Chapter Five
[A/N – Right, this one's for all the TDK fangirls (and boys) out there. This is the Joker at his most intense and passionate, but unpredictably so, of course. Please, review. Much love, guys. Enjoy! *fingers crossed*]
Looking back, Ray was still surprised it had been that easy. At the time, she thought maybe Dankovitch was going to stake a claim on her, as a mobster would put it, and the whole interview thing was just a precautionary gag; made easy to look easy, so to speak. But since then she'd sat in on most of the business meetings they'd had, and she'd never been approached by any of the men she worked for, not one single time. Apparently one of the perks of working directly for Marone was that no-one ever tried to invade her personal space. She was there, she worked on the assignments they wanted, she gave her professional advice when asked, and that was it. Outside those cloistered meetings, they didn't know her and she made a point of not knowing them. Of course there were rumors about gunfights and turf wars and things like that, but she kept her head down and worked unobtrusively, trying to stay away from that side of things. She'd been right in her assumption, too, that this job would open doors for her. Slowly she noticed that she was getting 'referred' to people she'd never met on the basis of her one client, until eventually her clientele expanded to include at least a dozen high-profile accounts scattered among the city's elite. It helped, of course, that people usually followed the advice of her first and most important client if they knew what was good for them. It also helped that her conscience was by and large easy going enough to allow for the occasional homicidal lapse in judgment on the part of the Mafia.
In the meantime, her modeling gigs were taking up so much of her time that she began to cut down on them. This created the impression that she was 'reclusive' and 'mysterious' and suddenly her fee-range shot up astronomically. Fate can be a real bitch, she reflected a year later, when a Page 3 columnist did a profile of her three-pronged career as a model/magazine columnist/stock-analyst. Not that there was something unusual about being snapped by the scandal rags, but when they actually started to remember a model's name........... all things considered, she needed to keep her head down, and increasingly frequent trips to New York to handle business there on behalf of her clients served her purpose well enough. She was vain enough to ego-Google herself once in a while, but now that the Joker was back she fully realized how dangerous any information about her in the public domain could be if it landed up in the wrong hands. Gotta do something about that soon, she thought irritably, upset for no better reason than that Brockway Timber seemed to be going down, contrary to her predictions. She twisted her mouth exasperatedly at the screen, almost at the exact same second her doorbell rang.
Loping over to the door, she leaned her forehead against the paneled wood to see through the peephole. Most inconveniently for her, there appeared to be a purple gloved finger blocking her view of the corridor outside. Ray backed away from the door, with that sinking feeling in her stomach yet again, the one she'd come to associate with nasty surprises and death threats. Reaching for the land phone to her left, her hand froze when the door shuddered on its hinges. Her visitor seemed to be kicking her door down.
Ray retreated to her bedroom and emerged at a stealthy pace, shotgun loaded and ready to go cradled in her arms. The door still juddered from the impact of the man on the other side, but she waited patiently, standing with her back to the light and legs braced for the first attack.
The door's upper hinge gave. The frame swung open with a depressed creak, and the Joker stepped through. He was alone this time.
He blinked as he entered, screwing his eyes up comically against the glare of the strong lava light she'd deliberately lit close to the door. From the shadows beyond the lamp, Ray's aim never wavered from his forehead. He couldn't see her and craned his neck in pretended confusion, acting so blasé that she couldn't decide whether to shoot him or beat him over the head with the lamp. Eventually, after thirty seconds of intense, soot-eyed canvassing of the room, he decided he'd had enough. The Joker looked around one more time, shrugged elaborately, and put a bullet in Ray's ceiling.
'What the hell was that for?' she shrieked in rage, painfully aware of her landlord's rules about remodeling and reconstruction in the place. 'I was standing right here, do you have any idea how much that scrolled plasterwork is going to cost me to replace?'
He grinned at her, squinting through the light as she vaulted over the sofa to better inspect the damage. 'Ah come now, angel, how was I supposed to know you were even at home?'
She looked down from the ceiling and was shocked half to death to find his face only inches away from hers. Heart racing madly, she noted that his teeth were the filthiest set she'd ever seen. Her eyes couldn't leave his scars alone, though, torn and jagged lacerations stretching his mouth into a cruel parody of a grin. His eyes were blood shot and the stringy green hair smelled terrible, like paint cans recovered from garbage dumps. The tic at the base of his neck was twitching madly, and for a moment she wondered whether he was on drugs. Certainly that would explain the schizophrenic behavior and maybe even excuse the murder OCD……..but when he easily twisted the shotgun out of her slack grasp and wrapped his left hand around her throat; well, that was when she began to suspect that something else was terribly wrong.
His fingers moved slowly on her neck, squeezing experimentally at various pressure points. She almost retched in pain and blinked in disbelief at him. 'You're actually going to kill me?' she said, her voice hoarse but still sounding incredulous. 'I take your messages, I completely forget to report you to the police for holding me up at gunpoint on the highway, and now you want to murder me?'
He snarled an obscenity at her, red eyes daring her to try anything more, but she brought up her fist and punched him in the jaw anyway. He stumbled back very slightly, giving her the time to pick up the closest thing to hand, which was an ornamental table clock featuring Harlequin and Columbine as the minute and hour hands respectively, and hit him over the head with it.
