new fic!
After not writing anything in forever, I have something new. This is L&O: CI, Barek/Eames. Spoilers, I guess, for 6.01, "Blind Spot." Someone else owns the characters.
Also, do check out onlyjustwhisper's lovely fic "Night for Now," which is a prequel to the events described here.
When the noises first resolve into something like language, something you can understand, it’s unintelligible, dark rumbling and something a bit lighter, familiar. Pain blooming like a sunrise in your body, your blood pulsing in your wrists like fire.
Rustlings, and whispers. Finally you hear “…stakeout all fucking night” and the voice, the words are hers, though trembling in a way you’ve never heard before, and you want to greet her, say hello, come in, please, I need you, but you can’t talk much, and your head is so heavy, and there’s, huh, a water stain on the ceiling, how interesting, and your hand feels twitchy a bit…
*
You open your eyes and she’s there.
*
The third time, you wake up as though you were floating back to the surface, and the light washes over you like waves, and then you’re breaking through, and the light is air, and you’re free and breathing, and Carolyn is holding your hand.
When your eyes open you squint because it’s too bright and then it’s just her, just her. She’s staring at your wrist and her eye is twitching, like it’s keeping something back. She’s just staring, not looking at your face, not seeing you watching her. Her hair is a mess, and her face is drawn, the half-moons under her eyes fragile, tinted purple. She hasn’t been eating enough, you think, her skin is so gray and looks so thin. She looks, you think, very small.
Her eyes flick to your face, widen, travel up to your eyes, and suddenly there you are, staring into her eyes, and maybe you’re a little afraid of what you see there.
It’s silent except for the beeping, the monitors: your pulse, your blood pressure. Vital signs. And everything in this moment is still. Still, still as death, as peace, as you look at her and her fear and her relief and she looks, God, so tired, so worried, and you feel a rush of - something, so warm and so sudden and so strong it scares you a little.
“You look like hell,” you say, instead of “I love you,” and your voice sounds scratchy and it echoes, loudly, off the tile on the walls. Coming back, it all keeps coming back.
She looks like she’s been punched and breathes “Alex” and doesn’t move, and you lie there and she sits, holding your hand, and you stare at each other and you watch her eyes fill and everything gets a little blurry around the margins.
“What is it?” you croak, because the silence is heavy like marble on you, crushing, and she seems to expand a little. She looks away.
“I,” she says. “I was on stakeout, and the radio-”
She closes her mouth, breathes. “It was your badge number,” she says, quietly, and her voice is fragile around the edges.
You would nod, because you know what that’s like except at least you got a call, she didn’t get anything but a goddamn dispatch in the car with a partner she couldn’t tell, but your head hurts too much, so you just hold her there, with your eyes, still and deep. You would say “I’m sorry” but you can’t, you can’t.
*
You wake up alone and you swallow because there’s no reason for the fear rising in your throat. Your heart is pounding and you’re lying there, trembling quietly, repeating it to yourself, over and over: you’re safe you’re safe you’re safe where is she.
There are footsteps in the hallway and you tense, trying not to look hopeful, and when they pass your door and fade away, you try not to collapse into your pillow. More footsteps, more beeping, time passing like this, marking the moments without her, and you’ve never felt so alone.
And then she’s there in your doorway, and you didn’t hear the footsteps, you didn’t hear her, you just see her there like a vision, and you don’t have time to mask your need, your desperation. She’s moving into the room and you look at her, tired and disheveled and fragile, and before her you never thought anything was beautiful.
“Hey,” she says softly, carefully. “Hey, Alex. Hi. Are you,” and she seems to reconsider, then breathes, “okay?”
“I’m fine,” you say, and your voice is pretty even, considering.
She moves toward you, sits in her chair and takes your hand, and you grip it instinctively, thank you thank you. She squeezes back. “I wish I’d been here when you woke up,” she says.
“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m all right. You don’t need to watch me.”
She tilts her head, and you watch the furrow appear between her eyebrows. She looks like she knows you’re lying and like she wants to say something about it, and you watch her decide to let it go. Instead she pulls a bag up on her lap. “I brought you a couple of magazines,” she says. “Maybe to keep you busy, in case you get sick of talking.”
You smile, and she pulls them out. And it makes you laugh, because Barek has brought you Scientific American, Foreign Policy, National Geographic. Those are her magazines, not yours. She looks a little sheepish. “They had a crappy selection downstairs,” she says, “or I would have brought something more interesting.”
