ikissdhimbck | OOM: Room #100 -- For Tommy Gavin

"All right."

None of the men in Kate's life have ever been morning people. She doesn't think much of it.

While he's off, she pours herself a fresh cup of coffee and finds the dish with the tea cakes.

He washes his face with icy cold water, gasping and shivering as his senses fully awaken and the previous night comes back to him in a flood. And at that, his lips twitch and a low chuckle to himself echoes off the porcelain sink. Combing his fingers through his hair, he regards his dripping reflection in the mirror for a moment before noticing a small red welt on the side of his throat.

Well. At least the guys at the firehouse will know he got some without having to ask.

After drying off his face, he emerges from the bathroom. He goes to the bed and shakes out the rumpled sheets in search of his t-shirt, eventually fishing it out from between the folds, before he approaches Kate at the table.

"How're you doin'?"

She sits with her legs tucked under her chair. Crossing them just isn't comfortable this morning.

"M'all right."

She eyes him from over the rim of her cup.

"I meant t'have that laundered for you before y'woke up. M'sorry."

"Ah, 's fine. No need."

He pulls the shirt on (it smells like her, too) and sits down at the table.

"Rough night, huh?" he then says, cracking a devilish smile up at her as he refills his cup of coffee.

She's completely nonchalant when she answers.

"It was all right."

The ho-hum is implied.

He sets down the pot of coffee with a soft thunk and levels her a Look.

"It was all right?" he scoffs with a short laugh.

"Well, it was wonderful until this obnoxious fella showed up at my door."

She spears a bite of jelly-filled pastry and brings it to her lips, making eye contact with him. That wicked spark is dancing in her eyes.

"An' he kept me up all night long."

"Is that so?" he says dryly, as he takes a sip of coffee. "You should've called me, I could've kicked him out for ya and showed you a much better time."

Her lips linger around her fork. She pulls it away, chewing slowly.

(And masking a grin.)

"Is that a promise?"

"Of course," he murmurs into his cup, meeting her eyes, before his gaze flicks down to her lips as she chews.

Suddenly overwhelmed with an appetite, he removes the lid from his plate and uncovers an omelet with a side of bacon, and immediately tucks in.

"So, what're you up to today?"

She pretends not to notice when his eyes sink to her mouth.

(But she almost always does — eyes on her mouth, on her chest, on her legs — and it always gives her a little thrill.)

"Mm, I'll probably check in on the stables at some point, but I might reserve this as a leisure day."

She cuts a biscuit in half, letting a pat of butter melt between the two halves.

"What about you?"

He crunches on some bacon.

"I'm just gonna go home, get a few more hours sleep before I have to go back to work again, since I'm pulling another double-shift. I'll have a couple days off after that, though, but I might hafta spend that time with my old man. Oh yeah, did I mention that yet? My dad moved in with me." He doesn't sound too thrilled as he shovels a forkful of eggs into his mouth.

"Really? That's wonderful."

So says the young woman who had the close relationship with her father. She doesn't notice his lackluster look until after the fact.

"That's not wonderful?"

A slight eyebrow twitch.

"Nah-uh. Not wonderful."

Cup of coffee in hand, he leans back in his chair. "You wanna know why it's not wonderful? Lemme tell you why. Take me on my worst day -- the boozing, the swearing, the carousing, basically all the seven deadly sins -- age that by eighty-two years, add incontinence, and that's what my dad's like. Don't get me wrong, I love the guy, and yeah, he was a war hero, yeah, he was a firefighter, but goddamn, he's a son of a bitch."

She eats quietly, eyebrow slowly, slowly arching. She takes in everything he says with the utmost solemnity, taking time to recall all seven sins, noting that his father was a firefighter as well.

"So what you're sayin' is — it's like bein' married to yourself?"

She stabs a bite of sausage, once more using her fork to mask her burgeoning smirk. Well, at least he's honest. And he knows what to expect in the next thirty or forty years.

She brushes his leg with her own.

"At two-and-eighty, I'd say he's earned the right t'be a bit of a sonnovabitch."

He brings his mug to his lips but pauses, his eyes narrowing at her over the rim.

"Mm. Low blow."

That's just his way of saying she got him there.

After taking a sip, he sets the cup down and continues work on his eggs. There's not that much room under that little table so his knee is inevitably going to nudge hers.

"It don't mean that I gotta put up with it."

She snickers.

"What's your alternative? We don't get t'choose when it comes t'family. Some of us get big families, an' some of us don't. Some women can have lots'a children, an' some can't have any. Two-and-eighty's a ripe age; it's unheard of. An' some people lose their daddies when they're young."

She was all right while she was saying it, but now that it's hanging in the air it gives her pause.

"Y'just gotta take care'a him the best y'know how. Um. So you're gonna spend your next few days on holiday with him? Anythin' special planned?"

He eats in silence for a while, because yeah, she's right again. As much as Tommy bitches and moans about his family, he wouldn't know what to do if they weren't around to bitch and moan about.

His eyes flick up at her at her last line. It weighs heavily with her, he can tell that much.

And he looks back down at his eggs again. He plucks up a strip of bacon and munches on it.

"I dunno," he sighs. "Hopefully he'll just wanna stay in so I don't gotta take him anywhere 'cause he can barely get around on his own as it is. Just turn on the sports channel on TV, set a couple of beers within reach, and boom, there goes 48 hours. At least on the weekends my kids can distract him. I mean, jeez, I have no idea what to do with him. Bad enough that his second wife died and left her millions to her thirty cats and his brother's in jail for murder--"

Tommy stops in mid-chew, realizing how that sounded.

