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Dex took Route 30 downstate from Albany, the truck’s headlights illuminating dark farmstands and apple orchards extending out from stone walls in satisfying uniform lines and fluorescent green road signs bearing place names whose shapes felt good and round in his mouth, like marbles. Phoenicia, West Kill, Kaaterskill, Patria.
He rolled them around between his tongue and hard palate in between glances at the rearview mirror, checking for the beady, narrowed headlights of a Mustang or Charger from the New York State Highway Patrol and biting his lip between his teeth - still riding high from the events of the night, and how good he’d been.
He’d waited till he was past Poughkeepsie to pick up his ride, which he found parked behind an old bait and tackle store with CCTV cameras that Dex was sure hadn’t worked since Clinton was in office. He’d stowed it in the leafy back courtyard of a dark, Tyvec-wrapped summer home a quarter mile from the governor’s property line, next to some bags of concrete meant for a pool that was being dug while the owners were in Florida or Jackson Hole or wherever the rich went when the weather started to turn on the East Coast. Never mind that it was late October, and there were already autumn leaves floating in the pool of rainwater that had collected in the black tarp that the contractors had thrown over the hole.
Dex hadn’t avoided looking down at it, really, and he hadn’t stood there to consider it, either. He definitely hadn’t stopped at the edge of the depression for a few moments, just watching the line of his own reflection, wavering and formless in the dark water as the last of the autumn sunlight faded behind the trees. Nothing but a shape, an absence, before he’d turned to walk towards the Governor’s property - to get himself acclimated, to do as Matt said.
It was a cold night, cold enough for the governor’s mansion to have smelled of woodsmoke when Dex had slid inside, but he cranked the roll-down window open all the same, loving the blast of cold, clear air that hit the unscarred side of his face, the individual jets of wind that cut along the side of the truck and tickled between his fingers when he fanned them to feel the shape of the world through which he was moving.
He’d done the same for a few moments on the road between Ramadi and Karbala, as the Habbaniyah Lake glittered in the distance, its blue waters sitting low in the center of a jagged tan coastline like the hole of sky that Dex had exposed when he threw a torque wrench through one of the opaque plastic skylights at Fort Benning, because he was alone and wanted to do something, anything that marked the world around him and he could.
Dex thought of how the Humvee’s tires had swept up dust and sand from the road and left it settling in the creases of his damp palm, under his nails, until flies buzzed inside his skull. Another time, another mind.
Now, with his mind clear and the cool mountain air on his skin - as light and loose as Dex’s body felt - Dex found that he preferred this.
No meds, no tapes. Just the joyful freedom of his new routine, the memory of Vanessa’s brain matter leaking onto the boxing ring, the squeeze of Matt’s strong, sure hand at his throat, solid as the day he’d tossed Dex off the roof with all the strength of his love.
Dex flexed his hand on the steering wheel until he heard the leather creak, and the dark ring marking where the cuffs had bitten in began to ache. He wondered how long the mark would last.
It took about an hour for the blood-high to fade, for the flushed excitement on Dex’s skin to cool, for the pride he’d felt as he left the governor’s house to settle into a low-burning satisfaction at the back of his mind. This was was how it usually went, unless he was unconscious, or had the anticipation of more work to run on. But Dex hadn’t accounted for how quickly it all would be replaced by awareness of the pain in his side, the tiredness in his own body.
It had been roughly 48 hours since he’d taken the bullet, with no sign of a fever or bleeding, but his body was still working to knit itself intact. As if on queue, Dex felt his obliques jump under the press of his shirt, pulling at the neat staples.
He had intended to drive straight back to the city - it had only taken him four hours to get up to Albany, counting the time that it had taken to retrieve one of his go bags uptown, to get out of the city, and even now he was only a few hours north of Fort Lee, where he’d stow his way back into Manhattan and to Matt. There was so much left to do, still. He wanted to ignore it - the pain, the come-down.
His fingers tapped out place-name syllables against the wheel.
Ok, Dex thought, tonguing at the empty space in his mouth to distract himself from the twinge in his side, feeling the sickening and pleasurable zing of the tender gum give way. Ok. Just a few hours.
