Nate Marszalek
They would have let him go on Tuesday but he spiked a temperature after they took him off the antibiotics and the attending decided to keep him another night for observation. The temperature went down once they realized he was mildly dehydrated from not taking in enough fluids by mouth. Other than that and the outbursts during his physical therapy sessions Mr. Marszalek was an easy patient and they let him go today.
He leaves with a back brace and a prescription for Flexeril and Vicodin, a warning that combining the two will probably cause him to fall asleep and he shouldn't mix them.
If weren't for the fact that he had decided against contacting his family Nate would not have taken Molly up on her offer to accompany him home in the cab. As it was his reluctance to ride in a motor vehicle is beyond understandable but he has to get home somehow and he can't teleport.
Getting him downstairs doesn't take a great deal of effort. He has developed a friendly if antagonistic rapport with one of the older transporters who has been carting him back and forth from the diagnostic imaging floor all week and the man goads him into getting into the chair and shutting up about it. He doesn't want his young ass slipping in the hallway and suing him out of a job.
At the curb where the taxi waits Nate grimaces instead of vocalizing the strain of standing from a seated position but can't keep a guttural noise from escaping his throat when he settles in the backseat. He's sweating just from that amount of effort.
He'll be better by this time next week. He's already miles better than he was when they wheeled him in two weeks ago.
His apartment is a matter of miles from the hospital and when they get there he uses a credit card to tip the driver. It takes him a moment to brace himself enough to stand. Even though he could make it inside on his own if he absolutely had to something about Molly has been tense if not terse since she arrived to pick him up and if she tries to give him an arm or her entire shoulder for the walk inside Nate is smarter than he looks.
Until they're upstairs he isn't going to argue with her about anything.
Molly Toombs
Since Halloween night, poor Lucy hasn't been having a good time living with Molly. Up until that night the kitten and Molly were getting along famously. Molly liked having the little spaz run around the apartment chasing lights on walls and toys on the floor, just as much as she liked it when the little animal tuckered itself out and fell asleep on her chest, belly or lap depending on how she was lounging on her couch at those times. When Molly brought that stupid envelope home, though, Lucy got tense and weird. She'd stare at things that weren't there, charge into a room and stop suddenly, and then turn about and flee the same room with her fur standing up and her tail gone bottlebrush.
She was happy today when Molly deposited her back at Nate's apartment earlier in the morning. On the day following the night that Molly duked it out with a pair of ghosts she'd returned to the apartment to clean up the water from the burst pipe and pick up books and (with some effort) push the couch back into place. She'd called a plumber to tend to the pipes and paid the man, figuring Nate could hit her back later if his medical bills weren't crushing him. Everything was in order (save for that black scorch mark above the stove) when she'd left the kitten to re-acclimate herself to her home and gone downstairs to return to the taxi driver she was paying today.
Molly was hanging out on the curb, waiting for Nate and the wheel chair that moved him from place to place. The transporter probably helped him up out of the seat, and Molly greeted the man by first name with a friendly, if distracted wave. She'd slide into the backseat along with Nate and didn't seem to have a whole hell of a lot to say on the ride over to the apartment building. She sat with her head rested back against the headrest and watched their journey through the windshield. Nate would notice that her round cheeks seemed only a little gaunt, and her eyelids didn't want to open all of the way. She was tired, stressed, and drawn tight. But from what Nate's seen of her so far she doesn't seem the sort to just lash out at people because she's in a bad mood, so she's pleasant to the taxi driver and attentive to her friend when it's time to get him out of the cab and into the apartment building.
He'll groan and take a little extra time to extract himself from the car, and Molly's there to offer an arm to steady him along the way. When he accepts it, he finds the woman to be sturdy and steady, she doesn't struggle to support him if he leans any weight into her arm. But then, she's a trauma nurse and far from waif-like. This comes as no surprise.
What may come as one, though is when they're upstairs and she's got the door closed behind them and she extracts That Damn Envelope out of her tote bag and places it on the kitchen counter.
"So," she announces to him only after they're away from everyone else and the walls are secure enough to keep their words private. "I don't think that this should be burned after all."
Nate Marszalek
For the first time in a long time he takes the elevator instead of the stairs. Though his back has been a constant source of annoyance for him the last few years Nate has not been hindered by it. Full-time scholastic endeavors and working what is essentially a desk job have done more damage than that roadside bomb did. But he takes the elevator to the ninth floor without complaining today.
Once they're inside he shuffles out of the way of the door. With Molly half steering, half supporting him the entire way he has nothing to drop once they're inside. Whatever bag she packed for him is hers to drop on the floor or the couch or the kitchen island. He just stands still and silent a moment as he looks around the apartment he almost never saw again. No signs of life but for the presence of batted-about cat toys.
Lucy is still hiding. It's like she knows the envelope is here.
Molly doesn't think the envelope should be burned after all.
Stood in the entryway as he is Nate looks as if he's wandered in uninvited and isn't sure where to put his feet next. He breathes with some effort for this being the furthest he's managed to walk without Latrice or one of the nurses egging him on and it's clear from looking at him that his ribs hurt and his back hurts and his heart is beating faster despite the muscle relaxant.
When he realizes the implications of the envelope and he continuing to exist in the same space at the same time a look of remorse comes across his pale face and Nate brings a hand up to his forehead.
