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The nightmares have finally begun to dwindle, decreasing from a monsoon to just bloody pissing it down.
She’s still soaked to the bone, still weighed down by the weight of heavy clothes and a heavy heart and a heavy helplessness that aches in every drop of her blood, but it’s…something.
There, in the distance, under umbrellas she can never open and awnings she can never reach, there’s the thin, vain hope that someday she might be dry again.
Someday the rain might stop.
Tonight though, it’s not a metaphor, this water-logged prison; she’s sodden, clammy with sweat and trapped under scratchy sheets — literally drenched.
And quite likely suffocating.
With a moment to gather her strength, she pushes every one of her limbs out in tandem, a mighty shove that frees her from her restraints and earns her a…shout?
“What the fu — ?”
Next to her, in curtain-filtered moonlight, Hardy is glowering at her.
“What are you doing, Miller?”
“What are you doing?” It’s easy to sound annoyed now, perpetually miserable, and her only friend left in the world, leading by example. “I thought you were dying or something? How can you weigh so bloody much?”
“How can you take up nearly the whole bloody bed?” His words are grit out between movement as he tugs and shoves covers toward her, finding them weighed down by his own body.
“Me? I think you’ll find your side about three feet that way.”
She frees her arm to point over his shoulder, and then winces when cold, hotel air meets her damp pajamas.
He snaps a glance backward, clearly preparing to correct her, and she feels a tiny spike of vindication when she’s proven right — there’s a wide expanse of empty bed behind him.
“Oh. Well. You were making noise.” The way he says it, it’s as if, to him, that explains everything.
“And you thought…what? Better smother me?”
“No, I just — I tried to wake you. I must’ve fallen asleep.”
“Fallen asleep in the middle of waking me up?”
“I don’t know, Miller. Go back to sleep.”
“Fine.” She tugs the blankets he’d freed over her, turning with an emphatic huff to face the opposite wall. It’s only a matter of seconds before she realizes it won’t work, she feels disgusting, her clothes still laden with sweat that’s making her too warm and too cool at the same time.
“I can’t sleep like this,” she says, flopping onto her back to stare at the ceiling.
Hardy groans. “Honestly, you’re the one that insisted I sleep in here with you, and now you have an issue at —”
In her peripheral vision, she can see him turning to grope at the nightstand before he finds his watch.
“ — two in the morning?”
The watch clatters to the wood as Hardy shifts back, mirroring her position, the same ones they’d fallen asleep in hours ago.
“No, I just — you made me all sweaty.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You were lying on top of me, got all…sweaty.”
“Oh, Christ, Miller, I hope the defense haven’t found a way to bug us.”
“Piss off, if the prosecution were doing a damn thing they’d have had all that thrown out anyway. Shape you’re in? Having an affair?”
He grumbles something she can’t quite make out and she waits for him to clarify, but when no explanation comes, she shoves herself out of bed.
“Now what are you doing?”
She crosses to her bag, yanking the zipper open and rifling through what little she’d packed.
“Looking for something else to sleep in, something that isn’t soaked from the passionate affair I’m having with my sickly boss.”
“Ex-boss.”
“Yeah, whatever.” There’s nothing in her bag except clothes for tomorrow, and the dirty stuff from earlier, but her pajamas are sticking to her, bunching and chafing, and —
“Here.” Hardy’s standing in front of her, something dark clenched in his outstretched hand.
“What? What’s that?”
“It’s a t-shirt.”
“Whose?”
“Housekeeping’s — rang down to the front desk and they ran it up, didn’t you hear? It’s mine.”
“Oh. Well, aren’t you gonna wear it?”
“Clearly I’m fine like this.” He gestures down his body to the rumpled work clothes he’s still got on. “Here, just — take it. Get changed, go to bed, we have an important day tomorrow.”
She glances down at his fist, the dark cotton he’s holding, and he shakes it gently, enticing her.
“All right,” she says. “Thanks.”
She snatches the shirt from him and moves to the bathroom. The light is bright when she flips it on, and she changes quickly, realizing too late that he’s only given her a top. Her pajama bottoms rest in a damp heap on the tile and the thought of putting them back on makes her lip curl.
Hardy’s shirt is long enough to reach her thighs — longer than Joe’s shirts ever were on her (stop, stop) — and she’s only getting right back under the covers. What’s a few extra inches of weird in the bleeding circus her life has become?
With a quick, fruitless tug on the bottom of the t-shirt, she switches the light off and leaves the bathroom.
Hardy’s still lying on his back, but she can see his eyes shift to her when she crosses the room, stooping a bit to try and cover her legs at the side of the bed.
“What?” She cuts him off before he can comment.
“Nothing. It’s, uh, it’s big on you.”
“Why do you sound so surprised?”
She’s lost weight since all this began, and she’d suspected Hardy had noticed, the way he asks her what she’s eaten — she’s mysteriously found a Flake in her bag twice now, even.
Maybe the defense’ll get ahold of that, too, talk about the chocolates he’s buying her.
