laughter.
The only solace Raylan finds in it is two healthy glasses of bourbon.
Carol and Boyd trade quips and barbs and Ava stares at her food. Raylan resists the urge to pour another, not wanting to look so desperate.
“So, you back in Kentucky to blow the top of somebody else’s mountain, Ms. Johnson?” Boyd asks from behind his drink.
Carol smiles a challenge. “Sure am. You’re so fond of blowing shit up, Boyd, you wanna come help me?”
Boyd’s teeth look sharp and hungry for something, but before he can reply Ava looks up from her food and stares at Raylan point blank, murmuring, “Looks like you got all the help you need, Ms. Johnson.”
Carol laughs and answers before Raylan can open his mouth. “Only insofar as a good screw every few days helps me, Miss Ava.” She glances at Raylan and her voice doesn’t quite hide her annoyance. “The Deputy doesn’t like to talk about my work. I can’t really imagine him watchin’ my men scrape the coal off that mountain.”
Raylan really doesn’t want to fight with her just then and he sees something twitch in Boyd’s expression. They both have a soft spot for the hills and Carol fucking knows about it. He won’t tell her to be nice again, that will just make her spitting mad.
“I don’t really like to talk about any work but my own,” he says with as self deprecating a smile as he can manage. “I’m selfish that way.”
All three of them immediately make some kind of noise of agreement then blink at each other.
Raylan gets up from the table as they begin to laugh. At least now no one’s got a knife in their hand or blood on their teeth.
He insists that he and Carol do the dishes, since the other couple provided the food and cooked the damn meal. He has to resort to using his lawman tone on Boyd, who stares at him for a second, then smirks and pushes Ava into the other room.
Raylan hears them talking low and laughing before he turns the faucet on. Carol is pouting at him because, living in and out of hotels, she both hates and has little concept of the idea of actual housework.
As he washes and she dries, she glances sidelong at him and says, very low, “You think they’d go for a foursome?”
Raylan breaks a glass.
He shouts that they are fine when Ava calls asking, and then turns very stiffly to Carol and grinds out, “No, they would not.”
She only smiles at him like she still thinks they might and helps him throw away the broken pieces. He gets another drink before they join Ava and Boyd in the living room and ignores her raised eyebrows at his glass.
The rain hasn’t let up, so they settle into the living room. The couches are comfortable and Raylan feels himself sinking lower into his seat next to Carol with each turn of the conversation.
Apparently, she never mentioned to Boyd that she was a literature major before things went the way of the mines. Raylan is surprised because she never shuts up about it to him.
They trade opinions about long dead writers and their works and Raylan only knows about half the names tossed around. Ava listens and smiles, but her eyes are only for Boyd, his animated face, his too-smart smirk, his hands moving with emphasis. Raylan watches her watch him and he can’t quite get the frown off his face.
It’s not jealousy. He’s sure everyone in the room is aware he was the one fucked himself over with Ava. He was never as sorry as he wanted to be about it, either.
He just can’t get it out of his head, the idea that he put her on this path of loving Boyd and it’s going to kill her in one way or another. She already caught one bullet and even if he’s the one goes down first, or gets locked away, she’ll still carry a wound, a deep one.
He feels responsible.
It’s unreasonable really, and unwanted by both her and Boyd. He has no right at this point to feel protective of her. He relinquished that long ago, yet still, it lingers. He can’t shake it and the guilt, the disturbance he feels, simmers just underneath his surface, the longer he looks at her, just smiling at him.
He gets up for another drink and nearly trips over his chair. He right himself readily enough and smiles at their looks of concern or confusion. Carol glares and he smiles wider at her. He winks and she huffs.
He brings the bottle back with him.
They all eye it, but say nothing. He wouldn’t expect the Harlan contingent to do any such thing at any rate, but Carol keeps her mouth shut as well. Raylan knows he’s walking a fine line here, especially with her lately, but tonight--because of particular company--he’s prepared, even excited to over-do things.
And anyway, it’s his fucking vacation too.
Carol watches Raylan stare at them and brood for like an hour.
It’s actually kind of a funny triangle of intense looks: Ava, listening attentively to Boyd as he talks, Raylan, watching Ava and probably pondering her early demise by Crowder misadventure, and Boyd, whose eyes seem irresistibly drawn back to Raylan, even though Carol is the one doing all the conversing.
She feels like some kind of fifth wheel, even though there’s only four of them, but she’s too interested in the mystery of what exactly is going on here to be very put out about it.
She still can’t believe Raylan broke that glass. He must want them so badly, but so deep down he doesn’t even know.
