Jamie's POV

We stare each other down, both unmoving, and too still. My heart pounds in hard, uneven beats against my rips. I try not to blink, afraid if I do he'll disappear like a hallucination.

"Jamie..." Riley pants, wincing in pain, "we've been standing here for like ten minutes." He hoarsely says in between pants, shutting his brown eyes in pain. Reaching out, I brush my finger tips over his jaw, feeling for myself that's he's real, that he's here. His one good, bruised eye opens at my touch, looking at me like I'm a firework show.

"Why should I let you back in after you left-" I almost utter the word me, but I realize that I'll sound clingy and emotional. So, with an aching heart, and a deep breath, I get a grip on myself. "Left without a goodbye."

"Because you're the better person who takes in an asshole you pepper sprayed, instead of leaving them to rot on a sidewalk." He states, leaning in. I'm quiet for long moment, needing the time to think.

"I don't have to let you in." I point out, tightening my hold on the one sided door knob.

"You don't." He nods slowly. "But I'm hoping you will."

"Why did you come here instead of a hospital?" I stall.

"Because they- nurses, doctors, and on sight police- would want to know how and why I got these injuries." He explains. "Plus, I don't have health insurance." He adds.

"I'm going to regret this." I give in, widening the doorway.

"Most likely." He sighs, limping inside. "You don't happen to have a frozen steak, do you?" Riley asks, limping over to fridge. I hover by the front door, my apartment so small I can easily see Riley dig through my freezer from my spot.

"Just as I suspected. No red meat, but plenty of frozen bags of vegetables." He takes an armful of frozen veggies. I stay rooted to my spot, my jaw clenched, and trying to sort out my feelings. I feel almost disoriented; shock debating with relief, happiness fighting with reason. Should I let myself be happy? Does all that hurt I felt just go away now?

-------

I was right, Mr. Williams didn't come back. I lazily twist the one sided door knob while Riley showers, not really sure what I should do, not sure how I am suppose to feel. Shutting my green eyes, I rest my head against the door, the wood cool against my skin. Trying to clear my head, I go to the kitchen to check that I still have all of Riley's preferable junk food. I didn't have the heart to throw any of it out.

"I forgot how great low water pressure feels." Riley comes out of my small bathroom, a towel knotted lowly at his hips. I wince at the sight of Riley's bare skin, my heart leaping with concern and horror. Riley looks like a car crash victim. Huge, gruesome looking purple blotches bruise his rip cage. The skin not bruised is an angry, irradiated red. Beady puncture marks the shape of a foot cut into his skin all over his body; on his forearms, his shoulders, his shins, his abdominal, and his back.

"It looks a lot worse than it actually is." Riley muses, wiping his dark hair with a towel. I can tell his every move aches like a bitch from slow and precise his movements are.

"What happened to you?" I gape. Riley pauses, his bruised face stoning over.

"This is the part where you rudely tell me it's none of my business, or I'm too basic to know, or all of the above." I mumble, walking past him. Riley stares after me as I scoop up his bloody clothes off the bathroom floor, the first time I've ever stunned him into a silence. I don't feel accomplished about it, it just makes me feel worse.

"I'm going to go wash these at the laundromat, I'll be back in an hour." Is all I say as I walk out.

------

"Jamie?"

"Hmm?" I hum, not bothering to look up from my bills.

"Can you patch me up?" He asks. Looking up, I find him standing over me shirtless, holding up some bandages in one hand, vapor rub in the other. I give a dull nod, and Riley's bruised face slacks with relief. Though the apartment is so small, I've been managing to avoid Riley in the limited space. While he's in the small bedroom, I'm in the living room. When he's on the couch, I'm busying myself in the kitchen. Whenever he's limping across the apartment, I linger for an extra minute behind the bathroom door. With a groan of pain, Riley carefully lowers himself down in front of me on the living room floor.

"You're mad." Riley states, as my fingers scoop out a cold glop of vapor rub.