His side was throbbing by the time the motel finally came into site, looking like the faded, dustier version of the ones on the old National Parks Service posters that someone had put up in the common room at Lyndhurst, the redwoods and geysers and happy families replaced by drifts of fallen maple leaves and dead witchgrass piling against the chickenwire fence that demarcated the barrier between the forest and the lot, and a parking area so cracked and crumbled that it rolled like gravel under the tires of Dex’s truck when he pulled in off the interstate and sent his mind static with the wrongness of it.
The building wasn’t much better - red clapboards and a grey trim that had undoubtedly once been white and a rotting false cupola at the center of it all, above the office’s plate glass window and double-doors and a neon sign that said Open.
Dex glanced past it all at the woman sitting behind the reception desk - young, tired looking, one soft full cheek pillowed on her knuckles as she looked down at something splayed open on the desk, next to the old school spring-drawer cash register and the cash box that Dex was sure would be tucked out of sight, with its small banker’s key still in its hole. No buzz-in call box at the door, no plastic barrier for the exchange of cash and keys that he’d seen before in the city. If she had heard the truck rolling in on the ruined lot, or registered the illumination of the headlights in the periphery of her vision, she didn’t register it.
Dex sucked his teeth as he swung around the side of the building, wondering what sort of idiot owned this place. Evidently, the kind that didn’t care if their young employees were left alone in an unsecured building in the middle of the night or broke their necks on a patch of uneven asphalt when they tried to get back to their cars after a long day.
It’s all the better for you, he thought, as he backed the truck into the overgrown space between the building and the trees, out of sight from the road.
But still - there were some real animals out there.
The electronic sensor above the lobby door let out a fuzzy static chime when he pushed it open. It sent the girl jumping in her stool, her paperback slapped shut in a flurry of pages. In the corner, a fishtank bubbled.
“Evening,” Dex said, with his best Bureau smile, slinging the black duffel over his shoulder and ignoring the twinge in his side. The room was surprisingly free of the grime Dex had expected, after his past life. Its wood-toned vinyl flooring smelled of lemon-scented cleaner, and the leaves of the pothos planted spilling across the front window were freshly-dusted and glossy under the red neon. The polished glass countertop was devoid of fingerprints.
Dex glanced down at his dark reflection, thinking briefly of the leaves in water.
The woman’s shoulders circled forward, and Dex watched as she pulled her cardigan closed across her neck, though it wasn’t very cold.
“I’m looking for a room for the night. Do you have anything?”
He knew that there would be something, of course. The parking lot had been desolate save for a little maroon Taurus when he’d pulled in.
Her car, Dex thought.
“Yeah, uh…” the girl opened the ledger with bitten nails. “We sure do - oh!”
Dex had pulled his roll of 100s out of his jacket pocket and begun counting them out. He dropped one, then two out on the counter, wrinkling his nose when they sprang back into their original coiled form, before he settled to level them with his finger.
“It’s just $90, but we’ll need your license...”
“Hm.” Dex counted off two more bills, and patted the pockets of his jacket to show that he had made a good effort to retrieve the wallet that he did not have, containing the identification that he did not have.
“Think I lost it.”
“...and … and your credit card. For damages.”
Dex thought of the bruise that remained from when Matt had kicked him into the drywall of his apartment. The force of Matt’s boot against his sternum, knocking all wind out from him.
“You know what?” He counted off two more bills, giving her another of his polite smiles. “I think I lost that, too.”
He watched her swallow and glanced past her shoulder, at the full wall of room keys hanging on their hooks and the little purple purse hanging beside them, where he knew her car keys would be. Pictured the Taurus gathering dust in a commuter lot in Fort Lee.
He’d only used a few of his knives, in Albany. It would be easy enough to make another one disappear inside her, before she had time to be scared, to scream, to hurt.
Would be easy enough too, to shut down the signage at the base of the parking lot, empty the lobby trash cans into the dumpster behind the building, water the viney tangled plants growing in the window boxes, sweep and mop the already clean floor, feed the fish in their tank, lock the doors, and step over the cooling body to grab a key of his choice off the wall.
