☓ LOVE LIKE AN ACHE IN THE JAW. ⁽ᵃᵖ⋅⁾

His laughter dies almost as quickly as it started. The air feels tense; he can’t remember the last time they had a room fully to themselves, either. David tries to stay relaxed -- he’s done nothing wrong, after all -- but he worries what Raphael might have said to him. He knows how close they are, and he knows how it all must have looked. Jane has tantrums sometimes. Wrecks a room, hurts herself. He was only helping her to calm down.

Despite himself, David’s throat goes dry and all the moisture seems to migrate to his hands, now too clammy to even hold his glass. He puts it aside and stands, hands now pushed deep into his pockets.

“I must’ve missed you giving me a first.” 

If Raphael thinks that time that he managed to catch David off guard counts as giving him a warning, he’s utterly wrong. David remains unshaken, untouchable, for even if Martel has started believing Raphael’s stupid ideas, he certainly hasn’t shown it. David’s lips stretch into a lazy smirk, and he looks at Raphael briefly before glancing away to light his cigar, swaying on his feet. 

Being Raphael must be tough, David thinks. He imagines that life presented him with a choice, once -- leave behind his home and his people to work here, or stay in the filth with the rest of them and be nothing. Perhaps he would have been happier being nothing. David assumes it’d be near on impossible for him to just go back to it now.

Something in Martel’s smile tightens for a moment when David says savage, but it relaxes; he claps him on the shoulder, squeezing reassuringly. “I’ll send him to his room in the evenings,” he reassures him, withdrawing his hand to offer a handkerchief from his coat pocket instead. “But I’m afraid he does have work to do for me, and Quispe can’t watch him every hour of the day. But he’ll behave himself around you and your ward from now on. Won’t you, my dear?”

Raphael hasn’t moved. “Yes.”

Martel laughs. “Really, you needn’t worry about him,” he assures David, patting him again. “Take a seat in the front room, won’t you? I’ll have Quispe make you some tea while Raphael and I have a chat upstairs.” There is the faintest hint of unpleasantness in his voice, but whether the threat is aimed towards Raphael or David, one can’t be sure.

David’s eyes narrow for a moment, just barely. Martel hasn’t believed him, he can tell -- but that doesn’t mean that he will go on to believe Raphael’s wild tale, and so David doesn’t worry himself too much with it. He is, however, horrendously put out by the fact that the punishment doesn’t feel harsh enough. Send him to his room in the evenings? “You ought to tie him out with the dogs,” he says, wiping his face clean. The bleeding seems to be stopping. David finds himself disappointed.

He looks at Raphael, stare hard, unfaltering. “If I can’t feel safe here, we might have to leave,” he says, and he knows that his words -- in Martel’s mind, at least -- are weighted with the amount of money he’ll take with him when he goes. He hopes that that is enough to make Raphael keep his mouth shut. 

Raphael has done some awful things in his life. Things unbefitting of anyone, let alone a priest tasked with taking care of an entire village. When he kills, it is at Martel’s command or in his own self-defense. That is all. He loathes it except for the fleeting moments where he doesn’t; where it feels good to have that much power over someone.

Right now, standing over David, he can feel that power running through him. More than that, he’s angry: angry that he knows what David is, angry that he wants to kill him but can’t. Angry at the smirk that tugs at David’s mouth when they both hear those footsteps and Raphael freezes, realising how this will look.

“Try and put me in one, then,” he says quietly. He flexes the fingers of his right hand, which doesn’t hurt. “See what happens.” He wants to tell him Martel doesn’t like women-beaters but there isn’t time: there’s a shadow in the doorway and he knows before he even looks that it is the last person he wants to see.

“G-d, I leave you two alone for five minutes,” Martel blinks, rushing forwards to offer David his hand. “Don’t tell me you provoked him,” he says, frowning as he pulls David up to his feet, eyeing the state of his face. “He can be touchy about some things. You know how Indians are. What happened?”

He hasn’t even looked at Raphael, who stares hard at the floor.

David doesn’t for a second consider how this is his fault. Raphael has meddled where things don’t concern him, and let himself be influenced by Jane’s childish fantasies. She likes to pretend that her life is oh-so-hard and that David is a cruel man, because it’s fun when somebody wants to jump in and save her. David knows he’s never done anything cruel to her, never a single thing that wasn’t done out of love. If she wants to hate him, let her, but he won’t have anybody giving him a beating over a little girl’s make-believe game.

When Martel pulls him to his feet, David edges around behind him so that the other man stands between him and Raphael -- partly for the line of defence, and partly so that Martel won’t see David smirking. 

