A flash of chrome gleamed in the light, a color that signaled danger to Jill's brain, like the red blare of a siren. Even though she didn't see the exact shape of the revolver at first, she saw his stance. He didn't aim the like someone who had training. Not the clipped, sharp expedience of the military or the police. One hand, no brace for recoil, no moment to draw a bead and fire at a weak spot that was sure to kill. Jill knew a civilian — and panic — when she saw it.
He fired six shots in Carlos' direction — the entire cylinder's worth of ammunition — with a series of deafening cracks that reflected down the street. A chorus of screams rang out, the footsteps of people running from the echoes of the reports pattering away. An explosion of red so dark it was almost black flung out of the back of Carlos' jacket in a ropey strings that curled on themselves and fell to the snow below. Carlos clutched himself — his chest, it looked like.
Jill stooped over and ran to him, ran faster than she might have thought she could, and grabbed him around his abdomen, dragged him with her to the cover of a car parked on the side of the road.
"Where are you hit?" She asked. Carlos fought with the buttons on his jacket, one arm working only with pronounced effort, and looked down; his shirt was still white, with a bright red corona radiating from under his jacket's left lapel.
"No center mass," he said, then felt his neck on both sides. "I think I got nicked over here, but it's not—" Then, as if just now realizing it was Jill, and Jill was supposed to be somewhere in the background, "Wait. Where'd you come from?"
"Stay down. I'll take care of it."
"But you can't, you'll—"
Jill slid her pistol out from where it rested, solid against her lower back under her sweater, and sidled in a crouch along the car's shell to where its cabin ended. She turned and aimed her gun over its hood to where the man was struggling to reload the cylinder, far away from any kind of cover. She took a breath, and fired. The man's hand snapped back and he cried out, one of the bones of his wrist visible through a gaping wound on the underside of his arm. He dropped the revolver, onto the pavement. Jill shot again, through his other hand as he raised it to clutch at the space where the knobby bone of his wrist used to rest; his fingers, now free of their anchoring, floated and bent in odd directions, and he screeched again, fell to the ground. The van's tires squealed, behind him, spitting snow and ice in a spray. It took off in frantic jags of overcorrection, down the street, left him behind.
Jill returned to Carlos, fell on her knees; the crust of ice and cold concrete bit into her skin, somewhere far away, and she put her gun down. "Just hold on, okay? I'll call 911, just—"
"No," Carlos shook his head. "No hospital."
"What do you mean 'no hospital'? I saw you take a bullet. You—"
"It's just my shoulder — promise," Carlos grunted, "I got some stuff at home. Help me up."
Jill grabbed his good hand with her own, leveraged him into a hunkered standing position. Carlos' eyes were on the man in the street, and he set his mouth in a line, walked toward him, his features blurring into a silhouette against the headlights of the cars that had stopped, at first honking at the obstruction, their drivers now distracted. Jill followed.
"Six shots and no kill, huh?" Carlos said, and scooted the man's gun away with his foot. It clattered and scraped along the asphalt, landing in a lonely glint somewhere under a nearby car. "Must be like blue balls. That sucks. You got a day job?"
"Fuck you," the man spat.
"That's real nice of you to offer, but if you fuck like you shoot, you probably don't make much money at that, either."
Jill's ears perked to the sound of a high whine that pierced the distance, and she looked to her left. Whirling sirens flashed their warning coloration into the dark of the morning.
"We got police incoming," she said to Carlos, "what do you want to do?"
Before Carlos could respond, the man on the ground looked into the distance with a sudden, harried panic; his breaths quickened, now rough and loud. His face suggested he was doing the speedy mental calculus of a man trapped, which he then turned on the people who stood above him.
"You got a gun," the man said to Jill, "just put one in my head. Please. Just fuckin' kill me. They'll send me back if you don't."
Jill and Carlos exchanged a brief look.
"Who'll send you back?" Carlos asked.
"Send you back where?" Jill finished.
"Like you don't fuckin' know. I'd do it myself if this bitch hadn't fuckin' shot my hands off! Just do it!"
"It's Umbrella," Jill said. "Isn't it? They put you up to this. How much did they pay you?"
