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Her first boyfriend was two years older than her and laughed too loudly and was a fatalist at heart. He murmured “When we break up-“ and “When this ends-“ and “When we leave, or you leave, or I leave-“ and she looked away at the words, at the sight of a big red stop sign 5 minutes into the future. She said “Don’t.” without really knowing what was wrong with it, because everything ends at one point, doesn’t it?
Maybe that’s why she knows, and doesn’t show it. “A lawyer, a resource, a teacher?” they ask, but green eyes have never fooled her, not since the first.
.
Laurel works late on her second day because everything is quiet in the house. She cleared half the table and filled it with highlighted documents and manuals and papers, mumbled to herself in hopes of remembering voices and not words, deciding on which was more important. She pauses before he sits, three books to his right and the case files to his left, a mug on his hand.
“Whisky?” she asks, blunt and thick, perfectly aware of the advantage his interest provides her. She’s been holding cards all her life.
“Hmm.” He takes a sip, eyes never leaving her. “Annalise’s bonus for making me put up with the new kids.”
She shrugs. “By all means, head off to bed.” she flips a page, the movement sickeningly planned. “I find it hard to believe I was disturbing you.”
He laughs, a burst. She smiles, unnoticeable.
This is the game they play, in the dark.
.
She realizes he’s toying with her just as much as she’s toying with him, the reasons the same and the purposes quite different. She wants what he can offer and he wants her, but neither admits to any of this. They hum slowly in separate rooms.
“So, what do you think?” Asher plops down on the couch beside her, legs stretched out onto the coffee table, arms spread wide along the headrest. “Handyman? In a gloomy-obscure sort of way? Type-thing?”
Laurel doesn’t answer him, but she is aware of how sound can’t shatter walls and how there are so few of those in the house.
“Think he’s whacked someone?” he wiggles his eyebrows, hitting her arm, “Hey, pay attention to me!”
“Money boy, if you don’t shut up, I might just have to whack you.” Frank claims, not a hitch on his step as he walks in. Asher turns somewhat pale and Laurel looks up, smiles with a secret. In her mind, she asks, and in his, he answers, and smiles.
(“If you show,” she says in passing, knowing it could be mistaken for an inner rambling, vain words, knows it won’t, not with him.
“They won’t wonder?” he chuckles, and it’s a game, really, always has been.)
.
She has the upper hand when he trusts her principles more than he trusts his eyes, feels slightly rattled by what’s implicit there but not enough to- to-
She kisses him when she leaves the bed at 2 am, not trying to hurt him but not caring if she does, and she adds it all up to a play of odds in which he’s the worst of them all, has been for a long time, will still be when she’s done with him, when she’s wrecked him, body and soul and heart, ripped every living cell from his hands and his arms and his broad shoulders casting shadows on the sheets. It’s something from inside, she reasons, a predisposition for evil, or something equally bad.
What she doesn’t expect is: “You think you’re better, don’t you?” a lazy grin filling his mouth, a cracking of bones.
I am, she thinks, grunts, and he smiles, and the future smiles along with him.
(How many bodies will we count between us?)
.
The worry comes when she’s curled up to Kahn and her phone buzzes with a different ringtone.
“You need to get that?” he murmurs, half asleep already. Laurel looks at him even though- because- he can’t see her.
“Yes.” She says, meaning it. Meaning it.
.
She forgets that Frank and her clash for a reason. He could drive halfway across the fucking continent and she’d know the exact road he’d be driving in.
“I find it hard to believe, really,” he rasps, breath damp on her neck, a quick succession of lips pressing against skin. He looks up. “You always sleep with murderers?”
She digs her nails in his back and rolls him so that she’s on top, hands on his chest in vain hopes of balance. “You never said you were a murderer.”
“I see,” he smiles, a hand sliding slowly up her left thigh. “So you’re just pretending, then?” another kiss on his collarbone, a bite- “What else are you hiding?”
A heavy sigh leaves her before she kisses him, maybe because of his taste, maybe because of the sharpness of truth- unconditional and bitter, nothing like him, wouldn’t be, couldn’t be.
(She feels the cards running through her fingers.)
.
The night the future catches up to her she’s irreversibly thrown into a whirlwind of change. She’s the one who goes after Frank and she’s the one fighting for what she didn’t do and she’s the one wanting to crumble to the floor. She does all of these and more- she slides down the wall of his shower and feels the water hit her skin but doesn’t really feel it at all.
He comes in at some point, gathers her up, wraps a towel around her shaking body. He looks at her like he’s almost broken, and she doesn’t know what scares her anymore.
“Are you going to tell me?” he asks, voice low and even, thought out. He slides a thumb up and down her palm like he’s still washing something, blood or fear or guilt.
She knows it’s pointless because he already knows, because she let her guard down once when he was on top of her and the world went blank and now she doesn’t know how to build it back up again. Green eyes can see straight through her and maybe she was a fool for thinking she ever had a chance against him.
“I never had the upper hand, did I?” she murmurs back, feeling her hands sticky with red. She wonders when she’ll forget, if she’ll forget, how long it’ll take for her to throw out any red item in her apartment. She could maybe ask Frank since he doesn’t have any in his, either.
He chuckles quietly, presses a kiss on her damp hair. “Never.”