"I'm not mad." I state in a measured voice.

"You've barely spoken ten words to me." Riley points out. Riley takes a sharp breath, and mutters "Cold!" under his breath as I lather the gel on his lower back. His muscles tighten, and tense against my hands, goosebumps rising on his bruised back.

"I'm not sure what to say." I admit quietly, my hands slowing to a stop on his back.

"Instead, you're just not going to say anything to me ever again?" Riley says, looking over his bruised shoulder at me. "I can't live like that."

"You're mad, aren't you?" Riley asks, as I run my hands up his back, spreading more vapor rub. Riley feels good against my bare hands, he feels solid, he feels here. As my fingertips graze his skin, my thumbs brush up his spine, while my knuckles rub into his muscles. All I can think about is how close he is to me again. My fingertips reach the back of his scraped neck, I can feel his quick heart beat against the pads of my fingers.

"Riley," I start, "please, I don't want to talk about this." I finally snap a bit, but my voice is still leveled and measured. Riley stiffens against my hands. He lowers his head, his dark hair falling over his beaten face, which is no doubt knotted up in a glare. Sitting in silence, we don't say a word, but the air is thick with an unspoken harshness. A large part of me wants to confide to him how lonely it was without him, how it was so quiet that that my ears rung, how I felt like I was freezing without him near.

Another part wants to ask if he'll leave again, but I'm afraid of the answer. I'm mortified to admit these crushed emotions to someone who can so easily cast me out.

"Turn around." I mutter, digging out another glop of vapor. Grimacing in pain, Riley carefully twists around. Even sitting he towers over me. In this case, the back looks better than the front. Every inch of his bare chest is either scraped, gashed open, bruised, or all of the above. To make it worse, he glares down at me with two swollen, blacken eyes over a puffy split lip, and a possibly broken nose.

"This is going to feel cold." I warn, purposely looking away to my hand rubbing his abdominal. This is intimate. Pressing my lips into a firm line, I try to ignore my hammering heart, and the excited tremor in my fingertips as I spread above his waistline. I force my hand to graze up on his abs, to his chest. My hand stops over his heart, feeling an uneven, accelerated pound under it. We're both still, not even breathing, both just feeling the rhythm thud in his chest. Riley's head falls forward, his forehead leaning against mine.

"Don't hate, Jamie." He states. "You can be angry, frustrated, and mad all you want. Just don't hate me." He hoarsely presses, his swollen eyes opening as wide as they'll go. I manage a shake of my red head, not able to force the words "I can never hate you."

"Why did you leave me?" I breath, my hand tight over his chest.

"You wouldn't like the answer." He straightens up, his voice low.

"Why did you leave me, Riley?" I repeat, my heart stopping all together in a tight knot. It won't beat again till Riley tells me. His wounded face shoots me what I'm guessing is a nasty glare under all those bruises.

"What the hell do you want to hear? Because you don't want to know the real reason!" Riley angrily gets to his feet.

"I want to know the truth." I insist simply, rising up from the floor. "I need to know why, because for the past week I've been so worry. I've been driving myself sick. Every night I couldn't sleep, anxious that you could be dead in a ditch or something. I couldn't focus, because I was panicking at the thought of you got into a car accident. For all I knew, you could have been sleeping on the floor of a holding cell, or worse in a coma in a hospital." I don't yell, I don't have the rage in me. Instead, I step close to him, and grip his hand like it's a life line.

"I don't have to tell you, because you're not my mom or my wife!" He bellows, my hand pulling away. "What do you think this is? You pick up some stray off the street, and we play house? We're not living together! That's not how this works, a penis and vagina together in a small space in 2018 don't function with each other like that. No, I come and go, do what I want, when I want! And I don't have to tell you where I go, update you how long I'll be gone, or why I left!"

A/N:
Reminding you guys that Riley went through something traumatic just 24 hours ago.

And we are all guilty at yelling at are loved ones, like parents or significant others for bad reasons.