Who: Erin and Colt What: Truths Where: Aubade When: Immediately after this Warnings: None
Get over here, Erin.
Colt didn’t put the phone away after he sent the text, having taken the elevator back downstairs. Instead, he held it in his fist as he took one lurching step forward, then another, then another. Step, drag. Step, drag. Step, drag.
Woman, answer me.
He told himself the stops, the small bits of rest with shoulder against wall, were for texting - not out of any need to rest, to take weight off his bad leg. Step, drag. Step, drag. Step, drag. He thought about the fact that he’d turned down amputation, turned down the supports that would remove pain (but leave him visibly deformed with screws and metals), turned down even the temporary casing that would allow him to move without bending his knee. He’d done it all for the sake of appearances, and for what?
Dammit.
In his pocket, the small cardboard box had been kept safe from the fall, and he touched it with fingers over fabric, a touchstone beneath denim. He wondered if the boy had abilities, wondered if he would turn mad, wondered if he would be ashamed of his father, ashamed the way Colt was of his father. Wondered if his own father would write the boy letters if he knew about him, if he’d beg his grandson to free him the way Colt had refused to. Step, drag. Step, drag. Step, drag.
Erin had a lovely morning since she’d gotten a great deal of sleep, but she’d had unpleasant dreams the night before about the plants she couldn’t coax into prosperity. There was a voicemail on her phone from her father that she kept putting off, and she buried herself head first in work the moment she’d felt clean and fresh enough to do so, somewhere around dawn. She was just returning from a business lunch with two heads of various private schools in the area, in which they advised her of a great many pitfalls that awaited her, both financial and otherwise, when she received Byron’s first text.
She really did hate it when he called her “woman,” and the contrast with the implied demand and when he actually said her name was so profound that whenever the latter occurred her insides predictably melted into warm butter. She was aware of the failing (as she viewed it) and the fact that the one reminded her of the other made her grouchy enough to ignore the first imperious text, and the second.
She stopped in the lobby of Aubade, which she hadn’t been aware she was going to visit until thirty seconds ago, and was typing a response on her Blackberry when the third text (the expletive) came through. Gritting her teeth (to the guard’s amusement) she persevered. I’m working.
Colt had managed to get halfway down the hall by the time she deigned to text him, and he was ornery as hell about it. He stopped, back against the wall, shoulders used for support against the opulent support, his cane dropped somewhere between the elevator and his current position. Fine.
This caused Erin to purse her lips in irritation. She started to drift toward the elevator, concentrating on the phone. The guard, who had overheard more of Erin and Colt’s shouting matches from noise complaints and passing observation, was still pretty damn amused over there behind his desk. He didn’t know Colt as much as he knew Erin, who went in and out at least twice a day. The elevator doors almost closed on her since she was concentrating on the little keyboard: What is it?
Colt didn’t reply. Now he was sore and angry. He’d asked for help, which he hated doing, and she hadn’t responded how he’d expected. He had no idea she was in the building, and no realization that he didn’t sound in anyway out of the ordinary in the texts. So, he finished making his way to the door, unaware she was in the opposite elevator, and he yanked it open angrily and slammed it just as angrily.
Erin heard the door slam right as the elevator doors swept open, phone still in hand, and there wasn’t anyone else that lived close enough to make the door echo like that. Alarmed now--because Colt didn’t have a reason to be outside of the apartment, to her knowledge--Erin caught her purse right as it slid off her shoulder and she ran straight to the door and threw it open. “Colt!”
Colt was partway across the living room, cursing himself for having left the cane behind, and he didn’t turn around when the door opened. Instead, he finished his lurching walk to the well-worn chair that sat alone in the center of the room, and he let himself fall into it with a sound that was a cross between a groan and yell. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and he pointed the way he’d come. “The woman on the fifth floor needs help.”
Erin skidded to a stop three feet in the door and nearly missed a table. Her eyes were a little wide, but they started narrowing and narrowing fast. “What? What woman? What’s wrong with you?!” She was alarmed, staring at him, half-dressed, obviously in a lot of pain. “What happened?”
