June 1, 2065: A Week Full of Change Who: Allie and Kieran When: Morning Where: Their suite
Allie came to with the sun on her face. She’d forgotten to roll the blinds closed the night before and now she was catching a full ray right against her eyelids, bathing her brain in red light. She rolled away from it and encountered her e-reader, which pushed her even further toward consciousness.
She groped for the thin piece of hardware and pulled it out from under the covers, eyes still closed. Somehow she managed to set it onto the bedside table without even looking. She could smell the open wine bottle and it caused her stomach to heave and roll over dangerously. She swallowed thickly, becoming aware of how bad her mouth tasted. Oh god, I’m going to be sick.
Her eyes snapped open and Allie sat up. Kieran was indeed in the bed with her, but she didn’t have the time to spare that any thoughts. She fumbled with the blankets for a moment but she managed to free herself. After rolling off the side of the bed and landing on the balls of her feet, she made the long trek around the massive piece of furniture to make it to the en suite bathroom.
The bathroom was blessedly cool and Allie realized that her new husband threw off a lot of heat when he slept. She had enough time to slide the door closed behind her before dropping to her knees in front of the bowl. Her stomach lurched a couple more times but the painful truth was just that there was nothing to come up. She folded her arms over the seat and rested her head on them. When was the last time she had eaten something? Not the night before. And she’d been asleep when her handler had come for her, so she hadn’t had breakfast either. And she hadn’t eaten the night before. Yet she’d drank a bottle and a half of wine all to herself. “Stupid,” she mumbled to herself into the bowl, the word echoing off the porcelain.
Kieran was not a morning person, and that was actually an understatement. The light coming in through the blinds hadn't troubled him at all as he lay on his stomach on his side of the bed, both arms down at his sides and the covers shoved down to his waist to reveal his broad, muscled back. Despite being in a strange place, he'd slept well, which was a great testimony to the comfort of the bed, most likely. He wasn't disturbed by Allie's mad dash for the bathroom, didn't hear the door slide closed or the toilet seat clank up. It would have been hard to say what woke him, since it was earlier than he liked to get up, but gradually he felt himself coming to awareness.
He turned his head away from the window, his eyes barely slitted open, and relaxed when he saw he was alone in the room. He saw that the bathroom door was closed and figured that was where Allie was. He sighed, trying to decide if getting up and going to pee in the other bathroom was worth the trouble, or if he should just stay put a while longer.
The idea of eating brought another roll of nausea but Allie knew she was going to have to. Sighing, she got up and wiped a hand over the back of her mouth. For the sake of her tastebuds, she quickly whisked her toothbrush around her mouth. Then, for good measure and fortification, she splashed some water on her face. She could recall Kieran just fine. Who knew if today would be any better?
Sighing, she flicked off the light and stepped back out into the bedroom. She glanced at the bed and saw that he was still in it, facing her now with his eyes closed. She didn't disturb him. Instead, she slipped into the dining room where some breakfast was waiting. Just some scrambled eggs and sausages, fresh cheesy biscuits. Allie sat and looked at the food, wondering where the safest place to start might be.
After Allie had left the room, Kieran got up with a sigh and headed into the bathroom himself. He'd wanted to go back to sleep, but his bladder demanded otherwise. While he was in there, he washed up and raked his damp hands through his hair, which was short enough not to be too messy. Damn, it was going to be a long-ass day getting up this early, he thought with another sigh. He was already feeling a little bit stir-crazy, and he wondered whose bright idea a week of complete isolation indoors had been. He wandered back into the bedroom and pulled on the running shorts he'd discarded the night before, then stood and stared out the window for a few minutes. Still raining, he saw.
He couldn't decide if he should drop to the floor and do some push ups or if he should go have some breakfast and exercise later. After a bit more indecision, he huffed out yet another sigh and headed into the next room. His gaze darted in Allie's direction but he didn't comment as he grabbed a mug and began fixing himself some coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream... the only way it was drinkable in his opinion.
Allie looked up when Kieran came in the room and was struck once again by the sheer size of him. He completely filled the doorway for a second, or that's the way it seemed. When he went about pouring himself a coffee, Allie blinked and realized she'd been so distracted by the food on her plate (which she hadn't had the fortitude of guts to touch as of yet) that she'd forgotten all about coffee. "Would you mind..." she started, pausing to clear some of the sleep-grit out of her voice, "pouring me a cup? Um, I take it with cream and sugar." She didn't sound entitled, she felt too wrong to be entitled. She just didn't think she could get up and make her own way over there without stumbling into the table or overturning the coffee pot.
