Fic: Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing) (1/13)
Title: Thirteen Conversations (About One Thing)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Word Count: 3,175
Summary: For all their talking, it’s only ever really about one thing. The conversations of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. Movieverse. For the pepperony100 Prompt #11 - Morning. Spoilers for Iron Man 2 (2010).
Prompt Table: Here
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.
Author’s Notes: In a nutshell: this is an unabashed, unapologetic, schmoopy fluff-fest. Mostly me just indulging a number of the juicy bits of romantic(ish) conversation that could have happened after the end of the film, with a touch of style-experimentation, in the hopes that just maybe, some of you might enjoy them as well.
Conversation One: Breakfast, The Morning After
She wakes in the morning, just as the sun is breaking -- glistening on the water that stretches wide outside the windows: fire reflected in the glass. She stretches -- stiff; realizes that she’s still fully dressed, and it doesn’t take long for the haze of sleep to begin to clear, to lift and burn away until she remembers: the smoke and the scent of searing, the way it still clings to her shoulders, the collar of her dress alongside the musk of evening, of the lingering cold above the skyline -- the rush of flying that made her want to laugh, just as nausea plunged in the pit of her stomach.
If she tries, focuses; licks her lips with thought, she can catch the way he tasted: spiced, almost metallic; the way he smacked of watercress and... coconut. It was definitely coconut.
She sits up slow, breathes deep as she straightens; she’s in a guest room, the one she’s stayed in from time to time, when she’s too tired to drive, or Tony’s talked her into a nightcap of some vintage worth half her yearly salary; when the arm of the sofa isn’t the last thing she sees before sleep takes her. She’s claimed the space, in her own way; all of her very favorite pieces from Tony’s collection are arranged on the walls, splotches of color and shade against the open glass, overlooking the breaking waves; she hadn’t though much of it, but he’d kept the art -- the ones she loved; none of those had been given away.
She wonders, for a moment, if she’s reading too much into it; but it’s Tony Stark, and if any man is made of subtlety and layers beneath all of the bravado and the snark -- by god, it’s him.
Her steps are quiet, a soft hush against the floor without her heels, and it’s not until she’s down the stairs and halfway into the dining area that he sees her, notices her, and she can feel his gaze following the trails of wrinkles and creases in clothes; feel something like longing tugging at the skin beneath.
When he lifts his hand to his mouth, sucks something -- the hints of whatever she can smell cooking, lingering sweet on the air, stronger as she gets closer -- off his knuckle with quick, thoughtless force, lips full and red as he licks the sticky residue away from the skin; when he grins at her around the finger between his teeth -- when the pop of it leaving his mouth smacks hard, almost seems to echo -- she wonders, briefly, what the hell they’d been waiting for; what took them so long.
“Morning, sunshine,” he greets her, voice a little rough, eyes a little dark, and how in the world had she failed to notice the way he’d been slipping, the way his skin had lost its color, the way the bruises sunk deeper, darker on his flesh? Because seeing him, the hunter green of his grease-marked polo pulling out the lingering sallowness, the deep tissue damage in olive-tones, the sleepless half-circles beneath his eyes; suddenly, it’s all very clear where it was muted, vague before -- though it shouldn’t have been. It’s obvious, now: the touch of stress, the toll it had taken on him as he suffered in silence for so long, too long; even as she can see the way the color’s coming back, the thickness of his skin, the glow -- it’s unmistakable.
She follows him as he approaches the table, and tries not dwell on why she hadn’t noticed, why she hadn’t let herself notice; the whys make her feel dizzy, and she’s not ready for them yet.
He slides a plate across the tabletop to settle in front of the chair she’s standing behind, that’s holding her steady. “Most important meal of the day,” he notes airily; she stares at the stack of pancakes -- a little lopsided, cut at strange angles, none of them quite circular -- swimming in a pool of syrup and topped with enough whipped cream to make her wonder why, exactly, he has quite so much of it on hand.
With a start, she realizes that a week ago, she wouldn’t have wanted to know; now, she kind of wishes she did. Wishes she had the intimate knowledge herself as to why, exactly, Tony possessed enough of the stuff on hand to transform her pile of flapjacks into a mountain of snow.
