Declan suffered some (setbacks) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-08-30 19:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, declan murphy, ryan ramos |
Marvel, NYC: Declan & Ryan
Who: Declan Murphy & Ryan Ramos
What: Two grouchy people meet.
When: Recently. Lets say before Saranac Lake with the sibs.
Warnings: None besides language.
There wasn’t nothing easy about getting around when you were in some kinda brace shit, right. People looked, and Ry was used to looks on the street. Looks that were all about long and slow, that slid over her ass or over her tits and the low murmur of something fucking filthy after, something sus hermanos woulda yelled back at and Ry, she woulda fucking laughed. That was looks in the city, and she was easy, being stared at. Follow-spots on stage and hours in class looking in a mirror for everything that was wrong, outta place or outta line and no one looked the way a dancer did, critical under sticky-sweat and lycra. Her ballet mistress had smacked her legs, hit her back into line and that kinda looking, the kinda look that slid on over and looked for faults and demanded some kinda perfection that was impossible, that was comfort too.
This kinda looking, this had nothing to do with being hot shit, tits and ass or a fucking tight fouette, right. This, the glances that slid on over the creeping progress down the street, Ry knew was pity. The kinda look that was ‘pobre niña’’ rather than admiration or appreciation and that burned hotter than the salt-raw burn that had begun a block in from her knee and bled up into her hip. It was pride, right, pride she had worked at keeping that ass where it was and pride that she’d bled into her toe-shoes to turn, whiplash quick again and again, until no one could do it better, burnished skin under light and black-wild hair plastered to her skull and the clean burn of concentration.
Nah, this had nothing to do with that. Pride, Ry found out a block in, pride meant shit when your weight was heavy on a crutch that had lodged itself into the gap between her ribs and her armpit and sweat rolled down the back of her neck and rubbed the skin raw between the hospital-sterile plastic and her skin. Her bag, the one with her cash, it bounced on her good hip, and she looked like weird contemporary piece, the one where the dancer on stage went from fetal-curl to jetes right down to hunching into nothing.
Reminder that all of that meant nothing. Couldn’t even contemplate thinking about it, not because she didn’t - she did, bouncing like change in her brother’s pockets, ever-present clink-clink-clink on her sub-conscious even if the squeeze-release bruising vice around her hip ever died enough to leave her to it. But because this, this walk down the sidewalk with her sweats rolled down to her hips, and the brace, this took every fucking thought she had, right. One step in front of another and no one was thinking bout pirouettes and standing at the barre being the best, no one Ry knew when she was counting cracks in the sidewalk, bodega upahead with the pharmacy near enough to fucking pray for. She wasn’t thinking bout looking like shit, the wifebeater dark under the arms with sweat and her hair thick with humidity.
Nah, she was thinking about how long to get the pills. How long she had to stand in line and it was the doorway before Ry started thinking about how the fuck she was gonna balance groceries on the way back. No fucking idea, and she stopped outside, her back to the doorframe and her weight heavy against the cool of the glass and she balled her knuckles in the socket of her eyes, the pinprick sharp in her throat and her nose because she wasn’t gonna cry in the street, right. Hadn’t fucking cried in public long as she could remember but the burn was choking up her throat, liquid and she wasn’t thinking about nothing except the nauseous heat in her hip and how the fuck she was gonna make the walk back, even without groceries.
The exalted prime of non battered bones had been too far back for Declan to recall with any vividity. This was his life now and always. He was not a man of lingering pasts or distant futures, he preferred the occasionally grim reality that rode sidecar with the present. That reality was six surgeries ago. He had nearly all of the range of motion in his leg once more, but the nerve pain lingered on. Sometimes it whispered up the small of his back, often it screamed instead.
Today was one of the gentler days. His aching was absent for the most part, chased away by the drugs that often whispered, I will soothe your pain, but rarely did. Not that the man looked ready to start skipping and singing down the street anytime soon. The atrabilious Murphy was difficult to read, often sour with a squared jaw. Eyebrows twined, pinched close in a most disapproving kind of way, like contemplating all of the universe's fault lines came naturally when one was walking down the street.