He shifted in the chair, hearing her skid to stop. “Don’t kill yourself on a damn table, woman,” he said, but there wasn’t any ire in it. “Woman on the fifth floor. Her name’s Joss, and she’s crazy as they come,” he told her. He turned his head, and he looked at her, and the corner of his mouth quirked into a smile at how her eyes went wide and then narrow. “Quit looking adorable and go call some help for the woman,” he told her, sounding calmer after looking at her for a moment longer.
Erin didn’t move. “How the hell do you know the woman on the fifth floor?” She didn’t sound as alarmed now, and not so scared, now only confused--not yet angry, as her eyes loosened at the edges where they usually crinkled.
“Woman, are you going to go check on her or not?” he asked, but he was reaching a hand out to her at the same time, motioning her forward, completely unaware of the contradiction between word and action.
Erin dropped her chin, hit two buttons and called someone she obviously had on speed-dial. “Larry? Hello, it’s Erin upstairs. Yes. Fine, thank you.” A second. “Can you check up on someone on the fifth floor, please. Have you--oh, you saw... oh. Yes, please. Yes.” She ended the call.
Erin stood solid and still for a few seconds there, looking down at the phone, and then at him, at his loose-limbed slump. “What were you doing downstairs?”
“I was in the mailroom,” he told her, and he stretched his bad leg out in front of him with a groan. “Damn crazy woman ran into me. You coming over here, or aren’t you?” he asked, and he sounded tired, that sort of bone tired that prevented even yelling. He was still clammy, sweat-damp around the face from the trek from the elevator, and it showed on his face as much as the pain did. “Bring me a few pills along the way,” he said, and he didn’t even look toward the office or the kitchen, where the pills were kept; he knew Erin had been over this apartment, and he knew she’d know where he kept damn near everything.
“What were you doing in the mail room without a shirt on?” She didn’t look straight at his eyes, apparently distracted by the sound of his voice and the way he wasn’t sitting upright. Honestly disturbed, but unwilling to do more than ask questions, she turned and moved rapidly through the next room as was out of sight in the kitchen, opening cupboards.
“Woman, why do you ask so many questions?” he asked, because women always did. Just when a man wanted something, they wanted to ask about things, and think about things, and feel about things. Why couldn’t she just bring herself over to him with those long legs and something for pain?
No reply until she came back into the main room and surveyed him on the chair in the middle of the room. She handed over a glass half-full with water and exactly the number of pills that the label dictated as a dose. “You’re not going to tell me?” Now she didn’t sound so confused. She put effort into trying to sound composed, and came off as distant.
He dragged the small box out of his pocket and he started to give it to her, but when he saw the number of pills in her hand he drew his own hand back. “Not if you’re only planning on giving me two of those,” he said, and he groaned when he shifted. “Reach me the phone, Erin,” he said a moment later, after he’d taken a few long seconds to settle after moving.
Erin, expression forcibly composed, wordlessly held out her own phone. “Here. The bottle says two.” She didn’t bring the bottle with her, those pills were all that she’d brought, and since she sat down on the arm of his chair--with a certain metaphorical distance--she wasn’t planning on getting more. She was waiting for an answer to her questions, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
He took the two pills as a start, though he intended to get more once those kicked in, and he dialed as he swallowed them down. He didn’t greet the man on the other end of the line, didn’t waste time on niceties. “I took a fall,” he said, not even bothering with his name, and then he was quiet a second. “Fine.” He held the phone back out to her, and he looked up at her face. “What?” he asked, not liking that expression on her face, unsure if it was pity or not. “My cane is in the hallway,” he added, the statement sounding like an order. Still, he sounded tired, pained, and his skin was even more pasty cold at this distance. The box, the one he’d almost handed her earlier, was clutched between his fingers again. “I met Joss years ago,” he admitted. “She was damn nuts then too.”