The heat at her center surges for a moment at the thoughts, the images that come to mind, and she coughs to cover a gasp; he doesn’t notice the slip as she pulls out the chair and sits, crosses her legs above the knee: too high, too tight.
“And look,” he adds, more to break the silence, to smooth whatever is making this different -- like it’s illusive, like they don’t know what’s changed. “No berries. No berries of any kind,” and indeed, they are completely berry-free, her pancakes -- made from scratch, she can tell, with two hands that could figure anything out; the scent of burnt batter that lingers under the saccharine of syrup and cream betrays the effort he tries to hide in the casual set of his shoulders, the way he leans, almost sprawls in the chair opposite her. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Hmmm, caution,” she comments idly as she knives off the corner of the oddly-triangular pancake at the top of her stack, playing into his attempt at cutting through the tension; she’s known him long enough to understand what he’s trying to do, what he wants. “Restraint. How very unlike you.” She smiles a little as his brows angle, just a tad; he raises a halting finger at her, rising and retreating into the kitchen again, and in his absence she does her best to be discreet about pushing the bulk of the whipped cream into the syrup that’s soaking the bottom cake, watching it mingle and dissolve, hoping he doesn’t notice when he sits back down.
She feels him approach from behind her, and it sends a thrill down her spine, the warmth and the weight of his presence at her back, the way the inside of his arm brushes her shoulder as he reaches around her and place a glass of orange juice at the top of her plate. “Aren’t you having any?” she asks, craning her neck to meet his eyes.
He shrugs, avoiding her gaze, and something in her tightens when her murmurs; “M’not hungry.”
“Did you already eat?”
His gaze is level, hooded, and he barely skims the her line of sight when he speaks: “Haven’t had much of an appetite, lately.”
And without warning, she can feel the heat, the hints of pleasure and promise start to drain away, replaced with cold, with shame.
“Because of...” she trails off, and she doesn’t need to say anything more, nor does he -- the way he fingers at the dulled-glow of the reactor beneath his shirt, drumming at the center and circling idly round the edges; it’s all the answer she needs.
After everything, he’d wanted to get home, run further diagnostics on the new implant; on the flight back they’d talked for a while, brief little snippets of conversation as the jet sped westward through the night -- they’d both dozed between stilted words and awkward half-explanations about palladium and blood poisoning; but when he’d fallen asleep in his chair, just across from her, the deep ‘v’ of his undershirt had shifted, revealed the lines he hadn’t meant for her to see -- smoky grids etched into him, centering at his chest, drawn against his heart; and in that instant, with certainty and the hollow weight of almost and so close bearing down upon her, she understood the gravity of what had nearly happened.
She’d almost lost him; and she’d have never gotten the chance to say goodbye.
The tears had been unavoidable, and if she’d broken down, if she’d stretched her feet out over the space between them, her ankles brushing the arm of his chair until she could feel the cadence, the heat of his breath as he slept against window -- well, it couldn’t have been helped; in truth, she figures, it had been a long time in coming. And while the details were still fuzzy, the basic outline was all she needed, all she required to know that there was really only one question she had left to ask.
“Would you have told me?” her voice cracks, almost fades into nothing; if any sound save both their breaths had existed in that moment, her words would have been lost.
He doesn’t reply, not at first; stares past her, at a point that doesn’t exist and isn’t her -- could never be her -- and that hurts, if she’s honest. She understands it, but it hurts.
“Not if I could’ve helped it,” he finally answers, and she bites her lip as the truth she’d feared suddenly becomes the truth she can’t deny, thick and heavy, suffocating. She turns away, opposite from where he looks beyond her, as if it’ll help, like it would create distance -- make it hurt a little less.
“But Pepper?” The feel of his hand draped, splayed over hers cracks something in her; it’s a tender kind of touch, one she’d never bothered to image coming from him, and in that moment, she knows she should have. She should have bothered to imagine it.
It kills her, to think that it had taken so little to shake her faith in him.
“I don’t think I could have helped it for much longer.”
And while she stares, stone-faced for the longest time, still and sure as she looks into him and reads the things he doesn’t want her to see, but that he can’t keep from her -- won’t keep from her, not anymore -- she starts to crumble inside. And she knows the sharp hiss, the way she inhales quick through her teeth against the sting in her chest, the pain that resonates in her lungs as the air hits -- she knows that it burns in him too, and not just from the way that he flinches a little, the corners of his eyes drawn up in creases at the sound.
