Author's Note: Hey, friends! I've graduated now! Yay! So, I anticipate having a lot of time to work on things. I know that this isn't as long as anybody would like, and I think it might be a bit sloppy, but I fully expect to revise, edit, and enhance it as I see fit in the next few days. I also have a few chapters in the works right now, so I think uploading should be a bit faster, wrist-pain allowing. Thanks for continued support. Reviews are love!
Boone had very little to say about Cass other than the fact that he was a little resentful that she took away Ren's attention, needlessly. Juli was supposed to be here for him, to help him, but, instead, Cass had a way of milling just a little too close. Until, finally, ever the nice one, ever the attentive, kind, sweet one, Ren invited the drunk woman to sit with the two of them.
Boone didn't like it, even though he recognized both today and the night before that he'd been a baby about asking for Ren to come here with him. He pretended like he didn't care, and he assumed that if he did long enough that both he and Ren would forget that it had ever gone down the way it had.
The woman seemed to make Ren on edge – and that made Boone on edge, in turn. In a lot of ways, frustrating ways, Boone didn't like when Ren was on edge. She was always in the corner of his eye, and watching her that way permeated into his feelings.
Made him itch.
They'd entered the pub to relax a little before heading off again this time, not to do random, loose women any favors. Not that Boone thought that they should even cavort with the woman. Cass was rude. When he'd been in the Mojave Outpost Barracks earlier, she'd been constantly drunk, constantly coming onto men, not least of all him. He'd put her down, none too gently, but, undeterred, she'd just moved onto the next poor sap.
Judging by the bob in her step, Boone assumed that some poor bastard had contracted VD from this street rat.
Not that Juli would know anything about this. Boone saw Ren as this kind of pencil-neck virgin, but without the negativity that sometimes went along with that. She had a vicious streak, perhaps. She was more than capable at fighting, but she'd never once lost her temper beyond that display through the scope in Nipton.
Still, though, more than once Cass brought up something about sex, and Ju just smiled benignly, a sign Boone was beginning to recognize as the indication that she meant no disrespect but that she just didn't understand.
Her English was there almost one hundred percent of the time. She told Boone often that it made her a little nervous, that she hadn't been accustomed to speaking it, even if at one point she'd been forced to understand it, so speaking in Boone's native tongue made her anxious.
She wasn't ignorant. Not by a long shot. Not stupid either.
But she didn't appear to know anything about sex or booze or the kind of vice Cass was relying on to forget about her troubles.
And Cass was drunk.
"Whiskey always gets my temper up," Cass spat maliciously into the bottom of her glass, "now more than ever!"
Her words slurred and her neck appeared loose on its hinges, bobbing forward and backwards as she struggled to remain upright in her bar stool. Boone should have felt bad for her, but he didn't. He wasn't particularly fond of loose women, promiscuous women.
He'd been burned once.
Maybe that was why Ren was starting to grow on him a little bit.
"You know," Cass offered knowingly, leaning in to talk conspiratorially to Ren, "your friend there's really tough to read. I bet he's really hard to stay on top of."
Ren furrowed her brow, but Boone would let her do the talking. He always did. His eyes strayed across the room, and he pretended he hadn't heard the innuendo. He wasn't fooling anyone, except maybe Ren.
Ren just replied, bless her soul,
"No, he mostly sticks to himself."
Cass was feeling Ren out, wanted to see if the two of them were together. After all, Boone had been in here all alone yesterday all day and shot Cass down. Suddenly, he arrives with a Chinese girl.
Cass recognized it as a challenge, clearly.
"So, you two work together?" Cass probed cautiously.
Again, Ren didn't pick up on the hints.
"We help each other – he is talented with guns and is good at cooking. When he cooks. Mostly, I cook and we take turns doing things. Just kind of..."
"Partners in crime, huh?" Cass finished.
Ren was pleased with this term and smiled, nodded.
Boone resisted the urge to stiffen at this unexpected compliment as it dawned on him a little too slowly.
Cooking?
He'd made basic Latino food, recipes he'd picked up from his dead wife. Nothing special.
New to Ren, though. Boone snorted into his drink, glancing at Ren only once, but Cass, and Ren, for that matter, didn't seem to notice.
"So he's firm and well-rounded," Cass offered with a smirk.
"Yes, his talent with sniper fire is exemplary," Ren offered back, a little too formally.
It was clear that Ren was on edge more than ever, aware that something was going on. She recognized the deceptive intent of the jokes, even if she didn't understand them.