Take that, clown, she thought viciously as she watched him curl up on the floor in pain, and that, and that, smashing the clock several times over his head as he stood up again, but this time he kept on coming at her. Finally he grabbed her wrist, so hard that she thought her bones might break, and shoved the clock out of her grasp. She wrenched violently at his grip, kicking at his shins to free herself, but he did nothing but squeeze her wrist tighter until she drooped with pain and exhaustion, her long black hair falling over his forearms and hers like a curtain. Her body sagged, and he muttered 'No, no, no' very softly, dragging her around to the sofa and pushing her down on it. As soon as the cushions softened her fall, he was there, kneeling on the floor in front of her, arms boxing her in on either side as she shrank away.
Pushing the hair off his face, he gave her a pseudo-friendly grin and said, 'Can we talk now, angel? What's that?' She nodded slightly, afraid of making any sudden moves. 'Here we go, then,' he said cheerfully, and she winced at how raw his eyes looked. 'In today's game of model Jeopardy, the word is Mafia,' he drew the word out, 'and the question is, what should pretty young things avoid at-all-possible-costs?'
'You?' she whispered, and got her hair yanked back by the roots for her pains. He towered over her, all whipcord muscle and psychopath eyes, and said, 'Let's have an instant repeat of that, shall we? The word is money, and the question was who did it belong to. Any guesses, angel?'
She frowned at him through the smarting tears of pain in her eyes. 'Why do you call me that?'
He twisted his misshapen mouth, wrapping his other hand around her bruised wrist. 'Because you look like you're not one and I like that,' he hissed, his eyes going to her lips. She opened her mouth to reply but let out an involuntary gasp instead when he buried his face in the hollow of her neck. He said something, his scarred lips moving against her pulse as he growled into her throat. She used her free hand to try and push him away, but somehow her hand met his shoulder and then stilled, clinging to him as he nuzzled his way up her throat and around the jaw line. Her mind was curiously blank and her body felt pleasantly light all of a sudden. A very soft moan escaped her lips as he let go of her wrist and pushed his hands up under her tank top. His lips reached hers, and then, suddenly, they were kissing. Tentatively and then deeply, the rhythm picked up pace as the room started spinning around, and he was lying on top of her as she lifted her arms and wound them around his neck, encouraging him as he shifted to move closer to her…….
Some time later, he lifted his head, lightly bit the underside of her jaw, and asked, 'Would you go now, if Marone called you?'
She sat up as though struck by a bolt of lightning, staring at him with horrified eyes. He could tell she hadn't even heard his question, she was so astounded at what she'd just let him do. Smiling slightly, he watched her scramble up from the sofa, running her hands through her tumbled hair as she did so. 'Holy shit,' he heard her whisper, and his smile broadened. He stood up to go to her, easily catching and trapping her against the wall when she would have moved away. He tightened his grip on her shoulders and slammed her against the wall when she struggled. Now she was staring up at him with big dark eyes, well-kissed, swollen lips and messy hair, looking like she couldn't believe this was happening to her. On impulse he bent and claimed her mouth again, and when he let up she was clinging to him to stay upright, her fingers playing with his hair, that bewildered expression in her eyes again. He lowered his head to her ear and growled, 'If you say that was a mistake, I'll kill you.'
An involuntary laugh escaped her, and her eyes lost some of that confused look. 'I didn't say anything,' she said, 'And if I had, it would have been about how I never do this kind of thing normally, and now, and with you, is an extremely bad place to start.'
He grinned at her, and some of the reddish gleam in his eyes was gone. He even looked younger, more human, and she wondered briefly what he'd looked like before the scars. As soon as the thought crossed her mind, he cocked his head to the side and asked, 'What?'
'I'm just counting the ways you repulse me,' she told him, her fingers moving from his hair to his neck and slipping inside the collar of his coat. He arched his neck back into her hands, cracking his neck muscles as he stretched, and her fingers traced patterns across his collar bones. 'You'll get used to the scars,' he said, his eyes closed, and her hands stopped moving in surprise, then started again. 'Yeah, the make-up and the psychosis have nothing to do with it, I'm sure. Oh – ' as he pulled her roughly against him at those words, and her eyes drifted shut, too. He ran a hand down her thigh and back up again, turned her around with him, pushed her against the dining-area sideboard and lifted her to sit on it so that they were on the same level. They didn't break the kiss, but her legs were lifting and wrapping themselves around his waist; his hands were cradling the small of her back, and now he was making sure she couldn't count anything, couldn't think of anything when he moved against her like that…….
'I think I've gone mad,' she said into his hair after a while. They were on the rug in front of the fireplace now, and he was exploring the contours of her ribcage in exquisite detail. Her head fell back and her hips rose off the floor in an undulation of pleasure. Above her, the Joker licked his lips with exaggerated emphasis, making her laugh again. 'I didn't mean mad like that – not that you really are insane, come to that, but considering I just met you for the fir-'
The Joker sat upright with a jerk, straddling her as he frowned fiercely. 'I am crazy, you know,' he drawled, his flippant tone at odds with the cruel grip of his hand on her wrist.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him quizzically, ignoring the pain. 'Do I really look that stupid? You know and I know you're not crazy. As an image, if it works for you, that's fine, you know? But-' she never finished that sentence. He pulled her up by the hair, so that now they were sitting face to face and his hands were thrust into fists at the base of her neck. Shaking her, he growled, 'Then what am I?' into her ear, his scars grazing her cheek.
She slid her hands up from his hips to his chest, curling her bruised wrists into his lapels. 'Let me tell you what I think you are, and then if you find I'm wrong you can tell me what you think,' she suggested, eyes gleaming with invitation. Against his will, his mouth opened to breathe the command 'Tell me' against her cheek. So she smiled up at him, and then she began to tell him.
________________________________________________________________________