He was dressed well, for those that knew labels at a glance. Otherwise, it was just cotton and denim. Both in shades of gently faded blue, distressed at the joints like they'd been worn in real well, even if one could buy them way. He had hands wedged down in the bottoms of his pockets and a Yankees cap shaded his face in mimic of the way that a celebrity might try to escape press hounds. But Declan was no celebrity, his face wasn't recognizable, and his expression was usually inexplicably peeved enough that even the tourists of the city knew not to approach him for directions.
He had a tendency to watch the cracks in the sidewalk as he moved, counting them in anticipation of a destination that was envisioned as a necessary evil of the modern world. This wasn't his neighborhood, but he'd parked while using his cellphone, and in doing so noticed the corner store that boasted the neon words, pharmacy. Might as well fill a script while he waited on a return phone call from one of the family lawyers regarding final touches about his dead father's estate.
He was about to pass through the door when he noticed the woman lingering at the front. His hand paused on the door, holding it partially open in a moment of chivalry recalled from privatized grade school. "You on your way in?" Upon closer inspection, she seemed nearly upset, and Declan wondered if the offer was a mistake.
Ry knew muscle spasms, right. Charlie horses, locking up the meat of her thigh, twitching like electricity jolted through sinew. They didn’t cramp, they fucking twisted. Wrenched. This, the pain in her thigh taking the weight off of her knee, that was a spasm and she blinked back searing tears and the choking-sweet taste of vomit in the back of her throat to look some guy who had a baseball cap crammed low over his eyes like he figured on paparazzi taking a picture, who held the door like she could waltz on through, like holding it would make a fucking difference if she was standing in the way. Maybe he thought the crutch meant she could fucking bourre in past the glass and the torn up posters. White guy, impatient.
She hated crying, out where people could see. Did it, right, but at home under the shower where you could kid yourself it wasn’t tears, just a lotta hot water all mixed up together. Nah, you were gonna feel something in public, you got mad. Angry, maybe. Let loose with some good cussing. New choreo, right, she had a filthy mouth every time she took a knee or the floor or her ñero de baile, he put his hand somewhere she didn’t want nobody groping outside a bedroom. She swore the air blue, English, Spanish, Ry didn’t care and she wanted to fuck the knee and the pain to hell but the blinding pain bit in and nothing was gonna chase it, swears or tears. Treacherous heat boiled in her nose, needled her eyes.
She looked a mess, che, and she knew it. Could feel the sweat dripping messily from the mass of her hair down the back of her neck, damp cotton under her arms. Scraped up skin, dark red and raw from the crutch, and the guy in front of her, holding the door like she could just swing on through, thank-you-have-a-nice-day bullshit, he was wearing denim, shit that looked like it never saw weather and dirt and a laundromat dryer, right. Expensive and Ry knew expensive when she looked at it.
“Yeah,” she said, around the lump in her throat that scratched up against her voice, made it raw. Sounded like she was gonna cry, but the weight on her shoulders, on her ass pressed up against the wall ‘stead of lodged against a crutch wedged in her armpit meant the world wasn’t fucking whiting out anymore, she could breathe without the wave of nausea rolling in.
“Yeah, but you hold that open, buey, you’re gonna wait a while.” She was in the fucking way and she knew it, she wasn’t big but the crutch blocked the entrance and her leg was stretched out in front, thick under the sweats with the brace. But if she was gonna move? She’d bet she was gonna land on her ass, or worse her knee was gonna lock and slide underneath her, and the thought of landing on it and trying to get the fuck broke cold sweat, and the acid lurch of panic into her veins. There was New York short in her vowels, and long in the yawning consonants and it was a little fucking chippy and her chin jerked daring expensive-denim guy to take a swing at her, hanging out in the doorway ‘stead of moving out the way to let him pass, but fear was real healthy, Ry had heard. Never had any before a surgeon started carving her up, but she had it now.
“Give me a second.” And she hated saying it; it was weak and it was piss-poor and expensive-denim guy had places to go, even if he walked so easy Ry hated him right then. But she didn’t apologize.