Because to hear him say it; admit to it -- good god, but he must have been half-dead already.
“Damnit, Tony,” she curses, hard; but her voice wavers, and any venom, anything left of the bitterness, the hurt seeps away prematurely, until all she has left is the terror, the seizing at the center her chest that trembled when he’d said the words -- dying, for pity’s sake; he’d been dying -- and she realizes that even with the drones, and the explosions, the death and destruction and the flying and the falling and the kiss; and his metal clad hands on her arms, replaced by the roughness, the dry lines of his skin; she realizes, suddenly, that the tremor in her chest was still there, still strong: the culmination of all the wondering, the worrying, all the things she’d brushed aside because she’d been preoccupied, too busy, too careless -- because the possibilities had made her stomach clench and her heart race and she couldn’t do it anymore.
And then she thinks about it, the things she’d been trying like hell to keep in the back corners, the dark places of her mind: thinks about finding him, cold on the floor of his workshop; about the cool, calculating tone of Jarvis calling her cell and telling her, calmly and without emotion, that he’d lost a read on Mr. Stark’s vitals, that emergency medical services had already been contacted, and would she please make haste in returning to the mansion. She thinks of him alone, thinks of the last thing he’d ever see being lights and metal -- nothing warm, nothing that cared, that felt...
She closes her eyes and tries to breathe through the lump, the pull in her throat as she sees, burned behind her eyes by nightmares and guilt, the flickering of his arc implant on that rooftop: ice-blue blinking, shivering in and out of existence -- the way his heart had followed suit beneath her touch when she’d found him, fluttering wildly and faint; she sees it as it goes out, fades to black forever, and if she manages to stifle a sob, it would be a miracle; if she fails, she doesn’t notice.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, brings her back to the present where he’s at her side, watching her, alive, though it had been a close thing. The words are like a rumble, a hum, and when he strokes his thumb across her the curve of her wrist, she knows he has to catch her pulse, the rhythm of it; the massage of his touch, though, is steady, and she tries to focus on it, tries to anchor herself to it without giving in to the fear so that she has a touchstone, something to fall back on when she looks up and finally meets his eyes: sharp, wide and honest like she’s never seen them before.
“Your breakfast is getting cold.” He scoots his chair closer to her, until his knee bumps up against hers, his thigh just a breath from her own. He grabs for her fork, uses the side to saw off a slice of that bottom, syrup-doused pancake before he skewers it, lifts it to his mouth with delicate, careful purpose -- proving something that she reads, that she knows; that lets the lead, the cold in her chest dissipate, just a little. “Mmm, still good. But cold.”
“I should have noticed,” she interrupts suddenly, the words seeming to spring forth from her and catch in the air, in his throat as he swallows hard around the bite of food. “You were quiet, you weren’t eating...” she gestures at the plate, the prongs of the fork he’s drawing from his mouth, her voice pitched higher, growing just a little bit hysterical as it all piles on top of itself, as it finally adds up and starts to make terrible, horrifying, utterly perfect sense. “You smelled like plants, and half the time it takes bribery to get you to finish a salad,” she adds, and he grins a little, the expression oddly, painfully haunted as his eyes flicker between her and her glass of juice. “You sold the...” and her voice abandons her, and she knows if she goes much farther she’ll burst into tears; that the pressure at the base of her throat -- throbbing and sore -- will erupt, escape, and she’ll have no recourse. “And the suit...”
The signs; so many signs -- and she’d missed every one of them. Overlooked them. Wrote them off. The man, the person she knew best in the entire world; he’d been dying and she hadn’t even noticed.
What kind of person did that make her?
Before she can stop them, reign them in, tears start well at the corners of her eyes; she shuts them, blinks hard against it, breathes deep until her heartbeats feel separate again -- quick but distinct -- instead of a single, endless, frantic hum.
“I should have known,” she finally forces through the clench of her jaw, emotion thick in her tone, and he’s quiet for a moment, until she opens her eyes and meets his gaze; and she can see the gentleness, the warmth -- the way his heart comes up and fills his eyes just a little, just enough. She can see him take pity on her, on the guilt that’s swallowing her whole, and she doesn’t deserve it, not now; but that doesn’t matter -- nothing matters, except the way he reaches out to rest his palm at the back of her neck, threading his fingers in the hair at the base of her skull and drawing her close, breathing against her cheek.