The man stared at her and panted, a sheen of sweat on his blood-flecked face. "You want me to tell you, or you wanna sleep at night?" He licked his lips; the approaching lights painted watercolor splotches against the sweat on his face. "You're gonna solve a lot of problems for some very desperate people."
The police arrived in their gradual, eventual way, blocked the street with cars that were topped with lights that spun and flashed blue and red in spastic flickers. When they arrived it was with guns drawn; both Jill and Carlos put up their hands.
They questioned both in turn, and Jill slipped into her "cop" mode with little effort; she did most of the talking, gave a statement, showed them her conceal-carry permit. They seemed like they could go either way with who they believed, until a nearby witness approached Carlos from one of the cars and asked if he was okay, then corroborated their story. The man on the ground started begging the police to kill him — when they stood him up and handcuffed him near his elbows, he began to sob, repeating that "they" would take him back, that they were sentencing him to death. The police didn't seem to mind.
While the excitement wound down, one of the police officers, a short woman with blonde hair and a powerful build, noticed the blood dripping from Carlos' arm onto the pavement.
"I'll call you an ambulance sir, just wait here."
She raised her radio to her mouth, and Carlos interrupted her with an outstretched hand.
"You don't gotta — was just going there myself. I think I'll save the money and have her drive me."
She eyed him. "You sure, sir?"
"Oh yeah. It'll be fine. Thanks, officer."
Carlos walked away, a hand against his arm, and then turned to Jill, who was watching him.
"You comin'?"
Jill stalked in front of Carlos with a great, executive clomp of her boots against the pavement. With her arms crossed, she obstructed his path. "This is stupid. I'm serious," she said, and though it was intended as a forceful command, it wouldn't exit as one; it sounded like more like a plea. "This isn't funny. Someone just tried to kill you. You can't not go to the hospital if you've been shot. I'm taking you, wheth—"
"Look," Carlos interrupted her. His eyebrows did the thing again; they furrowed just slightly, gave him an instant sheen of sincerity. "Do you trust me?"
Jill's mouth was still open from her unfinished word. "O-of course I do."
"If dipshit back there is tellin' the truth, then a hospital is the last place you wanna go. We've got different experiences when it comes to this stuff — let's just leave it at that."
The only thing that made Jill more frustrated with Carlos than when he didn't take things seriously, was when he took them seriously and proved her wrong in his easy, non-confrontational way. He weaved around her, and touched her on the lower back with his good hand as he passed.
"Sweet to be concerned, though."
Jill followed after. "If it's anything that worse than a flesh wound, I'm gonna knock you out and drag you there myself."
"You've got my permission."
"AND I'm going to make you stay there entire time. The entire time."
"Hey, if you're there, no worries about safety. I've seen that first hand."
She wasn't winning this one. It was a feeling she wasn't used to.
"Okay." She puffed. "Give me your keys — I'll drive. Just tell me where to go."
"Here," Jill said, and grasped Carlos' jacket by the thick, scratchy lapels. He winced with a loud sucking noise through his teeth when she slid it off of him; the left shoulder of his shirt was completely torn out. A deep, straight wound bubbled dark blood, black in the shadows of the apartment like an oil spill, down the heft of his arm.
"Where's the bathroom?" Jill asked him, holding the coat under him so as to not drip blood onto the carpet. When he led her there, she flicked on the light and closed the lid of the toilet with her foot, helped ease him down in case the blood loss made his balance unsteady. She took a seat on the bathtub rim beside him, cold and hard and angular.
Jill unbuttoned his shirt, white with one sleeve stained red, damp and clinging and warm. When the shirt was peeled away, he was left in a tank top, ribbed in tiny recessed vertical stripes, his dark chest hair visible over the deep scoop of the shirt's neckline.
The man had gotten spectacularly close to hitting multiple weak spots; a black char mark seared across the side of Carlos' throat in a crusted charcoal streak, just over a big, pumping artery beneath the skin. The wound on his left shoulder hit only flesh, but surprisingly deep, a quarter-inch trough with torn edges dug though beefy red muscle, drops trailing to fall dark and wet from the point of his elbow onto the tile floor below. Jill cleaned the wounds as best she could with a nearby bar of bright green soap. It always shocked her just how much flesh wounds could bleed, tunneled deep enough; his blood mixed with the water and the lather colored her hands a milky pink while she worked, down to her wrists. Once it was clean, clean as it would probably get with the supplies she had, she pressed a towel against his shoulder.