It meant work for him, but he’d do it, if it meant that he could sleep, if he could pop a few antibiotics and clean his wound and then get back to New York and to Matt without a fuss, or having to sleep in the musty truck parked behind the building, or getting arrested, or occupying his time with several Ulster Country police officers when his rotator cuff was still stiff from several days of heavy use, followed by two cuffed to Matt Murdock’s bed, with several days of heavy use projected, if the city was in the state that Dex predicted it would be when he got back to balance things.
Be good. Be good. Be good -
The woman looked down at the bills arranged neatly on the counter, then back at him. Dex kept his palms splayed open-fingered on the counter, where she could see them.
Just watching, waiting. He’d been told that it was polite.
Give people time to think, Dr. Mercer had told him. Let the conversation breath.
He felt her eyes on his cheek, watched with detached interest as they lowered down the length of his face, his neck. They paused at his torso, before travelling further down the line where his shirt lay exposed between the open panels of his jacket. With the leather holster tucked safely in his bag, it looked close enough to regular compression wear that Dex remembered seeing on the East River Greenway.
Was there blood? No, impossible. Dex would have smelled it on himself.
His side twitched again, and he shifted his weight with a small breath, conscious of the sweat that had cooled and dried there. He really wanted a shower.
The woman’s eyes snapped back to his face. There was a faint dusting of pink on the high crest of her cheeks. She rocked back and forth in her seat. A self-soothing motion that Dex had seen in the smaller boys at the Home. With some curiosity, Dex wondered if she was ill.
“Um…I’m not really supposed to do this, but…”
Come on, come on.
The woman recorded the sale of $90 in the ledger and slid the remaining five bills neatly under the counter. Dex registered the dry crumpling noise of dollars being shoved into a pants pocket, and thought of sunlight on the East River. An act of kindness.
The key was cool in his palm.
“Just ring if you need anything,” she nodded to him, a finger already wedged inside her paperback, trying to find her page. “I’ll be on till eight tomorrow.”
Dex smiled back. He’d be long gone, by then.
He kicked his boots off right by the door, happy to find the room uncarpeted, with a tight bed and crisp white sheets that revealed an acceptable mattress when Dex peeled them back to examine it. No dust in the metal grate of the air duct above the bed or on the frame containing a cheap print of a roe buck that hung by the front window, not even a hair off center. More importantly, it had a rare rear-facing window through which Dex would be able to slide into the cab of the truck. If he needed to.
The room had good water pressure, too. The hot spray of the shower hit the side of his face, sending little electric lines along his left cheek and eye socket that marked the secret, hidden places where his body had broken when Matt had thrown him four stories down. He wondered if Matt could sense the frayed edges hidden inside, could feel the nerves twinge in pins and needles across Dex’s face, and the possibility sent a little thrill through him that settled deep in his gut, had his mind feeling eagerly, blessedly quiet.
The spray of the water wasn’t too far off from the white noise tape that was still embedded in a wall in Hell’s Kitchen. Dex felt his muscles uncoil as he scrubbed - first his face, feeling the good sting of soap cleaning the scrape on his browbone, then his neck, his chest, his legs, his calves, and his feet - with a washcloth. In the Home and then the military, Dex had known boys and then - more shockingly - men who refused to actually wash themselves, who just let the residual flower of water and soap suds circle down their legs towards the drain, as if that was enough. It was fucking disgusting.
The stapled wound jumped when his fingers met it, the pain good to his warm, relaxed body. He bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from scrubbing and picking at the gummy pieces of adhesive that the medical tape had left behind, as much as his fingers itched to do so, and closed his eyes instead. Leaned his forehead against the cool tiles and felt the warm water undoing the knot in the pale curl of his scar tissue at his back and just breathed.
His bag was waiting for him on the counter, where he’d emptied and packed and then re-emptied and re-packed it just to make sure that everything was perfect.
Just odds and ends, really - his holster, leather polishing kit, a small zippered bag with everything he needed to maintain his hygiene, an unwieldy bottle of antibiotic pills that he had popped a few from as directed, gauze and medical scissors and single-use bacitracin for his wound. There was a bottle of painkillers, too, which Dex had half expected Matt to pour down the sink while Dex was still cuffed in place, if only to have Dex sit with the hurt a little more - although of course he hadn’t. He wouldn’t, even if he’d hurt Dex before.
