The Archways And The Doors

“It’s Karen,” she says hopelessly in the middle of his doorway like he wouldn’t know her a thousand other ways. The whiff of perfume on her, Viktor & Rolf Flowerbomb trapped underneath a thick smear of booze, or the sound of her shoes on the hard tile floor. She’s drunk already; her breathing is faint and thready. Her face is too hot.

Matt’s hand is on the doorknob. He could close it in her face and no one else would know. He could just have not opened the door in the first place. Karen smells like sweat and tears; that much is obvious. He’s not going to leave her there.

“You should come in.”

(Part of him still wishes it was Foggy standing there. Because that went so well last time, right?)

*

“If you want to wash your face–”

“God, do I look that bad?” Karen blurts. “I’m fine, I just – I’m sorry to just show up like this.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she says. Her tone says, like a date, maybe. Like she expects some stunningly beautiful woman to saunter out from the bedroom and ask who’s at the door. But Matt has never been more alone in here, never.

He gestures at himself, padding back across to the couch. His body aches, but he tries not to visibly favor any muscles, even the ones which are mostly held together by sutures. “Well, I’m not exactly catching up on beauty sleep as is, so nothing important.”

Matt could not be more visibly out of commission right now if he was wearing a placard saying so: he’s recently showered and bandaged, schlubbing around in an oversized tee shirt (probably gray) and sweatpants (ditto) without his glasses. He hopes his fixed gaze won’t give her the creeps, and that that much shapeless cloth will hide the worst of the marks.

“What a coincidence,” Karen says, “me neither,” like it’s a joke and not just a statement of facts, that none of them are going to sleep tonight. She crosses the floor and stands in front of the windows for a moment. The electronic billboard must still be cycling its messages through, but otherwise the room ought to be dark. Karen lingers there for a long time.

“Have a seat wherever. I’ve been parked on the couch all night, listening to voicemails.” Matt pauses. That sounds sadder than it is. “Business voicemails.”

This of course does not exclude voicemails from Foggy, it just means he’s reviewing the hurried yet hopeful ones about Mrs. Cardenas’ relatives in Guatemala and not the ones where an audibly tipsy Foggy ends the recording with thinking about you, bye.

This was where Foggy found him. This was where it happened. The words that keep thrumming through his head to hurt him are the ones that seem the most absurd in retrospect – are you even really blind, like it was easier for Foggy to believe he was some masterful faker than… well, it probably was. The magic chemical superpowers were the easy part, and yet somehow it was harder to believe that someone with Matt’s character could possibly be a vigilante? That he could go out there and fight for something? Like there was that much of a difference–

Karen sets her phone down on the table. Her hands must be shaking; the hard plastic rattles against the tabletop a little. “Couch okay?”

“Sure.”

Karen’s weight settles in next to him, and Matt exhales a long breath. For a moment she seems to consider pouring herself a drink; Matt only has the one glass out, and he’s not about to offer her more booze, she’s plainly in rough shape. It’s a little terrifying that she’s not tripping over herself or even really slurring her words, given how much she must have had tonight. The possibility that somebody hurts her looms on Matt’s mental horizon. A woman alone in New York at night, forget about everything with Fisk. That would have been bad enough.

Karen kicks off her shoes; they clatter when they hit the floor. The two of them rest there together for a long moment. This seems like the kind of scenario where sighted people generally switched on the TV and stewed in awkward silence while Netflix did the talking. Matt can hear her breathing grow more regular and full – did she take the stairs like this? Shit. He’s pondering whether to make her something to eat or anything, just to take the edge off, when Karen stirs to say something.

“Hey, can I ask you to do something stupid?”

Without waiting for an answer she takes his wrist – sending out another twinge of pain from another miscellaneous injury – and lifts it up; Matt thinks for one vertigo-clear panicked moment she’s going to press his hand against her breast, but instead she brings it up to her cheek. She’s blushing badly, or she’s really been hitting the sauce, because Matt can feel the sudden leap of heat against his fingertips even before he touches skin. She radiates it.

His fingertips drag from the soft wisp of hair alongside her ear, to her cheekbones, to the bridge of her nose.

“This is stupid,” Karen says, “I let Foggy touch my face one time. Way back when we were helping out Mrs. Cardenas.” And she sniffles sharply.

“I bet he liked that,” Matt mutters, trying to pinpoint the sensations: the brush of her eyelashes against the side of his thumb, the velvet finish of her cheek. There are shadows under eyes; he can feel them.

“He said you used to touch his face. I could tell he wasn’t telling me stuff, even back then. And now I’m not telling him anything, ‘cause it’d scare the shit out of him seeing me like this–”

“I don’t know. Foggy’s pretty tough. He’s seen some shit.”