Boyd says something almost profound about found families and searching and homes. They’d been talking about Dickens, whom Carol admitted she’d never really loved until she powered through Bleak House while staying in a particularly boring corner of Tennessee once. Raylan makes a disgusted noise into his glass and Ava gets this set to her jaw, like she’s biting hard on her tongue. Boyd just looks sad.
“All right, Raylan,” Ava says in the next moment, standing and crossing to where he’s practically laying in his chair. “You need some air. Come outside with me while I smoke.” Her hands are on his shoulder, pulling him up with the kind of attitude that says she’s done this before with him--Carol wouldn’t be surprised.
He rises unsteadily and mumbles something about how she shouldn’t be smoking and thought she’d quit. His voice has caught that surly tone he gets when he’s going deeper, like a pissed off teenager, angry at the world but confused about it too.
“Thought I quit drinkin’ too,” she says with humor. “Turns out quittin’ things is tough, honey.”
Carol almost laughs, but the look on Boyd’s face stops her.
She’s not upset Ava stepped in before she could, as Carol isn’t one to offer help unless it’s asked for, or patently obvious, and then only when the least amount of embarrassment or attention would be drawn. She and Raylan are similar that way.
She pulls out her phone as the two of them stumble away and considers how to approach this without sound curious as hell while Boyd stares moodily into his drink.
He could be a slightly distorted image of Raylan about two hours before. She almost hopes he is, then maybe she’ll get something out of at least one of them.
"I don't remember Raylan hating you so much the last time I was here,” she says casually, flicking through the pages on her blackberry. “What happened to your love story?"
Boyd tilts his head at her, looking very different than when she first met him, though not so different from the last time she saw him. He smiles, remembering what she said in the courtroom the day she hired him. He’d taken that one with a little more grace than Raylan had and she’d always wondered if maybe he thought it was a little bit true himself.
“Raylan didn’t tell you?” He tries to sound puzzled, but she doesn’t buy it.
She shrugs. “Raylan doesn’t tell me much of anything he thinks I don’t need to know. Granted, I usually don’t mind. But this, I’m curious about.” She sets her phone on the couch. “He doesn't usually get so smashed this early in the evening. And he used to smile at you like he liked you.”
Boyd looks away. “Raylan’s led a difficult life,” he says looking out the window, where Ava’s silhouette is clear next to a dark lump that must be Raylan either thinking about getting sick or already there. “It has complications. More than just the ones I’ve made for him.”
“You mean his ex?”
He frowns. “That, I don’t know much about.” He doesn’t elaborate.
“You mean his father, then.” It’s like pulling teeth with these two. But she’s not ready to show her impatience. He won’t talk if he thinks she won’t sit for it. He was like that before, too. “Raylan mentioned the man’s in jail now.”
He doesn’t say anything for about a minute, sipping slow at his drink. “I know Raylan has often wished he hadn’t come back to this place. He’ll tell you all about it if you ask, but you can see it in his face, too, when he looks at...people. Like they’re the last person on his list of those with whom he wants to converse.”
He sounds sorrowful, like he wishes that weren’t the case, so she doesn’t really know what to say. A moment later he says, as if answering a question she hasn’t even thought of yet. “Raylan can love things from a distance. I have never been able to do that.”
She frowns deeply at him, mildly pissed that she has more questions now than when they began this conversation, and says, “Boyd, what the hell did you do to him?”
He looks at her long and she grows uncomfortable under his scrutiny. “Do you really care for him, or are you just here to satisfy your libido?”
She laughs, a small burst of mirth that she tries to cover quickly, though she can’t lose the humor in her voice before answering, “You think I’m so great a monster that I’ll regularly fuck a man I have no warm feelings for? I’m almost flattered.” She sits herself up and straightens her shoulders, looking at him head on to fully assuage his doubts. “I like Raylan, Boyd. I wouldn’t have asked him to come with me on my employer-mandated weekend-vacation if all I wanted from him was a few orgasms. Sure, we ain’t in love. But not all of us are so lucky as you.”
He covers his mouth with one hand, as though giving serious thought to her words, then he turns his eyes to his glass. It’s nearly empty and all the ice has melted.
”I have done many things to Raylan Givens over the years that I’ve known him,” Boyd says, in a speech echoing the one Raylan gave her in that Lexington courtroom. “He’s done things to me as well, but only ever actions that I provoked from him. Most recently, I told Raylan something I shouldn’t have.”
“What?”
He shakes his head. “It’s doesn’t matter. I meant it at the time, still might today, if he asked me. But it wasn’t something he needed to know. It only twisted the knife and I have never meant to be that sort of friend to him.”
She leans back and picks up her own drink, only half finished, but diluted and warm now. She drinks it anyway, having been raised not to be wasteful. “What sort of friend did you mean to be?”