"You probably need stitches," she said. "You got lucky."
"Got some spray left under the sink, I think."
"Okay…" she said, "hang on, I'll get it. Hold this." Carlos clutched at the towel his with his other hand.
Jill dug under the sink in a cabinet that smelled like sawdust, moving bottles of cleaning solution and rolls of spare toilet paper until she found it: a green aerosol can, standing dusty and forgotten behind a jug of bleach. Jill picked up it, turned it over, and read its expiration date — a few months from now. She shook the can and something rattled like the errant bead in a can of spray paint, clacking against the aluminum from the inside.
"You need something to bite down on?"
"I'm a pro," he croaked. "Just hit me with it."
Jill held his bicep still, and, with a wince, pulled the wound open just a touch, aimed the nozzle of the can towards it, and sprayed; an acerbic green smell, like burnt rosemary or maybe peppermint leaves behind the sting of alcohol misted into the air. Carlos yelped and grit his teeth, let out a string of artless curses, clenched a fist so tight it was shaking against the white ceramic of the countertop.
"Sorry," Jill said. It foamed and sizzled, spitting little flecks into the air in a riot of white froth, then ran thin and grey like dishwater down the lines and curves of his arm. Jill wiped the residue with the towel; the wound was already starting to burn back together, recessed with a raw pink chemical scar that bubbled and fizzed. It wouldn't be pretty, but at least it'd be closed. She had to give it a few more doses for it to close completely.
"How's it feel?" Jill said, quietly.
Carlos flexed his shoulder, as if working out a muscle cramp. His range of motion returned in fits, and as the sting died, his winces faded and his expression became more relaxed. He felt the scar with the tips of his long fingers, checking their pads for blood.
"Thanks, doctor," he said, "much better."
"Do you have any Safespirin?" Jill asked from where she crouched, used the clean end of the towel to wipe his arm the best she could. "Might help."
"Yeah, I've got some painkillers. C'mon."
Jill tossed the towel into his bathtub, washed her hands, and followed him to the large front room that served as both kitchen and sitting room. He clicked on the overhead light, dim and close, and Jill got a look at the interior — medium-sized and left dark, not fully moved into yet despite being occupied for months. Cardboard boxes labeled for different rooms were still stacked in twos and threes, gleaming posters in frames leaned against walls, forgotten, a task for another day that hadn't yet come. The space was clean in a way that suggested absence more than fastidiousness, like a renovation model.
Carlos walked to his refrigerator, opened the door, and bent down to look inside. Jill looked into that black slash mark against his throat, and it looked into her, as well — though the drama of vital, dark blood and open wounds had absorbed most of the attention, that one mark, forgotten against the tan of his skin, signaled a sudden realization. He'd escaped death, sudden and absolute, by mere millimeters. Maybe not even that. It was pure luck, not skill, that prevented it; there was nothing that could have been done if that was what life decided was going to happen.
Maybe not tonight. But tomorrow…? The next day? The day after that?
A wave of nausea, an unsteady betraying pitch of the stomach, turned Jill's insides with sudden force. Jill gestured to the balcony, only slightly larger than the exit door itself.
"I'm gonna get some fresh air," she said in a throaty rush, clogged with saliva, "the smell of that stuff always did a number on me."
"Okay," he said, and something in his face looked concerned. "I'll meet you out there in a sec."
Jill slid the door open and stepped into the night air, leaned over the railing. The balcony, a series of black metal slats that doubled as a fire escape joined to the apartments below his by a set of rickety stairs, was built onto the back of the complex. A broad grey stretch of highway, lifted off the street in the beginnings of a mid-city on-ramp then away into the horizon, was busy with headlights and the rush of vehicles under forest green signs directing drivers to one historical district or another. Beyond, there were lights, twinkling white and pale yellow against the dark, a city that still churned and sparkled despite the early hour.