“Like Us Weekly?”
She looks like she’s not sure whether it’s okay to laugh, but you are, because you think it’s funny and you adore her (and maybe you’re a little loopy, you’re faintly aware that you sound a little ridiculous and it’s possible that you’re still being sedated), so she chuckles a little. “Something like that.”
“Thanks,” you say. “That was - nice of you.” You think you should be saying, instead, “I missed you” or “I need you” or “I don’t want to be alone” or “I got scared.” But the words die in your throat, somehow. They always do.
“You’re going to stay at my place for a while,” she says quietly. Her voice is not insistent, just solid.
You shouldn’t feel this way, because it’s obvious that things are going to be a little awkward, but you can’t really help it: you’re suddenly, wildly, grateful and so you thank her.
She looks up at you, and her eyes are a little wounded. “Stop,” she says, quietly. Then, more gently, “Just stop, okay?”
I don’t want to be taken care of, you want to tell her, but something about the slope of her shoulders stops you from saying it, and maybe it isn’t true anyway.
*
She drives you home the next day. She looks distracted and doesn’t seem to be concentrating on the road, and the car feels tense, awkward. You used to be good at silence, both of you.
You feel stifled so you look out the window at the city around you, watching the light open up as you reach the edge of Manhattan, the sun on the water. You’re about to ask her why she’s taking the bridge instead of the tunnel, and then you remember: because you told her you like the bridge better. Because ever since you did, she’s taken the long way home.
The light is blinding you, shapes burning into your retinas, and you squint against it. You wish it weren’t so sunny here over the river; it’s easier to hide in clouds. You haven’t felt so exposed in a while. You suppose you haven’t been to Brooklyn in a while.
You’re already feeling a little twitchy: you always do when you’re not working, and the seatbelt restraining your chest is making you a little restless. Confined. You look at your hands, folded in your lap, and consider the bruises that have blossomed up around your wrists in an angry purple bracelet against the threadlike lacerations where the metal cut your skin. The bruises should start turning green in a couple of days, you figure. “I’m only going to take three days,” you say, because they made you and you didn’t want to, and then you have to go get shrinked and you’re really not looking forward to that.
She cuts her eyes at you quickly, then looks back in front of the car, as though it hurt her to meet your eyes. “I wish you’d take a little more than that,” she says quietly. She sounds like she feels guilty for saying it.
“No,” you say. “I hate - not working.” You’re not sure that’s actually true right now, but you don’t want to be sitting around in Barek’s apartment, thinking about what happened, hearing the girl scream in your ears, feeling Barek’s eyes on you, letting her take care of you. You’re not sure you know how to do that.
“You know,” she says, and her voice sounds distant already, and infinitely sad, “you don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah,” she says, but it sounds like she’s saying something else. She blinks, then says resignedly, “I have an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment. Maybe you should - if your eyes are bothering you.”
The light glancing off the East River is making them tear up. “No,” you say. “They’re not.”
*
“What do you know?” you ask. It’s dark outside, and maybe you’d like to go lose yourself in it because the night is pitch black and her eyes are only brown but somehow, somehow her eyes are darker.
She looks at you, looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “Just - what I can see.” She swallows and looks down, and you watch her eyes slide over your wrists and try not to linger on the bruising. “And. The pictures. Of, of the. The others.”
You think about her looking at those pictures, her imagining you looking like that (the rash, the wounds, that expression, penetration with a foreign object), and the long stakeout without knowing anything of you, and you want to break for her, but you can’t.
“Why did you look at them?” you ask instead.
Barek shrugs and doesn’t say, Because they weren’t you. But you can hear her thinking it.
She sits down carefully, and she looks fragile: as though if she sat down hard she would fall apart. She looks out the window, and you watch the street light outside begin to gather in her eyes until they’re brilliant with it and then the light is dropping out of them, and Barek is crying.
You want to go to her, fold her up in you and protect her, but you can’t - you can’t feel anything left, and so you just watch her: frozen, silent. You can’t go anywhere.
Barek mashes her fist under her chin, as though she could hold her face together if she crushed her jaw hard enough. The tears fall silently down and they leave glistening trails over her cheekbones and she doesn’t make any sound at all. You’re grateful that she’s not one of those people who whimpers a little when they cry and then there’s the guilty stab, because who are you, glad you don’t have to hear her pain?