He lifts his eyes to hers and smiles softly. “Raylan doesn’t make friends easy, you might have noticed. I counted myself lucky when we were young, but I’ve squandered my second and third chances. Not all the circumstances were within the realm of my own control, but I lost what little I had when I made some hard choices since you last met us, Ms. Johnson.” He looks down again and says, “I can’t see a road back to where we once were.”
“Seems to me, according to Raylan, you weren’t really anywhere at all.”
Boyd huffs a short laugh. “What Raylan says and what Raylan thinks and feels are very different things. He don’t even know half the time what’s inside him.”
Carol tilts her head. She’s realized that about Raylan the longer she’s been with him. She thinks it’s sort of endearing, in a boyish kind of way. If she was in love with him, it would drive her up the wall, but she’s not, so she likes it.
She wonders though, so much, how it is that Boyd knows.
“How drunk do I have to get you to tell me the whole story?” Carol asks, leaning forward on her knees.
“Ms. Johnson,” he says, backhandedly polite, as ever. “You get me that drunk, I’m liable to forget what’s truth and what’s a lie, or my own imagination.”
“Would that be so bad?” she returns sweetly.
He just shakes his head and stands. “I’m going to bring them inside. It’s gotten late.”
Carol glances outside to where the rain still hasn’t let up. “We should get him to bed,” she says. When he looks at her she smirks and adds, “You think I’ll be able to do it myself?”
He doesn’t respond, turning to the door silently and stepping out into the middle of Raylan and Ava’s rain-soaked, alcohol-doused conversation.
“An’ Boyd?” Raylan is asking, though Carol didn’t hear in response to what.
Ava laughs softly. His head is in her lap and one of her hands is in his hair, the other has about a quarter inch of a cigarette left between her fingers. “A little more than him, maybe,” she says, looking up as they come out. She smiles softly at Boyd, who only has eyes for Raylan.
He twists in her grasp, but only slightly. He rubs a hand across his eyes and replies like the words pain him, “He ne’er changes.” He’s slurring and dropping his g’s like she’s never heard before. “I tried t’ tell myself he had, ‘n’ not for the better. Make myself feel good, or right, or--He’s always the same, he lets you see ’neath his skin.”
Boyd bends down beside him and offers the an insufferable smile. He carefully places his hand across the back of Raylan’s neck and Carol sees him stiffen momentarily, his heavy-lidded eyes widen, then relax. She pulls a hand back to grab at the door frame.
“I’m glad you noticed, Raylan,” Boyd says, and pulls him up and off the bench.
There’s a fateful moment when it looks as though Raylan might throw up or pass out or do both simultaneously, but it passes as he clings to Boyd, his feet steady enough if they keep moving forward. “Fuck you,” he mumbles and his head lolls onto Boyd’s shoulder. Carol steps out of the way.
Ava tosses her butt out into the rain and looks over at Carol.
“You’re not going to tell me either, are you?” Carol asks as the boys limp through the door and up the stairs.
Ava looks at her with pursed lips, brows creased delicately in the dim light. “You an’ me,” she says, “I suppose we have some things in common now, you being in roughly the same position as me with him.”
“And that is?” Carol asks dubiously.
“Raylan stays with what he likes, unless he finds somethin’ he loves, though he don’t really think he deserves either,” she tilts her head and smiles wryly. “Difference is, you don’t mind it like I did.”
Carol nods slightly and swallows some kind of apology. She knows it’s not welcome or necessary, but she feels an old guilt for being the kind of woman who can keep a distance, who can let go when she has to. It’s bullshit and it’s her own reaction that makes her tighten her jaw and turn away.
She remembers Raylan asking her in the car on the way out of town the first time, “You really don’t care about them at all, do you?”
She didn’t, doesn’t, but sometimes it’s hard anyway.
She climbs the stairs after the boys, pressed together, their steps moving in a jarring kind of sync. Boyd is clutching Raylan’s hand where his arm is draped over his shoulder and his fingers are sunk deep around Raylan’s waist. He’s speaking softly to him, “One more step, Raylan, that’s right.”
Raylan tells him to shut up.
Ava touches Carol’s arm from behind her. “Why do you want to know so much, if you’re just gonna leave him anyway?”
It’s on the tip of Carol’s tongue to say, because he loves you both and you are all beautiful together and deserve all the happiness you were taught that you don’t because even if they see it in each other, none of them see it in themselves. But it’s still raining and she might have to spend another day here with that in Ava’s head and maybe Boyd’s and then she really would be an extra wheel on their tricycle.
Besides, she’s not quite ready to let go of Raylan yet anyway.