“Your savage attacked me,” he says. “I didn’t provoke him. He approached me -- and he didn’t even have a reason.” Wild animals rarely need a reason, he wants to add, but he doesn’t want to risk angering Martel as well. He knows that the two of them are close and isn’t sure how far bullying Raphael will actually get him.

       David doesn’t have time to ask what he did to deserve it, but he is sure that he knows. He should have known that Raphael and Jane would get closer, and he understands why: she’s a pretty girl, and Raphael doesn’t strike David as the kind of man to get a lot of attention from pretty girls. Of course he laps up whatever she tells him, no matter how absurd. 

       He is, at first, stunned into not reacting. When he does process it, the first thing David thinks is how the fuck did the help even get that close to me?

       He tastes metal and spits. A red splatter appears on the tile floor before him, and he looks to Raphael as he wipes his mouth on his cuff. He’ll give Raphael one thing -- he punches like a horse kicks. If David weren’t so disgusted by the whole thing, he might have congratulated him on it.

      “She’s a child,” David finally says, words slurred by an already-swollen lip. “And you’d fight a man over the tantrums of a child?”

      Footsteps approach in the hall, and David considers getting up to save face, but quickly realises -- if they are found, especially by Martel, then Raphael gets stuck between a rock and a beating. A slow smirk spreads across David’s face, and he makes no effort to stand, listening to those steps getting closer.

     All he has to do is look this boy over, and he knows. There is no other reason for it -- their home is so far out of the way that it is rarely stumbled upon without intention, so he cannot be just passing. If he’d had the presence of mind to come up with a convincing lie, David might have had no suspicion, but as it stands, he is just a young man walking away from the home of a beautiful girl, with no excuse for the action.

     And even if David didn’t know before, the twitch of a curtain from a lit window at the house proves it. She’s watching, because she is worrying for him, and she worries because she loves him. The very idea makes him feel sick.

     David stands aside to give him room to pass through the gate and says nothing as he looks down at this street rat of a boy who’s dared to enter his home. He draws a mental picture of him -- of the nervous smile, the pretended confidence -- so that he can ask around about him later.

      “ain’t much, but it’s mine,” he says of the run-down cottage that stands before him. in truth, he’s just glad to be settled; he and jane have been up and down the country for so many years now that he’d forgotten what it was like to hang his clothes in a closet. he’s forgotten what it’s like to have neighbours, too. it’s gonna be quite a thing to get used to.

“Aren’t they quite the butcher?” Will Graham didn’t know if the corpses at his feet came from a real human. If this was another nightmare where he would wake up with sweat on his palms, he’d be grateful. This heart belonged to a little girl and this lung would’ve carried the air that kept her older brother alive. “Was it a kitchen knife?”

to stop himself from making a poorly timed ‘oh, you think i’m cute?’ joke, misty has to physically bite his tongue. it stings, but he figures it’s nothing to the fury and subsequent beating it’ll inspire in a raging homophobe such as this. this fucking charmer.

         ‘ you know absolutely fucking nothing about me, man. now would you step away from my car, please? ’

     he doesn’t need to know shit about his life to know that the guy’s disgusting. david finds himself wishing that the way he lives was still a crime, because at least then he could protect his family from it. deviants like him deserve jail. 

he’s barely got the window down before he’s being berated by the stranger outside  —  he’d even had an, ‘i’m sorry, do i know you?’ ready to go. a few thoughts cross his mind, starting with an all-too-innocent, because i’m a mortician? and ending with an infinitely more likely, because you’re a fucking bigot.

         ‘ by the likes of me, ’ he parrots flatly. ‘ you got something against long hair? green shirts? vw bugs? ’

   “don’t get cute with me, son,” david says, and though he thinks he’s being calm, his voice could still probably carry to the fifth floor of the building. “i know what you are. what you do.

    he’s been waiting for neil to come home. as soon as he sees his car pull up outside, david is out of his house like a shot, slamming the door so hard behind him that other people start twitching their curtains to see what’s going on. obnoxious as ever, he knocks on his neighbour’s car window until he rolls it down.

    if the drawn curtains and constantly locked doors didn’t suggest it already, david thinks his whole demeanor screams i like keeping myself to myself. it’s why he already regrets offering up his home to the other. he hates how vulnerable it makes him. the thought of somebody snooping around his house and touching his things makes him feel uncomfortable -- but not quite as uncomfortable as the idea of someone knowing anything about him does.

          “Whoa, you uh, you projectin’ there a little, buddy?            I bet you did consider it, jerk-off. Sorry. Detective            Officer Jerk-off.”