*
“I think you should talk about this,” she says. Fuck you, you think, anger hot in your belly.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” you say shortly. “I didn’t see her. I walked into my apartment and my bird was gone and I didn’t notice in time. I didn’t see her. It’s just what happened.” And you don’t want to talk about it, for fuck’s sake, you’re getting shrinked in a couple of days and you don’t want to go over this twice. It’s just what it is. People die sometimes. You’ve killed a few yourself.
But not like that. Not like that.
“Alex,” she says, and it cuts into your thoughts. “Alex. Talk to me.”
You look at her, and her eyes are naked and open to you and full of something like fear. She’s pleading, and something about it opens in you - she looks so sad and so desperate, and you shiver.
She reaches for you and pulls back, like she’s not sure whether she can, whether you’ll let her. And you don’t want to be alone, you don’t, and you roll into her, and she covers you with her arms and you’re there against her heartbeat, and you’re trembling a little, maybe, and she tightens around you, tucks your head into her shoulder, kisses your hair.
“Oh, darling,” she whispers, and you never thought you’d hear her talk like that.
“I don’t know what to say,” you tell her, your voice muffled against her skin, and what you mean is that you don’t know how not to hide.
I don’t know how to fix this, is what you really want to tell her, you don’t know how to stop resenting her for being here for you, for taking care of you, for doing everything right. And you wish the breaking could mean something. You wish, not for the first time, that life were as easy as your job: figure it out, go take care of it.
Real life doesn’t work that way; everything doubles back on itself and spirals around and you wish, you wish you could just snap out of this. You wish you could just say: I need you. I don’t know what’s happened to me.
She smoothes your hair, gently. “There’s no rush,” she says, softly, against your ear. “It’s all right, Alex. I’ll be here.”
You’re all hollowed out, but you already knew that. You had time, says the voice in your head, you had time: what are you doing, why can’t you do this?
“I know,” you say, because maybe you could start talking to her.
“Good,” she whispers. “Good.”
*
It doesn’t take you long to fall asleep. You dream, and you’re floating down a river with her, a gray river, thick and heavy and dull like the Neva in the Akhmatova poems she likes, with a sheen on it like it’s all molten lead, and the sky is fawn-colored, like something is burning in the distance, and the air is humid and smoky, and there are dead trees along the banks. The boat might be red. She’s standing in the prow when suddenly she crumples and you notice there’s been a man with a gun in the boat with you, and you didn’t see him. He might have Bobby’s face.
You go to her. She’s dying. I’m sorry, you say, because you should have done something.
She shrugs. It doesn’t matter, she says, then: I’ll miss you.
She dies and you’re covered in her blood. The sky might change color. You sit down beside her, not touching, keep floating down the river, staring at the skeletons of trees on the banks.
It starts to rain.
*
You wake before she does. She’s turned into you, her face drawn and anxious now even in sleep, and her lips are a little parted. You look at her carefully and wonder when she got used to disappointments. You wonder when you became one of them.
You kiss her forehead, wishing you could see the frown lines smooth out, but they don’t. Swinging your legs out of the bed hurts your left hip a little, and you wonder when the stiffness, the pulled feeling in your back, is going to go away. It might not, you think, and that’s pretty much just your luck.
Walking to the window, the floor is cold on your bare feet, and you wince a little. Outside you can see the moon over the back alleys and fire escapes of her neighborhood; the stars are fading into the gray of morning. You look at the clouds, luminescent with the first tinges of violent pink sunlight, but your love won’t show up in the clouds, and you can’t seem to find it anywhere else.
*
You can remember the last time you kissed her, and how cool and fragile her mouth felt even though it was only a few days ago, really, a few days before, before your bird died. It was hot outside and there was nothing cool on that day, no relief except her lips.
And now she’s so gray and frightened and her eyes slide off you before you can catch them with yours. You haven’t seen her look at you in so long; she hasn’t moved toward you at all, really: you know she’s scared to touch you, or maybe she’s scared that you’ll say: no, say: stop, say: this reminds me. And of course she wouldn’t want to hear that.
The curve of her neck is so lovely, so gorgeously sculpted, and suddenly the pit of your stomach drops out and you’re aching and you want her. You need to touch her, bury yourself where she’s warm and soft and alive and you’re yearning for her and you want her to look at you. And you look at her across the bed, at her eyes that have shifted too suddenly, the shift that means she’s been watching you and doesn’t want you to see, and God, you think you hate her sometimes and you want her.