“I should have known that, of all the things in the world, you were allergic to strawberries,” he counters plainly, the words calm and steady, sure; so much more than just themselves. And it’s enough.
He draws back after a moment, the hand on her neck moving to slide soft across her jaw, cupping her cheek as he reaches over and grabs her fork again, stabs at another hunk of cold pancake and offers it to her -- and somehow, whatever else the gesture could be, it’s only endearing. Only tender and unsure.
She leans in and takes the proffered bite between her teeth, and the smile he gives her makes it taste all the sweeter.
“They were delicious, by the way,” he says softly as she chews, swallows; but there’s a light in his eyes: something like hope and fear and all of the maybes that he’d never quite learned to let go of. “The strawberries. Probably the best I’ve ever had.”
She laughs, and whatever was broken -- it starts to feel fixed.
“Maybe...” she starts after a pause, after his touch is gone; tentative for the first time in his presence since the first week she’d spent in his employ, hesitant because she’s failed him, somehow -- and sure, they’ve failed each other over the years, but this is different. He could have died.
She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and lays her hand over his this time, keeps him close, and safe, and makes a silent promise that this -- whatever it is they’re doing, building, making between them two of them; whatever this is, she’s not going to fail him again.
Because she can read it in his eyes: he’s trying like hell not to fail her.
“Maybe once all this blows over, once we fix everything,” and she sees it, the little glimmer, the flicker of life in him that sparks when she says ‘we,’ and she smiles softly over at him, lets the curve of her lips untangle the nerves, the strain in coiled tight in his bones. “Maybe then, Venice.”
“Yeah,” his answer comes after a beat, a breath; and finally -- finally -- he sounds like himself. “Yeah, Venice.”
She finishes her pancakes -- soggy and too sweet -- but it’s not such a burden; more like a joy.
-----
Conversation Two: Deflect and Absorb
-
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Tony/Pepper
Word Count: 3,175
Summary: For all their talking, it’s only ever really about one thing. The conversations of Tony Stark and Pepper Potts. Movieverse. For the pepperony100 Prompt #11 - Morning. Spoilers for Iron Man 2 (2010).
Prompt Table: Here
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Title belongs to Karen and Jill Sprecher, from the film of the same name.
Author’s Notes: In a nutshell: this is an unabashed, unapologetic, schmoopy fluff-fest. Mostly me just indulging a number of the juicy bits of romantic(ish) conversation that could have happened after the end of the film, with a touch of style-experimentation, in the hopes that just maybe, some of you might enjoy them as well.
Conversation One: Breakfast, The Morning After
She wakes in the morning, just as the sun is breaking -- glistening on the water that stretches wide outside the windows: fire reflected in the glass. She stretches -- stiff; realizes that she’s still fully dressed, and it doesn’t take long for the haze of sleep to begin to clear, to lift and burn away until she remembers: the smoke and the scent of searing, the way it still clings to her shoulders, the collar of her dress alongside the musk of evening, of the lingering cold above the skyline -- the rush of flying that made her want to laugh, just as nausea plunged in the pit of her stomach.
If she tries, focuses; licks her lips with thought, she can catch the way he tasted: spiced, almost metallic; the way he smacked of watercress and... coconut. It was definitely coconut.
She sits up slow, breathes deep as she straightens; she’s in a guest room, the one she’s stayed in from time to time, when she’s too tired to drive, or Tony’s talked her into a nightcap of some vintage worth half her yearly salary; when the arm of the sofa isn’t the last thing she sees before sleep takes her. She’s claimed the space, in her own way; all of her very favorite pieces from Tony’s collection are arranged on the walls, splotches of color and shade against the open glass, overlooking the breaking waves; she hadn’t though much of it, but he’d kept the art -- the ones she loved; none of those had been given away.
She wonders, for a moment, if she’s reading too much into it; but it’s Tony Stark, and if any man is made of subtlety and layers beneath all of the bravado and the snark -- by god, it’s him.
