His hand covers his fork, the cool metal of the handle pressing into his sweaty palm, but he can't make himself close his fingers around it. His bones are wooden, too old and dried out to bend without snapping.
You're hungry, he tells himself, you know you're hungry. Except he doesn't really know if he's hungry. It's no longer an insistent ache in the pit of his stomach, he no longer feels his stomach grumbling and rolling against itself, hissing and needy and begging for something to consume. No more acid at the back of his throat or muscle twitches in his eyelids, his jaw. Now, not eating is strangely… easy. Comfortable.
It's like forming any new mundane habit, like flossing - once you don't eat for long enough, consistently enough, it becomes as natural as anything.
Matt stretches his fingers straight out and clenches them tight. Open, closed, open. Then he picks up his fork and spears a chunk of apple from the plate in front of him. Lifting it to his mouth, his hand pauses for a barely a millisecond. The apple hovers in front of his nose and he inhales: sharp, bright and sweet, lightly floral. Organic. No pesticide residue, scrubbed long enough and skinned carefully enough to avoid any chance of contamination. He places it in his mouth and lets it sit on his tongue.
The juice seeps across his tastebuds and cold, long fingers wrap themselves around his biceps from behind, squeezing and digging their nails into his flesh. Hot breath on his ear, voice low and dangerous: Do you think you're winning? You're nothing but a slave to your own gifts.
Matt shakes his head and crushes the apple between his teeth, pressing one palm into the centre of his forehead, hard pressure against his third eye. "Fuck that, you old hypocrite," he mumbles out loud as he chews, shuddering as he tries to shake the fingerprints from his shoulders.
Another lesson from long ago, learned from the fetal position on a cold, cement floor:
The sooner you learn to accept things, Matt, the sooner you'll be worth my time. Your dad's dead? Accept it and move on. You've got a knife stuck in your side and a broken elbow? Accept it. Move on. Rip the other guy's throat out.
Acceptance does not have to equal giving up. Acceptance can be strength. Not everything has to be struggled against, not everything has to be fixed and made neat and tidy again because some things just happen, some things just are the way they are.
Right? He tells himself as he slowly chews another piece of apple.
Right.
The bullet wound required more energy than he'd expected, and so he'd taken two guilt-ridden personal days to try and get himself into functioning shape. Two days of sitting on the floor, his brain focused yet unfocused, letting every bit of spare fuel (both mental and physical) zero in on his stitched-up flesh.
"Ran into a real big door," he explained to Foggy over speakerphone, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his living room, furniture pushed against the wall to give him enough space to concentrate. Complicated meditation work requires wiggle room; he can feel the weight of anything within a few feet pressing in on him. He added, "A big, solid oak door."
Foggy groaned. "Was this maybe the kind of large, thuggish oak door that, say, packs a knife and/or gun?"
"Who knows? I'm a lawyer, not an interior designer." A reluctant chuckle on the other end of the line. He pressed a hand to his side, wrapped in gauze and tape, and set his jaw to keep from hissing. "I'll be back on Wednesday. Can you please tell Karen I've got food poisoning so she doesn't bring me a get-better cassorole?"
"Yeah, yeah," Foggy said. "Can I come by?"
A pause.
"Don't worry, I just need to rest up." Not a 'no,' exactly. But not really a yes, either.
"Don't go out and get your ass kicked so much and I won't worry so much." Foggy cleared his throat. "Alright. Just. Get some sleep and get some food in you, okay?" A mumbled stream of syllables rushed together, so quick that Matt hardly parsed them out before Foggy signed off.
Since their awkward talk in the kitchen have been hit and miss, really - partly because he feels like he has to tiptoe around Foggy, now, now that he has some inkling of what's going on. He can't just pretend everything's fine and Foggy won't let him, which is all the more… well, he wants to say it's frustrating, but that wouldn't be fair and he knows it.
It makes it more complicated, though, to have someone else's wants for him projected onto him, because he doesn't want to eat, not really, and having Foggy want it for him just makes things… more complicated. It should be encouraging, comforting to know that Foggy wants him to be okay. Wants him to eat. And yet somehow it's the opposite. Under Foggy's concerned gaze he feels like a rebellious child, like he's back in the convent, whispering to his Dad under the covers when he's supposed to be asleep.