Erin reached out for whatever was in his hand, completely thoughtless, mostly because she didn’t think that anything was really outside of her reach. As she reached she was careful not to shift her weight into his lap, a very conscious effort. The phone ended up in her opposite pocket; she didn’t look at the number, since she knew who it was. She didn’t move to go get the cane, she just looked at him.
He didn’t let go of the small box, but he didn’t pull it out of her fingers either. He closed his eyes again, and he tugged her a little closer without taking her weight onto his lap. “I’m not opening my damn mouth until you say something,” he told her stubbornly. She knew he’d fallen, and he knew about Joss, and he knew Joss was insane. It wasn’t like he hadn’t told her anything. Difficult woman.
“Why did you go outside?” she said again, frowning a little as if discovering a toothache. She came closer but still didn’t slide off the arm, watching his eyes, pulling at the box. Erin liked boxes. More, she liked knowing what was inside boxes. Especially boxes in Colt’s possession, because they were always interesting, and they always said something about him she didn’t know before.
He chuckled when she tugged at the box, that one small action making him feel better than he had since he’d taken the spill on the main floor of the building. He didn’t let it go; he just kept exerting enough pressure to keep her from taking it. The box was important to him, but the expression on her face as she tugged at the tiny thing was unbelievably endearing to him. He didn’t have words for it, didn’t have a definition, but it made him feel protective and possessive all at once, and if he didn’t feel like he did, she would have ended up in his lap then. “The doorman called about the box, and I didn’t want to wait for him to bring it to the door.”
Erin always acquired the same expression when Colt put obstacles in her way, a very different expression, interestingly, from when he confounded her verbally. She tugged again, not hard enough to jerk it out of his grip, and then she stopped pulling--yet unwilling to let it go. “That was very foolish, Colt,” she said, disapprovingly.
The disapproving tone made his eyes narrow and go sharp, even through the pain, and he tugged the box free of her grip. “I don’t need you lecturing me like I’m some damn invalid who can’t take an elevator one floor to the mailroom,” he said, teeth gritted and pride thick in every word. His expression closed off, and he put the box back in his pocket. It was a testament to how much the sentence had bothered him that he didn’t yell at her about it.
Erin’s mouth compressed when he took her box away, and she stared at his pocket for a moment before she said anything else. “...You fell,” she pointed out, speaking now into his eyes. She worked her fingers one by one and then folded them on one of her knees. Sober teal today, pants and not a skirt. Restrained.
The movement of her fingers and that sober look wasn’t going to sway him. He was hurt, hurt in the way that you didn’t forget after, even if you managed to smile through it without the emotion ever reaching your eyes. This is why he didn’t tell her about his limitations, because he was afraid of this - of being treated like a damn invalid who couldn’t walk from point A to point B. “I texted you to help Joss, not to help me,” he said, his expression hard as stone, cold and hurt as he looked away from her.
“It doesn’t sound like Joss needs me,” she said, seriously, not understanding why he was withdrawing so much. “You do, because you don’t take care of yourself very well.” She reached out a hand, not for the box, but for his jaw. She just touched it, not roughly.
“I don’t need a nurse, woman,” He said, and he didn’t look at her, even when her hand touched his jaw. It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong implication, that he needed her. He wanted her, cared about her; she drove him damn insane, and she was an infuriatingly gorgeous woman, one who didn’t even realize what she did to him. But he didn’t need her, and she wasn’t his damn nurse, and he wasn’t some damn invalid.
Every woman likes being needed. Nobody had ever needed Erin before. She didn’t know to worry that he might only want her as a nurse; it never occurred to her that she might just be convenient company. He was too sour for that. Slowly, she drew her hand back. She was slightly hurt but she wasn’t precisely sure why. Trying to push it away, she frowned. “No, not unless you run yourself up and down however-many-floors to the mail room.” She criticized him all the time. She didn’t see how this series of criticisms were all that different, except he was always prickly when he did something stupid and stubborn.
“Erin,” he said, and he looked back at her with eyes gone serious, intense through the pain that was starting to throb from his shin to his thigh, “I want you to be my woman, not my DAMN NURSE.” He yelled the last, and he yelled it loud.