You reach over the bed and pull yourself up, over her body, and she’s on her side and she’s twisting under you, her hips jutting into your stomach, and you’re kissing her. You’re kissing her and she’s kissing you back, and her mouth is open and it’s all teeth and tongue and this is not gentle at all, this hurts, and she whimpers into your mouth as you kiss her and you can’t fucking stand how much you want her. You’re biting her neck, now, your teeth hard on her skin, and she’s gasping and curling up under you.
It’s a good thing she always gets so hot in bed because even now, with you as you are, she only wears underwear and a tank top and your mouth is on her breast over the fabric, hard and pulling at it, your teeth against the fabric, feeling the heat of her skin beneath it and the hardening of her nipple against your tongue, and you’re sucking it into your mouth, hard. The cotton is wet and feels thick on your tongue and she’s making little strangled sounds and your right hand is under the band of her underwear, your fingers stroking through short, coarse hair and God, she’s already so wet, you’ve never felt her like this, and you’re inside her before you know what you’re doing. She yelps and you look up at her and she smiles at you, faintly, and then you’re deep, deep, and the smile disappears and her eyes go wide and she’s making a long, low sound, too guttural for a sigh, and she’s so warm and so wet, and your mouth is on hers again, not kissing, just feeling, and all you know is the pulsing of her around you and her breathing and her gasps against your mouth. She’s tightening around you and your eyes are screwed shut so you can’t see what she looks like and her hips are moving under you, and you can feel every ridge, every curve, every smoothness inside her, and she’s whispering, “Alex, Alex,” and her voice is strangled and suddenly she’s snapping up against you and you catch her with your body and it’s over.
She falls back heavily. She’s staring at the ceiling, and she’s still tight around your fingers and you don’t think you ever want to leave, and suddenly your left arm gives out and you collapse gracelessly onto her. She’s sweating and her breath is coming in shallow gasps that sound a little like sobs.
“God,” she says quietly. “You've never-”
You don’t want to talk about it. “Yeah,” you say, and your voice sounds harsh.
She turns away from you, God, that neck, and her eyes close. You’re pretty sure you know what she’s thinking but you were so glad to feel something again, and still she didn’t look at you.
She gasps as you leave her, lower yourself against her side, and when you take her hand it’s trembling. That’s how you fall asleep, holding her hand, wishing you could keep it from shaking, wishing you knew how.
*
When you wake up the bed is empty beside you and you clutch at the sheets, wondering what’s happened, and the shape of her head is pressed into the pillow and a few of her hairs are there, curling over the linens, but the bed feels cold. You stand up, groggily, and make your way to the bathroom, but the door is closed, and that’s when you first hear it: a low, throbbing keen, through the door.
She’s crying. You can hear her sobbing, very quietly as though she wanted to be polite about it, and it sounds close: she’s probably sitting on the floor, right on the other side of the door, arms wrapped around her knees. You know exactly how she is, with her bedshaped hair mussed around her shoulders and sticking to her face, eyes swollen. The sound is empty, hollow, and it’s horrible. She sounds like her heart is breaking.
It probably is. You slide down against the door and sit down, settling into the hardness of the floor, and you cross your legs and listen to her. No tears come.
After a while, everything is quiet.
*
Bobby calls to make sure you’re doing okay, and you can hear in his voice that he misses you. Sometimes you feel like a babysitter, with him: maybe it’s just that you can’t deal with this many people depending on you for something, and the emptiness in her eyes matches the need in his voice and you don’t know how to fill it, you don’t know how to make either of them whole anymore. When you hang up it feels like you’re letting him down.
She’s at the kitchen table staring at the dumpster in the alley three floors down, fingers cradling her coffee mug. She looks small and fading and you lean against the sink and watch her, watch the morning wrap its light around her. It’s silent, just the pigeons outside and the rattling of her air conditioning.
Finally she says, quietly, “What are you thinking?”
It takes you by surprise. “Nothing,” you say. You’re lying again.
She nods. She’s still looking out the window. “I thought you’d say that.” She sounds so sad, you think. So sad.
“Why did you ask, then?”
She shrugs. “Because I hoped you wouldn’t.”