Damn. He hadn't seen the tripwire, had no prescience of its existence, until she shattered his ignorance with the sound of her voice. She sounded wrapped tight with an ace bandage, squeezed down to nothing like volume would clue the pain to come back for more. White guy, she was right. Declan had the condensed atmosphere of those born into a world of pursuit. He didn't entirely mean to be the center of his own universe, it just kind of happened that way. He'd seen her with the same cursory, predatory masculinity that he saw most women, a glance that could be appreciative or dismissive, but it was never more than a glance because his focus was more solitary than all-encompassing. He'd seen the crutch ,but he hadn't really considered the weight of its reality when stacked up against the monotony of chivalrous instinct. He opened the door for her because his body remembered opening doors for women in the same way that his heart beat without conscious effort. The women he'd grown up with expected doors to be opened for them, and as his sisters had creativity in the realm of cruel and he preferred to avoid their scorn whenever possible, the theatrics of gentlemanly behavior had become a kind of second nature.
It hadn't ever given him a problem or instigated anything more than banal conversation with strangers, but now. Shaken loose from effortless geniality, he looked at the crutches. Declan forgot that anyone could have the kind of injuries that exhausted the owner, the kind where all energy was spent not losing it entirely. "Alright," he said at the prospect of waiting awhile. He could have left her then, to handle the door on her own while he resumed proper speeds, but he didn't. "Do you need a chair?" She was clearly in pain, although he didn't know where to go looking for one.
Somebody else approached the door then, huffing about the blockade. Declan gave the stranger on their cellphone a hard look and tilted his head toward the other door, which was clearly an exit but still opened both ways. The shopper frowned and complained loudly into their phone's mouthpiece to whomever was listening until they vanished inside the pharmacy. Declan held the door still, claimed for whenever the girl with the crutches was ready.
The seconds stretched into minutes, right. Like elastic, like turning on the spot, one after the other and waiting for your own body-weight to carry you through into the next. Ry, she’d always been center of her own universe, except her family and her dance people, they were constellations that swept close in her own orbit so she never forgot they were there, che? She was center of it now, universe narrowed down to the blunt of blinding pain and her eyes were squeezed shut against the threat of tears and watching some white guy wait for her to move outta the fucking way. She heard, ‘stead of saw. Heard him offer up a chair like he could produce one out of thin air, truco de magia and she laughed, wet and thick in her throat but it sounded OK out in the open.
“I sit down, buey,” and she cracked one eye open, the lashes thick with treacherous damp spidering wide, and she looked at him, concerned bystander who had no good fucking reason to wait on her other than pity, right? And that needled in her gut, sidled up close to her pride and kicked it in the knee, she looked at him and she closed her eyes again, focused on breathing deep, from her center, like she was back in el estudio again, ‘stead of stuck in the doorway to some pharmacy was never gonna remember her except as that one shitty client again, right.
“I sit down, I ain’t getting up again real quick.” The words pried themselves outta her, sharp and spiked with what was left of her pride that day. Yeah it was obvious, and he pitied her right or he wasn’t stood there telling other people to go ‘round instead of trying to muscle through. Alright, he said and Ry, she could tell he was a white guy because no one from her own neighborhood had the fucking patience. Maybe they understood pride a little better, maybe they just had places to be. Rich white guy, he had no places, Ry judged as she opened her eyes, drew a sharp breath through her nose, and tested her weight experimentally, easing off of the door.
Wasn’t going no place for a minute, but she could stand, the muscles at the back of her good knee weren’t shaking like she was stood at the end of a long class, fatigued, right. And that was something.
“You ain’t gonna use the same entrance?” She looked over his shoulder, the guy with the cellphone disappearing inside. “You don’t gotta open the door for me, hermano.” Grin, even if it was all deliberate, all front ‘stead of confident.
"No, I ain't." He tried the word on for size, but it just didn't warm to his voice like it did to hers. It wasn't tailored to his accent, which was something chiseled out of the days spent fitting in at a Northeastern preparatory school. She was all burrough, although like any half-spent tourist, he couldn't tell the difference. Most of the time that he spent in New York was spent away from people. It was only when working that he spent time within the city's massive limits. Being here was its own kind of job, and Declan regularly felt drained for no reason at all. Or maybe that was the meds.