But now it's Wednesday morning and his bullet wound has stopped oozing, so it's time to man up and get some work done. He slides through the front door of the office and winces as both Karen and Foggy's heads snap up to look him over and take in the state of him - he can practically feel their eyes searching his face, prodding him.
Karen left him a voicemail on his second personal day, echoey and mumbly like she'd locked herself in the bathroom to make the call: Hey, Matt. Hope you're doing good. If you need me to run any errands, or, you know, if I could bring you some groceries, anything you need… let me know. He feels guilty for not calling her back, now, in the way she snaps up from whatever she's going over with Foggy at the conference table and gazes at him, chewing nervously at her bottom lip. There's a silent shuffle of feet as she steps forwards one step, then backwards, then looks to Foggy for instruction. He nods at her.
"Hey," Karen says finally, gently, and he can hear her muscles tense - she's holding herself back from rushing towards him.
"Bud," Foggy says, warmly. "Welcome back."
"Hey," Matt nods in their direction, pulling off his snow-dampened wool coat and feeling for the coatrack. "Which one of you is gonna get me up to date on all the work I've been slacking off on? 'Cause I'm in the mood to be worked to the bone."
The joke lands, thank God: Foggy exhales, relieved, and Karen laughs. She comes over to take his elbow and lead him to his desk and Matt, gratefully, lets her.
He drags himself around the office, pacing in and out of each room as he listens to monotonous legal docs narrated by his screen reader. The exit wound in his side is smarting, and sitting down in their piece-of-shit scavenged furniture pulls at his skin in just the right way to make the anchor points of his stitches feel like pinpricks of fire. It's normally not something he'd mind, honestly, but the sensation is incredibly distracting when he's trying to keep focused on dull-as-dirt legal lingo and so he weaves through the office, fingers tapping rhythmically along with the screen reader's awkward cadence.
Making another slow pass past Foggy's office, his cane waving slowly, carelessly in front of him, he can sense Foggy's irritation. Foggy's pen pauses its scratching and his shoulders tense in a frustrated creak of muscle as he leans back in his chair and waits for him to take his pacing back into the other room.
"Sorry," Matt says automatically, crossing the threshold and pulling out his earbuds. He reaches out to feel for a chair out of habit and eases himself into it, tossing his tablet onto Foggy's desk. "I'm distracting you."
"It's cool," Foggy says, but Matt can hear the relief in his voice. "I mean, I think you've worn an inch-deep trail in the floor from all the pacing but, y'know, it's cool. Wanna talk about it?"
"About Schumer v. McCormack?" He taps a finger on his tablet.
"About what's eating you." It's a particularly unfortunate choice of words and they both wince as soon as the words leave his mouth. To his credit, Foggy soldiers on: "I mean, we haven't talked much since..." Matt makes a face and Foggy pauses, his fingers fidgeting in his lap.
"Yeah," Matt says quickly. "Yeah, I know we haven't. I'm sorry. I've turned myself into a bit of a ghost lately and I'll make it up to you."
"You don't have to make it up to me but it would be nice to see more of your face, y'know?"
Touched, a hint of a smile pulls at the corner of his mouth before Matt wrestles it into submission. He nods once. "Alright. Can do."
"You name it, man. Drinks, movie night, uh, a freakin' picnic in the park? We could take a very romantic baking class?" It's clear from Foggy's voice that he's smiling, too: a hopeful little lilt in his tone, the confident shot of energy he gets when he's gaining momentum, using just the right words to tease out what he wants. He's lawyering. "I'm serious," Foggy continues, laughing, and Matt finds himself catching the moment, too, coughing out a chuckle. "I'll buy you tickets to the goddamn ballet if you'll just hang out with me. I miss you."
The air in his lungs pushes itself out with a final heave of a laugh and the gunshot wound goes from a low moan to a throbbing shriek of pain. Matt hisses in a gasp of air, clutching at his side out of reflex, and slowly breathes back out.
"Yeah man, of course," he says, nodding, trying to keep his expression straight. "You don't have to bribe me with Swan Lake. We'll get drinks tonight, the three of us."
