"So what do you do?" he grins at her as if he has come up with the best pick-up line to ever grace a bar and Emma tries her hardest to suppress an eye-roll. She fails.
"Aren't you supposed to ask about my name first?" she replies without looking at him, not even bothering to pretend to be interested.
"Well, I like being original."
Maybe it's because she can basically hear the smirk in his voice, or because she thinks eye-contact will drive her 'not interested' point home faster, but most likely it's because she hates that too-casual and horribly-not-accented voice, that she finally looks at him.
As she predicted his smirk is all wrong. Not sexy, not inviting and definitely not making her blush. His eyes are the wrong shade of bluish grey and she feels like he doesn't even see her. Not that she wants him to. His face has no shape to her, his hair - no colour and his words - no allure.
"OK, then," she turns fully around and looks him straight in the eye. "I'm a bounty hunter. But what I really do is that I sit by the bedsides of people who are dying in hospitals, all alone, with no friends or relatives, or anyone to hold their hands in their last moments."
He stays staring at her for a few moments, mouth slightly open, eyes half-shocked and half-confused as fuck, and she's just about to turn back to her drink when words come back to him.
"I'm sorry."
Her eyes snap back up to his shapeless face. She is suddenly surprised, sure that this stranger cannot possibly know her pain.
"What are you sorry for?" she asks a bit more angrily than she probably should have, and with so much mistrust and suspicion that he is probably a little scared now too.
"It must be horrible," he mumbles and she realizes he hasn't read her at all. Of course not. Only one man could ever do that.
"It's worse to die all alone with only beeping machines for company," she says, her voice devoid of emotion and her eyes returning to the depths of her glass of rum.
"Still, why do you do it?" he looks slightly perplexed but any desire to take her to bed has thankfully left him.
Emma sighs and then looks at the guy sitting on the stool next to her. She has never been one for sharing, but as the years passed she realized that she would talk about him to anyone who will listen, and sometimes to those who won't.
"Three years ago I ended up in the hospital after a run-in with one of my nastier targets," that was a lie. It had been three years, four months and five days ago and she will still know that time to the day even after another fifty years. But she doesn't tell him that and stares down at her hands, playing with the single ring she is wearing. "My leg was broken and I had to stay there for some time. On the second day I witnessed a nurse yelling at one guy in the corridor. She gave up on him eventually and walked off in a huff, then he turned around with the most infuriating smirk on his face and told me that all the nurses couldn't get over him wanting to leave them."
Emma shook her head, a kind of choked chuckle coming out at the memory.
"He had… he had cancer. They weren't sure how long he had left. Three? Four months? They… turned out to be five weeks," she grows silent for a while. Five fucking weeks. She shakes her head, swallowing back the tears, not even once looking up to see if the guy is still listening to her, she isn't talking to or for him. "He had constantly wanted to leave. He had been a sailor, a captain no less. Being between four walls all day long just wasn't his cup of tea. Or glass of rum."
Her little laugh is broken and hollow, but her words echo with a sense of pride that old ladies, gasping through their last days of life, have told her can make one warm inside. They love listening and she loves talking about him. It's all that she has left – her memories and her pride that she found and loved the best man to even set eyes upon her.
"They wanted to keep him in, so that he could hold on longer. But he didn't really care. Not… not before those last five weeks."
Her hair is in her face and her vision is blurry. And she is gripping the glass way too tightly, her hold unbreakable, just like it had been back then. She had tried to hold on to him so hard and he had tried to stay. For her. He hadn't cared about spending his last days at sea in the end. Hadn't cared about the constant pain. All he had wanted was to not leave her alone. Emma swallows back the cry of pain and anguish rising inside of her and tries to order her thoughts. Time to head back to the coldness of her bed and the only other thing she has left – dreams.
"Anyway, we got to do a lot" she finally looks up, her thumb caressing the ring on her finger. Go figure, the guy is still listening. "I was with him literally every hour of every day for five weeks. Then he died. And I have been back to that hospital and many others, kinda volunteering, to spend time with people who… who don't have anyone else."
She finishes the story emotionlessly, like she always does, because, in all her life, she has cried in front of one person only. And now that he is gone tears are a reserved privilege of her many small, empty and constantly-changing apartments. She gets up abruptly, needing the cold air that is sure to meet her outside, and is already a few steps away from him when the guy calls after her.
"So what is your name?"
"Jones," she turns around, once again angrier than she has a right to be, and so fierce and protective that one would think that poor guy was trying to take her most precious treasure away. But he isn't even looking at her so she lets the glare slip, her voice both defeated and proud, and so soft that he definitely doesn't hear her next words. "Emma Jones."