Then Dex reached back into the bag. There was a parcel there, a bag within a bag, to keep its contents clean.
The black t-shirt settled over his shoulders, seams supple and smooth from all of the times that Matt had worn it before he had tossed it into Dex’s hands. He had been careful to change out of it before he left New York, not quite able to cope with the thought of it becoming unclean, losing his scent.
What are you doing?, Dex wondered as he slid under the top sheet, hissing at the pull of the medical tape over his obliques.
Was he safe? Lying low (though Dex already knew that this would not be the case), or being an idiot again, like when he’d offered his hand in the church. Did he regret it - letting Dex loose?
He understood Matt’s anger, he really did - for Ray, for the priest, for his dead friend that Dex could have finished with a headshot, nice and clean, if he hadn’t taken him off-center through the chest, just to have bleed out over time because he wanted Matt to feel it - in the same way that he could read an itemized receipt and understand how each purchase accounted towards the final bill. In the same way that he could trace the trajectory of a moving object in space. Point A to Point B.
But all the same, he thought of the weeks he had spent waking up to church bells, learning the grooves and habits of Matt’s movements, feeling the kinship that connected them, and wondering if Matt had felt it yet, too - how Dex could be useful to him. Not just for this one good deed, but beyond that, too.
There was a window in the Clinton Street Church. Panels of cream and gold fastened with hammered joinery that had disturbed Dex with its irregularity, the endless ricochet of the lines like a bullet that never found a place to rest. If he had seen it, during one of the many times that he had tried to kill Karen Page, it hadn’t registered. He’d been so desperate, then. Unmoored. Now Dex had time to think, and to see. Really see. And boy had he seen it, when he went to find Sister Maggie.
A nun - a saint, he’d learn - pierced through the heart with the arrow of divine love, expression ecstatic, as sweet as anything.
The transverberation of the heart, the prelate had called it, his throat jumping unsteadily under Dex’s blade, voice trembling but very, very clear. Bravery.
A complete transformation of the soul, the willingness of the divine to enter into union with us.
Dex had liked that - the force of it, the directness of something greater that did not wait to be approached or supplicated to but rushing to meet you, even if you were unwilling. His parents, little of them that he could remember, had not been churchgoing folk, or reliant on any creed, but someone had left a few brochures in the home - the words “enjoy life forever!” plastered over a sketch of a mother and child staring into an off-page horizon, bathed in the golden light of a brighter future that Dex had already known would never come. A divine love suspended in space, without motion. Static, formless.
He liked this forcefulness more. What was the use of a suggestion of how things should be, how you should be, when you could be pierced all the way through, honest as the cold ground in front of the bar. A faith made in the intersection of two lines in space.
Was that what Dex had felt, when he opened his eyes to see the outstretched hand, and reached his own out, though he knew that he had to die - whether that was bleeding out in the back of the church, or otherwise? When Matt had taken his own fate from him, ripped him back from the edge of the rooftop just to be the one to throw him down? When Matt had set him loose? A belief that struck at the core of you and transformed you completely?
He turned his cheek into the cotton pillowcase and found it cool on his flushed skin. The black shirt shifted over him, butter-smooth reminder of how he’d been spared, everywhere save for the gap of bare skin below his navel where the shirt had ridden up as he’d lain there and drummed his fingers along the bare skin and thought about wounds.
He smoothed his hand up his torso, the hem of the shirt riding above his waist, and felt his own wound jump under the clean cotton bandage - first when the fabric slid across it, and then again when his left hand came down to press at it. He tried compressing his palm against his side as he’d begun to do for added leverage every time he needed to sit up, and sighed at the ripple of pleasure that came with the warmth of it, the solid pressure holding his body together.
But - he needed something more.
The bandage gave way easily under his fingers.
The staples had been set in neat uniform lines. Dex’s fingers met the cold brackets and his own warm skin, hand shooting up to his mouth to silence the little abbreviated hiss as his fingers pressed down.