It was probably fortunate that Kieran wasn't all that alert yet and probably wouldn't be for a while; otherwise, he might very well have snapped out something like What, I've gotta be your slave now, too? To no one's surprise, he could be quite the ass when he wanted to be. After taking another quick glance at her, he did as she asked without protesting. She didn't look all that hot, actually. He didn't put as much cream or sugar into her cup as he did his, since he was aware that most people liked to be able to taste the coffee. Once he had both cups ready, he brought them over to the table, setting hers at her placemat before putting his own down and grabbing a plate. "What's the matter with you?" he inquired as he began loading it up.
"Rough couple of days," she answered as she sipped the mug, wrapping both hands around it to keep it steady. The program sprang for really good coffee. It was one of those luxury products that were getting harder to find as poor rural communities fell prey in masses to Grangers. "Good coffee," she complimented him. He'd added just the right amount of fixings to her mug for her taste. "What about you, did you sleep alright?"
He had seemed to. She didn't even remember him coming in the night before. If he'd tossed and turned, she hadn't felt it in the least.
"Great," Kieran replied when she asked how he'd slept. He didn't think he'd moved more than once or twice during the night, and that qualified as a great sleep. It had taken him at least a month, maybe even six weeks after his dad had died not to startle awake at the slightest sound as he'd done for so long, concerned that the man might need something or-- blackest horror of all-- be dying right then. Once in a while, he still woke up and thought foggily, Is he dead yet? Once he had a ton of food on his plate, he dug in, savoring the smells and tastes of hot food that someone else had prepared. If they were going to be fed like this the whole time, he'd absolutely have to exercise more.
Allie watched him tuck into his meal and it brought a smile to her face. "So you're the kind of guy who likes a big breakfast, huh?" Her own plate, though it had a bit of everything on it, it didn't have much of everything. She broke off a hunk of her cheese biscuit and chewed on it, as though testing the waters with her stomach. Normally, she'd be eating with just as much enthusiasm as he was, but today she just couldn't trust her stomach.
She had noticed he hadn't acknowledged her tiny compliment about the coffee, and so she had tried to open up the "getting to know you" conversation again with something innocuous, like food. These were things she was going to have to know, right? Allie liked to cook. She envisioned herself being the main food-preparer in their new home. She was, she had to admit, dying to know how he saw himself fitting into this future. His bitterness the day before hadn't completely left her mind, though. She was prepared to get nowhere, maybe even to be verbally abused again. However, she told herself, she wouldn't accept that indefinitely.
Kieran, his mouth full of food, gave her a wry, slightly raised eyebrows look. He thought it was fairly obvious from looking at him that he ate large amounts quite frequently. Once he'd chewed and swallowed, he said, "Yep." He didn't really have it in him to be openly hostile this early in the morning. "Guess you don't." He shoveled in another forkful of sausage. He would have been taken aback if he'd known she was mulling over their future together right then; it wasn't something he'd even considered yet. He was actually wondering how he was going to get through the week, and in all fairness, that wasn't entirely attributable to her. It was more the whole situation, and his feeling that maybe he should have thought more carefully about it before he'd agreed to honor his dad's request.
Allie gave him a smile that seemed to bring a bit more life into her face. "Not true, usually. Well," she chuckled, "you've got me on sheer size and probably storage capacity but I'm usually a good eater. My mother's side was Italian and they had the money to spend. My grandmother was as thin as my pinky and a genius in the kitchen. My grandfather was as big as a house." She chuckled faintly and sipped her coffee. It felt good to talk about her family, if only because Kieran was too busy eating to wander off and do something else.
Kieran wasn't much of a talker first thing. He was the sort of person who grunted and made noncommittal sounds until at least ten or eleven a.m. and shuffled around bleary-eyed and mildly sullen, as if in resentment of the morning itself. Did he really have a wife who was going to talk a mile a minute the second their eyes opened? If he'd been inclined to wonder about such things, he might have questioned the validity of the program's matching abilities. "Mm-hmm," he replied, wondering if he could request some pop along with the breakfast coffee and orange juice. He watered his coffee down too much to get much of its caffeinated benefits.
Allie wasn't dumb. She was a doctor, after all. She could see past her personal misery to see that Kieran wasn't completely revived for the day yet. She decided to hold her tongue for a while, sipped her coffee and nudged her eggs around her plate. She forced herself to nibble, chew, eat slowly and get some valuable and desperately needed nutrition into her body. When ten minutes or so had passed, she decided to try to make yet another overture. "I'm sorry if I'm acting...I dunno, needy, in any way. My boss was killed the other day in a riot." Her throat felt tight just saying it out loud. "I'm taking it kind of hard. He was a good friend."