Darkly, Foggy notes, "I'm going to take a wild guess and suggest that your sick days and current ouch-face are related to that pedo busted in Jersey the other day." He pauses. "You know about Swan Lake?"
"Everyone knows about Swan Lake. And please lower your voice."
Leaning in close over the desk, Foggy whispers, "Are you hurt bad, man? The papers said there were shots fired."
"Nah." Another jolt of pain, less intense this time - he presses his palm tighter over the epicenter and concentrates. The pulsing heat reduces to a tremble, radiating outwards and diffusing into something more manageable. A piercing scream shifting to a stage whisper.
"Is that nah as in, 'I'm hurt but not too bad' or, 'I'm hurt bad but I'm not going to tell you about it'?"
Matt taps his nose. "Yes."
"Yes what? You're dodging the question."
"Can you blame me? It's good exercise."
"Mhmm. Funny guy."
"That's why you keep me around, right?" Matt smirks.
Foggy drums his pen against his legal pad. He shifts around in his chair, scratches the back of his head, taps his heel against the ground. There's an awkward tug at the edges of his voice as he asks: "You taking care of yourself?"
You eating? The implication clangs around the inside of Matt's head, deafening as a gong. He clears his throat and eases himself back out of the chair, one hand grabbing for his tablet and the other feeling for his cane.
"Sure I am." Fight-or-flight adrenaline tugs at him, dragging him backwards with an urgency so swift his feet can barely keep up. Sirens in his head, buzzing in his fingertips. Dry mouth, tight throat. "I'm going for a walk," he says, not even a little bit evenly. He clears his throat. "A little fresh air will do me some good."
Low, urgent, Foggy insists: "Matt, we have to talk about this sooner or later, you know that!"
Matt ignores him and plugs his headphones back into his ears. That way, he can at least pretend he can't hear Foggy muttering after him as he grabs his coat and heads out the door.
ANONYMOUS TIP LEADS TO DISCOVERY OF KIDDIE PORN HARD-DRIVE
Matt flicks through the news as he circles the block, listening to brief snippets of articles with bombastic headlines and no actual meat. The arrest he'd spoonfed the cops became big news fast but, in the days since, nothing seems to be moving quick enough to suggest the force knows what to do with what he's given them. Dozens of front-page headlines litter the major news outlets, but they're all vague enough to belie the fact that they have strong suspicions but that nobody actually knows shit.
Two blocks away from the office, he passes a kebab cart and the smell hits him so hard he might as well have been suckerpunched in the stomach. The smoke gets in his mouth, up his nose, carrying with it the grease and the char of the meat. In an instant it coats his tongue and he stumbles sideways to try and get away from the source.
"You okay buddy?" a man asks, and Matt senses him reach for his elbow to help straighten him out and lead him away from the curb, away from traffic, but Matt waves him off with a muttered, "Fine, thanks," and shakes his head to clear the taste from his brain.
He clicks ahead through the news, looking for something useful.
LOVING FATHER TURNED MONSTER, ALLEGED PEDOPHILE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT - CONNECTIONS TO HELL'S KITCHEN RING SUSPECTED
Nothing but pulpy, editorialized bullshit.
There's an obvious difference between when information is being withheld from the press and when the police are drawing blanks and scrambling to seem effective in the public eye and the situation, in this case, is really fucking obviously the latter. The incompetence on display - after all the perps, all the information he's placed directly into their hands, the police have come up with nothing? It's shameful. A handful of minions and a rich insider in custody and they can't get a single one to open his busted mouth and squeal. The number of cell phones, laptops full of potential leads, and yet they haven't made a single step forward that he hasn't blazed the path for himself.
Another headline, more sensational news with no meat.
MANHUNT CONTINUES FOR MIKHAIL ZOTOV: STINGS ACROSS NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY PROVE FRUITLESS
It's been week after week of anguish, spending every waking day terrified that he's going to hear of another tiny body pulled out of the river before Zotov can be found, another gesture meant to send a message loud and clear (that is, stop looking). But there's been nothing.
It should be comforting, but it's not. It makes perfect, aching sense.
Children are valuable commodities. It's dangerous and expensive to smuggle a kid, to pay off a couple of drug dealer piece of shit parents, to steal a runaway off the streets. When the risk is so enormous, you don't toss away the spoils just to prove a point to the fuzz. Instead, you tighten your grip on your valuable commodity.