He leaned back against the open edge of the door, holding it in place for her even as its sharp corner pinched between his shoulderblades, thin cotton rubbing thinner. She asked about the other entrance, and Declan tilted his head in that direction as if contemplating it for a second round. "If I do that, you might never get inside." In speaking, he wasn't neat and tidy. He didn't offer her the reassurance that she could get inside on her own. The way she was pitched up against her crutch with tears burning her eyes, he didn't think that she should have walked as far as she had. But he wasn't a doctor.
"I'm not in a hurry, and maybe I'm trying to earn my way into heaven, besides." It was a joke, but he didn't smile to clue her in.
White boy couldn’t say ‘ain’t’ and have it sound natural, ‘stead of sounding like he was talking round marbles on his tongue, fat and glassy and rich. Ry had heard that before, little spun-sugar ballerinas lined up at the barre, who talked like they came out of movies, black and white and never worried about nothing, not money or food or rent or how much it cost to go through ballet slippers every week. Ry laughed. Still sounded real damp, but teasing, that part wasn’t hotel rooms and hospital beds, that part she remembered, right. Being teased and teasing, and feeling like a girl, ‘stead of a broken, fucked-up knee with somebody attached to it. Her teeth flashed white in her face, and she’d been told she laughed too loud too many times to count in class, ‘Ramos, tais-toi’ pissy French above the whirr of the air-conditioning, and she was loud in the doorway.
Yeah, white boy couldn’t talk street if he tried, but his tongue slid around concern like he’d decided he didn’t like the taste of it, and Ry, she felt her eyebrows slide together, knitted annoyance he’d decided she couldn’t make it on her own. Ignored right then she was stood in a doorway, che, ignored she was balanced between the door and the crutch because she wasn’t gonna say she couldn’t do nothing, ever.
He thought she was charity, more of that pity from the people on the street? “You think I’m some abuela, you gotta help me cross the street, get inside the store?” It was challenge, back of her voice and the pain dulled right under all that angry at judge-y white boy, who thought she was his ticket into God’s graces, ‘stead of prayers he’d help cripples into stores. “I can do it, right. You gotta need to get into Heaven, buey, I’m not your ticket in.” No tears then, just anger and a lick of what felt real good to burn with, ‘stead of self-pity.
Declan didn't know anger, not really. He'd grown up in a family so knotted, so twisted backwards and inside out, that nobody got angry, they just got even. In Declan's experience, it was the quiet ones that made it hurt the worst, they pushed their knives the deepest and twisted hard like his sisters and their beautiful machinations. So anger that came like fire sputtering, that was new.
The humor had been poorly timed, but it amused him only because of its absurdity. A Murphy trying to get into heaven with good deeds instead of a blank check, hilarious. He hadn't stopped to help her out of any misplaced extensions of a hand toward the less fortunate. Declan remembered crutches, he remembered the pinch and chafe, he remembered the pain of it. He remembered the pain that came before, it was sharper when he was in chairs and traction, therapy four times a week. He'd thought it would go away eventually, if he got stronger, and that was the only thing that had kept him going for as long as he had. He hadn't known then what he knows now, pain never really leaves. It just changes.
Like now, the ache he lived with was a perpetual, dull grind on tissue wearing thin. The bone had been replaced, but the joint still ached like plastic and titanium had found a way to feel. Some days it radiated up, making him hot and uncomfortable until he couldn't think about anything else. The pills kept that from happening, but they brought new aches when they were gone.
So while Declan didn't know what he story was, he knew crutches. She asked if he thought that she was an abuela, and he stared at her with irritation brewing, clearly having no idea what that word meant and therefore having no idea if he thought that she was one or not. She said that she could do it on her own. Mad at him for even bothering to help, and Declan didn't think he'd done a damn thing to earn that kind of vitriol. But fine.
"Right," laconic and unstirred, his voice was a void when he released the door. "Go on then."
