#is gonna kill me | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

averagejoesolomon · 8 months ago

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lmao, good luck you guys, I'm crying for so many different reasons rn. Please have so much fun with this one. If you're new here, you can read all of Full Circle on Ao3. Enjoy!

Chapter Eight

Matt’s never found a safe house shower that’s left him satisfied, but this one does a decent job of washing the Bolshoi down the drain. He gets a full ten minutes before the hot water runs cold, which gives him just enough time to find the start of a plan in the grout between each tile. The middle of his plan comes to him in the steam-shrouded path between bathroom and bedroom, while the end reveals itself at the bottom of his go-bag, right next to his favorite pair of wool socks. By the time he finally spots the passports, he already knows exactly how to sneak them out of the house, and exactly how to get them back.

Rachel's left the leather messenger bag completely unattended, looped around a golden hook on the back of the bedroom door. It hangs with a lopsided lilt, slouching under the weight of nearly a dozen different identities, and Matt reckons he could reach right for it. Pluck it from the hook and strap it over his shoulder. Take it before Rachel even knew it was gone, and leave her with all the plausible deniability in the world.

Except he hasn’t made up his mind quite yet. And anyway, he really ought to put on some pants before he fully commits to violating the Espionage Act.

“Oh.” It’s the last voice he wants to hear right now. It’s the first voice he wants to hear, always. Both. “Sorry, I didn’t realize—”

As the door swings open, Rachel stops short in the archway, her hair still wavy and wet with the smell of sage and lavender shampoo. He sometimes forgets—although he doesn’t know how—just how many freckles she has when she’s not all made up, especially in the summer months. He can always tell when she’s fresh off the plane from Italy, or France, or Spain, betrayed by the hundreds of little spots sprinkled across a sun-kissed red. He sees that same rosy color in her cheeks now, although that’s probably got less to do with recent European excursions, and much more to do with the fact that Matt is wearing nothing but a towel.

Matt blinks, unsure of the protocol in this particular situation. “No trouble,” he says. “You, uh, looking for something?”

“You.” Rachel doesn’t blink. Not even once. “I was looking for you.”

She seems to have that much covered. In fact, she’s looking at him more than she’s looking for him, with all the same attention to detail she brings to every other facet of her life. Dark eyes slip across his torso like she’s taking in the layout, making note of every entrance, every route, every room she wants to hit along the way. In this particular department, Matt’s got nothing to hide—a clandestine lifestyle does plenty of favors for a fella’s core strength, to say nothing of all those dawns spent lagging behind Joe as they run laps up and down the Mall—but it’s strange to be on the receiving end of such a tactical and overt scan. Stranger still that he might like it.

He really likes it, actually.

The longer her look lingers, the more he’s able to settle into his own enjoyment. There’s a physicality to her gaze, as tangible as if she reached out to touch him. Her eyes brush across his chest, trail down his obliques, and wrap around his middle just in time to work their way back up again. Matt’s always been a good, wholesome looking guy, according to his mama and every girlfriend he’s ever had. But this moment proves he’s got the kind of looks that make a girl like Rachel Cameron stop and stare, which is a whole new level as far as he’s concerned.

“Well, you found me,” he says, unable to bite back a broad grin. He has to catch himself and straighten his features into something more serious. “And, uh”—he clears his throat—“keep finding me, seems like.”

She flits across his collar, down his shoulders, biceps, forearms, hands. “What?”

Matt lets out a huff of a laugh. “My eyes are up here, Ace,” he teases, throwing two guiding fingers toward his face. “Not that I can’t appreciate a wandering eye.”

Finally, she blinks like she’s making up for lost time. One, two, three, right in a flustered row. “Sorry,” she says, and he swears she’s turning redder. “Oh my god, no, sorry. I just—I didn’t realize you had so many scars.”

Now it’s Matt’s turn to feel the flush rise to his face, not because he minds her looking, but because he didn’t realize she was looking that closely. He’s never been asked about his scars before, not least because few people ever see them. Outside of his own reflection, Joe’s the only one to know when Matt adds a new cut to his collection, and that’s only because Joe’s usually the one stitching him back together. He’s never had to answer for the menagerie of pink and silver marks puckered across his skin. Never had to explain why he seems to be more scar than not.

Matt doesn’t consider himself to be a nervous man, but something about Rachel noticing all of his long healed hurt gets his heart all twisted in a tizzy.

“Yeah, well,” he says with a shrug. “Knife wound here, gunshot there, a questionable tussle with a Spanish bull—you know how it is.”

“That’s not funny,” she reminds him.

“Wasn’t joking,” he promises, but this doesn’t console her the way he hopes. He tries another approach. “I’m sure you’ve got your fair share.”

She won’t stand for it. “That’s not a fair share, Matthew.” She eases closer, one step at a time and thoughtless in a way she never is. “Look at you. How many knives are you going to take to your side before you learn to cover it—and are those cigar burns?”