Her steps are quiet, a soft hush against the floor without her heels, and it’s not until she’s down the stairs and halfway into the dining area that he sees her, notices her, and she can feel his gaze following the trails of wrinkles and creases in clothes; feel something like longing tugging at the skin beneath.
When he lifts his hand to his mouth, sucks something -- the hints of whatever she can smell cooking, lingering sweet on the air, stronger as she gets closer -- off his knuckle with quick, thoughtless force, lips full and red as he licks the sticky residue away from the skin; when he grins at her around the finger between his teeth -- when the pop of it leaving his mouth smacks hard, almost seems to echo -- she wonders, briefly, what the hell they’d been waiting for; what took them so long.
“Morning, sunshine,” he greets her, voice a little rough, eyes a little dark, and how in the world had she failed to notice the way he’d been slipping, the way his skin had lost its color, the way the bruises sunk deeper, darker on his flesh? Because seeing him, the hunter green of his grease-marked polo pulling out the lingering sallowness, the deep tissue damage in olive-tones, the sleepless half-circles beneath his eyes; suddenly, it’s all very clear where it was muted, vague before -- though it shouldn’t have been. It’s obvious, now: the touch of stress, the toll it had taken on him as he suffered in silence for so long, too long; even as she can see the way the color’s coming back, the thickness of his skin, the glow -- it’s unmistakable.
She follows him as he approaches the table, and tries not dwell on why she hadn’t noticed, why she hadn’t let herself notice; the whys make her feel dizzy, and she’s not ready for them yet.
He slides a plate across the tabletop to settle in front of the chair she’s standing behind, that’s holding her steady. “Most important meal of the day,” he notes airily; she stares at the stack of pancakes -- a little lopsided, cut at strange angles, none of them quite circular -- swimming in a pool of syrup and topped with enough whipped cream to make her wonder why, exactly, he has quite so much of it on hand.
With a start, she realizes that a week ago, she wouldn’t have wanted to know; now, she kind of wishes she did. Wishes she had the intimate knowledge herself as to why, exactly, Tony possessed enough of the stuff on hand to transform her pile of flapjacks into a mountain of snow.
The heat at her center surges for a moment at the thoughts, the images that come to mind, and she coughs to cover a gasp; he doesn’t notice the slip as she pulls out the chair and sits, crosses her legs above the knee: too high, too tight.
“And look,” he adds, more to break the silence, to smooth whatever is making this different -- like it’s illusive, like they don’t know what’s changed. “No berries. No berries of any kind,” and indeed, they are completely berry-free, her pancakes -- made from scratch, she can tell, with two hands that could figure anything out; the scent of burnt batter that lingers under the saccharine of syrup and cream betrays the effort he tries to hide in the casual set of his shoulders, the way he leans, almost sprawls in the chair opposite her. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Hmmm, caution,” she comments idly as she knives off the corner of the oddly-triangular pancake at the top of her stack, playing into his attempt at cutting through the tension; she’s known him long enough to understand what he’s trying to do, what he wants. “Restraint. How very unlike you.” She smiles a little as his brows angle, just a tad; he raises a halting finger at her, rising and retreating into the kitchen again, and in his absence she does her best to be discreet about pushing the bulk of the whipped cream into the syrup that’s soaking the bottom cake, watching it mingle and dissolve, hoping he doesn’t notice when he sits back down.
She feels him approach from behind her, and it sends a thrill down her spine, the warmth and the weight of his presence at her back, the way the inside of his arm brushes her shoulder as he reaches around her and place a glass of orange juice at the top of her plate. “Aren’t you having any?” she asks, craning her neck to meet his eyes.
He shrugs, avoiding her gaze, and something in her tightens when her murmurs; “M’not hungry.”
“Did you already eat?”
His gaze is level, hooded, and he barely skims the her line of sight when he speaks: “Haven’t had much of an appetite, lately.”
And without warning, she can feel the heat, the hints of pleasure and promise start to drain away, replaced with cold, with shame.
“Because of...” she trails off, and she doesn’t need to say anything more, nor does he -- the way he fingers at the dulled-glow of the reactor beneath his shirt, drumming at the center and circling idly round the edges; it’s all the answer she needs.