Don’t worry about me, you want to tell her. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be fine. But Barek never lets you catch her watching you.
Also, do check out onlyjustwhisper's lovely fic "Night for Now," which is a prequel to the events described here.
When the noises first resolve into something like language, something you can understand, it’s unintelligible, dark rumbling and something a bit lighter, familiar. Pain blooming like a sunrise in your body, your blood pulsing in your wrists like fire.
Rustlings, and whispers. Finally you hear “…stakeout all fucking night” and the voice, the words are hers, though trembling in a way you’ve never heard before, and you want to greet her, say hello, come in, please, I need you, but you can’t talk much, and your head is so heavy, and there’s, huh, a water stain on the ceiling, how interesting, and your hand feels twitchy a bit…
*
You open your eyes and she’s there.
*
The third time, you wake up as though you were floating back to the surface, and the light washes over you like waves, and then you’re breaking through, and the light is air, and you’re free and breathing, and Carolyn is holding your hand.
When your eyes open you squint because it’s too bright and then it’s just her, just her. She’s staring at your wrist and her eye is twitching, like it’s keeping something back. She’s just staring, not looking at your face, not seeing you watching her. Her hair is a mess, and her face is drawn, the half-moons under her eyes fragile, tinted purple. She hasn’t been eating enough, you think, her skin is so gray and looks so thin. She looks, you think, very small.
Her eyes flick to your face, widen, travel up to your eyes, and suddenly there you are, staring into her eyes, and maybe you’re a little afraid of what you see there.
It’s silent except for the beeping, the monitors: your pulse, your blood pressure. Vital signs. And everything in this moment is still. Still, still as death, as peace, as you look at her and her fear and her relief and she looks, God, so tired, so worried, and you feel a rush of - something, so warm and so sudden and so strong it scares you a little.
“You look like hell,” you say, instead of “I love you,” and your voice sounds scratchy and it echoes, loudly, off the tile on the walls. Coming back, it all keeps coming back.
She looks like she’s been punched and breathes “Alex” and doesn’t move, and you lie there and she sits, holding your hand, and you stare at each other and you watch her eyes fill and everything gets a little blurry around the margins.
“What is it?” you croak, because the silence is heavy like marble on you, crushing, and she seems to expand a little. She looks away.
“I,” she says. “I was on stakeout, and the radio-”
She closes her mouth, breathes. “It was your badge number,” she says, quietly, and her voice is fragile around the edges.
You would nod, because you know what that’s like except at least you got a call, she didn’t get anything but a goddamn dispatch in the car with a partner she couldn’t tell, but your head hurts too much, so you just hold her there, with your eyes, still and deep. You would say “I’m sorry” but you can’t, you can’t.
*
You wake up alone and you swallow because there’s no reason for the fear rising in your throat. Your heart is pounding and you’re lying there, trembling quietly, repeating it to yourself, over and over: you’re safe you’re safe you’re safe where is she.
There are footsteps in the hallway and you tense, trying not to look hopeful, and when they pass your door and fade away, you try not to collapse into your pillow. More footsteps, more beeping, time passing like this, marking the moments without her, and you’ve never felt so alone.
And then she’s there in your doorway, and you didn’t hear the footsteps, you didn’t hear her, you just see her there like a vision, and you don’t have time to mask your need, your desperation. She’s moving into the room and you look at her, tired and disheveled and fragile, and before her you never thought anything was beautiful.
“Hey,” she says softly, carefully. “Hey, Alex. Hi. Are you,” and she seems to reconsider, then breathes, “okay?”
“I’m fine,” you say, and your voice is pretty even, considering.
She moves toward you, sits in her chair and takes your hand, and you grip it instinctively, thank you thank you. She squeezes back. “I wish I’d been here when you woke up,” she says.
“It’s fine,” you say. “I’m all right. You don’t need to watch me.”
She tilts her head, and you watch the furrow appear between her eyebrows. She looks like she knows you’re lying and like she wants to say something about it, and you watch her decide to let it go. Instead she pulls a bag up on her lap. “I brought you a couple of magazines,” she says. “Maybe to keep you busy, in case you get sick of talking.”
You smile, and she pulls them out. And it makes you laugh, because Barek has brought you Scientific American, Foreign Policy, National Geographic. Those are her magazines, not yours. She looks a little sheepish. “They had a crappy selection downstairs,” she says, “or I would have brought something more interesting.”