He can't make them wait any longer. There are still kids waiting to be rescued.
Matt knows this for certain, deep in his bones, just as he knows how satisfying it will be to hear the sound Mikhail Zotov makes when he breaks every last one of his limbs over his knee.
Matt gets back to the office twenty minutes later, his brain no clearer than when he left, to find Karen alone in the office.
"Foggy's meeting some potential clients," Karen says brightly before he can ask. "Lunch meeting thing."
"He didn't mention it," Matt says, trying not to sound put out, and he feels his forehead wrinkle. He does his best to smooth his expression into something conveying surprise instead of, well, annoyance. It's clear that Karen catches it, anyway.
"Oh, no," Karen says quickly, "I don't think he purposefully, you know, didn't invite you. I think they're his cousin's in-laws or something, one of those borderline-blackmail mandatory relative favor things, and he didn't want to make you waste an afternoon listening to family gossip."
"Ah." He half-believes it.
"But hey, actual clients with actual money that Foggy doesn't mind taking," she repeats, laughing, and between the quiver in her laugh and the shift in her posture it's all a little the-lady-doth-protest-too-much but he lets it slides. "Anyway, I don't know about you, but I didn't pack a lunch today. Since we're gonna be the two losers left behind, would you be into grabbing lunch with me today? Food truck or diner food or whatever. Your pick."
She sounds so eager and so genuine and God, he wants to. He wants to make her smile and feel like she's done her job, done the right thing by getting some colour in his face and some food in his belly, but instead he has to listen to hear heart go from an eager hop-skip-jump to a disappointed thump as he stammers, "Oh, uh, thank you for the offer. But I can't, I'm so sorry. I have lunch plans."
"Oh," she says awkwardly. "Of course, yeah. No worries." She curls in on herself, just a little: head dropping a half-inch, arms wrapping themselves protectively around herself. She nods and pushes her hair behind her ears and if he didn't already know she was hurt he'd be fooled by her easy tone. Cool, no problem, all good.
"Otherwise I would have loved to," he adds, meaningfully, and she shakes her head (her skin picks up heat from her embarrassed blush, and it makes her radiates the jasmine and clean musk perfume hidden under the collar of her dress - a tiny bit of cigarette smoke and whisky, too).
"No problem," she insists, shuffling her paperwork. "I'm pretty sure I'm the only one out of the two of us who's craving Chinese, anyway." She laughs at herself, softly, and he feels like a traitor for breaking his awkward silence by laughing along with her.
Lunch plans is not entirely a lie, in his defense.
"You been eating the last couple days?" Claire asks, the moment he settles onto her couch. It's obvious she's staring at him intently, eyes boring into him like lasers.
He shies away under her gaze and nods, feeling like a schoolboy called to the front of the class. Forcing himself to speak, he manages to mumble, "yeah," and cracks a smile at her, an uncontrollable reflex when he feels outgunned and can't lawyer himself out of it: smile, laugh, brush it off - everything's cool, don't mind me.
She presses on: "How much?"
"Uh, I don't know. Some." He shrugs and fidgets with the cuff of his dress shirt. He knows exactly how much: one avocado, a cup of cubed pineapple, two slices of grapefruit that proved to be too overwhelming to eat more, seven spoonfuls of white rice (which was as much as he could manage before he caught a whiff of something fetid from the bowl and couldn't bring himself to eat another bite - it was all he could do to keep down what he'd already eaten).
Hell, if she asked for his weight he's fairly certain he could tell her right down to the gram. But he hopes to God she doesn't ask.
"How much?" she repeats. "I'm not asking to embarrass you, I'm asking because it's important. Just give me a rough ballpark of your caloric intake - did you get a thousand in you, at least?"
At least is a decent-enough tell, handed right to him, and Matt considers jumping at the opportunity in front of him and saying yes, of course, at least that much. But he bites his lip and rolls it between his teeth as he thinks of a palatable answer that's at least mostly true.
"Less than that. I don't know. Four hundred?" He tries to gauge her reaction, bumping up his estimate to be safe: "Five, maybe."