Her attention starts to feel sharper, infused with equal parts scrutiny and curiosity. Rachel’s the type of person who likes to understand how things happen, and he can feel her calculating the angle, force, and method behind every last mark. It’s a dangerous game, trying to guess all the ways a guy’s been wounded. Leaves too much room for the imagination.

“That’s the thing about the Russian Mob,” he says, trying to cut through her conclusions before they go too far off the tracks. “Once they get their hands on you, they’ll make you talk one way or another. Sometimes that means taking cigars to your chest for six hours straight.”

These scars are courtesy of low-level mobsters—that much is true. He leaves out that one of the mobsters was a Circle informant on the verge of switching sides, before he was found dead in his apartment a day later with a suicide note written in someone else’s hand. After a night like that, Joe had to haul Matt out of the country via cargo plane to avoid suspicion at customs.

What Rachel doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

Finally, she trades tangible looks for real, honest touch. Her fingertips grace the field of burns from left to right, silently counting as she goes—twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two—before she lands on the mark just an inch from his heart. “Doesn’t look like you did much talking.”

Her hands are warmer than usual, but Matt still fights a shiver. “I try not to make a habit of it.”

Her eyes finally meet his, with that same appraising severity she spared for his scars. She studies him, intently, before saying, “I know that about you.”

They’ve had this same conversation before—or one like it, at least—on the procedural, bureaucratic training grounds of Camp Perry. He remembers a younger Rachel waiting for him after four long nights of sleepless, shivering, hungry Hail Marys and only now, years later, does it occur to him to wonder why she was the first one to greet him. “You never told me,” he says, “what they did to you. Back in training, when they took us all away and…”

Her hand falls, but her gaze does not. “That’s need-to-know.”

Matt tries, “What about want-to-know?”

“Matthew—”

“What did they do, Rachel?”

They’re right on the verge of one another, ready to fall straight into whatever shared past, present, and future they have. An answer sits at the edge of her lips, hesitant, and he could wait a lifetime just as long as she keeps looking at him like this—chin up to meet his height, eyes wide and wanting, her breath rising and falling just inches from his own. He likes the way she fits at his front, likes how his broadness compliments her petite frame, likes that she ain’t afraid to get right up in his face and tell him how things are.

She takes a step back.

The only thing that keeps Matt from reaching out, wrapping an arm around her hip, and pulling her firmly back into place, is the fact that he’s got socks in one hand and a towel in the other. That, and he’s pretty sure that Rachel’s hands are actual, registered lethal weapons. He’s got no choice but to let her pull away. “I came in here to tell you that Townsend will be sleeping on the sofa.”

“You…” It’s a Cameron family specialty, to change subjects so abruptly it leaves his head spinning. “Uh, okay. Suppose I can take the floor.”

She works her way across the room and plucks a silk scrunchie from the nightstand, slipping it around her wrist. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she says, pulling up her hair with that special one-two-three movement women do. “You’ll take the bed.”

Sage and lavender waft through the room as she twists her hair into a bun with all the casual magic of Houdini tying knots. “I already told you,” he protests. “My mama would kill me if I let you—”

“I’m also taking the bed.” She keeps herself busy by fluffing the pillows and straightening the wrinkles from the quilt. “It's a queen. I don’t really need the whole thing to myself, do I?”

This is phrased like a question, but coming from Rachel, it sounds more like an irrefutable fact. She has that effect, always speaking with enough certainty that everything she says sounds like a universal truth. Usually, it’s in Matt’s best interest to take her at her word, but this one will take some extra convincing, on account of how it sends his stomach flipping.

“You and me?”

“Yes.”

“In the same bed?”

“Yes.”

“At the same time?”

“Matt, please don’t be a boy about this,” she says. “Abby and I share all the time.”

If Matt were to name all of the differences between Abby and himself, they would be here well into the night, the most notable among them being that Matt ain’t anyone’s sister. “You don’t think this is maybe a little different, than you and Abby?”

She glances up at him, a challenge in her eye. “Why?”

There it is again. That edge that sits between them. Over the years, they’ve become experts at dancing along this particular cliff side, and Matt doesn’t have the guts to jump first. Instead, he hooks two fingers through the strap of his bag and starts toward the door. A retreat. “I’m going to get changed.”

“Change in here.”

“Rachel—”

“I’m leaving,” she says, all innocence and throwing her hands up to each side to prove it. She’s already following through on her promise by the time she says, “Get dressed. Get settled. I’ll work out Townsend’s watch schedule with Abe and Grace—are you okay to take him for an hour or two?”

What Rachel doesn’t know won’t hurt her. “Sure.”

She closes the door as she goes, leaving the messenger bag swinging on its hook. Its buckles scrape against the wood, back and forth, back and forth, and Matt knows he has a decision to make. The more he thinks about it, the more it comes down to the same two options he always runs into: Joe or Rachel. Except this time, the answer ain’t so obvious.