So much of his life had been punctuated with the noises of other men and boys in the dark, their little whispers of secrets that he did not know the nature of, stifled animal grunts buried in cotton and down, the shifting of cots in the desert as men slid from the tent and out into the dark. It came nearly as second nature for Dex to cover himself even alone in this room that he’d be gone from soon.
His fingers scated across the tender line, pressed at it, gentled it. A touch at one far end of the wound and the pain burst forth, had him gasping, vision fading in his periphery - like the comedown from the psych meds after his release. He bit his palm. Was this how it had felt? How it could feel, with Matt? To have a strong hand holding him down, a trajectory that rose up to greet him rather than simply travel down it.
He was so strong, so perfectly matched for Dex in a way that sent a thrill through the whole of Dex’s body. He thought of staring down the dark stairwell, of crawling up the stairs, of sliding across the floor of his apartment, of allowing himself to die, even when he hadn’t been able to stop himself from reaching up to meet the outstretched hand.
Absently, Dex he realized that he was hard.
He left the wound to throb, his hand reaching down. He’d be feeling it for a few days, but it was worth it.
The shaft sprang out from his waistband. He whined at the first slide of his split-slicked palm down the length of it - it has been so long since he’d done this, has so rarely wanted to touch himself. Too much, too sensitive. And yet he couldn’t stop - couldn’t stop the movement of his hand, the humiliating noises crushed against his palm, the flood of what he’d be willing to do, how he’d let Matt rip him open, ruin the nurse’s good work and expose all of the soft wet parts that hid in the dark there. Would let Matt touch him, if Matt wanted to, open Dex’s body up and teach Dex that he could be useful in a different way, too.
He had never done that - had never been touched by another man or woman, had never wanted to be pushed into, opened up. To feel the boundaries between himself and another muddy and melt, beyond what it took to watch from a distance, to learn the approximate contours of what made a person, of the goodness of others, and apply it to himself. To try to be better.
I’d let him, Dex thought, desperately, his cock leaking in the squeeze of his palm with the heat of that knowledge. He was so close, the pressure building into something that was nearly too much. I’d let him take anything from me. Everything.
He thought of warm hands, opening him, hurting him, marking him. Anointing him with a new purpose. Of being split in two, pushed open. He had seen the gold crosses on chains that some men wore over their chests. Wondered if Matt wore one, as well. Wondered how it would feel, sliding across Dex’s skin.
And if Matt found that he still hated Dex, after everything, if he wanted to go back on his own insane morality and kill Dex for everything as Dex thought he should have done, Dex would lay down and take that, too. Would let Matt take anything from him and take everything that Matt had to give. Would bask in the shroud of Matt’s hate, his love. Whichever he had to offer. However little. And if Matt wanted him to live, as he’d said - if he wanted Dex to endure, to keep taking and taking, like the woman in window, her heart pierced through - well -
Another twist, he whined against his palm. It was too much, he wouldn’t be able to do it, he needed something more - something to hold him together - to -
He reached down and Matt’s shirt against his lower face, moaning into it as he worked his cock in his hand. He knew that smell, would know it anywhere, now, truly fucked as he was. The salt of Matt’s sweat, so close to his tears had been on the rooftop. The musk of his skin, when he’d forced Dex to his feet, hand pressed to his side, holding the life in. Perfect, it was perfect.
Dex came with a shout and warm, precious pain in his side.
He lay there, gasping, for a few moments, huffing on the scent of Matt’s skin mingling with his own tears that had fallen and soaked into the cotton, his breath ragged in the quiet darkness, until the numbness faded.
He glanced up at the slatted blinds across from the bed, at the neat slats of moonlight that fell across the sheets, his legs. He would need to leave, soon. Would need to get up and wash the cum off. Take off his shirt and spot clean it, as best he could, in the sink. Redress his wound, do his stretches, and make his way downstate. He needed to be there to see this through, to complete the arch of his life. He would do all these things, Dex was sure of it.
As sure as he was of this new purpose that he had been anointed with. It was a token left in him. A balance to meet. An intersection.
The love and faith of something, someone, greater, that had come to pierce him straight through.