So far they had had a very level conversation. She was aware that Colt had fits of temper and that he yelled quite a lot, but she was usually able to understand his moods with a good degree of accuracy. Not this time. The even sentence finished by the shout, so close physically, didn’t just startle her, it scared her. It was a very brief flash in her eyes, and a moment later she was on her feet and a couple inches back. She frowned at him. “Stop calling me woman and shouting at me.”
“Stop treating me like a damn invalid,” he replied, not backing down. It wasn’t loud, not like before, not yelling or growling, but it was a determined sentence. He wasn’t backing down, not on this one. He couldn’t have her around if she didn’t see him as a man, if she thought of him as some sick cripple she needed to take care of. “I don’t want that from you.”
“I wasn’t. I was treating you like an adult who should know better.” She stared at him from the long distance between them, a distance she felt he put there, not her. She crossed her arms over her ribs, unmistakeably defensive.
“Who should know better than to walk down the hall?” he asked defensively. “Dammit, Erin, this is important to me. Quit being so damned stubborn about it, and quit talking down to me.” He said it like there was an ultimatum in the phrase; it was there, behind the words, in his eyes and in the way he held his jaw, proud and pained.
Not relenting, though she slowed, a little, in her pursuit, and took the time to build up her defenses a little higher. She inched slightly back. “It’s important to me too. You tell me what to do all the time for my own safety, how come I can’t do the same to you?” She indulged in the relatively modern phrase at the risk of sounding ten years old again.
“I don’t treat you like a damn child, Erin, but you’re treating me like one.” He looked away from her, looking out the window in the distance again. He didn’t know how to explain it to her, how to make her understand. “I don’t need a nurse,” he repeated, sounding tired. It was the only way he knew to put it into words, the only way he knew to tell her that she was making him feel broken, crippled, useless, without admitting to that emotional weakness. He needed to be a man in her eyes, not a broken boy she bossed around.
“Neither do I.” She scowled at him. “You expect me to take care of myself. Why do you get angry at me and shout when I want you to take care of yourself?” She was trying to keep her temper, because if she was angry then she wasn’t going to be hurt. He always got angry when she cared. It wasn’t fair.
“I’m not going to stay locked up in this apartment like a damn invalid. I’m trying to make changes, and I’m trying to get out there again, and I don’t need you treating me like I need to stay inside with a damn bib and pacifier, Erin. It’s not smart for me to be walking, no, but they damn well told me I couldn’t do it five years ago, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I’ve hidden in this damn apartment since I moved out here, and now I’m finally doing something again, and I’m not going to hide inside where it’s safe and fucking babyproof!” It was a tirade, but it was calm up until the end. He was making a real effort, because it was important to him that she understand this - no, it was imperative. “I need you to understand that.”
She hadn’t known he was fighting old opinions, and he never said anything about where he had been before the apartment or why he was there, and she was angry at him for throwing it at her as if she was supposed to know. “I didn’t say you had to stay in. I just said be careful.” She hadn’t just said be careful but she thought it and that should have been good enough. Her eyes were stinging and it wasn’t because she was angry. Embarrassed, she took in a breath and kept it.
“You told me it was ‘very foolish’ to take an elevator down one flight of stairs with a cane,” he argued. “How the hell was I supposed to some damn madwoman was going to run into me like hell was on her heels?” he demanded. “Dammit, Erin, can’t you quit arguing for once and listen? Life isn’t always about winning a fight.”
“It wasn’t careful,” she argued, ignoring the order not to argue. “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going and it might have been something that wasn’t a madwoman from the fifth floor.” She could see it, too. He would fall, and then he’d be so stubborn that he wouldn’t tell her he’d fallen, just like this time, and then she wouldn’t be there to help, and then he’d just be stuck there and hurt. Without a shirt. Or anybody to help. Her eyes stung again.