Cass's leer had advanced into a naughty grin. She knew Ren didn't get it now, and Ren was the last one to pick up on it. It actually made Boone feel pretty about the whole thing.
"So, how does that work, exactly?" she asked Ren. "Does he take a long, hard look at his targets or does he prefer to wrap his hands around them and rub them out of existence?"
Ren hesitated now, but Boone was now looking away. This should have been funny. A year or two ago, it would have been. But a year or two ago, he had a wife. And he hadn't known Ren.
She glanced at him, Boone saw out of the corner of his eye.
"Why don't you ask him?" Ren stated nervously, not impolitely. "He's right here."
Boone turned towards the woman now, who seemed thoroughly amused.
"I just wanted to start slow and build up to asking him, wait until the thrust of my point had climaxed, if you know what I'm saying."
Ren clearly didn't know what the woman was saying.
"Look, did you want something?" Boone asked her rudely, scowling his best scowl at her.
The woman was too drunk to be fazed.
"Aw, don't be like that."
"You're drunk, lady," he shot at the woman named Cass. "Get lost."
Ren nudged him in the ribs, and Boone made a loud noise of protest.
"Sorry about him," she murmured to the drunk woman. "He's rude sometimes."
"It's okay. His oral skills must just be lacking. Not everyone can manipulate the suppleness of language the way I can."
Cass burst out laughing at this point, and Ren, anxiously, glanced in Boone's direction. But he wasn't about to try to save her again. That nudge to the ribs had hurt, for sure.
"Language can be such a pleasurable thing to learn, don't you think?"
"I'm…not sure," Ren admitted, clearly in distress now. "I'm still learning English."
"Oh, don't worry, for most people it comes really quickly."
Boone couldn't take it anymore.
"Look, lady, either shut the hell up or get lost! We're trying to drink here!"
Ren shot him a glare that could level mountains, and Boone felt his skin crawl as she leaned forward to whisper to him.
"Don't be so rude!" she whispered through gritted teeth.
"Then make her shut up or I will!" Boone replied, nodding forcefully with his head.
Ren obliged.
Without any effort at all, it seemed, Cass was made to talk about the reason for her drinking. Cass complained about the roads and Ren replied in kind, ever the sympathetic ear to the avid talker.
The two of them had cleared the roads on their way down to the Outpost, and Cass, surprisingly, hadn't heard yet. Though, maybe it wasn't so surprising. Cass had been in the bar since they'd arrived, or at least had been all the times that Boone had been awake. She would have heard the good news had she not been thrusting herself onto soldiers and drinking her sorrows away.
But, it didn't matter. Cass eventually began to proposition Boone again. Somehow, it was worse with Ren standing right there, especially after their sexual repartee just moments earlier. They left in short order in terse, uncomfortable silence. When the two of them finally reached the fence's barriers, just beyond, they stood on the warm pavement in silence, staring around at the open desert before them.
Boone felt disconsolate, suddenly. He was surrounded by women and lonely. He wasn't ready for propositioning. He wasn't ready for sleazy women to throw themselves onto him. It felt wrong – he felt wrong.
The hangover didn't help. Boone was glad to have sunglasses in the warmth of the desert heat at midday. They probably shouldn't have left at midday, but Boone and Ren both knew it would be less awkward to leave when everybody else had the sense enough to be inside. Goodbyes weren't easy - not for him, and he suspected not for her, even if they were artificial, meaningless gestures. Perhaps, especially if that was the case.
Except for those kids, who Ren called out to on her way out. Ren waved good-naturedly and smiled warmly.
Boone resisted the urge to snap at her for it. Why did she always do things to put him in a bad mood? Maybe he was just always in a bad mood.
Or maybe that bimbo in the bar had put him there.
"Why were you so nice to her?" Boone snapped.
Ren didn't look at him. She seemed to be focusing on their surroundings.
"Do I need to have a reason to lend a sympathetic ear to others?"
"You do when they're people like her," Boone shot back. "She was clearly coming onto me. And she was before too. I told you that."
"The woman was drunk – and sad. Couldn't you tell?"
Boone shook his head dismissively, but Ren continued unaffectedly, with that level tone she always seemed to have.
"She had bags in her eyes, and her eyes were bloodshot. She did not get any sleep last night."
It was Boone's turn to recoil, just a bit.
Boone thought he knew the real reason Cass didn't get any sleep last night, but he wasn't about to explain that to Ren. She probably wouldn't want to talk about that kind of shit anyway.
