Hatchetverse|Charlotte Sweetly x Melissa|hurt/comfort
The CCRP holiday mixer was the kind of event that existed to be endured rather than enjoyed — folding tables dressed up with plastic poinsettias, a punch bowl nobody trusted, and forty people in ugly sweaters standing exactly as far from Corporate as they could manage without leaving the room. Melissa liked it anyway. She liked most things. She'd worn the sweater with the cat on it, the one with the little bell sewn into its felt collar, and she'd spent the better part of an hour refilling the cheese tray because nobody else seemed to think of it and somebody had to.
She noticed Charlotte the way she noticed most people from Accounting — pleasantly, peripherally, a woman with soft eyes and a softer voice who always said thank you so much like she meant it twice. Charlotte was standing near the drinks table in a green dress that didn't try very hard to be festive, nursing a plastic cup of something red, and Melissa was refilling the little dish of pretzels beside her when Greg Bishop wandered over.
Melissa had a private taxonomy for men like Greg. Loud men. Men who touched the small of a woman's back to steer her somewhere she hadn't agreed to go. Men who laughed at their own jokes before anyone else had a chance to.
"There she is," Greg said, too close, his tie already loosened like the day had personally wronged him. "Charlotte Sweetly. You get prettier every year, you know that? Somebody oughta tell your husband he's a lucky man." He said lucky like it was something he was owed and hadn't gotten.
Charlotte's smile didn't move, but something behind it did — a small contraction, like a hand closing. "That's kind of you to say, Greg."
"I'm just being honest." He leaned an elbow on the table, knocking Melissa's pretzel dish half an inch and not noticing. "You ever get tired of Sam, you let me know. I'll show you what a real man does with a woman like you."
There was a pause. Melissa, half-turned away with the pretzel bag still in her hands, felt it more than heard it — the particular quality of silence that came before Charlotte said something.
"You know," Charlotte said, mild as milk, "my mother always told me you can tell everything about a man by how he behaves when nobody's making him behave. And you behave like a dog, Greg. Not the sweet kind. The kind that gets into the trash because it doesn't know any better and bites the hand that tries to stop it."
Greg blinked. Somewhere behind him, someone from Sales laughed into their cup and turned it into a cough.
"Jesus, Charlotte, it's a compliment—"
"I know what it was." Her voice hadn't risen at all. That was the part that stayed with Melissa later — how gentle it remained, how unbothered, like she was commenting on the weather instead of skinning a man down to the thing underneath. "Go bother somebody else's dish, would you? You're getting your paws all over the pretzels."
Greg left, muttering something about women and their moods, and the office swallowed him back up into its noise, and Charlotte picked her cup back up like nothing at all had happened.
Melissa stood very still with the pretzel bag crinkling in her hand.
A dog, she thought. She called him a dog. Not clumsy, not thoughtless — she'd said it exactly the way Melissa thought it, the precise shape of it, dog in a man's clothes, dog that had learned to stand on its hind legs and ask for things it hadn't earned. Melissa had spent years being the only person in any room who could see it. She'd learned to keep it folded up small and tucked behind her smile, because the one time she'd said it out loud — he's not really a person, you understand, he's just wearing one — a girl from Human Resources had looked at her like she'd grown a second head.
But Charlotte had just said it. To his face. Sweetly.
Melissa set the pretzel bag down very carefully, the way she set down anything she didn't want to spill, and came around the table.
"That was wonderful," she said, and she meant it with her whole chest. "What you said to him."
Charlotte looked faintly startled, like she wasn't used to being complimented on cruelty, or on anything, maybe. "Oh — I don't know if it was very nice."
"It was true, though." Melissa tilted her head, cat-bell chiming faintly with the movement. "Sometimes true is better than nice."
Something passed over Charlotte's face — not quite recognition, not yet, more like the first warm draft before a fire catches. She looked at Melissa properly for what might have been the first time all night: the sweater, the bell, the eyes that were a little too bright, a little too steady.
"I suppose it is," Charlotte said slowly.
"You should say it more often." Melissa smiled, the wide easy smile that made people forget to ask her follow-up questions. "The world's just full of dogs pretending they walk on two legs. It's nice, meeting someone else who notices."
Charlotte laughed, a small uncertain sound, and looked down into her cup as if the punch might explain what she'd just been told. "I don't know that I notice anything. I just say what I'm thinking. Probably too much."
"No," Melissa said. "Not too much. Not nearly enough, I'd bet."
They ended up by the window, away from the noise, because Melissa had steered them there without seeming to steer at all — a hand light on Charlotte's elbow, a murmured it's stuffy over there, isn't it, and Charlotte had gone along easily, the way people always went along with Melissa, never quite noticing they'd been led.
Outside, the parking lot was strung with the same tired lights as the office, red and green smearing on wet asphalt. Charlotte watched them rather than look at Melissa directly, turning her cup by the rim.
"Can I ask you something?" Melissa said.
"Mm-hm."
"Do you actually think that? About men. About — dogs." She kept her voice light, curious, the voice she used when she asked people how their weekend was. It cost her nothing to sound harmless. It never had.