He holds his breath as he waits to find out if it's an acceptable number but, strangely, neither the pattern nor speed of her heartbeat changes, even though he knows he hasn't given the answer she seemed to want.
Claire just nods and runs her fingers through her hair. "Okay," she says. "Thanks for being honest. Let's do something about it, yeah?"
And… that's it? No lecture, no punishment? He tilts his head, curious but wary, as she pushes herself up and walks to the kitchen, grabbing a plastic grocery bag off the counter. Her skin temperature is even, heartrate steady, no perspiration. Why can't he get a read on her? The distinct sound of cans clanking together (four cans - he concentrates on counting them, tracing their shapes and counting them out, onetwothreefour, a brief distraction from the present). They bump mutely against the other contents of the bag: cardboard cartons of heavy liquid and plastic tubs of God-knows-what.
"Got a whole whack of options here." She settles back down onto the couch and starts lining up containers like soldiers along the edge of her coffee table, naming them as she goes along: "We've got: calorie supplement shakes in a variety of flavors for your choosing, coconut milk, protein powder, peanut butter -"
"I can't do peanut butter," he says quickly, holding up his hands. "Sorry for interrupting you, I just... can't eat that."
Blowing out a breath through her nose, Claire shrugs. "Well, you could try," she says, carefully. She taps her nails along the plastic edge of the lid, not impatiently (he knows from her touch that she prefers to keep her nails cut short and blunt and unpainted and he can hear all of it in their taptaptap against the peanut butter, a soft, blunt sort of noise).
He keeps focused on the soft, blunt noise of her fingers as he answers, too embarrassed to focus on her reaction: "There's too much oil in it. It coats my mouth and my throat and I can't keep it down." He pauses, wrinkling his nose. "Not to mention the bug parts."
"Bug parts?" She makes a grossed-outsound and tosses the peanut butter back into the shopping bag with a heavy thunk. "I guess straight-up olive oil is out, too, then?" She sets a heavy plastic bottle of oil onto her coffee table and Matt's stomach turns.
"I can't," he says with a grimace.
"What if it's blended into a shake?"
"Can't blend anything to the point where I can't taste it. I can even taste the residue of oil on your fingers if you've touched it before you've touched my food." He considers it, and adds, "I can taste anything you've touched at all, really."
"I see." She nods and tosses the oil into the reject pile, then hands him a can of supplement from the line-up. "Try this."
He runs his fingers over the paper label, trying to parse it out, but it's too smooth to read. All he can feel is the ridges of the metal can and the weight of the liquid, oozing back and forth as he shifts its weight in his hands. "I, uh," he mumbles. "What flavor is this?"
"Chocolate, but I've also got strawberry, vanilla, and, uh," she spins the other containers to read the labels, "wild berry, which really does taste like berries, kinda-sorta."
"You're really selling me on it."
"Sorry," she says. "Just try?"
He hesitates, tipping the can side to side, over and over again, feeling his stomach start to clench and his pulse quicken. "Can you read me the ingredients?"
"Don't psyche yourself before you even try it."
"Fair enough." The corner of his mouth twitches nervously as runs his fingertip around the rim. "Do you mind if I wash the can first?" She tilts her head questioningly at him, and Matt explains: "I, uh, don't do so well with drinking from cans. I can taste all the hands that have touched it, everything those hands have touched. Dust from sitting on the shelf, how many people's skin has combined to make that dust." He crooks the corner of his mouth into a bleak grin and walks his fingers along her coffeetable, explaining, "Sometimes, if I'm really unlucky, I can taste the paws of the rat that scurried across it in the warehouse."
She makes a sound, something like a sympathetic groan, before swallowing it down and shaking her head, "Sorry. Yeah, yeah of course. I can wash it for you," she holds out her hand, but he doesn't hand it to her, just rolls it back and forth between his palms, steeling himself. "Or would you rather -"
"I'd rather do it," he says finally, nodding. "If that's okay."
"Of course. Do what you gotta do."
Matt nods but doesn't get up. He picks at the edge of the label, peeling it away from the can. "Claire," he says carefully, not quite able to face her. "It's going to make me sick. I already know that."
"Okay," she says simply. She rubs her palms on her thighs and pushes her hair behind her ears and they sit in silence for a long moment.
