Work Text:
She always knew the exact moment people saw it. She could see them forget she was looking as their eyes darted across her face and paused a moment too long on the scar that jagged its way across her neck.
She was washing Rocco in her kitchen sink when she caught Bob looking at it the first time. He averted his eyes quickly, turned his head like a scolded dog. Only the warm water, running pink with Rocco’s blood, broke the silence.
Silence was a thing with him; she learnt that pretty quickly. You could hide a lot of secrets in silence, and she’d built a fortress around herself that way. She wondered if he’d done the same for his secrets, wondered most when his eyes would slide in her direction or when he’d fix her with a stare so steady she could feel it holding her in place.
Everybody has a past. That’s what he’d said when she couldn’t bear it any longer and confronted him, asked him why he refused to ask her about it. With every other person it had felt like they were dragging a secret from her. Their curiosity was intrusive and made her feel ashamed, but she’d wanted to tell Bob almost from the beginning. It wasn’t just that he didn’t say anything and maintained a polite distance even though she thought she could feel something burgeoning between them. It was that she felt like he’d know why she did it, or at least be more than halfway to understanding her.
+
She caught him staring at the scar on her neck the first time he met her. They were washing his dog in the sink, although he didn’t know it was his dog at the time; he’d just found the puppy in her trash all bloody and beaten, and she’d let him into her place so they could wash him and fix him up.
He didn’t know it was her ex’s dog either, then. That dog, that girl. He wondered how his life might’ve been different if he’d just ignored them both. He’d been doing fine before he found them. At least he thought he was, but what is it they say about loneliness being like starvation? You don’t know how hungry you are until you start eating.
He wanted to tell her that the scar reminded him of the statue of Mary in Saint Dom’s with the crack across her neck, that you could be broken and still be beautiful, not in spite of the cracks but because of them.
But he looked away as soon as she noticed and he felt ashamed for drawing even the slightest attention to it. He knew as well as anyone that people had pasts, and things in those pasts that they preferred to keep secret. He resolved not to say anything about it until she did.
+
I mean…you just fucking shot him?
She was shaking when he let her out of the bar, and it wasn’t because of the cold. It wasn’t even a long walk to her house, a block and a half at most, but it was the longest walk she ever remembered taking. She counted every breath, every footstep, all the time listening for his steps on the sidewalk behind her. He wouldn’t just let her go like that, would he? Not after what she’d seen him do.
The Bob she’d known before this night, the quiet one who was awkward around her and seemed out of place in this world: she trusted him not to follow her, not to eliminate witnesses and tie his crime up in a neat little bow. But that wasn’t the Bob she’d just seen. She didn’t know what that guy would do, the one who told her he’s not in the life as he stood over the body of a guy he’d just shot in the face. She didn’t need to think about that shit right now. As soon as she got home she grabbed the first bottle she laid hands on in the liquor cabinet and swigged and swigged until she couldn’t think anymore.
The next morning she woke up to find nothing had happened. He hadn’t come after her to finish the job. Her limbs were attached to her body, she was still alive, with a pounding headache to prove it. So she made herself a coffee and had a smoke on the stoop. Still nothing. And so it went for a week, and then two. Only then did the knot in her stomach slowly begin to unravel.
+
There’s no more holy water to bless himself with, no more Saint Dom’s, so he washed his hands in the sink and wondered if him wanting this water to mean something, for it to finally wash all of that shit with Richie Whelan away, made it so. I’m washing my hands of this, he told himself, my hands are clean.
And you meet God halfway; he knew this. You say you’re sorry and you grovel, but you’ve got to mean it, and if you’re sorry enough He won’t turn you away, He has to take you in. But Nadia — he didn’t know what she’d say. He could be as sorry as he wanted, and she still might never want to see him again.
+
She heard the clicking of claws first, skrit-skrit-skrit up the sidewalk, and she knew it was Rocco, knew it was Bob. She took a deep breath and another drag on her cigarette before stubbing it out. He stood at her gate, looking like the guy who fished a beaten-up puppy out of her trash a couple of months back.
He shot someone right in front of you, she told herself, shot them right in the face like it was nothing. Rocco pawed at the gate and whined.
“When you left the bar I know that that meant stay away, you know, I know that mean stay away. But you didn’t say it. If you say it then I will just go. Believe me, Nadia, I will just leave right now, but you have to say it.”
He sounded lighter, as though he’d kicked off whatever he’d been dragging around these few months that she’d known him. She searched his face for signs of that detached, methodical guy in the bar, but all she could see was someone polite and hopeful.
And she still couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t get her head round the idea that this guy and the one in the bar with the gun were the same. She didn’t want to think about it; it made her head hurt. Maybe I’ll walk around the block with him, just once, she told herself, and see how it goes.
“Let me go and get my jacket.”