She didn’t know none of that, right. They’d told her she was gonna be in a chair, short-term. They said that then, when she was in the bed and she wasn’t gonna get up, not even for the bathroom, they wouldn’t let her and the pain washed over every time she moved. And she knew real well this was stupid, right. A chair would work, get her places easy, easier than right now, trying to get inside the fucking door without passing out, che? But a chair was giving in, sitting down, and Ry, she’d never sat out from a fight ‘stead of going ten rounds until she was exhausted.
White boy didn’t look like he’d taken a swing at nothing right then. He didn’t catch like driftwood on the spark of her anger, right, the way she’d expected. Nah, the way she’d wanted, because someone got angry with you, they weren’t pitying you right then, anger the way Ry knew it, it burned you up, took all of you with it until you didn’t think nothing except that, that moment right then.
White boy didn’t flare up, he went flat. Like the fingers going quiet on the keys of a piano, ending ‘stead of an argument. And Ry didn’t know anyone who didn’t argue, right. She could see he was irritated. Flare in his eyes, twitch in his jaw -- she read people fine, was looking for it and the spark, right, it was there. Anticipation was a little bubble of hope maybe, in her chest, something more than pity and a ticket into good graces with God, right. But he didn’t, he let the door swing closed and it butted up against her shoulder, and Ry, she looked at it real deliberate.
“You think I can’t.” Statement of fact. She read that on his face, white boy didn’t believe she could and she fed that to the flame and it hurt like fuck, but she wedged the crutch against the line of the door, where everybody pushed at it and shoved. Weight transferred from one side to the other, and the crutch dug in under her arms, and she leaned back, real afraid of falling on her ass if her weight went over, ‘stead of against but her hip -- the good one, it caught the door and some guy on the other side, he waited.
Defiant then, she lifted her chin and proud triumph glittered in her eyes. Yeah, it was just a door and there were gonna be doors all over the city she wasn’t gonna manage. But Ryan thought she’d proved her point, che?
If there was a point to be made, Declan supposed that she'd proved it to herself. If she was trying to prove something to him, well she was making a poor investment. Declan had no reason to believe that she couldn't make it in the door on her own. After all, she'd made it all the way here from however-far down the street, what was another metre going to be aside from painful? The fact that she could was apparent to him, but that didn't mean that she should.
When the girl made it to the door, there was victory burning where the anger had been in her eyes previously, but Declan figured that the anger was still there, lurking in the muddy waters of her eyes. "Does it matter what I think?" It shouldn't, but Declan knew that shouldn'ts didn't account for very much when it came to all of the ways and reasons that made up a person's mindset. More than most, Declan had a varied interest in what people thought. It kept him quiet, it kept him shrouded. He didn't like to talk about himself because there was too much that could be judged. He knew that even to his family, he was sometimes a mystery.
He couldn't tell if she liked proving him wrong or just reveled in proving herself right, but a bet had never been made. He hadn't wagered either way, and the conflict that followed was likely because he'd tried to help at all. There was a reason he never bothered with such things, and it was now staring at him. Blatant. Bold. Big, prideful eyes like she was on the victory lap. Girl didn't even realize that she wasn't even to the halfway mark yet. Whatever business or shopping she had here, there was still the whole round back from wherever she came. But she didn't need Declan to tell her that.
He eased back from her claimed doorway, and stepped to the other, the exit he'd once denied. He abandoned the exchange in favor of the inside, leaving her to her victory. He hit one of the aisles, grabbing a box of toothpaste from a shelf before moving for the pharmacy counter. He gave his name to the girl behind, and provided his license before she moved off to collect his medication and get it all bagged up neat. Meanwhile, Declan watched the progress of the girl with the crutches. He'd left her there, sure, but he glanced over just in case. One of New York's finest, he was in the business of helping people, and that wasn't going to change just because the girl said she didn't want him to.