The wind that toyed with her hair and pulled at the hems of her shirt wasn't particularly cold for a January, but it clung to the mist of warm sweat on the back of her neck and her chest, turning it into frigid sheets against her skin. She overlooked the yellow pinpricks of light with eyes unseeing, and caught her breath. Once she was sure the urge to vomit had passed, she leaned her forehead on her arms.
Carlos returned with a shuffle of the door on its runners, a bottle of alcohol in hand, its fluted glass frosted from the cold. He poured himself a shot into a small glass. Jill could smell it, strong and piercing, from where she stood.
"I didn't mean mercenary medicine, I meant medicine-medicine."
"Hey. Contractor is the polite term," Carlos chided, indicated the bottle with a shake. "You want some?"
"Dunno — can you hold back my hair with that bum shoulder?"
Carlos tossed the drink back with a swift, practiced gulp. He made a terrible face against the taste. "Oh God. You have to try this." He poured her a shot in the same glass, passed it over. "Here."
Jill picked it up between the pads of her middle finger and her thumb. The alcohol tipped and shook in its glass, quivered under the fine shakes and tremors her hand. Jill swirled it around in the glass, then dumped it back. It tasted like shit: hard and acrid and burning all the way down, no sugary training wheels to coat it. It pooled in her belly, warm and hard, and started to spread its fuzzy tendrils almost the instant it was swallowed.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah…" then, "can I have another?"
"You sure?"
"About the drink? Yeah." She passed the glass back.
"No," he said as he poured, "I meant about bein' okay."
"I'm fine."
"You know," Carlos said, and Jill took the shot from his fingers. He placed the bottle down on a small wooden crate, one that looked like it normally doubled as a seat. "My detector isn't as good as a cop's. Probably. But I like to think I know bullshit when I hear it."
Jill tossed the second shot back, placed the glass down, wiped her mouth and looked up at him. "That so?"
"Mhm. Sudden distance," he gestured to the balcony, "two shots of Don Julio back-to-back, and…" by way of explanation, he lifted one of her hands from the balcony railing; her fingers trembled, even though she tried to still them, tiny flecks of his blood still wedged between her pale fingernails and their beds. "So're you gonna tell me what's going on in there, or do I gotta keep feeding you tequila till you spill your life story all over my bathroom? One way or another, it's comin' out."
"Adrenaline dump," Jill said, flexed her fingers. He released her hand. "Thought he plugged something more important than your shoulder. I guess my fight or flight just hasn't caught up yet."
Carlos' face didn't shift or change; he turned to the railing, and leaned his forearms against it, looking away across the highway and into the city. The dim ambient light cast a pale corona against his profile, against the deep, burnished shine of his hair, which seemed to settle on only one direction, which was disobedience.
"Y'know… caring about someone else isn't such a bad thing that you gotta hide it." He looked at her, then. "You're not by yourself anymore. You know that, right?"
It made Jill uncomfortable, like someone had looked into her brain with an x-ray, pulled out spools of the grey matter and examined her fears with a jeweler's loupe. "Old habits die hard, I guess." She fought to keep her tone even.
Carlos considered this, then shrugged with one shoulder, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I'll help you kill 'em, then."
Jill paused. She decided it was another of his japes, ill-matched with the circumstances, now more than most times. Those jokes that lifted the edges of her attempts to focus, made it impossible to keep her mind trained on the task at hand, no matter how serious it was. She hadn't resented the intentional poor timing of one of those jokes in a long time, but tonight was different.
"You like to joke," she said, "And maybe it's funny for you, but you… you're confusing me."
Carlos seemed taken aback by the tone in her voice, and turned so he could face her. "I'm not jokin'."
"You shouldn't say things like that unless you mean them," Jill said, as if she didn't hear him, "because I think you mean something different than you probably do. I need you to be serious, just this once. Please."
When the words left her mouth, he was already moving towards her. That same intention from that moment in front of the stairs, unafraid, no hesitation — this time, soft and almost chaste, he stooped down and kissed her on the lips. There was no hunger in that first kiss, no desperation, no push for more, only a reverent and unexpected sweetness that lingered until he pulled away. He leaned his forehead on hers, and watched her from that close vantage; his eyes flickered over her face, as if trying to commit it to memory.