“Grown men don’t have to tell people where they’re going, Erin,” he said, exasperated. He saw the dampness in her eyes, and he cursed and motioned her toward him. “Get over here,” he said, voice tired. “Do you have to tell people when you walk to the damn mailroom? No, you don’t. Because normal adults don’t have to do that. Invalids have to do that. I am not an invalid. Now, come here and quit fussing.”
She resisted. As usual. "You could have fallen down the stairs," she accused, wetly, trying not to sniff and forgetting the breath she was holding that was supposed to keep the sob down. "Neither of us are normal adults! Shouting at me doesn't change it, and neither does hiding it from me until I come back and find you all hurt!" She went for a shout but she just wasn't angry enough.
He looked at her, and maybe it was the pain that made him realize that she was reacting more like a scared girl than a woman. Maybe it was the exhaustion that really wasn’t letting him concentrate on anything, or the pain that was throbbing a beat in his leg. Pulse. Pulse. Pulse. “How old are you, Erin?” he asked.
She visibly reacted to the question as she would have a blow, first the surprise, the disbelief, then the pain, and finally the retreat. She interpreted the question as rhetorical, that she was acting young and betraying her inexperience, and as with all sensitive vulnerabilities, she was quick to see an attack where there wasn't one. "Fine." Glassy eyes. "I won't say anything to you about it again. You can just--keep on--" she couldn't say it, even in defense of herself, and went silent.
“I was asking a question, Erin,” he said calmer than he’d sounded in the entire conversation. He knew age in Musings wasn’t what it was here, and there was something about the way she always needed to win an argument. “Don’t make me get out of this chair and fetch you, not when my leg’s swollen up like a balloon. Get over here.”
She was afraid that this would lead to more criticism, and she most certainly didn’t want to tell him exactly how old she was, but she was too stubborn to say either of those things. She walked back over and sat down again where she’d begun, on the arm of the chair, and the support barely shifted under her feather’s weight. Inadvertently she stared at his knee worriedly, not that there was much to see.
“It isn’t the knee. The knee’s just a bystander. It’s the bottom part,” he said, not bothering with fibula and tibia and other things that sounded medical. “And there’s arteries up top and bottom that have been bypassed,” he explained, but he didn’t go into it any more than that. He was counting on her lack of medical knowledge not to line that up with circulation and the heart and a whole slew of problems that meant she would worry more. But still, he wanted to give her candor, if he could, especially when she was looking at him like he’d kicked her puppy. “Now, I told you something true. You tell me something true.”
He was right about her medical knowledge; she didn’t have any. Doctors were only a little farther away than nuclear physicists, and she hadn’t any idea what, exactly, was below a knee beyond the shin, the ankle and the foot. Bad injuries were strains and breaks, and when people got sick it was because of too much wine or flu season. “Oh.” She looked again at his leg as if it would reveal any of this, but it didn’t. She shifted uncomfortably. “Something true like what?” The not-quite-argument was over, and they were now on uneven but neutral ground.
“About you,” he said, because he hadn’t realized until that moment that he knew next to nothing about her. Well, he might have noticed along the line, but pain and medication made him selfish, and he had that sort of surface view of life that was common to men raised roughly. He grabbed and he took and he protected, but he didn’t often think of emotions as part-and-parcel to happiness. Happiness was physical, tangible things; he was, at the end of the day, a man.
“Me?” she repeated. She looked uncomfortable. She could think of very little about herself that wasn’t on her resume that he didn’t already know--about her garden, about how she liked health food, about how she liked to win control over things. She thought about the things that he might not know; her weakness for heavy cream on scones, perhaps, or that she tried to talk her plants into health (to no avail). There were a great many things she did not want him to know; her other relationships, for example, particularly the long one in L.A., or what her mother was like--or perhaps that she spent a very long time as a child by herself, and as a consequence, rambled a great deal within the comforts of her mind. “I...” she cast around for something. “...don’t know,” she said, sighing.