"But I'll try," he says finally.
She cracks a smile at him and nudges his knee with her foot. "Thattaboy."
Claire takes a deep breath, hissing between her teeth sympathetically as she crouches beside him in her tiny bathroom. "No good, huh."
"That was," Matt begins, before spitting into the toilet. "That was… a lot of oil and a lot of dairy and someone who works in that canning factory isn't a huge fan of personal hygiene. To put it delicately." The thought makes his throat lurch again and he desperately leans over the toilet bowl, gripping the watertank with white-knuckled intensity.
His ribs ache with the pressure of the dry heave that pushes its way out of his chest, but nothing comes up except acidic mucus which he spits into the bowl, ashamed. He tries to turn his face away from her, to hide the heat in his cheeks and the tips of his ears and the tears he can feel trickling their way down his face, forced out from retching so hard.
"Fuck," she murmurs, gently. Slowly, slowly, she reaches out to touch his back, her fingers millimetres from grazing his spine, but before he feels her touch she yanks her hand away like she's been burned.
Something guilt-like in his chest snaps in two and he wants to tell her it's okay, that he's sorry for pulling away from her, before, when he was telling her about Stick. He wants to make her understand the truth: that it wasn't her fault, that he's not really like that, that he's not damaged like she must think, that he wants her to touch him, that...
But the words don't come out of his mouth, he just stays hunched over the toilet bowl, face hidden, listening to the echoes of his own desperate panting bounce off the bathroom tiles.
Claire stands up straight. "I'll get you some water, Matt, hold on."
He nods and gags, reaching out to brace one hand on the water tank of her toilet as another wave of nausea surges up.
When he was little, only six or seven, he'd had an imaginary friend named Bruno. Bruno was big and fuzzy, with floppy ears like a rabbit and a long nose like an anteater, one that could wiggle and point. He was his best friend; Bruno would sit with him every day at lunchtime, helping him ignore the other kids and focus on his food, explaining him what ants taste like and how they're so much yummier than peanut butter sandwiches. (Ironically, years later, he knows that it's more likely that the average tablespoon of peanut butter will have a few ant legs suspended in it than not.)
Bruno stuck around longer than most kids' imaginary friends. Bruno was the one thing he was able to keep from his life after his dad died. He rocked him in his arms every night, stroking the hair from his forehead with his long, long nose, and read the Bible out loud to him in the dark of night when all the other kids in the convent were already fast asleep. He used to think how amazing it was that Bruno always knew which verses Matt needed to hear, always the ones he knew by heart and could mouth along with. ("That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.").
After the hospital - when Stick came back to get him, and things changed. When lines were crossed that could never be uncrossed. That was when Bruno left him.
He wasn't always alone after that - sometimes Saint Catherine would come to him instead in the darkest moments, when he needed someone to hold his hand through the worst of the beatings and the worst of the rest. But his childhood friend never came back, and, yes, he was left alone. But self-pity is useless and damaging and, in this case, he thinks, wrong. Those moments (when he was bloody, or broken, or naked and trembling, with only himself to keep his mind clear and his head held high) were formative. They were the experiences by which he became self-reliant. Independent. Fully-imagined.
(He has to believe that, or else he might not be able to stand it. He has to.)
Memories of Bruno still come back to him in flashes and hazes. Even now, he half-remembers seeing him sitting by his bedside after the lye incident (God, incident - that's what he can't help but call it). It makes no sense, really, because he was good and blind at that point, blind for years, but he can still see the image in his head clear as day: white, sterile hospital walls, a cornflower blue crocheted blanket, the way the bed dipped where Bruno sat. A mount of brown fuzz reaching out to stroke his hand.
It's funny how intensely real imagined things can sometimes be.
He's never told anyone about Bruno - not even in college as an endearing, pseudo-vulnerable way to make slightly drunk girls realize they want to kiss him. A strange aspect of his nature has always had a hard time letting go of the iron grip he keeps around the secret parts of himself. And now, he feels like he knows for sure: total honesty feels fucking terrible, all shaky and strange, a constant full-body cold sweat.
He wishes he could take it all back, scrub Claire and Foggy and Karen's memories clean, because letting even just the half-truth of what's going on in his body and in his head escape out into the world makes it all so… real. And it doesn't need to be real, not when it can just as easily stay hidden where no one can see it but him and the world can go on as normal.