“Like Us Weekly?”
She looks like she’s not sure whether it’s okay to laugh, but you are, because you think it’s funny and you adore her (and maybe you’re a little loopy, you’re faintly aware that you sound a little ridiculous and it’s possible that you’re still being sedated), so she chuckles a little. “Something like that.”
“Thanks,” you say. “That was - nice of you.” You think you should be saying, instead, “I missed you” or “I need you” or “I don’t want to be alone” or “I got scared.” But the words die in your throat, somehow. They always do.
“You’re going to stay at my place for a while,” she says quietly. Her voice is not insistent, just solid.
You shouldn’t feel this way, because it’s obvious that things are going to be a little awkward, but you can’t really help it: you’re suddenly, wildly, grateful and so you thank her.
She looks up at you, and her eyes are a little wounded. “Stop,” she says, quietly. Then, more gently, “Just stop, okay?”
I don’t want to be taken care of, you want to tell her, but something about the slope of her shoulders stops you from saying it, and maybe it isn’t true anyway.
*
She drives you home the next day. She looks distracted and doesn’t seem to be concentrating on the road, and the car feels tense, awkward. You used to be good at silence, both of you.
You feel stifled so you look out the window at the city around you, watching the light open up as you reach the edge of Manhattan, the sun on the water. You’re about to ask her why she’s taking the bridge instead of the tunnel, and then you remember: because you told her you like the bridge better. Because ever since you did, she’s taken the long way home.
The light is blinding you, shapes burning into your retinas, and you squint against it. You wish it weren’t so sunny here over the river; it’s easier to hide in clouds. You haven’t felt so exposed in a while. You suppose you haven’t been to Brooklyn in a while.
You’re already feeling a little twitchy: you always do when you’re not working, and the seatbelt restraining your chest is making you a little restless. Confined. You look at your hands, folded in your lap, and consider the bruises that have blossomed up around your wrists in an angry purple bracelet against the threadlike lacerations where the metal cut your skin. The bruises should start turning green in a couple of days, you figure. “I’m only going to take three days,” you say, because they made you and you didn’t want to, and then you have to go get shrinked and you’re really not looking forward to that.
She cuts her eyes at you quickly, then looks back in front of the car, as though it hurt her to meet your eyes. “I wish you’d take a little more than that,” she says quietly. She sounds like she feels guilty for saying it.
“No,” you say. “I hate - not working.” You’re not sure that’s actually true right now, but you don’t want to be sitting around in Barek’s apartment, thinking about what happened, hearing the girl scream in your ears, feeling Barek’s eyes on you, letting her take care of you. You’re not sure you know how to do that.
“You know,” she says, and her voice sounds distant already, and infinitely sad, “you don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“Yeah,” she says, but it sounds like she’s saying something else. She blinks, then says resignedly, “I have an extra pair of sunglasses in the glove compartment. Maybe you should - if your eyes are bothering you.”
The light glancing off the East River is making them tear up. “No,” you say. “They’re not.”
*
“What do you know?” you ask. It’s dark outside, and maybe you’d like to go lose yourself in it because the night is pitch black and her eyes are only brown but somehow, somehow her eyes are darker.
She looks at you, looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “Just - what I can see.” She swallows and looks down, and you watch her eyes slide over your wrists and try not to linger on the bruising. “And. The pictures. Of, of the. The others.”
You think about her looking at those pictures, her imagining you looking like that (the rash, the wounds, that expression, penetration with a foreign object), and the long stakeout without knowing anything of you, and you want to break for her, but you can’t.
“Why did you look at them?” you ask instead.
Barek shrugs and doesn’t say, Because they weren’t you. But you can hear her thinking it.
She sits down carefully, and she looks fragile: as though if she sat down hard she would fall apart. She looks out the window, and you watch the street light outside begin to gather in her eyes until they’re brilliant with it and then the light is dropping out of them, and Barek is crying.
You want to go to her, fold her up in you and protect her, but you can’t - you can’t feel anything left, and so you just watch her: frozen, silent. You can’t go anywhere.
Barek mashes her fist under her chin, as though she could hold her face together if she crushed her jaw hard enough. The tears fall silently down and they leave glistening trails over her cheekbones and she doesn’t make any sound at all. You’re grateful that she’s not one of those people who whimpers a little when they cry and then there’s the guilty stab, because who are you, glad you don’t have to hear her pain?