"My uncle didn't kill my step-mom, by the way. My family's crazy but they ain't that kinda crazy."

Kate's fork is paused in midair, mouth ajar.

"I don't even know where t'begin."

So, in deference to Tommy and his family, she skirts around the crazy.

"You an' your daddy sound like y'have a lotta things in common. Is it really so hard figurin' out what t'do with him for a few days?"

He sighs again through his teeth with somewhat wry bemusement as he refills his cup.

"Yeah, well, lemme explain something. Me and my old man-- we don't exactly get along. I mean, sure, we do experience stretches of civility between him bein' a jackass to me and me bein' resentful towards him, but for the most part, the only things we ever exchange words on are baseball, war, and sometimes Ma. We don't-- we don't really talk. We just don't. We never did. Not even about firefighting. Okay, yeah, he used to tell the occasional anecdote or whatever, but frankly, it's like we've already said what we had to say and the only thing left to do is bitch at each other, especially now that we actually hafta live together, when before we had Ma or Uncle Teddy as a buffer. It would probably be a helluva lot easier if I was still drinking 'cause then at least we could drink together, but since I ain't, he'll just take every opportunity to call me a sissy for giving it up. But whatever. I'll try, y'know, of course I will, I'm the only one out of all my brothers and sisters who can take him in right now, and I'll do it 'cause, well-- he's my dad."

At some point she abandons her plate.

She watches him, because she's not afraid to make eye contact. She's not afraid to listen to the difficult things, and let her remorse show on her face.

"I'm sorry."

She's quiet, sincere, and more than a little sorry she brought it up. It sounds miserable, whether or not he tries to make it sound that way.

"I know y'will. I know y'will try. I didn't — I'm sorry. My daddy an' I were close when he was alive. We were all each other had. I can't imagine havin' gone a day without talkin' t'him when I had the chance to. Perhaps that makes me naive."

But it's still difficult imagining why anyone would treat Tommy that way.

As Tommy speaks, each time his gaze ventures back to her eyes, she's always there.

It's easy for him to get legitimately angry when he talks about his father, and it probably shows in his eyes and the set of his mouth, but all he allows himself to be right now is severely irritated. She doesn't need to hear a full-blown rant.

Taking a few bolstering swallows of coffee, he sets the cup down, shaking his head at her apologies. He picks up his fork and jabs at the last of his eggs.

"Nah, that don't make you naive," he assures her. "That just makes you lucky. I can only hope my own kids never feel some of the things I do about my dad, but it might be too late for that." He wipes his lips with a napkin. "In any case, I didn't mean to dump this on ya, especially during breakfast, but-- heh, well, I have issues, as people from my time tend to say."

Lucky.

Yes.

She was.

She smiles crookedly, giving him another nudge with her foot.

"D'you really think y'need to explain yourself to me?"

Her voice is soft, non-accusatory, and just slightly amused. If he was expecting shock or disappointment, he's not going to get it out of her. Her 'issues' have issues, and she knows better than to press.

She looks away, with a self-deprecating little half-shrug.

"Listen, sugar — I know we ain't anythin' special. But we are friends, aren't we? Y'can say an' do whatever you like; or y'can not say or do whatever y'like. Y'wanna come up an' mess around, then we don't hafta worry ourselves on talkin'. But if y'want someplace t'spend the night, or someone t'talk to, I suppose I can be convinced."

Her lips twitch.

"I don't mind."

Resting his elbows on the table and loosely lacing his fingers, he glances at her over his knuckles, then past her shoulder out the window at the brightening morning sky.

She confuses him sometimes. That whole physical/emotional thing. It's no more clearer to him on a full stomach and two cups of coffee than it is after cheesecake and sex.

He flashes back briefly to the first time he kissed her. He wishes he could take it back if only to never see the shock and fear in her eyes.

I don't mind.

How or why she even let him get to this point, he'll never know.

But they are friends. And he's grateful for it.

"Thanks."

It's a word that Tommy says so infrequently that he might as well have forgotten how to pronounce it or what it means.

As he looks at her, an already imperceptible smile is hidden behind his hands, but it somehow manages to reach the hard sharpness of his eyes. Under the table, his knee touches hers.

She's still trying to figure out the physical/emotional thing herself. She's only been vulnerable with him once before last night, on that day he kissed her for the first time. She doesn't like being vulnerable, not least because others don't like it either. He'd burned so hot and then went so cold, flashing from annoyance to remorse, in such a blink that it startled her, and made her feel guilty.

She doesn't know what she's doing, but he doesn't need to know that.

(Just like he doesn't need to know that while he was sleeping she had herself a good cry in the tub when she finally allowed herself to think — about the curse, about her dimming hope for a suitable life, about Doc, about her empty heart.)

She's feeling her way through the dark, hoping he won't notice just how out of her depth she is, how lost she feels. Because, despite all her better senses, it feels good to be looked at again. To be touched. To not have to wake up alone, for the first time in far too long.

Even if it isn't real.

Cradling her chin, a smile spills across her face. She bumps her knee against his, and her bare foot dips under his pants leg.

"Anytime."

She warned him. She gave him every opportunity to back away. Instead, he closed the distance.

Maybe it's a little selfish, trying to fill up an empty space at the expense of someone else.

(It's more than a little.)

Or maybe, somewhere deep down, she's still gripping that hopeful-hearted girl who can't let go of maybe.

maybe it will be different this time.

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