Ren was a lot of things, and classy seemed to be one of them.
"I don't know if I like her though," she admitted.
Satisfaction at her wickedness boiled in him. She seemed so good and pure that these rare glimpses of naughtiness made her seem more reachable, relatable. More real.
"Why not?" he asked, trying and failing to hide his eagerness.
"She seemed like she was laughing at me, I guess," Ren replied dismissively.
She resumed looking at the horizon.
But, all at once, Ren's eyes shot off the horizon and darted towards him, almost shiftily. Her back stiffened, and he saw her fists tense into the straps of her bag, almost so huge on the girl's figure that she looked nearly ridiculous.
"What?" he asked.
She shook her head, letting out a breath.
"Nothing," she dismissed, a little too quickly.
Odd. Even for her.
"Whatever you say," he dismissed, scowling at the horizon as he wondered what she'd just thought of.
She didn't reply for a while, and the two of them just stood there in awkward silence. This was the first time that they'd stayed together after being away. The first time reuniting against the world. They'd only been together for a few weeks before the Mojave Outpost, but, regardless, that time felt like a lifetime. Like the two of them were a plant growing together from the dry soil. This was the first peek of green from beneath the surface, the first indication that maybe the relationship wasn't just one of convenience.
Maybe they worked well together.
Partners.
Somehow, Boone didn't hate that thought as much as he once thought he might. It was almost nice having somebody to fall back on. Not that he relied on her, not much, nor she on him, but the presence of a human next to him was comforting, somehow.
He wished she wasn't a woman, but nobody was perfect.
Realizing how chauvinistic that thought was, Boone's scowl switched from a scowl to a grimace.
"Where to now then, Warden?" he asked her – a new, less offensive nickname he'd adopted – to get away from these thoughts.
"Warden…" she repeated, smirking.
She seemed to like it, or at least didn't seem averse to it particularly. Not that she seemed averse to too many things.
"I have to go to a place called Primm," she told me resolutely, glancing at the machine on her wrist that looked like an overblown wristwatch.
A Pip Boy. He hadn't seen one of those in a really long time, and he was tempted to joke with her about it to draw that keen smile from her face, but she seemed just as flustered by their encounter with Cass as he was.
"What's going on?" he asked after a while, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
"I don't know," she replied, not meeting his eyes. "I think I just…"
Her face grew flushed. It was tan enough to begin with, but the creeping red of a blush on her cheeks was unusual for her. The redness overtook her face quickly, and he felt his anxiety from the meeting begin to ebb somewhat.
"What is it?" he pressed, a little less gruffly than before.
She opened her mouth once before shaking her head.
"Never mind," Ren told him, waving his attempts to force her to meet his eyes away.
She finally turned her back to him, and he was almost thwacked with her bag.
But now he was intrigued.
"What's up?" he urged her.
"Well…may I ask you a…personal question?"
The mirth that had been budding in his stomach drowned, and he was instantly on high alert again. The abruptness of that switch made him a little sad.
"What?" was all he said.
"That woman…" Ren muttered.
Then, suddenly, Ren laughed, revealing those sharp, white teeth that seemed just too perfectly maintained to be possible. Boone was taken aback by the suddenness of the emotion pouring from her face and voice, and he just blinked, unsure of how to interpret the way it made him feel.
Finally, Ren leaned forward.
"She was talking about sex, wasn't she?"
There was a moment.
Then another.
The wind whistled in her hair as it whipped about her face, and the flush of her abashed virtue shone from her face like radiation off a ghoul. Then, for the first time in all of the days he'd been with her, Boone's head turned towards the sky and laughed. Warmth stemmed from his stomach, and he couldn't help it. Hysterical laughter began to take him as he took note of how long it had taken her to pick up on it, how sweet she was not to know any better, how innocent she must have been to only grasp it now. Somehow, for the first time in what felt like forever, Ren represented everything that was good in the world.
"Don't laugh at me!" Ren protested.
She shot him a bad look now, hurt and anger lacing her dark, powerful eyes. As they always did, their intended result was effective. The warmth died, and Boone remembered himself, remembered her, remembered that the whole reason they'd gone there and met that woman was to help him drown without having to actually die. Only this time, with it, there was a new truth.
Boone was a poison.
And Ren was good. Really good. Great, even.
Boone would have to keep her at arm's length. She didn't deserve his fate, and he'd be damned if he dragged this small, pleasant girl down with him. Even if sometimes, on the coolest, quietest nights, part of him entertained the notion that the shadow of his former self really, really wanted to.