"Serious enough for you," he said, "or you need more convincing?"
His body language was shocked when she leaned forward into him and rocked him back, the sound of his step to steady himself ringing against the metal underfoot. After a brief moment to re-calibrate, his hands were against her waist and he pulled her to the line of his body, warm amid the January morning. Under his power that first kiss was something sweet, maybe even innocent — Jill's was something different, full and deep, her fingers laced in his hair, bodies pressed together. They stayed there on that balcony, cocooned together. Time seemed to stretch, all at once immediate and close, and also distant, expanding. One of his hands, out of what may have been habit, drifted up the flat of her ribcage and brushed against the fabric of her sweater, over one of her breasts. Jill shivered against her own nerves and the bluster of a passing winter breeze, and Carlos pulled away from her, gave her a look that struck her as serious before he remembered to smile.
"Gotta admit, this is the first time I've had to take a literal bullet to get to first base. Totally worth it."
Jill laughed, and wiped a faded smear of her lipstick off of his mouth with the pad of her thumb. "Do you ever get sick of ruining things?"
Carlos pretended to think about this. "Nope," he said, and led her back inside, away from the cold and the impersonal flutter of headlights. He lifted one of her hands to his mouth, kissed her knuckles.
"You need me to take you home?" He asked. "You said its been a long day."
The question was coached in innocent concern, but Jill knew what it was asking.
"I figured I…" Jill said, "could just… stay here? It's cold, and…" it was her turn to lead him by his hands, tugging him back into the shadows of the hallway. "I was promised some more convincing."
"Alright, I—" he said, and followed with the look of a man in a dream, lost for words for perhaps the first time in his life, "—okay."
It was brief and feverish, and like most things looked forward to, over before Jill realized it. She would be sore, tomorrow; even after he'd knelt before her, made sure with thorough care and enthusiasm that she was satisfied first, she needed a little extra easing into it. He didn't seem to know where he wanted to touch her, his hands roaming from one place to the next, but always seemed to return to clutching her against him, keeping her close. Jill was used to these sort of situations devolving into frantic animal desperation after long periods of build-up, and while sparks of intensity found their place there under those rolling gray shadows and twisted bedsheets, it was drowned out by another force, something like solace, nervous but unquestioned.
They finished with her leaned over him, her face nuzzled against his neck, his arms wrapped around her amid the languid humidity of their sweat. Jill moved to raise herself off of him, and found herself stuck, trapped in his arms.
"Hey," she said, and poked his side, "locks are still engaged."
"I know," he said, between ragged breaths, and laid his face alongside hers. "Just… gimme a minute."
Jill relented, rested against him in contented silence while he ran his fingertips along her bare shoulder. After a long few moments of this closeness, Jill poked him again, sudden. He jerked away from her finger, laughing.
"Now you're the moment ruiner," he said, and let her go. "Congrats."
"Please," Jill said, "I'll have to do a lot more to take that crown from you."
Somewhere along the line, Carlos went silent during one meandering conversation or another. His fingers, still stroking her shoulder in lazy circles, faded to stillness; a quiet, musical snore stopped Jill's sentence, and she turned her head, nuzzled her face under his chin. When she eventually slept, there were no nightmares, no blood or ripping flesh under blunt teeth. When she slept she dreamt of the peaceful respite of nothing at all.
When Carlos awoke, he had been dreaming of hornets, or maybe bees. They buzzed around his head in a droning cloud, distracted him while he tried to do something important. That important dream-thing was forgotten as soon as Carlos opened his eyes, its pressing urgency dissipated under his squints against the deep lavender of early sunlight. He swallowed, his throat dry and his mouth gummy with sour spit.
The buzzing didn't stop when the dream did. Somewhere in the corners of the small white room, with the door closed and the blinds drawn, far enough away that he couldn't reach without getting up, the rattling buzz of an electronic device continued its song clear into the silence of morning. Carlos thought about getting up to turn it off, to see exactly what the blue hell someone wanted at the crack of dawn on a Saturday — but that would require careful extraction from his current predicament, first.
