Eames: Bobby, if you do not stop humming "Lovely Ladies" right this minute—
Goren: Well, I could always move on to something from 'The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas'—
Eames: No.
Goren: A selection from 'Sweet Charity'—
Eames: No.
Goren: "I'm in Love With a Stripper"—
Eames: I HAVE A GUN.
"Here."
Bobby stumbled back a few paces from the wallet being shoved unceremoniously in his face. "Oh, thanks. Hi."
"You need to be more fucking careful with your stuff. I could've just taken this. Just because you felt sorry for me doesn't mean you get a free pass on being stupid. Some people would've just taken this to teach you a lesson."
"Oh." He blinked the sleep from his eyes. "Thank you for, um, not doing that."
"Take it!" The wallet came perilously close to whacking his nose. God, she didn't want to be here. She didn't want to be doing this. "Take it before I fucking change my mind."
He took it.
Dutton jammed her empty hand back into her—his—her coat, backing away. "I took $15.42. It's a ten percent finders' fee, and I rounded up to the nearest cent. I am not giving it back."
"Oh. Okay. Thank you again for bringing it back. Uh…do you want any more—" He began to open the wallet.
The fucking nerve--
"I am not a goddamn charity case!" Her hands clenched into tight hard fists in their pockets, pressing against the suffocating wool. "You don't get to patronize me."
He snapped the wallet shut quickly, palms up towards Dutton in a placating gesture that made bile rise in her throat. "Look." She forced the words past her lips. "Thank you. I don't think I said it, last night, so—thank you. That was—you were decent. So I brought back your wallet." She swallowed. "And I took a percentage because I deserve that for my trouble, and because you need to learn not to be such a fucking idiot, because that 'whore with a heart of gold' business is complete bullshit. But I was not looking for a hand-out. I don't beg."
"I…didn't think you were." Her head jerked up, glaring, and he took a step back. "I swear."
"Good." She swallowed again. There was a rushing in her ears. "If I ever see you holding money out to me in that hand again, we better be a dark alley and you better be using your other hand to take off your pants."
She turned and left.
xxxxx
Almost a month later Dutton was huddled in the shelter of a bus stop working her way through the copy of The Mabinogi and Other Tales Goren had pressed on her. It was some seriously fucked up shit, shapeshifting and giants and sex and a lot of stuff about horses, for some reason. She was just beginning the adventures of Culhwch—if the Welsh loved anything more than horses, it seemed to be consonants—when she heard it.
"Dutton?"
She turned around and barely had time to hear the voice go "Dutton!" when she was swept up into a monstrous bear hug, her entire body lifted clear off the ground. Panic flared, and she twisted, struggling, drawing her knee back for maximum force and getting ready to slam it forward when she looked up and—
"Jesus fucking Christ, are you trying to give me a heart attack!?"
Bobby Goren beamed down at her. "You're alive!"
Oooookay. "Um, yes. Yes, I am." He looked dazed, happy but stunned, literally, as though he'd just been hit very hard upside the head. "Could you put me down now?"
It seemed to take a second for her words to penetrate his brain, but then he blushed and set her down rapidly. "I'm just glad you're…you're okay. I was worried—why don't you have the coat?"
"I gave it away," Dutton said, brushing herself off. "This kid I was walking the track with, she—"
"It was for you."
Jesus, controlling much?
"She needed it more than me," Dutton said carefully. "She's a junkie, she gets shivers—"
"You gave that coat to a junkie?" His eyes narrowed and grew cold. For the first time since she had met him, he looked angry. "What, are you needle buddies? Did you trade it for some of her stash?" He grabbed her arm, shoving up the sleeve. "You had me worried—"
"Fuck you!" Dutton wrenched away. "You gave that coat to me, it was mine to do what I wanted with, and I gave it to her. I'm not your pet hooker!"
"I got called down to the morgue!"
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and solid and utterly surreal.
"What?"
"I…I got called down to the morgue." He'd backed away, hunching his shoulders and looking at the ground, as if trying to fold back into himself. As if trying to pull his words out of the air and back into himself. "I got a call saying they had a Jane Doe, dead from—from exposure, and my name was on a piece of tape in her coat pocket, you know, f—from the sandwiches—" he gestured at Dutton, still not looking at her. "So I got called down to I.D. the body and it wasn't you, but it was the coat, and I didn't know how she got the coat and whether or not you were okay, and I, I didn't see you around the neighborhood…"
"Vice's been cracking down, I've had to keep a lower profile," Dutton heard herself saying. "God, Lara…"
"She was…your friend?"
"She was a nice kid." Dutton closed her eyes. "Ran away from home. Her ex got her addicted, and she started hooking after he ditched her—I should've known what happened when she didn't show up, but I hoped—" She could hear the edge of a crack working its way into her voice, and she shook her head sharply, one, two, three. Opened her eyes. "But I'm sure you don't care, seeing as she was just a junkie."
"I—I didn't mean it like that—"
"Really."
"It's just—" he scrubbed his face with his hand. "I was projecting—my brother, he—he'll say anything, do anything, for a hit, he sponged off me for a long time, and I—I'm sorry." He turned to go.
"Wait!"
Dutton grabbed at his cuffs. "Not that it's any of your business, but—look." She pushed up her sleeves. "I'm clean."
He was giving her that Magic Eye Puzzle scrutiny again, and she was suddenly embarrassed. "I mean, it's not like I couldn't be smoking something instead of using needles, but I'm not. Not that it's any of—"
"My business," he finished. He tugged down her sleeves again. His fingers lingered for just a second on her wrist. "I trust you."
"You're an idiot," Dutton said, but without any fire. She stepped away, then hesitated. "You were really…concerned about me?"
"Yes."
She was not touched, dammit. "You don't even know me."
Bobby shrugged. "I don't know you less than I don't know most people, these days."
xxxxx
The next time, Dutton saw him first.
She was moonlighting at Connie's Dinner, swabbing down a table when he came in the door. He had to duck his head, and the wind blowing through the entryway set his coat flapping around his ankles.
And she was so ridiculously fucking happy to see him.
For Christ's sake, he was just some fucking crazy librarian who gave her a coat once. They weren't friends.
They weren't even acquaintances, not really.
She watched him sit down, fuss with the placemat. He studied the menu briefly, flirted with the waitress.
She watched him pull out a thick orange paperback, and scoot around the booth while he read, trying to scrunch his gigantic frame into the small space but not willing to tear himself away from the page. He barely looked up to thank the waitress when she brought his meatball sandwich and coffee, and he ate with one hand holding the book open and just barely out of reach of the dripping bread.
He didn't move his lips, but his expressions twisted and twitched and morphed to match the story: surprise, mirth, hope, delight, despair, grief…it was like a facial rollercoaster.
Dutton watched all this, her hands moving robotically on the table beneath her—it would be cleanest table in Connie's Diner history—and then he twitched as if he were about to look up, and she snapped out of it and tore herself away, beating a hasty retreat out of his sight, not stopping till she reached the dumpster out back. She leaned against it, breathing heavily, picturing his face all soft and quiet and confused, and her hands shook with frustration and misery and fury.