So she says, “It’s like watching a movie, or solving a puzzle. Could be a beautiful thing, Miss Ava, if I only had all the pieces.”
Ava’s expression shutters in, closes down, her smile fades and her brows rise. “Goodnight, Miss Johnson,” she says coldly.
When she comes into the room she and Raylan had taken earlier, Boyd’s just laid her man down on the bed, between where they had left their suitcases. She crosses quickly to pick them up and shove them across the floor while Boyd tries to leverage himself away from Raylan, who doesn’t seem to want him to do so.
Raylan tries to sit up again, not speaking, but his fingers wrap hard around Boyd’s elbow. Boyd raises his other hand to push Raylan back down at his shoulder. It’s not an ease of movement, of touch between them, that betrays some past intimacy as Carol had suspected, but there is something in it, something old and something new and something so so fond it pains her.
No one speaks as Boyd pulls away finally and Raylan turns his head as though he’s been rebuffed. Boyd meets her eyes and she puts her hands on her hips, quirking a lip into a half-smile, half-smirk. “What do you think I should do with him?” she asks in a low voice.
Boyd steps toward her as as he passes, leans in to speak even lower in her ear, “You got a smile like I got a grin, Carol Johnson. You’ve never fooled me.”
She stiffens and he walks through the door, closing it lightly behind him. “Fuck you, Boyd Crowder,” she mutters and hears Raylan laugh into his pillow.
She takes a minute to step out of her jeans and lip off her bra, then climbs onto the bed next to Raylan. “Come here, Man,” she murmurs and pulls his head onto her lap. He’s not even under the covers yet. She won’t bother to take off his clothes.
He grunts and settles himself against her and she pulls her hands into his hair, the way she saw Ava had done it. “What happened?” she asks him. She doesn’t elaborate, she just wants him to talk.
He shakes his head, but still speaks, “Ava said, Arlo called Boyd by my name.” There’s a note of disgust hidden deep in his exhaustion. His eyes are closed and all his limbs loose and relaxed. He’s frowning and he’s going to have such a headache.
Carol licks her lips, searching for some way to keep him talking. “He's old, honey. Is that really so bad?”
Raylan huffs and turns his face into her lap. She’s never seen him so gone.
“But what did Boyd do, Raylan?” she insists.
“He let him,” Raylan says and it sounds like someone really is twisting a knife.
He curls further around her and she rubs a hand across his back. He makes no further sound and she can’t bring herself to question him again.
She swears she must have only got three hours of sleep before Raylan starts awake beside her. He stiffens fast and groans, not loudly, but enough to make it clear he’s in pain. She rolls over and sighs, thinking he’ll drink the glass of water she put next to the bed and go back to sleep.
She must have fallen asleep again, but it couldn’t have been very long before he’s shaking her. “Ugh, what?” she mumbles.
“It stopped raining,” he says quietly.
“Good for it,” Carol groans and sticks her face into the pillow.
“We should go,” he tells her. She tells herself she did not hear him say that, but he shakes her again then moves to turn on the light.
As the fluorescent rays burst through her eyelids, burning orange and painful into her retinas, she curses loudly. “Get up, Red,” he says, tone tight and stilted. “We’re leaving now.”
“Jesus, are you serious?” she asks and finally opens her eyes to see that he is.
He looks terrible. Pale and drawn, his hands are shaking minutely, like there’s no strength left in them. He’s stuffing their shit into the suitcases. “Put on some goddamn pants,” he tells her.
She sits up in the bed, legs tangled up in the sheets and considers him. He probably doesn’t remember exactly what he did and did not say to certain people the previous night, but he probably does have the sense that what happened was something personal, something hurtful and raw.
He doesn’t want to look them in the face again. Not so soon, and not so they’ll have to actually talk or resolve anything.
“What if the bridge is still out?” she asks him.
“We wait,” he says curtly. “In the goddamn car.”
She gets up and pulls on her jeans.
They are out the door in three minutes, walking softly, saying nothing. Every time Raylan closes his eyes, even to blink, she can practically feel the pain and nausea coming off him. He didn’t get enough sleep. He needs to eat something, drink another glass of water.
She knows he won’t listen to her.
“Do you think you’re okay to drive?” she finally asks when they get the shit into the car.
He only glares at her and pulls open the driver’s side door.
Carol turns her head to look back at the house as he drives away, white knuckled and staring straight ahead. She frowns, surprised she’s actually feeling a little sad she probably won’t ever speak to Boyd or Ava Crowder again.
She can’t imagine Raylan will bring himself down to Harlan again for months. It’s not as if he’d bring her if he did, but by then, she’ll be gone anyway.
“Next time you see them,” she says as she faces forward again, “tell ’em I said to be careful.”
~End~