Ryan had been proving points against people who never really thought they’d entered the argument her whole life, che. Just because they didn’t think, it didn’t mean they hadn’t, right. Nah, they coulda had arguments just by living the way they did and expecting her to measure up when she didn’t, and Ry had stopped explaining that shit because if Ry believed in what other people thought she’d have taken her ass and her stained pink ballet slippers outta the studio in New York City and back to Queens where her tia was real happy to give her work to do, ‘stead of dance. It didn’t matter -- but it did and Ry didn’t think about it like a contradiction, she’d just built her confidence on proof and there wasn’t no proof inside the apartment building she was anyone, except a girl who’d once been special and was now just broke, right.
Nah, she didn’t care what he thought, white boy who sailed off toward the other door like he was done earning brownie points with God. He didn’t matter, but the flare of feeling something that wasn’t defeated, hot and quick and living inside her breastbone, that carried Ry through the doorway and down the aisle. The air-con swept over the sticky back of her neck, waved tendrils of hair in the fake wind and shivered over the bare of her arms. She didn’t sit, right. There was a chair, off to the left where she could sit and wait, make the staff fetch and carry after her like she was her abuela. Needy, right.
Ry, she didn’t need nothing or nobody.
She leaned on the crutch up to the counter, slip of paper in her fingers with a doctor’s scrawl on the bottom and she was counting on this exchange being easy. Hadn’t watched for white boy; she’d had her eyes pinned on the woman at the counter cashing out her script in change, quarters -- laundry money, maybe. Yeah, Ry remembered that too. When the cost of getting some cash together to pay for something that couldn’t be stole, it ate into everything. She wanted to slide up behind the woman, cover her script and Ry’s together, but pride, that shit didn’t cost nothing and pride was important when you admitted you needed something, even just a script for meds. So she didn’t. She waited, right, the air-con breezing over her and beginning to make her shiver, contrast between hot and cold.
And white boy slid up to the counter with his own and slapped down his license before she even eased herself over. Ry followed him. Dogged, because she wasn’t gonna wait another five minutes to pick up the meds when her knee and her hip were throbbing, steady as a heartbeat for the meds that were listed on the script. Nah, she wasn’t estúpido, wasn’t gonna screw herself further just because him standing there, cool in the air-con pissed her off. Didn’t even have a reason to piss her off, except he pitied her and pity felt like having underwear ride her ass -- annoyed her, right.
She slapped down her own script, her own ID -- the hotel, it hadn’t taken that from her either, even if the girl in the picture with the wild curls and the lipstick wasn’t the same girl sweaty and damp in front of the counter.
“You coulda been out already, you just came in in the first place,” she challenged him.
"And miss the show?" Declan could challenge too, even if it didn't sound like much. He could make a curse sound like fruit and cream, almost sweet. He could be friendly when it suited him, although Declan found that it rarely did. Most ends just didn't justify those means. He wasn't roguish or an obvious jerk about it. He'd inherited charm that he never put to use, but sometimes it made his words sound dashing. Even if he thought Clementine did it better, all sweet tea and petticoat lace. So, while his tone of voice sounded as amicable as a compliment bestowed during a slow dance, his eyes flicked up from his credit card receipt, mid-signature, and they were cold like the house he'd grown up in. Dismissive of children and whimsy and challenging women with barely a leg to stand on.
But if that was Declan's true nature, he didn't want it to be. He admired his father for that Murphy family charm, but he didn't want to be anything like the man for a half dozen other reasons. Declan dropped his eyes from her, and the stare softened through the fall. He glimpsed her ID, and a frown formed with contemplation of her age. She'd been young then, younger. He looked back to her and realized that she still was. She didn't have the lipstick anymore, but she was still young. However she'd gotten hurt, maybe thats what aged her. Not that she was old by any means, just tired maybe. She didn't look like she wore lipstick very often anymore.
Reconsidering his grouchiness, Declan turned back to the pharmacist, dropping his credit card onto the counter again. "Run it for hers too." And the pharmacist shrugged, swiping the card again, this time for the girl's script.
The girl -- woman, gracias, Ry hadn’t been no girl since she’d been bare skinny knees and shorts and popsicles sucked to ice on a hot sidewalk in Harlem -- she didn’t mind white guy giving her shit about the show. Nah, she leveled a look down her nose when he did, because it was stepping up to the plate, a little fight to whitebread man who waited on doors like he got paid to do it, but she could feel her mouth curl, right. She knew it was a show, didn’t they say that all the time at the studio, her bitching and complaining? It didn’t do nothing for the hip and the knee complaining, but it felt real even if he looked at her like she was some shit on his shoe and she coulda told him that shit would get him hit.
