Buyer's Remorse
A ficlet
The first time he kissed her, it was a question. It asked "may I" and "is this alright" and "can I still have this."
Can you give back to me.
She should have known better than to answer "yes."
But first it was his lips and then she was in his lap and then he had her laid out on the couch laying kisses on each lonely inch-by-inch of skin that she hadn't let anyone touch for so long, that maybe she'd been saving for him, and his shirt was on the floor in a pile with her dress and then, and then, and then--
He wept in her arms that night in her bed while her fingers moved in slow, consoling circles over the scar on his shoulder too neat and to linear to be a gun shot. In the morning she sat up under the covers while he slept and watched the sun come up.
"If we're going to do this," she told him when he sat up beside her, "we should really do it."
He nodded for a while before his mouth seemed able to say "yeah."
He stayed for breakfast.
He made her lunch.
They went out together for dinner. Spaghetti. An off-menu special of a hole in the wall pizza parlor. Family style.
"Should we do like Lady and the Tramp?" She said.
"Nah," he answered. "That's a mess."
But he smiled imagining it.
***
It took her some time to realize that he was never going to kiss her in public, not because he didn't want to be seen, but for the same reason he couldn't have his back to the door in a restaurant, or sleep out of reach of his pistol.
She remembered daydreaming about a handsome soldier when she was young-- Maybe a marine. Someone with an iron will and a contained, controlled way of living his life that could rub off on her fucked up world and make everything sit right. But Frank was chaos. Frank was insomnia and nightmares and pacing in the living room clutching at his own scalp like maybe he could crack his skull open and take his bullet-pierced brain out and beat it into some kind of submission. He could never sit still, whether it was the twitch in his trigger finger or the movement of his eyes in his head that took everything with it, little twitches of his nose and jerks of his chin. He tapped his foot while he sat in chairs if he didn't ebb in them, a little foreward, a little back, like the tide approaching and then re-thinking the shore. In his sleep he ground his teeth so hard his jaw locked and muffled the sounds of the nightmares.
It took her some time before she had to accept it was getting worse.
***
When Frank got more volatile, Karen told him to call Curtis. He said, "he's not the one. "
"What does that mean, Frank? The one to what?"
"Keeping me down."
"I keep you down?"
"To Earth, yeah. To something, to something real. I can't--"
She wrapped her arms around him but she said it again:
"Talk to Curtis."
Frank stopped going to group.
***
Around the time he started living like he was still in boot camp, up at four in the morning to run until dawn, sweating rivers into her living room thanks to a pull up bar mounted in place of the bedroom door, he got the tattoo. It was a relief, in a way.
It suggested he was holding on to something more than just her.
***
She'd never met "Micro" but she had her suspicions when he knocked on her door. It was the shifty-eyed way he said "uhh, is he here?" Like Frank was still a secret not to be caught talking about and not a pardoned man. Like how a person would talk about buying or selling a weapon.
"What do you want?" She asked past the door chain.
"I found something. I think it might give some closure."
"Found what?"
"A list of buyers. He, uh, seems like he almost got them all."
"Almost?"
"There's a family, a powerful family, that might have trafficked some of Blacksmith's product...can we not talk about this in the hallway?"
Karen said:
"I don't think we should talk about this at all."
Karen said:
"It's done."
Two weeks later Frank was out the door by 3 am, ready to run. His ribs had started to show.
Karen called David Lieberman.
***
The night Frank turned his pistol on himself--just for an instant--was the night she told him. She said:
"Frank, don't do this. You're not done."
"I think I gotta be--"
"I can't let you be done."
He needed something to hold onto that was stronger than her.
***
One morning she woke up and he wasn't there, as usual, but there was a box in bed beside her with a ring inside it, sitting atop a velvet insert that seemed to be swelling out of its container. Underneath was the note, the money: be safe, it said, and a phone number.
The first Gnocci died the next day.
Karen put the ring on a chain.
When he can come back, she told herself. When he can be done. Then I'll put it on.
When he can be done.