After everything, he’d wanted to get home, run further diagnostics on the new implant; on the flight back they’d talked for a while, brief little snippets of conversation as the jet sped westward through the night -- they’d both dozed between stilted words and awkward half-explanations about palladium and blood poisoning; but when he’d fallen asleep in his chair, just across from her, the deep ‘v’ of his undershirt had shifted, revealed the lines he hadn’t meant for her to see -- smoky grids etched into him, centering at his chest, drawn against his heart; and in that instant, with certainty and the hollow weight of almost and so close bearing down upon her, she understood the gravity of what had nearly happened.
She’d almost lost him; and she’d have never gotten the chance to say goodbye.
The tears had been unavoidable, and if she’d broken down, if she’d stretched her feet out over the space between them, her ankles brushing the arm of his chair until she could feel the cadence, the heat of his breath as he slept against window -- well, it couldn’t have been helped; in truth, she figures, it had been a long time in coming. And while the details were still fuzzy, the basic outline was all she needed, all she required to know that there was really only one question she had left to ask.
“Would you have told me?” her voice cracks, almost fades into nothing; if any sound save both their breaths had existed in that moment, her words would have been lost.
He doesn’t reply, not at first; stares past her, at a point that doesn’t exist and isn’t her -- could never be her -- and that hurts, if she’s honest. She understands it, but it hurts.
“Not if I could’ve helped it,” he finally answers, and she bites her lip as the truth she’d feared suddenly becomes the truth she can’t deny, thick and heavy, suffocating. She turns away, opposite from where he looks beyond her, as if it’ll help, like it would create distance -- make it hurt a little less.
“But Pepper?” The feel of his hand draped, splayed over hers cracks something in her; it’s a tender kind of touch, one she’d never bothered to image coming from him, and in that moment, she knows she should have. She should have bothered to imagine it.
It kills her, to think that it had taken so little to shake her faith in him.
“I don’t think I could have helped it for much longer.”
And while she stares, stone-faced for the longest time, still and sure as she looks into him and reads the things he doesn’t want her to see, but that he can’t keep from her -- won’t keep from her, not anymore -- she starts to crumble inside. And she knows the sharp hiss, the way she inhales quick through her teeth against the sting in her chest, the pain that resonates in her lungs as the air hits -- she knows that it burns in him too, and not just from the way that he flinches a little, the corners of his eyes drawn up in creases at the sound.
Because to hear him say it; admit to it -- good god, but he must have been half-dead already.
“Damnit, Tony,” she curses, hard; but her voice wavers, and any venom, anything left of the bitterness, the hurt seeps away prematurely, until all she has left is the terror, the seizing at the center her chest that trembled when he’d said the words -- dying, for pity’s sake; he’d been dying -- and she realizes that even with the drones, and the explosions, the death and destruction and the flying and the falling and the kiss; and his metal clad hands on her arms, replaced by the roughness, the dry lines of his skin; she realizes, suddenly, that the tremor in her chest was still there, still strong: the culmination of all the wondering, the worrying, all the things she’d brushed aside because she’d been preoccupied, too busy, too careless -- because the possibilities had made her stomach clench and her heart race and she couldn’t do it anymore.
And then she thinks about it, the things she’d been trying like hell to keep in the back corners, the dark places of her mind: thinks about finding him, cold on the floor of his workshop; about the cool, calculating tone of Jarvis calling her cell and telling her, calmly and without emotion, that he’d lost a read on Mr. Stark’s vitals, that emergency medical services had already been contacted, and would she please make haste in returning to the mansion. She thinks of him alone, thinks of the last thing he’d ever see being lights and metal -- nothing warm, nothing that cared, that felt...
She closes her eyes and tries to breathe through the lump, the pull in her throat as she sees, burned behind her eyes by nightmares and guilt, the flickering of his arc implant on that rooftop: ice-blue blinking, shivering in and out of existence -- the way his heart had followed suit beneath her touch when she’d found him, fluttering wildly and faint; she sees it as it goes out, fades to black forever, and if she manages to stifle a sob, it would be a miracle; if she fails, she doesn’t notice.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, brings her back to the present where he’s at her side, watching her, alive, though it had been a close thing. The words are like a rumble, a hum, and when he strokes his thumb across her the curve of her wrist, she knows he has to catch her pulse, the rhythm of it; the massage of his touch, though, is steady, and she tries to focus on it, tries to anchor herself to it without giving in to the fear so that she has a touchstone, something to fall back on when she looks up and finally meets his eyes: sharp, wide and honest like she’s never seen them before.