*
“I think you should talk about this,” she says. Fuck you, you think, anger hot in your belly.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” you say shortly. “I didn’t see her. I walked into my apartment and my bird was gone and I didn’t notice in time. I didn’t see her. It’s just what happened.” And you don’t want to talk about it, for fuck’s sake, you’re getting shrinked in a couple of days and you don’t want to go over this twice. It’s just what it is. People die sometimes. You’ve killed a few yourself.
But not like that. Not like that.
“Alex,” she says, and it cuts into your thoughts. “Alex. Talk to me.”
You look at her, and her eyes are naked and open to you and full of something like fear. She’s pleading, and something about it opens in you - she looks so sad and so desperate, and you shiver.
She reaches for you and pulls back, like she’s not sure whether she can, whether you’ll let her. And you don’t want to be alone, you don’t, and you roll into her, and she covers you with her arms and you’re there against her heartbeat, and you’re trembling a little, maybe, and she tightens around you, tucks your head into her shoulder, kisses your hair.
“Oh, darling,” she whispers, and you never thought you’d hear her talk like that.
“I don’t know what to say,” you tell her, your voice muffled against her skin, and what you mean is that you don’t know how not to hide.
I don’t know how to fix this, is what you really want to tell her, you don’t know how to stop resenting her for being here for you, for taking care of you, for doing everything right. And you wish the breaking could mean something. You wish, not for the first time, that life were as easy as your job: figure it out, go take care of it.
Real life doesn’t work that way; everything doubles back on itself and spirals around and you wish, you wish you could just snap out of this. You wish you could just say: I need you. I don’t know what’s happened to me.
She smoothes your hair, gently. “There’s no rush,” she says, softly, against your ear. “It’s all right, Alex. I’ll be here.”
You’re all hollowed out, but you already knew that. You had time, says the voice in your head, you had time: what are you doing, why can’t you do this?
“I know,” you say, because maybe you could start talking to her.
“Good,” she whispers. “Good.”
*
It doesn’t take you long to fall asleep. You dream, and you’re floating down a river with her, a gray river, thick and heavy and dull like the Neva in the Akhmatova poems she likes, with a sheen on it like it’s all molten lead, and the sky is fawn-colored, like something is burning in the distance, and the air is humid and smoky, and there are dead trees along the banks. The boat might be red. She’s standing in the prow when suddenly she crumples and you notice there’s been a man with a gun in the boat with you, and you didn’t see him. He might have Bobby’s face.
You go to her. She’s dying. I’m sorry, you say, because you should have done something.
She shrugs. It doesn’t matter, she says, then: I’ll miss you.
She dies and you’re covered in her blood. The sky might change color. You sit down beside her, not touching, keep floating down the river, staring at the skeletons of trees on the banks.
It starts to rain.
*
You wake before she does. She’s turned into you, her face drawn and anxious now even in sleep, and her lips are a little parted. You look at her carefully and wonder when she got used to disappointments. You wonder when you became one of them.
You kiss her forehead, wishing you could see the frown lines smooth out, but they don’t. Swinging your legs out of the bed hurts your left hip a little, and you wonder when the stiffness, the pulled feeling in your back, is going to go away. It might not, you think, and that’s pretty much just your luck.
Walking to the window, the floor is cold on your bare feet, and you wince a little. Outside you can see the moon over the back alleys and fire escapes of her neighborhood; the stars are fading into the gray of morning. You look at the clouds, luminescent with the first tinges of violent pink sunlight, but your love won’t show up in the clouds, and you can’t seem to find it anywhere else.
*
You can remember the last time you kissed her, and how cool and fragile her mouth felt even though it was only a few days ago, really, a few days before, before your bird died. It was hot outside and there was nothing cool on that day, no relief except her lips.
And now she’s so gray and frightened and her eyes slide off you before you can catch them with yours. You haven’t seen her look at you in so long; she hasn’t moved toward you at all, really: you know she’s scared to touch you, or maybe she’s scared that you’ll say: no, say: stop, say: this reminds me. And of course she wouldn’t want to hear that.
The curve of her neck is so lovely, so gorgeously sculpted, and suddenly the pit of your stomach drops out and you’re aching and you want her. You need to touch her, bury yourself where she’s warm and soft and alive and you’re yearning for her and you want her to look at you. And you look at her across the bed, at her eyes that have shifted too suddenly, the shift that means she’s been watching you and doesn’t want you to see, and God, you think you hate her sometimes and you want her.
