Disclaimer: Justified ain't mine. Sadly. Comments welcome.
Author Note:This was written for norgbelulah's excellent Summer In Harlan fic meme at LiveJournal. The prompt for this story was: Ava/Boyd - coffee and cigarettes
Shelter
weakness - n.
1 a self-indulgent liking for
2 a person or thing that one is unable to resist or likes excessively
1.
The porch had always been one of her safe places. Hiding in plain sight, she thought sometimes, but that was just the way it had been. Bowman had always preferred to do his brooding indoors: in Johnny's bar, in the house, in Johnny's again.
She would take refuge outdoors, out in the fresh air with her hanging baskets and the hills rolling into the blue haze horizon beyond. The outside was hers and the inside was his (except for the kitchen, because she was the woman, his woman) and that's how it was.
She still feels slightly proprietorial, has marked her turf (as it were) with wind chimes and the tiered shelving bearing her potted plants that she ordered off the internet. But it has also become a neutral space. It's somewhere that they sit when she is done with the salon and when he's done with the mine and he smells of coal dust and earth and soap, or before he heads off to his shift and he smells of pine and the bluegrass hills and clean cologne.
She stands by the porch rail, drawing deep on her cigarette and he sits on the wicker-frame seat with a book for which there isn't enough light to read; but he seems to keep it with him as a sort of defence, an innocent reason for him to be there even if it isn't a reason at all.
Sometimes she thinks that the way they circle each other is ridiculous because they've known each other all of their lives and she knows that despite the things he's done and and the things he's said he's always had a decency at heart.
Now with so much stripped away it's easier to see, although sometimes she wishes it weren't. He still seems raw and only half-healed and most days she thinks that if she looks at him wrong, or talks wrong, or even breathes wrong he will break and there will be no putting him back together.
He sits in the semi-gloom of her porch, hands loose around a mug of coffee and after a while she sits near (but not close) to him and blows out creamy folds of smoke.
He coughs.
Her eyebrows go up. 'You okay?'
His head rises and his fingers peel away from the contours of the mug, close around it again, settle it in the cupped hollows of his hands.
'I remember stealing a pack of cigarettes from the store one time. That was my idea of a rebellion when I was a kid. Ten, eleven, maybe... I didn't have the good sense to take them up into the hills, somewhere I couldn't be caught. I lit one of the things up in my bedroom, figured that if I sat next to the window nobody would be able to smell it.'
'I'm guessing someone did,' she says, her cheek resting on her hand, elbow propped on the arm of her chair. She can see him smile slightly, a flash of white teeth in the dark.
'Someone did. My daddy...' The end of the word trails off in an exhalation laced with agony, then his voice comes back stronger, firm. 'My daddy found me, made me smoke the whole pack.'
'And then you were sick?'
Another flash of teeth. 'Very. Never touched another one from that day on.'
She shifts, a little uneasy. She always smokes out of doors, even at home, because she doesn't particularly like the smell of it inside the house. And she's never been a heavy smoker, not a chain smoker (although, at times, under stress, she has been known to light one cigarette from the butt of another) but she knows it's enough that the smoke gets caught in her hair and her clothes and the skin of her fingers.
She stubs out the cigarette, grinding it down and the embers flare red and die.
'I keep meaning to quit.' She grimaces. 'And I keep saying that.'
He tilts his head back. 'It ain't much of a vice.'
Her hands feel empty, fingers uncertain, and the restlessness seems spread up from them. 'You have any weaknesses these days? Apart from real strong coffee, that is?'
He smiles at her. 'It is mighty fine coffee you make, Ava.'
He takes it black, very hot, almost no sugar, a rich, heady concoction.
'Want some more?' she asks, suddenly eager.
He starts to shake his head then catches himself. 'That would be good.'
She unfolds herself from the chair, heads into the house and he follows her slowly.
2.
He found a pack of her cigarettes, half-full, and her lighter in one of the kitchen drawers. Of all the rooms in the house he thinks of her most strongly here and then corrects that: he thinks of them most strongly. This is where they have sat and talked, and sometimes sat and not talked.
He sits now at the kitchen table and flicks the lighter, watching the controlled leap of flame, gold edged with red and an area of nothingness between that and the blue-black heart. He pulls a cigarette out of the pack, lights it, watches the way the thin paper catches, starts to burn back, the tobacco leaves glowing red-hot for one glorious moment before curling to grey ash.
'You don't smoke.'
Watching so intently, he had not heard the squeak of the stairs, or anything else, but suddenly she's there, in the doorway, her faded bathrobe tied loose at the waist and one arm still held a little stiffly, protecting the damaged shoulder.
'You're up,' he says.
In a contest for stating the obvious, he thinks, he would be the winner.
She stands for a moment, a healthy frown building across her face, then she crosses to him, takes the cigarette from between his fingers. She sits on his knee, her weight warm and welcome and wonderful.
She lifts the cigarette to her lips, draws in a breath, deep.
He moistens his lips. 'I thought you were quitting,' he says when he can find his voice.
Her head tilts back and she blows out a long plume of smoke. 'I am.' It gets stubbed out in a saucer, ground down to flecks of blackened paper and sooty grey grit. 'And that's enough of that.' There's a finality to her tone and she looks down at him from her perch, daring him to defy her.
He smooths one hand down her back, feeling the rigid curve of her spine, then links his fingers together at her waist. She takes a sip of his coffee, winces against its bitterness, then settles against him.
'You asked me once if I had any weaknesses,' he says softly, studying the fine, perfect contours of her face. She smiles then, moves her head and he tastes the coffee on her lips.