Fate.
Signs.
I'd never really believed in them.
But if my woman believed in them, then I guess I could get behind them too.
"Kinda works out. I worked the docks here before the mob took over," I told her. "Gives me an in. I left on good terms. I think Grassi will hear me out, agree to stay out of my way if I stay out of his. Then I just need to have a talk with the bikers and the guys over on Third Street. Throw my weight around a little. Let them know there is a new player in town."
Her lips quirked up at one side. "What?"
"It sounds like you are deliberately trying to get yourself hurt. You know... to, ah, endure my nursing ministrations."
My lips curved to match hers, eyes dancing.
"Woman, I will spend my life getting banged up just to feel your mouth on me."
"What do I have to do to... feel yours on me?" she asked, trying her best to say it with some confidence, and mostly succeeding.
"Breathe, baby. You just got to fucking breathe."
"Well," she said, smiling. "I can certainly do that."EIGHTHelenIt was the elephant in the room for the next few days, giant and in-the-face every moment we were inside the room. Which, given Charlie's condition, was most of the time.
The bed.
Looming large and suggestive there as we pretended to ignore it, to act as though all it was was a place to rest our bones when they got weary.
For the first few days, that was just a saying for me as I was out of work for grief - something insisted on by all three of my bosses who had heard the stories on the news or read it in the papers.
Brother shooting father.
It was practically biblical.
And, they thought, traumatizing for me, losing my whole family in a single night.
They were both right and wrong, of course.
I had lost my whole family.
But that family consisted of one person.
Helga.
Whose body was sitting at the medical examiner's office, waiting for the investigation to close.
And then for arrangements to be made.
I had to find a way to handle that.
I didn't exactly have credit to take out a loan. Or, obviously, the cash to pay it outright.
I wasn't going to tell Charlie, but I was debating sneaking into my father's house one last time, grabbing just enough to pay for her burial. A proper one. With a lovely casket, flowers, and a nice gravestone.
But those were problems for another day.
The bed - and the things we both wanted to do in it - were what was making it hard to focus.
Even when I went back to work, falling into old routines, making the money that would ensure we had a place to stay while Charlie healed, then while he got a business up and running, it was all that was on my mind.
Maybe because I had gone down on him.
More than once.
And he had played with me.
And both of us were feeling it. The sensation of needing "more." Of needing it all.
We had waited so long already, and climbing into the same bed each night, fresh from showers where we had both tried to calm the need growing inside, snuggling close, yeah, it was only aggravating the problem.
Charlie was getting better.
Most of his cuts had healed over. The missing tooth - luckily - had not gotten infected. The bruises were even lightening.
But his ribs were still giving him issues.
It wasn't like it was the first night or two, when any movement at all made him hiss out in pain. But there were still times when he tried to turn too fast, or reach over his head, or bend forward that I could tell it was still a struggle, still a nuisance.
And for someone like Charlie - all action - the injuries were getting to him.
I got to go out every day, breathe different air, see different people, do different things.
He was stuck in a dingy motel room with nothing to do but flick through television shows and feel useless.
I tried to remind him it was temporary every night when he would give me that look of his as I went off to work, and he had to stay back. The look that said he hated this, hated me being the provider, a job he wanted to hold.
I'd bring us home shift meals that Ed made for me, doubling up on the portions because he felt bad for me, living at a motel with a dead father and incarcerated brother. I felt guilty taking advantage of their good will, but everyone brushed it off, told me I had been through so much, that a little kindness was just what I needed.
They weren't wrong either.
I had been through a lot.
A lot that I was trying not to focus on too much, knowing that was not a headspace I wanted to be in right then. I didn't want to analyze what it said about me that I had shot my own father, that I had framed my brother.