He wishes he knew what fixed felt like so he could make a map of how to get there, so he could find his way back on his own no matter how lost he might become. Turn left on 10th, hang a right on 45th, listen for the bug zapper hum of the giant neon sign announcing, Congratulations, You're Normal Again.
And then walk right on in like he belongs.
Claire calls him when they're four rounds deep at Josie's. His burner phone buzzes insistently in his pocket, dragging him out of a mostly-friendly three-way argument. "It's all bullshit!" Matt shouts, slamming his hand on the table and laughing, before excusing himself to duck into the street to take her call.
It's snowing lightly, coating Hell's Kitchen in a light dusting of wet, cold pinpricks. Matt leans his head back and lets the snow tickle his face. His cheeks and forehead feel hot, from the bourbon and conversation, and he knows he shouldn't be drinking on an empty stomach but things are going well in there; Foggy is laughing, Karen is smiling. He's doing a good job at being normal.
"Hey," he says softly, bringing his phone to his ear. "What's up?"
"I've been thinking a lot about this - about everything. And I'm a realist. If this isn't going to work, tell me now and I'll stop torturing you with protein shakes. I'll figure something else out."
He bites his lip and heads around the corner so Foggy and Karen can't watch him through the windows. "You don't have to, Claire. It'll be okay."
"Well, I'm not putting money on your sense of taste going back to normal anytime soon." She takes a sharp breath. "And I'm not putting money on you feeding yourself properly in the meantime."
Her words hit him hard and the silence stretches on - neither of them knows how to move on from her statement. The snow keeps falling and the tip of his nose starts to feel cold, his fingers starting to stiffen around his phone. Matt chews at the inside of his cheek and sniffs, once, before wiping at his face with the back of his hand and clearing his throat.
"Can we please not make a big thing out of this?" he asks, quietly.
"Matt."
"Claire."
He hears her shift the phone in her hands, hears her grind her teeth together. She swallows, hard, before telling him, "You're worth taking care of, you know that right?" Matt chuckles, darkly, briefling dropping the phone to his side before lifting it back up to his ear. "I'm serious," she continues.
"I don't need - I don't know what you think this is," he begins, voice wavering, but he has no idea where he's headed and he breaks off awkwardly, words hanging in the air.
"It doesn't matter what I think it is. Just come over tomorrow night and let me try to keep you healthy, okay?"
Inside the bar, he can hear Karen and Foggy mumbling to each other about him, their voices warm and optimistic ("He seems better, don't you think?" "He's making an effort, I'll give you that."), before Foggy changes the subject back to ordering another round.
The words climb up Matt's throat before he can reconsider them: "And if I said no?"
"Well, Matt," Claire says, her voice thin, "if you said no, that would be really fucking stupid of you."
She hangs up before he can argue.
Matt stands outside for a while longer, frost nipping at the tips of his ears. He presses his fingernails into his palms and focuses on the eight tiny little half-moons of pain. The pain pulls his attention closer, slowly shutting out the yelling from the apartment three blocks over, the radio in the cab two blocks away, Karen and Foggy's conversation just on the other side of the wall. His mental bubble shrinks until it's just him and the sting in his palms and the snow falling on the back of his neck and the world is briefly, mercifully quiet.
A loud noise, sharp like a gunshot, and Matt jumps, muscles tense and ready to react before he realizes it was just the front door of Josie's slamming open.
Karen pokes her head around the corner.
"Hey you!" she shouts, laughing as the snow falls on her exposed skin. "You good? Come back inside!"
Matt pushes himself away from the wall and tucks his burner phone in his pocket, forcing himself to crook a smile as he makes his way towards her. She reaches a hand out to him as he gets close, the warm skin of her palm brushing his icy fingers.
"You know me," he says, taking her hand and letting her guide him through the threshold, back into the glowing heat of the bar. "I'm always good."
(Hello friends. Thank you so much for your patience during this very long wait. I appreciate each and every one of you for reviewing and subscribing, thank you for your kind words and your encouragement. As always, you can come hang with me on tumblr where I'm shmazarov. More to come in the very near future, I promise!)