He wanted another pain pill. Baring that, he wanted to drag her into the recliner in the study and close his eyes until he stopped feeling so damn exhausted, until he stopped thinking about his father and insanity and everything else he avoided like the plague. He settled for tugging her closer, until she slipped off her careful perch on the arm of the chair. “Tell me about your parents.” It was something he never talked about, but he didn’t think there could possibly be anything wrong with her parents.
Erin fluttered some at this request. A butterfly hem-haw as her eyes skipped around the room as she wondered what to tell, and then a welcome distraction as she carefully wedged herself next to his hip. She was warm and faint cocoa-scented skin. “My father works a great deal, out of L.A., with a business management firm,” she said, hedging a little. “He is very--” she touched her tongue to her lower lip thoughtfully-- “busy.” Yes, good word. “My mother stayed behind when we came here.” And this explained it all. She turned her head and looked expectantly up into his face as if this would satisfy the question and he would ask her another.
He pushed a strand of hair off her forehead. “Do you miss your mother?” he asked.
Strange question. Erin thought about it for a moment. “Sometimes I miss her face,” she said, after a little while. “She’s an actress and there are a lot of photos there of her. But not here.” She fidgeted some with her fingers, leaning a bit so she could take up some of the couch and his side. She tucked her heels up.
“Do you hate her for staying?” he asked, and there was something personal about the question, something dark and lingering and unsaid, something about being away from a parent, a parent who had abandoned you. He ran his hand down to her ankle when she tucked her heels up, his palm covered the entire slim surface of bone and skin.
She immediately stopped fidgeting and began to relax, an obvious result of the contact, and her answers came more readily. “No. I didn’t expect her to come.” She sounded mildly surprised at the thought. “She always had her career,” she told him. “It’s more important to her than anything else.” She didn’t sound angry or hateful about it. Resigned, and at most, perhaps a touch bitter. “It... might have been nice if she’d come.” Wistfully.
“How old were you?” he asked, “when you came over?” he gritted his teeth at the end of it, a pain shooting up his leg that made him shift and groan beside her. His hand on her ankle balled into a fist through the shooting pain, and then it relaxed and went limp a moment, before resuming its lazy caress. “A job shouldn’t be more important than a child.”
Erin was just trying to find a way to avoid that particular question when he moved, and Erin knew very well what pain looked like. Alarmed, she shifted her weight away as if she might inadvertently cause more damage, giving him a frightened look not unlike the one when he’d shouted suddenly at the beginning of the conversation. “Are you alright?” she ventured cautiously, searching his face.
“It just hurts, honey,” he said, catching the fear in her eyes. “It’s going to do that.” Something was different in the saying. It was almost an explanation for future occurrences, and it sounded like permanence. “Answer my question,” he went on gruffly, without waiting for her acknowledgement, acceptance or denial.
Erin hesitated. “I was... small,” she said, nodding slightly. “My father came, so I came with him. I was surprised at the time, I didn’t think that he would take me, but he did.” She slowly relaxed back into his side, watching him in case she did something to aggravate the leg, which was an arcane thing that seemed to cause pain so randomly she couldn’t predict it properly. She frowned down at it.
He watched her frown a moment, after she finished her explanation. They normally yelled at each other, so loudly and so passionately that he hadn’t ever slowed down enough to pay attention to things she didn’t quite seem to grasp. “He’s still alive, your father?” he asked, though he thought he remembered her saying as much once before. He’d never really listened, and he might forget everything he’d just learned in his next fit of temper, but right now it felt like there was something he was missing, some key piece of the puzzle.
The ongoing damage when he wasn’t just being stubborn or doing it to himself bothered her quite a lot, and so did all the pill bottles with names she didn’t understand, the ones that made him cross. She read that label very carefully before returning, because without the thin scraps of information she didn’t have any real understanding of what was wrong with him.
“Y-yes,” she said, now frowning at him as if trying to divine his reason for wanting to know. “Working. In L.A.” She had said that. She wasn’t angry, just faintly nervy about this subject, trying to hide something without being secretive, and yet oddly forthright about her parents, which clearly were not the Brady Bunch in any sense of the word. She had said her father would pay her bills, though, with great confidence.