“I don’t. Blimey, Miller, remind me not to speak to you until you’ve had your beauty rest in the future.”
There’s a burn of shame low in her stomach as she quickly flips through the last few minutes. Maybe she’s been a bit rude to him tonight — no more rude than he’s been to her, but, still.
“Sorry,” she says, slipping back under the covers, and then, because it feels like something she deserves, she rubs salt in the wound. “Joe used to say that, too. It’s why I had those pills.”
“Queues,” he says.
“What?”
“Queues. Queues make me grumpy. My wife — my ex-wife — used to hate queuing with me for anything. Said I turned into a right bastard, waiting around like that.”
She smirks, tapping him with the hand that’s still on top of the blankets. “Must’ve been pretty bad, to really stick out.”
He breathes out a laugh. “Aye, must’ve.”
There’s a few moments of silence as she stares at the moonlight on the ceiling and she’s just about ready to wish him good night — again — when he speaks.
“Sorry,” he says. “About earlier.”
“Hm?”
“The, um, the falling asleep on you.” He scrubs a hand down his face before turning his head to face her. “Been a while since I slept in the same bed as someone. Think I got a wee bit confused.”
Words are on the tip of her tongue, teasing words, words to make light, but what comes out instead is — “Me, too.”
There’d been that bloke, that awful night with Claire, but he hadn’t stayed, and she hadn’t wanted him to.
This, now, what she’s doing with Hardy, quiet words in the dark of night, seems much more intimate. It’s fitting, in a way, but also more than a little obvious — he’s seen her sliced open, the worst of her spilling out onto a police station floor. What’s a little pseudo pillow talk after that?
He takes a deep breath and she rolls to her side to face him, but instead of speaking again, he lies there, staring at the ceiling. His chest is rising and falling like anyone else’s, steady, measured movements she tracks with her eyes, straining to locate some clue, some hint, to the trauma lying below.
The harder she looks, the more panicked she becomes. Her fingertips begin to burn, her hand growing itchy and restless, it’s the unseen things that do the most damage, that cause the most pain, and before she knows it, she’s moving her hand to touch his chest, settling right over his heart through the thin fabric of his shirt.
“Does it hurt?”
He tips his chin down so he can see her hand, though he must know what she’s done, must feel it.
“Not all the time,” he says, and she almost laughs with the twisted poetry of his words.
No, it doesn’t hurt all the time. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all.
Numb.
She knows.
And she doesn’t move her hand.
They lapse into silence again and she thinks this’ll be it, the final goodnight before a few more hours of sleep, but he surprises her once more.
“Thanks,” he says, and then clears his throat, jostling her hand a bit before starting over. “Thank you for your help on this.”
She shrugs. “Not much else to do, gotta find some way to —”
“No,” he says, cutting her off. “It means something. To me. It means something to me, that I can count on you.”
She’d fixated on her hand on his chest, watching it rise and fall, but at the tone in his voice, she glances up to meet his eye.
There’s something there, in the way he’s looking at her, it looks raw and frayed, the same expression she sees in the mirror on nights exactly like this.
“I think we can count on each other,” she says, as much for herself as it is for him.
“Yeah.”
He’s still staring at her, her hand is still on his chest, and it doesn’t feel sexy, it’s not that sort of thing, not a seduction, but she…she sort of wants to kiss him.
Before she can pick it apart, get to the lonely, bleeding heart of it, he shifts, brushing his lips against hers in a way that doesn’t linger, but doesn’t feel rushed either. It’s deliberate and reassuring and when he pulls away and meets her eye with a nod, it feels natural to mimic his actions back to him, pressing her mouth to his own.
She holds it for a fraction of a second longer, trying to clarify what they’re doing, what this means, but something buckles out from underneath them, those frayed wires of their existence touched together, and suddenly his mouth is open against hers and she’s got his head in her hands, tugging him closer as his tongue sweeps into her mouth. He fits himself over top of her, the blankets still between them as she bites at his lip and he fists a hand in her hair.
He tastes like medicine and water, like he must’ve taken a pill while she was in the bathroom, and she wonders how bad her breath is for only a second before he’s changing the angle, kissing her deeper and making his beard scrape at the skin around her lips.
For a moment she’s gripped with anger, pushing her tongue roughly into his mouth as her fingers curl into back of his neck, but he receives the movement, subverts it, slowing them down until things feel lazy and warm and comforting, like the hugs they never give each other.
There’s a point where she thinks to pull away, not because it’s awkward or she’s worried things will go too far, but because it…feels natural. It feels like a rapport, a conversation, and he must feel it too because they part in sync.
This time when she meets his eye, looking up at him where he’s braced above her, he looks the tiniest bit dazed, but she can’t comment, confident that she’s got a look to match.
Whatever that was — and she’s not ready to name it, might never be ready — they’d both needed it.
With a slow, shaky breath, he levers himself off of her and back to his side of the bed.
He stays on top of the covers, but her hand finds his chest again.
“Good night, Hardy.”
“Good night, Miller.”