Charlotte was quiet long enough that Melissa thought she might not answer at all. "I think," she said finally, "that some men have a look. Right before they say something ugly, or do something ugly. Like a — a hunger that doesn't know it's rude to be hungry. I've been married eleven years and I still can't always tell who's going to get that look until they get it." She glanced sideways, almost apologetic. "That probably sounds insane."
"It doesn't," Melissa said, too quickly, too warm. "It sounds like you've been paying attention. Most people don't. Most people just let the ones with that look walk right past them, over and over, and never once ask why does he keep getting away with it."
"You've thought about this a lot."
"I think about it constantly." Melissa laughed, and it came out fonder than she meant it to. "I used to have a cat named Boots. Best boy in the world. Never once bit anyone who didn't have it coming. And I used to think — well, wouldn't it be lovely if people worked that way. If you could just tell, right off, who was going to be good and who was going to be a problem. Save everybody so much trouble."
"And Greg's a problem."
"Greg," Melissa said, "is a very obvious problem. That's not even interesting. What's interesting is that you saw it too, and you didn't wait for someone else to say it for you." She turned, and there wasn't very much space left between them, and she didn't step back to make more. "I don't meet a lot of people who say things out loud. Mostly they just think them very loudly and hope somebody else does the saying."
Charlotte's breath caught, just slightly, the kind of catch a person doesn't mean to let show. "I don't usually say things like that at all. I don't know what came over me."
"I think you knew exactly what came over you." Melissa reached out, unhurried, and tucked a strand of hair behind Charlotte's ear that hadn't really needed tucking, and let her fingers rest there a half-second longer than the gesture required. "I think you've been holding your breath around men like that for a long, long time, and tonight you just finally let a little of it out."
Charlotte didn't pull away. That was the thing Melissa would turn over later, lying in bed with Boots purring against her collarbone — she hadn't pulled away, hadn't laughed it off, hadn't glanced over her shoulder for Sam. She'd just gone very still, the way a held note goes still right before it breaks.
"You're very forward," Charlotte said, but it wasn't quite an objection.
"I'm very honest." Melissa smiled, and let her hand drop, because she was patient, because she had learned a long time ago that the animals worth keeping were the ones you never had to chase. "It's a family trait."
"Sam says I overthink people," Charlotte said, to the window, to the parking lot, to anyone who wasn't quite Melissa. "He says most people are just people."
"Sam sounds like a very trusting man."
"He is." A small, complicated pause. "I love him. I want you to know that — it isn't that I don't."
"I didn't think it was." Melissa said it gently, and meant it, because it wasn't really the point, and she was old enough in her own strange way to know that jealousy was a waste of a good evening. "I just think loving someone doesn't mean you stop being able to see clearly. You can love a person and still notice all the dogs standing around him at a Christmas party."
Charlotte huffed something that was almost a laugh, wet at the edges. "You're strange."
"I get that a lot." Melissa didn't seem bothered by it in the slightest. "I like to think of it as observant. Strange is just what people call observant when it makes them nervous."
"You don't make me nervous."
"No?"
"No." Charlotte looked at her then, fully, for the second time that night, and something in her face had loosened, the careful accounting-department composure slipping just slightly off true. "You make me feel like I've been saying the right things to the wrong people my whole life."
Melissa felt that sentence land somewhere under her ribs and stay there, warm as a coal. She had loved things before — Boots, mostly, and the particular clean satisfaction of a job done thoroughly, and her mother, in the uncomplicated way a person loves the first thing that ever taught them anything true. She had never before felt anything that moved quite like this: quick and total and faintly alarming, like a door opening onto a room she hadn't known was in the house.
Oh, she thought, with the same simple wonder she brought to everything. There it is.
"Well," Melissa said, and her voice came out softer than she'd planned it, "then I suppose you've finally found the right one."
Somewhere behind them, inside, someone had put on music, tinny and cheerful through the propped door, and Greg's laugh rose and fell over it like something that couldn't be drowned out no matter how loud the party got. Charlotte glanced toward the sound instinctively — toward Sam, maybe, or the idea of him, the whole warm ordinary shape of her marriage waiting a few miles away — and then back at Melissa, who hadn't moved, who was simply standing there in her cat sweater with her bell chiming faintly whenever the wind came through the propped door, watching her with an attention that felt like being seen in a way Charlotte wasn't sure she'd been seen in eleven years.
"I should get back," Charlotte said finally, though she didn't move.
"Mm," Melissa said. "You should."
Neither of them did, for a little while longer. And when Charlotte finally did turn back toward the lights and the noise and the life waiting for her on the other side of the door, Melissa watched her go with the same fond, patient, terrible tenderness she reserved for things she had already decided, quietly, to keep.
This is a knitting WIP of mine, for a commission! It's going to a very lovely cat who overgrooms a little bit (especially in the winter). So far I'm really liking how it looks, and I think once it's done I'll be relieved to see it go, because counting back rows is stressful af.