“Your breakfast is getting cold.” He scoots his chair closer to her, until his knee bumps up against hers, his thigh just a breath from her own. He grabs for her fork, uses the side to saw off a slice of that bottom, syrup-doused pancake before he skewers it, lifts it to his mouth with delicate, careful purpose -- proving something that she reads, that she knows; that lets the lead, the cold in her chest dissipate, just a little. “Mmm, still good. But cold.”
“I should have noticed,” she interrupts suddenly, the words seeming to spring forth from her and catch in the air, in his throat as he swallows hard around the bite of food. “You were quiet, you weren’t eating...” she gestures at the plate, the prongs of the fork he’s drawing from his mouth, her voice pitched higher, growing just a little bit hysterical as it all piles on top of itself, as it finally adds up and starts to make terrible, horrifying, utterly perfect sense. “You smelled like plants, and half the time it takes bribery to get you to finish a salad,” she adds, and he grins a little, the expression oddly, painfully haunted as his eyes flicker between her and her glass of juice. “You sold the...” and her voice abandons her, and she knows if she goes much farther she’ll burst into tears; that the pressure at the base of her throat -- throbbing and sore -- will erupt, escape, and she’ll have no recourse. “And the suit...”
The signs; so many signs -- and she’d missed every one of them. Overlooked them. Wrote them off. The man, the person she knew best in the entire world; he’d been dying and she hadn’t even noticed.
What kind of person did that make her?
Before she can stop them, reign them in, tears start well at the corners of her eyes; she shuts them, blinks hard against it, breathes deep until her heartbeats feel separate again -- quick but distinct -- instead of a single, endless, frantic hum.
“I should have known,” she finally forces through the clench of her jaw, emotion thick in her tone, and he’s quiet for a moment, until she opens her eyes and meets his gaze; and she can see the gentleness, the warmth -- the way his heart comes up and fills his eyes just a little, just enough. She can see him take pity on her, on the guilt that’s swallowing her whole, and she doesn’t deserve it, not now; but that doesn’t matter -- nothing matters, except the way he reaches out to rest his palm at the back of her neck, threading his fingers in the hair at the base of her skull and drawing her close, breathing against her cheek.
“I should have known that, of all the things in the world, you were allergic to strawberries,” he counters plainly, the words calm and steady, sure; so much more than just themselves. And it’s enough.
He draws back after a moment, the hand on her neck moving to slide soft across her jaw, cupping her cheek as he reaches over and grabs her fork again, stabs at another hunk of cold pancake and offers it to her -- and somehow, whatever else the gesture could be, it’s only endearing. Only tender and unsure.
She leans in and takes the proffered bite between her teeth, and the smile he gives her makes it taste all the sweeter.
“They were delicious, by the way,” he says softly as she chews, swallows; but there’s a light in his eyes: something like hope and fear and all of the maybes that he’d never quite learned to let go of. “The strawberries. Probably the best I’ve ever had.”
She laughs, and whatever was broken -- it starts to feel fixed.
“Maybe...” she starts after a pause, after his touch is gone; tentative for the first time in his presence since the first week she’d spent in his employ, hesitant because she’s failed him, somehow -- and sure, they’ve failed each other over the years, but this is different. He could have died.
She takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and lays her hand over his this time, keeps him close, and safe, and makes a silent promise that this -- whatever it is they’re doing, building, making between them two of them; whatever this is, she’s not going to fail him again.
Because she can read it in his eyes: he’s trying like hell not to fail her.
“Maybe once all this blows over, once we fix everything,” and she sees it, the little glimmer, the flicker of life in him that sparks when she says ‘we,’ and she smiles softly over at him, lets the curve of her lips untangle the nerves, the strain in coiled tight in his bones. “Maybe then, Venice.”
“Yeah,” his answer comes after a beat, a breath; and finally -- finally -- he sounds like himself. “Yeah, Venice.”
She finishes her pancakes -- soggy and too sweet -- but it’s not such a burden; more like a joy.
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Conversation Two: Deflect and Absorb
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