He was entangled, cuddled against a woman from behind, laid against the dips and swells of a naked body, warm and soft. One of his hands rested flat against the slender curve of her waist, his other arm wrapped under her shoulder and neck like a pillow. Carlos paused for thought, coiled against the faint shampoo scent of her hair, and laid his head back down. He closed his eyes, content to let the thing run its course without his intervention while he tried to recall how he'd gotten here through the blur of fatigue. They could leave a message if it was so important; they should know he'd be unavailable around this time, anyway.
He struggled to remember and it came back in disjointed snippets and swatches, their edges torn and their timing shuffled around. He'd gone to dinner with… Jill. Right, that was right. Sushi and Japanese food and a huge hole in his wallet. Okay. And then…
Carlos' memory normally served him correctly, but for something like this, some strange pull demanded he be sure, that he verify with his own eyes. Carlos craned his head over the woman's shoulder, hesitant, and brushed her warm brown hair away from her face with tentative strokes of his fingers, careful not to wake her, tucked it behind her ear. He'd know that face anywhere, just from the proud, clean way her structure was arranged; the jut of her jaw, the heavy eyelashes over the soft, wide angles of her cheekbones. A strange swoop of elation so strong it dipped precariously close to panic, the same moth-flutter of the heart against ribs, sped his breath as he searched the room, recollected, tried to rebuild the scene from under the heavy bows of blood loss and bitter tequila. The two had swirled, dovetailed hard and nipped at the edges of his propriety, blurring the boundaries between cleverness and imposition; truly, without both he might not said the things that were said, might never have advanced on her, and…
Did he? Was he the one who pushed for this?
Huh.
With a hesitance that felt like a sibling to regret, Carlos picked his way out from underneath her, cradled her head so it wouldn't drop and wake her up, dragged a pillow underneath and eased her down to rest. He moved off of the bed with slow intent, silent. As careful as he was, she woke up twice, but not completely either time, mumbling and ducking her head down, away from the light.
Carlos rounded the bed, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his thumb. Their coats, which Jill must have thrown onto the bed in her haste to return to him and tend to his wounds, had tumbled to the floor in an intimately tangled pile of puffed nylon and wool. Carlos rooted through his pockets, came up with only the leather of his wallet, worn soft and smooth with age and use, then thought maybe his phone was still in his jeans. He finally found it, small and cold and still, tucked away in the deep safety of one of Jill's pockets amid the silvery clutter of cosmetics — she must have picked up the phone while he wasn't looking. If Umbrella had such a hard-on for him, they probably would have come back for anything identifying they could find. Smart. He certainly hadn't thought of it.
So if his phone was still, what was that buzzing? Carlos looked under the bed (there his pants were — what the fuck?). Then, the sound triangulated, reflected at him in just such a way that when he sat up, he looked up straight at it… a pager, glowing and shaking for his attention, trapped in the angle between the floor and the wall. Must have been Jill's. Carlos picked it up. Out of habit, he glanced at the screen — he caught the words where are — then realized whatever messages were contained in this tiny little bobbling annoyance were firmly in the realm of None of His Fucking Business. He looked away, curled fingers calloused and scarred around the device, and approached where Jill slept, knelt to the side of the bed, beside her.
"Hey," he said, quietly, and touched her shoulder, soft and smooth and round with slender muscle. She made a little happy noise and smiled, but didn't wake. He gave her a gentle shake. "Jill. Hey."
Jill's eyes blinked open, then looked at him.
"Hey, your—" he started, and her eyes fluttered down, drifted closed again. Carlos considered his options, then simply left the pager on the table at her bedside.
In a fog of lightheaded disbelief, Carlos pulled clean clothes from the white plastic laundry basket in his closet, selecting an outfit with all the care of a roulette wheel. Kevin said he'd wanted a good story, and, well, Carlos had the fuckin' mack daddy king supreme of all good stories to tell, now to just hone it down to something audience-appropriate and respectful, while still being entertaining. Which would cut out all the good bits, but, those were Carlos' to keep. Kevin would just have to deal.
