He didn’t mean to make her wince, and seeing the little recoil halted him for a minute, brought him back to the kind eyes in front of him as opposed to the Morrigan snake he’d had washing out his vision the whole time he’d been standing there. That was all it took, a little hurt in her eyes, a little confusion, and even though Belulah was so quick to shake it off and play it sweet, Hamlet caught it. What he didn’t catch was her reaction to what he said about Remi. It was too slight, to quick for his drunkenly lagging brain to pick up on.
The last thing he wanted to do, hurt anyone - except maybe JR. Even if he didn’t like where she came from, even if he didn’t like her, bringing pain to anyone who in that moment didn’t deserve it was not something Hamlet ever wanted to do. Still, his face, though it shifted out of hostility and disgust, read empty and he stayed motionless as she tried to maneuver a way to get to his face. Apprehensive, his position remained upright with a softer, but still semi-scowl to confront her begging eyes.
“A worrier?” It was a scoff and he practically rolled his eyes straight out of his head. His tone was less aggressive, and though his words were semi-cruel, it was with a slight laugh in his voice he said them. “I’m definitely not your problem to be fixing, Belulah.” But still, just then he was trying to do her the favor, to bite his tongue and hold back his aggression because placing it on her would’ve been incorrect. It was not her, specifically, he had a beef with and though he never intended on having any kindness towards her, Hamlet figured for just that night he could bite back his cruelty and just let her fix his damn face.
It wasn’t with so much defeat as it was annoyance that Hamlet let himself practically free fall to the curb, lacking grace and thunking down like a young dog who didn’t quite have a handle on his long gangly legs yet. “Just hurry up, my parents will be wondering where I am.” A lie.
Even though Hamlet hadn’t given in to her yet, Beulah felt like maybe she had a little pull. He wasn’t still walking away. That was one thing. And while he wasn’t exactly smiling at her, he wasn’t giving her the same look of contempt as he had been before. Which was, in her eyes, basically a smile when it came to Hamlet Atkins. That was another thing. Wasn’t it the little victories, after all? Little victories that almost went unnoticed, that were so slight, but eventually added up over time? Her whole life, Beulah had lived for the little victories. She’d seen what they’d done for her in the past. Maybe now would be no exception. Maybe this was the first step to getting in.
Out of everything that Hamlet had thrown her way in the months since she first approached him, it was only his next words that dug in to the core of her. Sure, she’d felt fleeting moments of hurt or self-consciousness, but that’s all they were in the end--fleeting moments. And yet this...this got her. ‘I’m definitely not your problem to be fixing, Beulah.’ She didn’t know where Hamlet himself had put his emphasis, but in her mind she heard, ‘I’m definitely not your problem to be fixing, Beulah.’ It wasn’t a dig at her. At the very most, it was a dig at himself disguised as a dig at her. Maybe that’s why it got to her. Because it wasn’t thrown to hurt her, really. It was a small insight, almost like proof in her mind, at the pain that dwelt beneath. There was no question in her mind, now, that it was there. She wasn’t sure seeing things. It was there. The laugh he said it with did absolutely nothing to quell this confirmation. Proof is what it had seemed like for a moment, but a quick turn around to amend--it was like a confession.
Now, Beulah let her face crumble. She didn’t withdraw from her telling expressions this time. Her eyebrows knitted together--a fine wrinkled like a wall between them, a frown on her face, her eyes round and genuine with worry, with concern, with confusion. Where Beulah had been all frantic energy, her words bouncing around and her body skittish in its constant movements, she was now frozen. Halted in the air, a mannequin, mid-task. Hands poised over the first aid kit. Her head tilted back, eyes glued up to his face. All of this happening in the small space of a few seconds. Even so, there was a pause, a rather long one, before she spoke. Her words came out in a husk, it was hard for her to believe she even had to tell him this. “You’re not anyone’s problem, Hamlet. You’re not a problem period.”
Not hers, not anyone’s. She hated to think that he thought otherwise. Just as before she spoke, there was a few seconds pause after. The words clung to the air with all the life they had. Hanging there. They echoed without a real, audible echo--it was just an inclination of the mind. She could still hear them, ringing, in her head long after they’d died in the air. That was just something you got when time no longer existed and every pore of your skin ached in the stillness. At least, that’s how it was for Beulah. Perhaps Hamlet had already brushed the moment off by the time she spoke again. “Your lip. The bleeding. That’s what I meant.”
In another moment shared between the two, just after the halted stillness, there was nothing but movement. Beulah thought of the movie Big Fish. Its circus scene, where Ed sees Sandra for the first time in a similar moment of stopped time, and remarks that what you never get told about time stopping is that afterwards, time has to move extra fast to catch up. What had once seemed like a fantastical, theatrical element was now her reality. Hamlet tumbled to the curb before she had a chance to help slow the motion. “Okay, I’ll be quick.” She stepped closer, and her hands worked at a rather fast--albeit gentle--pace to amend the split in his lip. And a small band-aid, of course, to assist the healing process.