Except he glanced down, side-look at her ID on the counter and Ry didn’t mind the picture on the front. She’d been twenty-one and she didn’t look like a prima in the photo, she looked like she spent time in the clubs dancing, ‘stead of slicked back hair and pink leotards. Curls and earrings and lipstick and a wide, carefree grin and she watched the cold look slide off whitebread’s face like ice melting on the baked sidewalk outside. She’d been hot shit, che, even if she wasn’t now and pride swelled as he turned back to her, ID compared to sweaty-sticky woman in front of him -- Ry knew she looked like shit, che, but she wasn’t nothing to be pitied. She lifted her chin, defiant as he checked her against her photo.
Except white guy thought she couldn’t pick up her own meds. Like she was some sticky-fingered kid, sent down to pick up her abuela’s script, like she couldn’t afford to be the girl in the photo no more. Ry’s eyebrows knitted darkly, her scowl was outrage. “Besa mi culo, puto, you think I can’t pay for my own meds?” Demand, and her voice rose, louder than boxes of band-aids and tylenol saw most days. She leaned on the crutch and step-swinged her way closer to the counter, five-three of challenge right close to his fucking toes. “Vete a la verga culero, you think I don’t got a job? Or you think you’re better than me, that it? I can pay,” she said loudly -- firmly, right, levied that scowl right at the cashier, handed over a fifty dollar bill from the bag at her waist.
“I don’t want him paying for me. I can pay.”
"You've got no idea what I think," he said, spiceless in comparison to the way her voice rose and ping-ponged all around the pharmacy's few aisles like indignation was half-price and highlighted neon to draw eyes. More than one person peeked down the long aisle of varied deodorants to glimpse the promise of a spectacle. Of course, there wouldn't actually be one. Declan didn't rise to being baited. He was exceedingly cool, a trait that he'd discovered to be more infuriating than any degree of yelling.
Meanwhile, the pharmacist seemed uncertain of who to take orders from, but ultimately deemed it safer to take the woman's money for her own prescription. The cash register door dinged and some changed was pushed back across the counter to her while Declan returned his credit card to a sleeve of his wallet. He fit his paperbag of pill bottles under an arm and edged away from the counter in easy retreat. He turned to the direction of the door, and after taking one step, turned back. It was a quick pivot, one that was only possible because it was his good leg that assisted the turn.
Declan wasn't sure that he had anything to apologize for, but if so, he preferred to do it without actually having to say those particular words. "Can I buy you a coffee or are you going to bite my head off?"
The pharmacist, she fucking gaped. Ry didn’t fuckin’ blame her, right. Ryan didn’t mind spectacle. She’d been looked at her whole life long just for existing, brown in a buncha pink and white, no es gran cosa, che? She’d been looked at since she was eleven, her neighborhood and it was her brothers who were drama, yelling and shoving in the street and Ry laughing herself drunk on watching, right. Nah, a little yelling wasn’t theater, even if the little old white lady at the back of the pharmacy was gawping like she’d never heard of people talking ‘bove a whisper. Maybe they didn’t where she came from. But for Ry, living was loud. She’d been quiet, agreeable even, in the hospital bed. She wasn’t there no more.
‘Course he didn’t yell back. Whitebread didn’t look like he’d yelled in years, maybe they atrophied vocal chords when you lived somewhere rich and dull. Ry decided he was wealthy, someplace far up town with a view of Central Park, well-heeled green and where the sidewalk was never covered in dog-shit. Nah, he mealy-mouthed her and she took her own paper package of meds with gratitude from the pharmacist, and slid her ID back into her pocket, careful. Cracked the cap of the bottle and took one, right there on the stained carpet.
