Chapter 2: Stitches
The Red Hood's safehouse is above a laundromat that closed in 2009, and it smells like dryer sheets and gunpowder, and there are books everywhere.
That's what you notice first, once he's kicked the door shut behind you and thrown three deadbolts and a bar, once you're done shaking and can see. Not the guns laid out on a workbench under a hanging bulb, or the police monitors along one wall. Books. Stacked on the windowsills, on the floor beside a mattress, on top of the refrigerator. Paperbacks with cracked spines and library hardcovers that are absolutely overdue. A copy of Pride and Prejudice is splayed face-down on the arm of a ratty green couch, a third of the way through, like somebody got up in the middle of a chapter to go shoot someone.
"Sit," he says, pointing at the couch.
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding on my floor."
You look down. He's right. Your coat, your beautiful charcoal coat, has a ragged hole through the left sleeve just below the shoulder, and the silk lining is dark and wet and dripping, slow and steady, onto his scuffed hardwood. You hadn't felt it. You'd felt the carpet, his weight, and then nothing but running: Oswald's kitchen, the loading dock, the back of a motorcycle that had no business being that loud, Gotham smearing past in streaks of sodium orange.
"Oh," you say.
"Yeah. Oh." He pulls his gloves off with his teeth. "Sit down before you fall down, Harbormaster."
You sit. Mostly because your knees make the decision for you.
He gets a military-surplus first aid kit the size of a tackle box off a shelf. He kneels on the floor in front of the couch and holds out a hand for your coat, and when you don't move, he raises his eyebrows above the domino mask and waits.
You take the coat off. It hurts a lot more coming off than going on. On the outside of your upper arm, below a ruined silk strap, there's a shallow red furrow about three inches long where the bullet kissed you and kept going.
"Graze," he says, turning your arm toward the light with two fingers, very gently. "You're lucky."
"I'd be luckier if your friend at the bottom of the stairs had been a worse shot."
"He wasn't my friend."
"You're sure about that? You picked the time. You picked the table."
His hands stop. He looks up at you, and his face goes flat and hard in a way that makes you remember exactly who he is.
"If I wanted you dead," Jason says quietly, "I'd have done it myself. I wouldn't hire some idiot to miss from forty feet, and I sure as hell wouldn't throw myself on top of you and take one in the ribs for my trouble."
You look at him properly. The leather of his jacket is torn along his right side, and there's something dark and shining under the tear.
"Take it off," you say.
"Excuse me?"
"The jacket. And whatever's under it. Take it off."
"Wow. Usually people buy me dinner first."
"Hood."
"Jason," he says, after a second. He doesn't look up. "If you're gonna bleed on my couch you might as well call me Jason."
It's worse than yours. The armor stopped most of it, but the round skipped off the edge of a plate and opened a gash along his ribs, long and ugly and still leaking. He sits on the edge of the workbench under the hanging bulb, stripped to the waist, with the light pouring down over him like something in a museum, and you stand between his knees with a curved needle and a length of black thread.
"You know how to do that?" he asks.
"My mother was a seamstress in the Narrows. I was sewing hems before I could read." You pour lidocaine onto a gauze pad and press it to his side. He doesn't flinch. "Also, I work on the docks. Men get hooks through them."
He holds still. You work. The first stitch goes in clean. So does the second. It's quiet except for the buzz of the bulb and his breath, slow and controlled, through his nose.
He is very warm. That's the problem. You have to stand close to do it right, close enough that your hip is pressed against the inside of his thigh, close enough to feel the heat coming off him. Every time you lean in to set a stitch the muscles of his stomach go tight under your knuckles.
He's watching you. You can feel it on the side of your face. You don't look up.
"You saved my life," you say, tying off the fifth stitch.
"Don't make it weird."
"It's already weird. You're shirtless in a laundromat."
"Above a laundromat."
"Why'd you do it?"
He's quiet for so long you think he won't answer. Then: "Because you said you don't move poison. And I believed you." A pause. "That's rare for me. Didn't want to waste it."
You tie the last knot and cut the thread. You press a square of gauze over the line of stitches and tape it down, and your palm stays flat against his side after you're done, against his ribs, against the heat of him.
You should take it away. You don't.
"There," you say. "Done."
"Thanks."
Neither of you moves.
His hand comes up, slow, and catches your wrist. Not hard. Just holding it, there against his side, his thumb resting on your pulse. You know he can feel how fast it's going. You can feel his heartbeat through the flat of your hand, and it's going just as fast.
"So," Jason says, very low. "Back at Oswald's."
"Yes?"
"You said something."
"I say a lot of things."
"You said on my knees." His thumb moves over your pulse. "I've been thinking about it. Kind of a lot. Bullets were flying and I was thinking about it. That's a problem for a guy in my line of work."
You finally look up at him. It's a mistake, and you know it's a mistake, and you make it anyway. Under the domino mask his eyes are dark and all the way green. There's a cut on his cheekbone you didn't notice before. His mouth is a little open.
"Take the mask off," you say.
He does. He reaches up and peels it away and drops it on the workbench, and without it he's younger and older at the same time, and there are faint shadows under his eyes like he hasn't slept since the Clinton administration. He looks at you without anything in between.