For now, all he can do is follow the instructions he was given. He towels off, gets dressed, and meanders back to the main room. Abe’s made bedtime tea and tries to coax Matt into a cup. Grace has found a deck of cards and challenged Townsend to a game of War. The couple share a sickeningly long kiss before Abe retires to the bedroom, leaving his wife on the first watch shift.

It’s late and getting later, but Matt doesn’t recognize the evening for what it is. Throughout his career, he’s spent so many nights fighting off sleep that he doesn’t realize how tired he is, until Rachel calls to him from across the room. “Matthew,” she says. “Come to bed.”

She’s standing in the doorway of their shared bedroom and, for a moment, Matt spots a flash of everything he wants in the world—Rachel Cameron, freckle-faced and hair tied, beckoning him to sleep. Rest. Be, right beside her. It’s enough to stop his breath. It’s enough to get him up and moving without a fight.

They navigate by moonlight creeping through the cracks of closed curtains. Rachel slips into her side of the bed, and Matt fumbles into what is apparently his side. The mattress groans, and the frame squeaks, and while Matt admits this is an upgrade from the hellish loveseat, he still can’t find any comfort. He clings to the far edge of the bed, giving Rachel ample space, stiff as a board while he stares up at the wood paneled ceiling.

But slowly, slowly, her warmth seeps through their shared blankets, and his must too. Her low, even breaths fill the spaces between his own. He begins to unwind, one muscle at a time, until enough seconds have passed and enough sleep has taken over that he asks, voice heavy, “Rachel?”

And she responds, “Mmm?”

“What did they do?” he needs to know. “At Camp Perry, what did they do to you?”

He can’t see her through the darkness, but he’s got this crystal clear memory of her with a black eye, waiting for him with worry woven into her every feature. Her answering voice perfectly matches the version of her in his mind’s eye. “Nothing.”

“Fine, don’t tell me.”

“I mean it,” she says, vowels drawn out and sleepy. “They didn’t put me in a training cell. Didn’t starve me, or freeze me out, or beat me. I just had to…sit there, knowing that I didn't fight hard enough. Hell, I didn’t even have to do that—I was free to go about my day.”

He lets his head fall to the side, pressing past his pillow until he spots her silhouette. It’s a perfect profile. The curve of her cheek, the slope of her nose, and round, easy lips. “But you didn’t,” he guesses. “You couldn’t.”

She turns to look at him now, and he can feel her gaze, even if he can’t see it. “If my sister’s screaming behind a door,” she says, “I’m going to be on the other side of it, trying my damnedest to get it open, even if I know it won’t make a difference.”

That’s what Rachel does. She covers Abby. She covers her father. “Yeah.” And now she’s covering him. “I know that about you.”

It doesn’t take much, to cast an exploratory reach toward her side of the bed and come back with her hand in his. Her fingers are back to their usual chill, like the first day of fall after a blazing hot summer, and he likes the way their palms fit together. She must too, because she squeezes once, twice, testing the feel of it.

“You waited for me,” he goes on. “After Abby was released, you were still there, waiting for me.”

There’s a hitch in her breath. He can see it in the rise of her chest. Hear it interrupt the steady beat he’s long latched onto. “Yes.”

And maybe his own breath hitches, too. “Why?”

One more time, they find themselves on the edge of almost. Except this time, Rachel’s tired enough to fall. “I liked you.”

He smiles. “You had a funny way of showing it.”

“Maybe I didn’t like you yet,” she admits. “Maybe I just liked the idea of you. Maybe I hoped you could become someone great, and maybe I hoped I could be a part of that.”

“Am I?” he wonders. “Great?”

“Better,” she says. “You’re good.”

It wouldn’t mean anything coming from anyone else. But because it comes from her, it means absolutely everything. “You’re a part of that, y’know.”

She gives his hand another squeeze and laces her fingers between his. Before long, she falls asleep like that, and Matt reckons her touch could keep him pinned in place until his very last breath. For the first time in his adult life, he understands why his pops is always praising simple pleasures.

And by God, he really is in love with her.

This is a revelation that comes at exactly the wrong time, although, if he’s honest with himself, it has slowly and steadily snuck into their years together. In hindsight, he realizes this is exactly how it’s supposed to happen. It’s impossible to fall in love with Rachel Cameron overnight, because there’s too much to her for any one person to love all at once. She ought to be savored, piece by piece, laugh by laugh, fight by infuriating fight. She ought to be discovered—taken in time, taken in stride, taken by surprise—rather than given without effort or care. To love Rachel is to know her, and understand her, and anticipate her every word.

He decides, then and there, what he’s going to do. Dozing off at her side, he takes sleep where it will come. The hours pass and soon it’s Matt’s turn to watch over Townsend. He carefully slips out of her hold, shakes the kid awake, and takes the messenger bag from its golden hook, trying to be the good man Rachel Cameron thinks he is.

#full circle #THIS KID #IS GONNA KILL ME #I'm fine #nothing is going to go wrong #(except I know what's coming and uh)#(well)#(buckle up)

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