She’d swallowed -- dry, when he turned back around and Ry, she felt a spike of envy spear heat through blood. Estúpida, right? Little thing, turning on one leg, wasn’t nothing. Wasn’t even the beginning of nothing on bare boards in tights. But he could do it and she couldn’t. Her eyes narrowed, the brows knit, ready, che, ready for another argument. But the words that came outta his mouth weren’t fighting, and the pharmacist, she looked like she was swallowing air.
For real? “You’re loco,” Ry leveled at him, real quick, skeptical curl to her mouth. “You wanna buy me coffee because what, you think I maxed out my coffee allowance on meds?” But it was wry, right. She wasn’t hot shit right now, maybe she’d forgotten, but Whitebread didn’t make a fucking bit of sense.
“You like getting yelled at so much you want to get me coffee, buey?”
Loco, he knew that one. He'd never been accused of being crazy, but they didn't call it crazy where he grew up. Eccentric, that was more like it. One was allowed a little eccentricity when they grew up around that much money, and to be honest, Declan didn't think on the money part of it. He was too bred into the culture to see the dollars and cents. Maybe he preferred not to think of himself as privileged because that clashed with the chip on his shoulder, but to a certain extent… he knew. He'd done too much traveling to feign blind, when he was younger and got around just fine without the assistance of pills.
He thought that three months in the South Pacific spent living off of young coconuts and salted fish meant he knew something about the way the world really worked. And maybe it gave him insight, but he was still the only one in that village who'd been capable of up and leaving, buying a V8 truck and a loft. That fishing community had been paradise, but not because of the blue waters and green-frond trees. It'd been the furthest thing from himself, and maybe that's why he romanticized it. Loco.
He smiled. It didn't look a particularly happy expression, but maybe he was just out of practice. "What, you don't drink coffee?"
Whitebread didn’t open his mouth and say nothing about deserted islands, filled full up of people who wanted to leave but didn’t have air fare and a papi who could pay the way home. If he had, che, she’d have known him, what he was. Something real discontented and disconnected with what made him who he was. Everyone was made up of their people, right. Made that way, she had ‘made in Harlem’ stamped somewhere on her ass maybe, it was in her voice and it was in her walk and the only place that didn’t feel like she stood out, loud, was the studio.
Ry, she didn’t romanticize nothing. right. Not rich people, she’d seen too many little white girls with a lotta money get real unhappy dollar bills couldn’t buy talent. Not ballet -- not when you’d seen the sweat paint a man raw, when you had a man with his hand wedged in your crotch who was more interested in your brothers, right, even when he looked you in the eye like you were the last girl alive. Nah, pain had stripped the romance right outta ballet, but pain had shoved something back in that was bigger than romance. Bigger than dreams, something you could live in.
But she wasn’t doing a fuck of a lot of living just then, right? Stood leaning on hospital-issued plastic, with a paper package of meds stuffed into the bag slung from her hip. Oozing sweat underneath her hair, and her arms all over bumps from the hiss of cool air. “I drink coffee,” she agreed. This was the city, who didn’t drink coffee? Nah, either Whitebread had a savior thing, all that rich white boy guilt he was carrying around, or he was trying to slum it or something, che.
“This the white boy version of an apology?” The smile was slow, but she remembered how to give it, plenty. The kind that gave away cheap. “You wanna buy my coffee, Whitebread, you’re gonna have to hold the door some more.”
He wasn't sure if he was supposed to feel insulted. It wasn't the white, but more so the boy that did it, it it did at all. But if he was insulted, it was difficult to tell. He was never particularly friendly, certainly never beaming. There was rarely a smile to slip, and in this case, the smile was just barely anyway. The smile tucked itself away at the corner of his mouth, and if it was an apology, he didn't confess to it. He held the door for her, quiet and impersonal as a footman. He didn't rush her, but he also didn't wait for her after she cleared the door with her crutch. There was a coffee cart up ahead, thirty paces, and Declan bought two cappuccinos with nothing syrupy to sweeten them. Savior or not, white boy didn't walk the cup back to her. He left it at the cart for her to come claim if she wanted it. He just gave her a glance, a tick of his head toward the red paper cup that sat on the cart in waiting, and then he turned down the sidewalk in his own direction.