You reach over the bed and pull yourself up, over her body, and she’s on her side and she’s twisting under you, her hips jutting into your stomach, and you’re kissing her. You’re kissing her and she’s kissing you back, and her mouth is open and it’s all teeth and tongue and this is not gentle at all, this hurts, and she whimpers into your mouth as you kiss her and you can’t fucking stand how much you want her. You’re biting her neck, now, your teeth hard on her skin, and she’s gasping and curling up under you.
It’s a good thing she always gets so hot in bed because even now, with you as you are, she only wears underwear and a tank top and your mouth is on her breast over the fabric, hard and pulling at it, your teeth against the fabric, feeling the heat of her skin beneath it and the hardening of her nipple against your tongue, and you’re sucking it into your mouth, hard. The cotton is wet and feels thick on your tongue and she’s making little strangled sounds and your right hand is under the band of her underwear, your fingers stroking through short, coarse hair and God, she’s already so wet, you’ve never felt her like this, and you’re inside her before you know what you’re doing. She yelps and you look up at her and she smiles at you, faintly, and then you’re deep, deep, and the smile disappears and her eyes go wide and she’s making a long, low sound, too guttural for a sigh, and she’s so warm and so wet, and your mouth is on hers again, not kissing, just feeling, and all you know is the pulsing of her around you and her breathing and her gasps against your mouth. She’s tightening around you and your eyes are screwed shut so you can’t see what she looks like and her hips are moving under you, and you can feel every ridge, every curve, every smoothness inside her, and she’s whispering, “Alex, Alex,” and her voice is strangled and suddenly she’s snapping up against you and you catch her with your body and it’s over.
She falls back heavily. She’s staring at the ceiling, and she’s still tight around your fingers and you don’t think you ever want to leave, and suddenly your left arm gives out and you collapse gracelessly onto her. She’s sweating and her breath is coming in shallow gasps that sound a little like sobs.
“God,” she says quietly. “You've never-”
You don’t want to talk about it. “Yeah,” you say, and your voice sounds harsh.
She turns away from you, God, that neck, and her eyes close. You’re pretty sure you know what she’s thinking but you were so glad to feel something again, and still she didn’t look at you.
She gasps as you leave her, lower yourself against her side, and when you take her hand it’s trembling. That’s how you fall asleep, holding her hand, wishing you could keep it from shaking, wishing you knew how.
*
When you wake up the bed is empty beside you and you clutch at the sheets, wondering what’s happened, and the shape of her head is pressed into the pillow and a few of her hairs are there, curling over the linens, but the bed feels cold. You stand up, groggily, and make your way to the bathroom, but the door is closed, and that’s when you first hear it: a low, throbbing keen, through the door.
She’s crying. You can hear her sobbing, very quietly as though she wanted to be polite about it, and it sounds close: she’s probably sitting on the floor, right on the other side of the door, arms wrapped around her knees. You know exactly how she is, with her bedshaped hair mussed around her shoulders and sticking to her face, eyes swollen. The sound is empty, hollow, and it’s horrible. She sounds like her heart is breaking.
It probably is. You slide down against the door and sit down, settling into the hardness of the floor, and you cross your legs and listen to her. No tears come.
After a while, everything is quiet.
*
Bobby calls to make sure you’re doing okay, and you can hear in his voice that he misses you. Sometimes you feel like a babysitter, with him: maybe it’s just that you can’t deal with this many people depending on you for something, and the emptiness in her eyes matches the need in his voice and you don’t know how to fill it, you don’t know how to make either of them whole anymore. When you hang up it feels like you’re letting him down.
She’s at the kitchen table staring at the dumpster in the alley three floors down, fingers cradling her coffee mug. She looks small and fading and you lean against the sink and watch her, watch the morning wrap its light around her. It’s silent, just the pigeons outside and the rattling of her air conditioning.
Finally she says, quietly, “What are you thinking?”
It takes you by surprise. “Nothing,” you say. You’re lying again.
She nods. She’s still looking out the window. “I thought you’d say that.” She sounds so sad, you think. So sad.
“Why did you ask, then?”
She shrugs. “Because I hoped you wouldn’t.”
Don’t worry about me, you want to tell her. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be fine. But Barek never lets you catch her watching you.