Carlos let Jill sleep while he busied himself with his morning routine. He went for a 5-mile run in a nearby park along a dirt trail under bowing pines and oaks, pounding the buckled soil under heavy feet and the loud blare of his headphones. It occurred to him this might have been unwise, considering the last night's events, but Carlos was a man married, helpless, to a militant sense of freedom that overrode all else; if they wanted to come get him, they'd come get him. A run seemed small, but small things lead to big things, and he wouldn't let something nebulous like a threat of what could happen turn his life into something he didn't recognize. So, he carried on, as he always had.
Drenched in cold January sweat, Carlos returned. He moved with polite silence through the cold stillness of the apartment, shut himself inside the blue-tiled bathroom, and turned on the shower's spigot as hot as it would possibly go. When his shirt was half over his face, peeling off of his wet skin with the reluctance of a child refusing to release a parent, Carlos' phone jumped to life, banging and ringing against the white sink counter top. It made him jump, and he cursed, annoyed, while he checked the number on the display.
Kevin.
Carlos debated not answering. It was Saturday — 8:01am on a Saturday morning, to be exact — and they didn't work weekends. Not yet, anyway. However, it was Kevin, and Kevin got up to all manner of unsavory things on the weekend that made good stories on Monday, but staring down Saturday morning's clear focus, he often needed to be rescued from. Carlos screwed his mouth to the side, then erred on the side of being a good teammate, and maybe friend, and hit the "accept call" button.
"This better be good, numbnuts." Carlos said, leaning his head to the side to pin the phone between the mountainous pack of his shoulder and his ear while he untied one of his running shoes.
"Hey, Heavy," Carlos' nickname — at first a one-word description of his job, adopted by men who cared so little for him they'd assumed they wouldn't need to learn his name because they'd never use it while addressing him — but as their relationships improved in grudging inches, it stuck, as a term of endearment, "better than good. We're deployin', Captain just put out the call."
Carlos froze. "Deploying? Deploying where?"
"Europe. Scotland, he said. Don't know anything else about it. They said they'd brief us at 1200."
Scotland? "Okay. I, uh…" Carlos cracked the bathroom door and leaned to look at the bedroom straight across the hall. The door was still closed. "I'll be there ASAP. Lemme take care of some stuff first."
Kevin laughed. "Now correct me if I'm wrong, which I often am, but that sounds like you got a good story for me."
Carlos blew out his breath in a low whistle. "Man, you got no fuckin' idea."
Carlos took a long shower, then had breakfast (last night's leftovers — for $120 a plate, he was going to eat this shit until it couldn't be eaten anymore, maybe even after that). He was pouring a pitcher-full of water into the reservoir of a small white coffee maker when the door to his bedroom creaked open a little before 9am. Jill poked her head out, the makeup around her eyes smudged in gray blots and her hair messy, fluffed up away from her head. She smiled at him, and he thought it looked a touch embarrassed. He leaned against the counter, and their silence was one of nervy deference, one that waited for the other to speak first.
"Morning," he said, "you sleep good?"
Jill nodded. "Yeah. You?"
"Oh yeah." A small laugh. "Best I've slept in a while."
She looked down, that smile still on her face. "Can I use your shower?"
"'Course. I don't have any lady stuff, but there's clean towels in there. You need something to wear?"
"I think so. On account of the… blood."
"Sorry. Can't take me anywhere."
She laughed at that, worried her bottom lip with her teeth. "It's okay. It was worth it."
After that she disappeared back into the bedroom, leaving him smiling to himself, rubbing the lower half of his face in thought.
Jill wrapped herself in his bedsheet to make the five-step jaunt and shut herself in the bathroom. Women were always sort of weird about the morning after, at least the first one — it didn't matter how absolutely naked they'd been the night before, how up close and personal you'd gotten with that nakedness, they always tried to cover themselves and skitter away from you. It was endearing, in an odd way, another one of those unexpected flashes of vulnerability that was at diametric odds with her tough demeanor.
When she'd emerged, her skin pink from scrubbing and her brown hair limp and damp against her face, Carlos was seated on the couch, sipping at a cup of coffee. She was wearing his sweater, and they both laughed at the same time when she held her arms up to illustrate the size difference — the sleeves were at least half a foot too long, and it came almost down to her knees, hanging off of one shoulder.
"Well, what do you think?"