In the silence, Kieran had cleaned his plate and gotten up to pour himself a huge glass of orange juice before sitting back down again. He'd been thinking that this was damned awkward and wondering why the program folks did it this way: marrying people off to strangers and then leaving them for a week with no other company. Maybe he'd be able to find that out eventually, somehow, once they could go elsewhere in the complex besides just here. Allie's words caught his attention, made mild surprise wash over his features for a few seconds. He hadn't been expecting that somehow. "Sorry to hear that," he said. He wasn't sure what else he could say to her, so he thought he'd leave it at that. Excess words might come across as insincere.
She managed a little smile that didn't tremble one bit, no matter the fact that she had the strangest urge to throw her arms around him and cry. She didn't like to think about the fact that she had no one to really do that with. She had hoped that he would be the person she could rely on for that sort of purge but she was getting the sense that it wasn't going to be the case. Not right away, anyway. Still, she'd seen the surprise and his words actually held a hint of sincerity. "Thanks," she said, keeping it simple as she picked up one of the small links of breakfast sausage on her plate to nibble at it. It was cold now but she honestly thought they were better that way anyway. "I guess it's just a week full of change." She heaved a sigh and chanced another glance at him.
Even back in the days before his dad had gotten sick, Kieran had never been the sort of person that truly warmed to others immediately. He could be glib and superficially charming under optimum circumstances, but it took longer for him to feel comfortable with another person to the point of opening up. Now he felt stunted by trauma, tempted to close himself off and not risk more pain after losing the only person he'd had left. It didn't occur to him that others could have the same type of emotional wounds he did, and that there was strength in numbers. Everything was still too fresh. "Guess so," he replied, his tone relatively neutral. Try a year of change, and all of it bad, he thought sourly.
Allie sighed and abandoned the meat. She contented herself to pick at the cheese biscuits, washing them down slowly with her coffee. "I'm gonna check my messages and then try out the big tub in the other bathroom," she told him. She didn't know why she felt the need to report her actions to him. She wanted privacy while she went through her emails or logs but she didn't really think he would let her. Nothing about him seemed to fall under the category of "agreeable" so far.
She got up and set her plate aside to be cleaned up later. She snagged her toiletries off of the en suite counter and made her way back into the bedroom, just in case he wanted to make use of the other room and be undisturbed.
Kieran slanted a glance at her, wondering why she'd felt moved to give him her schedule of the next little while. "Okay," he said, then turned his eyes to his nearly empty juice glass, frowning at it as he wondered why he suddenly felt bad, almost crying bad. That wasn't an indulgence he allowed himself all that often, and he fought it away as Allie went into the other room, schooling his face back into a blank neutral. Maybe when she went to the bathroom at the other end of the suite for her bath, he should go shower. Just standing beneath the flow of water for a while might help. It was too soon after eating to exercise, and he couldn't think of anything else he wanted to do. Except go home. Hell. He scrubbed his hands over his face with a heavy sigh, trying to get up the energy to get up from his chair.
With her little bathroom case in one hand and a thick terrycloth towel draped over her other arm, Allie slipped back through the dining room. She flashed a close-lipped smile at Kieran but she saw that the heels of his hands were pressed over his eyes. It was a posture of exhaustion and maybe a little bit of denial. It was almost interesting, but she didn't dare comment on it. If he ever wanted to talk to her - which she was beginning to doubt - he would do so on his own.
She didn't hang around.
When the bathroom door closed on the empty living room, Allie sighed. Man, she couldn't deny the relief she felt at putting some space between herself and Kieran. And a locked door. She cranked on the hot water for the tub and went around prepping the room. She hung up her robe on the back of the door and moved the fluffy towels over beside the tub, along with a face cloth. She marveled at the fact that her whole body hurt. She couldn't wait to get into the steaming water and let the jets pummel away some of her unease and stress. Things hard to get better, right? He'd have to talk to her eventually. Until then, she'd just try to stay out of his way.
Kieran got up once Allie had passed through and moved into the bathroom off the master bedroom, stripping down and getting into the shower. He quickly took care of the perfunctory motions of washing and rinsing himself and then stood there for a short while, one shoulder leaned against the wall of the shower, just letting the water pour over his head. With his eyes closed, it almost seemed like he could be anywhere. Once he felt less agitated and less uneasy, he shut the water off and toweled himself off, then went into the bedroom to put on sweatpants and a t-shirt.
It was still raining, and he decided to lie down on the bed, facing the window, and watch it despite the fact that it wasn't good to eat a meal and then lie down. Right then, he didn't care. He might doze off and he might not, and it didn't matter. It wasn't as if there was anything else to do, anyway.