Karen laughs, a sharp harsh sound. “Yeah, like whatever it was that busted your face. You didn’t walk in front of a car.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

“What the hell did he do to you?”

“That wasn’t Foggy.” As if Foggy would hit him. As if Foggy could – that had been the horror of it, that if he hadn’t found out the masked vigilante currently bleeding like a stuck pig all over Matt’s home furnishings had been Matt himself that he might have taken action. Foggy hadn’t hit him, he’d gotten him patched up like a real pal. Which meant that he’d seen him not only in the costume, but underneath – in various stages of repair, with Claire patching him up. Foggy had said she’d seemed nice.

“Whatever happened with you guys, I want you to know it’s all right. You’ve been friends way too long to let this get in your way.”

“You have no idea how complicated this is. It’s not the kind of thing you can just sort out over coffee. Why did you come here?”

Why wouldn’t she go to Foggy? Matt doesn’t know the first fucking thing about getting back to all right.

“Foggy’s out. All the bars are closing. And I can’t stand being at home.”

Karen takes the bottle and takes a swig. The glass rests against Matt’s leg for a moment, cool and hard, before he firmly and emphatically relocates it to the floor.

Karen’s breathing is damp and irregular. “Whenever I’m at home, I just – I keep seeing some goon kicking my door in, somebody coming back for me. Like Fisk’s going to try again. There’s nowhere that feels safe. I can’t sleep, I can’t think right – it was like being in a fucking spy movie getting over here, I just didn’t know where else to go.”

Matt almost wants to ask if this is a regular occurrence for her, getting so scared and wound up that she can’t stand to be in her own bed. Maybe this is the side of Karen he’s never known. She could have gone to Foggy’s and crashed on his stoop until he got back. She didn’t. She could have gone to the office, sent some faxes to Australia on their top-of-the-line circa 1993 office equipment. She didn’t. None of these places were safe; why would this place be any more safe? Thinking back to when they met, it was stupid to expect her to come out of that more or less unscathed. She’d nearly been murdered, more than once. It’d do a number on anybody. But there’s something else she’s not telling him.

Matt can’t tell if he smells blood on her, somewhere sunk into the seams of her clothes or the webbing of her hands, or if he only expects to.

“I know you’re fucked up right now. There’s nobody who wouldn’t be, but nothing’s going to happen to you. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Sometimes in Matt’s wildest fantasies he’d dreamed of just camping out with both of them permanently – with Claire to make house calls, maybe, some underground basement bunker where he can be the guy in the mask and Matt Murdock, amicable attorney with two best friends. Now he’s not even sure he has one.

Hadn’t he once said he’d keep Karen safe?

He curls an arm around her shoulders, as clearly-telegraphed from a distance as he can and as lightly as possible. She still flinches.

“Sorry–”

“No, no, it’s alright, I’m just wired right now. Please, go ahead, put your arm around me.”

The leather couch creaks under them as Matt leans in to cuddle up against her, if cuddling is what this is, bonelessly tired in the dark next to a girl who smells like a distillery. But Karen is here; her body is warm. She’s not mad, she’s just scared, and Matt is lonely.

Matt leans down and kisses her. Her mouth is warm, and full, and sweet after the initial pop of surprise that parts her lips; her tongue is still heavy with bourbon and it stings.

“I’m sorry, Matt,” she says when they part. Her voice is thick with whiskey and distress. “I can’t do this. I can’t – stick around, and be bad for you. I’ve done some things you wouldn’t believe. I’ve done some bad shit. Horrible things. And I liked it.”

“Whatever you’ve done, it’s nothing–”

“Excuse me, were you going to say ’nothing compared to what happened with Foggy’–”

In comparison with what Matt has already done. He’s lied to her about beating the shit out of people, for a start. If Karen’s not pissed at him yet, she should be.

“What I was going to say was in comparison to the kind of shit we’re dealing with. This firm needs you.”

Her voice is low and tight, a hiss from the periphery. “It’s not about the firm.”

Karen’s hands work in his lap, fumbling like she’s going for his belt, and he can’t suppress a groan – Matt has to smother it against her shoulder, and her body shifts to tilt him deeper against her chest, admitting him.

This is bad. This is bad, and Karen wouldn’t be doing it sober. She’s straddling his leg now, and the cloth of her panties chafes minutely against the cloth of his pants – another core of liquid heat. Matt’s hard already, and reeling from it.

Karen’s sweat-limp hair is trailing against his cheek like a veil. Matt presses a hand into it and holds it against his lips, where it sticks. He breathes its scent, as rich and complicated as any color – bourbon and salt and chemical shampoo. A whisper of hot lead, tangled in with all the other threads of environmental traces. What the hell happened to her? What had she done?

“He’s with Marci,” Karen says breathlessly. “He knows what she does and he’s fucking her.”

