She wasn't, by nature, a crier. Other people cried over everything from films to funerals and sick children but not her. She never locked herself away in a toilet cubicle to sob over a patient the way most of her colleagues professed to. They thought that that meant that she was cold, hard and unfeeling and perhaps it did but if she was that way it was only because she'd learned to be. When she was a child she had cried over spilt milk and scraped knees and boys who called her stinky ginge and laughed at her Oxfam clothes but it had never done her any good. The twelve year old girl left at the children's home had cried and cried for her mother but she soon learned that there was no point. It was better to be cold, hard and unfeeling than to let them see you cared.
But then there was him. He cried at anything from funerals to arguments to some soppy programme about rescue puppies that he made her watch. He cried tears of happiness, of sadness and of frustration with her for being so impossible. He'd even cried when she'd accused him of being emotionally incontinent which had only served to prove her point. He was wet, something that she simply couldn't abide and yet for him she made an exception because when she was with him for the first time in a long time she felt something. It wasn't simple, nothing in her life had ever been that, but it was momentous. For the first time in over twenty years she cried and that was because of him. Because he made her happy.
He wasn't, by nature, a fighter. Quite the opposite in fact, he would go out of his way not to have to fight. He liked harmony and friendship and not getting punched. He'd picked the wrong woman to fall for. He could have had any of them. Mo, he knew for a fact, would be up for it - she'd told him after one too many beers, and he could have sworn that Marie Claire had been giving him the glad eye at the bar after the funeral. He would probably have taken her up on the offer had it not been for the voice in his ear suggesting that he'd probably catch something nasty from just talking to her. The voice in his ear was his biggest problem. He wanted to tell her that it was none of her business but the truth was, he was flattered that she cared enough to pass sarcastic comment. He was flattered that she made a beeline for him even though it always ended in a steaming row, with added infidelity and a slap in the face if he was really lucky. He was flattered that she even knew his name, even though it was often as not spoken in contempt. Mo insisted that flattery was not enough reason to tolerate the endless abuse but he disagreed. The fact that she bothered to be vile to him showed that she cared and the fact that she cared meant that he was right. They did have something special and he was willing to fight for it.