“Erin, what the hell aren’t you telling me?” he finally asked, because her nerves, obvious as they were, indicated something. She was usually opinionated as the day was long, and this was an entirely new reaction to questions. Granted, he’d never really probed here before, but that didn’t change a damn thing.
Erin pressed her lips together in a very familiar expression and deliberately curled up closer with her head against his shoulder. “It’s your turn to tell me something,” she said, a little muffled.
He reached over and tipped her chin, his hand forceful and strong given how clammy it was right then. “Don’t shut me out,” he told her, and it was very much an order.
The brown eyes hid dismay. “I’m not,” she protested, honestly. She hadn’t lied, and she didn’t want him to not care about her or her history. But he already didn’t think very much of her and her experience (she was sure) and it didn’t help that she lost her temper around him quite a bit. “How old were you when you came over?” she asked, a little desperately, hoping there might be something there that would make him understand if she did have to tell him, or if he found out from her father.
“Five,” he told her, no hesitation, no nerviness. “I’ve been here thirty-eight years this fall. When did you come over?” he asked, noticing her desperation but not having the slightest idea why she was reacting that way. He cupped her cheek. “Woman, quit worrying about whatever the hell you’re worrying about,” he cautioned her.
“We came in 1991.” There was something there that she didn’t think he was going to like if he found out, Erin was as transparent in her thoughts as always. Most of the time she just babbled them aloud, especially if he was the only person present or she perceived herself to be alone. “It is strange you’re asking all these questions all of a sudden,” she said, sounding slightly antique when she was being petulant. It didn’t appear to occur to her to try to take her head out of his grip, however, and if anything she snuggled a little closer in the bizarre combination of trust and wariness.
His grip on her chin loosened, but did not retreat, the touch turning into a caress while holding her still. There was something there, something he was missing, and he concentrated through the throbbing pain, focusing on it instead of on heat that was starting to climb ominously up his leg. “I just realized I should be asking them,” he admitted, not really apologetic for letting her get away with whatever lie she was telling before. “How old were you in 1991?”
She made a little clucking sound of distress, but she didn't want to lie to him, especially when he had his hands on her. "It was my birthday. My mother sent me a card and a stuffed bear with real pearls for eyes." She sighed. "I was eighty-five that year."
Colt never thought about defining age. He had moved to humanity when he was still aging, when he was just five and not really old enough to understand the concept of aging just stopping out of the blue one day. And so it took him a minute to even understand what she was saying. Eighty five? And then, as if something went click in his mind, he looked into her eyes, the question there before he even spoke you. “You’re in your nineties?” he asked, “but you were a little girl for almost all of those years?”
She understood how different it was for him. He had come too young to remember what it was like there. She knew how strange it was going to be, and she knew exactly what kind of conclusions he was going to leap to about her maturity. She pressed a little closer in case he got it in mind to push her away, stubborn. “But that was almost twenty years ago.”
He looked into her face, and he thought back to all the wide-eyed innocence she’d exhibited in the past, the childish temper tantrums and stamping stubbornness. The child’s curiosity, the keys. He slid his hand over her cheek, and he tugged her close, ducked his head for a kiss that was softer, more gentle than his normal roughness. “Twenty years is a long time,” he said.
She was so relieved she actually shook a little as the tension moved out of her, and she wound one arm between his lower back and the couch, leaning in greedily for a blissfully soft kind of kiss that she wasn’t expecting. Entirely without guard now, she smiled thickly in agreement. “Yes, exactly.”
He dragged a hand through her hair, his fingers still cold as it became lost in the dark tresses, but a knock at the door stopped him from whatever he’d been about to say, been about to do. His hand on her ankle tightened for just a moment, and then he freed his hand from her hair. “Go on and let the doctor in,” he told her, a newfound sort of care in his voice.
Oblivious, and only glad that he hadn’t taken it with concern or disgust, Erin touched her fingertips to the back of his hand, kissed him again briefly on the mouth, and wriggled off the cushion to get the door, happier than she had been when she woke up that morning.