“You don’t know that.”

Her hands are on his belly, beneath the hem of his shirt. Matt winces.

“Wouldn’t you fuck her?”

“I don’t know,” Matt says, until Karen’s hands find his erection and start savaging it through cloth. Either she’s drunk enough that her dexterity has suffered or she’s determined to make him hurt a little, he is achingly horribly hard and her mouth is pressed against his mouth like a malediction. Her lips on his mouth, his cheeks, his chin, catching at his stubble.

Karen bites his lip, and breaks away to ask, “You love him, don’t you?”

Matt has nothing to say for himself.

Karen’s hands find his shoulders, roaming against the muscles of his upper back, and he fumbles with her blouse – mouthing against her collarbone, her chest, the softness of her breast where it swells over the cup of her bra. She spilled bourbon down her blouse earlier, and the pungent trace of it still remains in the satin-covered foam like a thumbprint. But her hands slip around his neck to cup his chin and she catches him in another sequence of clumsy kisses. She kisses like something wild and untrained, like she’s got something to prove – curling into Matt’s lap, and immersing him in a tide of small sensations, minute differences in feeling.

If Foggy knew, he’d be hurt worse than words can say. Good. Matt wants him to be hurt. This is the next best thing to making Foggy bleed, it’s some kind of revenge, and Matt is dying for it. The wicked part of him wants this, very badly. All of it.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this her skirt’s started to ride up. He’s already thumbing down her panties when she goes to help – mistaking his slowness for caution, or clumsiness, when he’s just relishing the sensation of cloth marks pressed into skin from lace and seams, the smoothness of her skin. Pulling out of that level of scrutiny throws him for a loop, but once again she assists him by pressing his fingers up and under against that soft cleft, into that pool of wet heat.

Matt eases her back on the couch with his other hand under her back. Karen is making small, soft sounds. She should not be here like this, his coworker and his friend, a trembling mess on his leather couch – he can’t not wonder if Foggy has seen her like this, overheated and completely abandoned, if he’s ever fucked her on a couch. It’d be different with Foggy, for one, there’d probably be more laughter and less abject horror about what he’s about to do–

Matt lowers his trembling head. His eyes are stinging with tears; the most he can hope for is that Karen can’t tell.

“You don’t have to,” Karen says, but it’s a little late for that.

Matt starts in on her, not even bothering with a little trail of kisses but smearing his mouth up her leg, teeth catching in ways that make her breath lurch and her muscles jump.

She’s wet and she’s eager and he’s fucking her with his tongue, working against her and into her as her thighs clasp against his neck and her feet flinch against the deep bruises of his back. Matt eats her out like there’s nothing he’d rather be doing in the world, like nothing else exists but their two bodies, like if he keeps going long enough and hard enough it’ll come back around again to being alright.

The soft creases at the tops of her legs are damp with sweat; he breaks from burying his face against her to press against those delicate lines and sob for breath. Going back again is like going under, losing himself in this sole act – his agonized muscles cease to be, the buzz leaves him. It’s a kind of clarity, being with a woman like this. It’s not right, but it’s the best they can do. The tears threaten to spill forth, hot against her skin, and all Matt can do is press closer and keep going.

It’s not clear how long he spends down there, licking wet patterns into her against the stiff rise of her clit – and when she does come it’s almost silently, if not for the tiny shivers of her release and the slackness of her body against his shoulders he wouldn’t even have known. They both lie there then, broken, spent.

Karen sits up a little. Matt’s head is still in her lap, pressed against her sticky soft thigh. She reaches down, ghosting her fingers up his chest – the way her touch hesitates, Matt feels a kick of worry that she’s noticed something. Like a bandage that won’t lay flat. Or God forbid, he’s popped his stitches. Matt remembers how Foggy had sounded, seeing him bleed once it had clicked that it was him at all. Karen might be more sympathetic about the mask stuff, but she shouldn’t see him bleed.

Her fingers trail against his throat, tickling against his stubble. Matt exhales.

“Do you need me to help you out?” Karen asks, quietly.

Matt shakes his head – if he tries he can maneuver over to be on his back, head still pillowed on her legs and close enough that her arm will still be draped over him like a wreath. He presses his mouth to the soft part of her arm. Karen is trembling.

“Whatever happened with you and Foggy – I’m sorry. I didn’t come here thinking this would happen. I shouldn’t have come here. Now it’s all fucked up.”

(Matt lies still, and says nothing.)

Karen continues. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. I can leave now, if you need me to, I mean.”

Matt lies still, and tries to clear his head. Karen must be crying now, because her tears begin to drop onto his face, one by one – like drops of blood, each one stinging with the unmistakable chemicals of its composition. Matt flinches when they fall.