"Okay, that's just fuckin' adorable."
Jill scoffed with a smile on her face, drew near. "Don't ever call me adorable ever again."
"Or you'll what?"
Jill smoothed the sweater over her backside and sat beside him. She leaned in close, into kissing distance.
"If this is your way of getting me to stop," he said, "I gotta say, you're pretty bad at it." She plucked the coffee from his hands, then sat back, and drank from it.
"Dirty," he shook his head.
"It's a part of my charm."
Carlos propped one of his arms over the back of the couch, across her shoulders. On a normal day, perhaps this would have been a doorway into some less-than-savory jokes, given the previous night's events. But today, the laughs died into a silence pregnant with words unspoken, and Carlos let them fall out in an honest tumble.
"We're bein' deployed. This afternoon, they said."
Jill nodded, rolled the cup between her palms. "I heard you on the phone. You never told me what it is you're doing now."
"You never asked."
Jill fixed him with a look that was sharp and playful in even parts: come on, cut the bullshit.
"Okay, okay. We got a group of guys," Carlos said, "guys that were there with us, saw what we saw. In the City. Few were cops, few were just regular people. Uncle Sam figures we're the best way to get some hits in against the Company's bases abroad, given we survived scrapes with bioweapons and all."
Jill's eyes brightened. "They—what? How'd they find you? The FBC?"
Jill's look of sincerity, just on the cusp of excitement, was at odds with the sudden image in his brain of her, limp and pale and helpless in a hospital bed, hooked up to some behemoth of a machine, crammed with dials and blinking displays. It broke a tiny chip off of the boundary of his heart. Do you want a guarantee of her safety, or don't you? Because last I saw, she was in a predicament much worse than yours…
"I volunteered," Carlos said, and hoped his voice didn't betray him.
Jill searched his face, and then looked away. "Do you know where you're going?"
"Scotland, I think. That's what they said, anyway."
"Europe..." Jill said, and nodded to herself in a thoughtful, trailing way.
Carlos touched her far shoulder. "You okay?"
Jill smiled, opened her mouth to speak, but the words came out in that belated way, like she was choosing them with care so she didn't trip on them. "I might be a little jealous. All this sitting around and doing nothing makes me feel…" she shook her head, "I should be out there, too, doing... something. I just feel useless."
Jill's expression became distant, focused on the wall ahead and nothing at all at the same time. Carlos thought he saw a flash of himself in that expression; of needing to grasp anything to keep the helplessness at bay. Of needing to not feel complicit in your circumstances through inaction. He'd seen her in action — focused on a task, she was like a hurtling comet with a tail of flame, smashing through obstacles and enemies alike with a fury and purity he'd been in awe of. He considered for the first time where that fire would go, what it would consume, without a clear target.
"Hey," he said, "you deserve a rest. You got banged up pretty bad."
"I don't have time for a rest. They're not going to."
Jill was right, of course, but being right wasn't important now — she was, her morale and her spirits.
"Let us take the lead for a bit. You did your part, and now you gotta get better. There'll be some left for you to break a piece off once you're in fighting shape again."
Jill wasn't satisfied by this — he could tell by the way her jaw tensed, the way her eyes lowered. "When will you be back?"
Carlos didn't know. With Umbrella, he'd been sent on deployments that were promised to last for months — like their tour in the Congolese rainforests outside Kinshasa, a mission to quell a rebel uprising which neared an Umbrella compound, a tour which had flared in a sudden oil-fire blaze that lasted perhaps four days, and they were on their way home. Then there were deployments like Raccoon City, a quick 2-day payday, in and out, which turned into weeks-long tangles of fuckery and failure. There was truly no way to know.
Carlos turned his hand over, palm to the ceiling, a silent invitation. Jill looked down at it and tentatively put her hand in his, soft and cool. She turned them over, looked at his knuckles, the tough skin scarred from being split and skinned and healed repeatedly. Carlos wasn't sure how long the tour would take, but he knew that now he had a driving force behind him to end it as quickly as possible: the pull of something to return to, perhaps. It was new and made him nervous in a way he wasn't sure how to parse, but accepted as good.
"Won't be long," he said, "promise."