22 for Mattie/Sharky because honestly that could go horribly, comically wrong and I’m here for it.
It takes Mattie an absurdly long time to realize the man she’s been traveling Hope County with is her soulmate. She thought he was just like that, that he would bare his soul to anyone who paid attention to him, that he’d just casually announce, “I am not gonna lie to you, I have not pooped in six days,” to anyone who would listen to him without being a dick about it.
Hurk certainly never seemed to act like the stuff pouring out of Sharky’s mouth was unusual. Sometimes he’d even nod along, like when Sharky was talking about the cousin of theirs who worked the parking lot “as a prostitute, not a truck driver,” because it was stuff he knew and it was also stuff Sharky would normally say aloud.
How the fuck was she supposed to know he physically couldn’t lie to her when he never acted like he hadn’t meant to tell her the truth?
She suffers through the stories about his exes, the one he fingerblasted at the telecom tower and the one who kicked him in the balls with her roller skate, the one who cheated on him and broke his heart, the one who dumped him when she found out about the fur suit.
(Okay, maybe that one should have been a clue for her. He did look uneasy when he admitted that one night, but she’d thought the flush on his face was from the campfire between them or the bottle of whiskey they’d been sharing. She’s only been a cop for a year, okay, and there’s a lot going on, you’re just going to have to forgive her.)
He asked if the furry thing bothered her, and she said no, because it doesn’t, but it didn’t occur to her there was anything hanging between them that would compell her to tell the truth. She wouldn’t lie and tell him it did bother her, and he didn’t ask if she was into it because that would have been a different answer and still not something she’d lie about in any case.
So, yeah, maybe she was just being dumb for the weeks between meeting him and figuring it out, and maybe the way she finally fucking put two-and-two together and came up with four for the first time instead of three isn’t the way she would ever admit it to anyone else, but she figured it out in the end, didn’t she? Just because they’re going to have to pretend the first time she tried to lie to him and couldn’t was about why she was so squirmy and insistent on looting a pharmacy doesn’t mean they’re any less destined to be together.
When someone asks, probably Nick because he doesn’t have much of a filter either, or Hurk because he probably knows and just hasn’t brought it up, or oh holy Jesus Whitehorse next time they’re at the jail, she’ll just lie. She can lie to them, right? She’s only contractually obligated by the universe to tell the truth to one Charlemagne Victor Boshaw IV, not everyone else… right?
She doesn’t have to tell them she realized she’s been with her soulmate when he casually asks her, “What’s the deal, Po-po?” and she finds herself saying, instead of something polite and vague and designed to get a dude to stop asking questions, “I have a yeast infection and if I don’t find the fluco-whatever I’m going to murder someone.”
She also doesn’t want to admit that their first kiss was from opposite sides of the pharmacy counter, or that he’d sadly admitted he thought she knew and was ashamed of him, or that they also looted two boxes of condoms to use later.
Most things just aren’t anyone’s business.
She can still lie to most people, after all.