"Your turn," he says. "Tell me to go to hell, Harbormaster, and I'll go sleep on the roof. I mean that. Or..."
"Or?"
"Or tell me what you want."
You put your other hand flat on his chest. His heart slams under it.
"I want," you say, "you on your knees."
He goes.
He slides off the workbench and down, slowly, and doesn't take his eyes off yours the whole way. The Red Hood, who put a man through a window on Park Row, who came back from the dead, kneels on his own scuffed floor in front of you with his bandaged side and his scarred hands and looks up at you like you're the only thing in Gotham worth looking at.
"Yes?" he says. Asking. Even now.
"Yes," you say. "God, yes."
His hands slide up the backs of your calves, behind your knees, up the backs of your thighs under the hem of your skirt. They're rough and warm and very sure. He finds the waistband of your underwear and looks up again, a question, and you nod, and he draws them down your legs, slowly, and helps you step out of them, one heel and then the other, like a gentleman. He's still wearing his boots and his tactical pants and nothing else, and you're still wearing your heels and your ruined silk, and it's the filthiest thing that's ever happened to you, and you haven't even started.
He pushes your skirt up. He hooks one of your knees over his shoulder. And then his mouth is on you and your hand is in his hair and the hanging bulb is swinging because you grabbed for something and caught the cord.
He's good at it. Of course he's good at it. He's patient in a way that surprises you, slow and thorough and maddening, learning you, paying attention to every catch in your breath, every shift of your hips. When you pull his hair he groans against you and the vibration nearly takes your leg out from under you. His hands hold you up, one splayed across the small of your back and one gripping your thigh where it's thrown over his shoulder, and he does not let you fall. You hear yourself saying his name. Jason, not Hood. You hear yourself saying it a lot.
When you come it's sudden and enormous, and it bends you forward over him, both hands in his hair, the swinging bulb throwing your shadows all over the room. He keeps you there through every shudder of it, gentle now, until you're shaking and swearing and pushing at his head because you can't take any more.
He sits back on his heels. His mouth is wet. He looks extremely pleased with himself.
"Sorry enough?" he says, hoarse.
You haul him up by the hair.
You kiss him hard enough to taste yourself, and he makes a sound into your mouth that you will be thinking about for the rest of your life. His hands are everywhere. Your top goes somewhere. Your skirt goes somewhere else. You're backing toward the couch and you knock a stack of Steinbecks over and neither of you stops, and then the backs of your knees hit the arm of the couch and you go down onto it, onto Pride and Prejudice, and he follows you down.
"Ribs," you gasp.
"Don't care."
"I just sewed those."
"Then you can sew them again." He's fumbling at his belt. You help, because you're a team player. "Tell me if..."
"If you ask me one more time," you say, wrapping your hand around him, watching his eyes go unfocused, "I'm going to shoot you myself. Yes. Yes. Get in here."
There's a condom in his back pocket, which you'll make fun of him for later, and then there's nothing between you at all. He pushes into you slowly, so slowly, his forehead dropped against yours and his breath coming ragged, and you lock your ankles behind his back and drag him the rest of the way in, and he swears in a voice that cracks down the middle.
It isn't gentle after that. You don't want it to be. He moves like he fights, all heat and drive and sudden bursts of tenderness that catch you off guard, his mouth on your throat, your nails down his back, the couch springs protesting under you. He holds himself up on one arm so his weight stays off his side and uses the other hand to tip your hips up to meet him, and the new angle makes you cry out, and he does it again, and again, watching your face the whole time like he's memorizing it. When you come the second time it's with his name in your mouth and his hand in yours, fingers locked, pressed into the cushion above your head.
He follows right after, burying his face in your neck, and the sound he makes is low and broken and nothing like the Red Hood.
Afterward you lie tangled on the too-small couch with your head on his chest, careful of the bandage, listening to his heart come down. The bulb has stopped swinging. There's a paperback digging into your hip.
"I bent your book," you murmur.
"I've read it nine times." His fingers are moving slowly through your hair. "Mr. Darcy can take it."
"You really are a nerd."
"Tell anyone and I'll have to kill you."
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it less." He shifts under you. Reaches down to the floor, to the pile of his torn leather jacket, and digs in the inside pocket. When his hand comes back up there's something small and brass between his fingers. He holds it up in the light.
A shell casing. He must've grabbed it off the Iceberg's carpet on the way out.
"Forty-five," he says. "Custom load. See the stamp on the bottom?"
You lift your head and squint. Pressed into the brass is a tiny emblem, almost too small to make out: a skull.
"Black Mask," you say.
"Black Mask." His jaw is tight. "So Sionis wants us both dead. Fine. That's Tuesday. But here's what's bugging me." He turns the casing over in his fingers. "Nobody knew which table we'd be at. Oswald didn't even know till an hour before. His shooter was set up on the far stairs with a clean line to your chair, waiting, like he had a seating chart."
You go cold all over, slowly, from the inside out.
Because you didn't pick the table either. You never pick the table. You haven't picked a table, or a car, or a route home in five years.
On the floor, in the pocket of your ruined coat, your phone lights up through the fabric. Once. Twice. You reach down and pull it out, and Jason watches your face as you read it.
Where are you? Are you hurt? Tell me where you are and I'll come get you. Just you. Don't trust Hood.
It's from Dez.