"Shit," he says. Slow and almost slurred. "I..." He lets go his forehead and walks towards the kitchen island. Uses it to support himself as he asks, "What happened?"
Molly Toombs
Molly had packed a bag for Nate, and she'd deposited it gently on the floor against the side of the kitchen counter. It held his laptop, which she'd brought for him to entertain himself with at the hospital, and perhaps a few other odds or ends that he'd requested from home. She only brought enough street clothes for him to walk out of there wearing. She's chosen to stay on her feet, hovering in the kitchen with her hands on the countertop and the envelope between them.
She was dressed for the cool weather in a matching set of scarf and gloves to go over her red peacoat, but these were removed when she'd come inside, and the coat was draped wherever was out of the way and most appropriate. Under that she had on a pair of dark wash jeans, brown sneakers, and a loose and soft sweater that is cream-and-navy stripes. Her hair is down, but bobby-pins hold it out of her face. Her expression is grim, and the posture she holds leaned against the counter speaks to the unease she's been living with for the past week now.
Despite this, she sees how he moves and grabs the kitchen island for support. She looks at him with some mix of half-concern and disappointment before rolling her head to nod toward the living room. "You should go sit." She figures he'd want to for the story she was going to tell anyways.
One way or another Molly gets Nate over to the couch, and she'll take a seat beside him only after fixing them both a cup of something warm to drink-- coffee, cocoa, tea, whatever it was that he had and preferred. She'd end up sitting leaned forward with her elbows hooked on her knees and her cup cradled between her palms. She'd watch the steam while waiting for it to cool.
"I got up here and was given one hell of a time each time I tried to burn the thing. First my lighter won't work. Then your stove won't work. Then it shoots fire to your ceiling and your goddamn pipes burst and the envelope goes flying across the room." She shakes her head and looks at the black, blank television screen across from them instead. "Then they told me that it was a 'traitor' or something that wanted it burned, and they didn't. Said that only bad things would happen if I followed through."
Nate Marszalek
Most of Nate's clothes fall into the business casual category. He owns three pairs of shoes: a pair of Oxfords, a pair of motorcycle boots, and a pair of loafers. Four, if one considers flip flops to qualify as shoes. If he owns running shoes they're someplace Molly would not have thought to look while she was blindly throwing clothing into a bag. He only has one pair of jeans though he has more t-shirts than he knows what to do with. Like as not they serve as undershirts for the dozen or so button-down shirts that hang in his closet. At least half of his t-shirts are olive green. Stowaways from his time in the service. They come three to a pack at the commissary. The rest of them are cast-offs from various events he was dragged to. Charity marathons and community sports teams.
Apparently he played kickball one year while he was studying at Berkeley. The things you learn about a person when you have to rifle through their belongings.
He'd thrown on the jeans and the loafers and whatever t-shirt Molly had brought him and he had expressed looking forward to a shower only to have the doctor pop that bubble by reminding him to keep his stitches dry. It would help if he would stop walking around like he doesn't have stitches at all. All it takes is Molly looking at him like that and putting a hand on his back to get him to walk himself over to the couch and sit down. He grunts like an 80-year-old man and covers his eyes to laugh at himself as Molly fixes coffee for them.
Once she's settled and they're talking that look of strained remorse creeps back into his eyes. He doesn't touch the coffee even though it sits at his elbow and waits for him. His hair keeps flopping into his eyes. Sitting is an improvement at least. What little color he possesses comes back to his cheeks now that he's off his feet. It doesn't drain as he hears testimony as to what happened and yet:
"Molly... I am so sorry."
Molly Toombs
The apology is dusted away with a rolling shrug of the shoulder that was nearest to him. "I don't think you could have known." With this statement, she lets him off the leash.
Initially on Halloween night when she was sitting on her couch watching John Carpenter's 'The Thing' and still wearing her witch costume, she thought about laying hell down on Nate's ears. After all, he was the one that sent her on this errand in his stead. He was the one who could communicate with these ghosts, or 'shades' as he called them, so she presumed that the whole thing would have been much easier for him than it was for her.
At the end of the night she'd decided that there really wasn't any way for him to have known that she'd take a sofa to the ribs and nearly have her face burned off and have to flee his apartment with the envelope and her life clutched to her breast. Going into the hospital room and raining her ire upon him would have done nothing but made him feel bad and then made her feel bad later because of acting like such a dick. So, instead, she just lived with the cool creeping in her bones and continued her day to day life, waiting until Nate was out of the hospital and away from nurses and monitors and all of that to have this conversation.
When the coffee has cooled some, she took a sip. Molly liked cream in her coffee today, so she borrowed some of the milk that she'd supplied in Nate's fridge before he'd come home. Basic perishables had been replaced for him so that he wouldn't need to go brave the grocery store for something as basic as a bowl of cold cereal on his first day back.
"So... I don't know what to do with it. Maybe take it back where you found it?"
Nate Marszalek
Just because he had no way of knowing Nate is not prepared to let himself off of the hook. Nothing to be done for it and if they had done nothing else they could not have sorted out what the nature of the envelope's game was. It has to matter that he does not possess a mentality that would make backpedaling and pointless self-flagellation masquerade as appropriate conversation with a person who's pushed air into his lungs for him.
Yet Nate looks drained sitting here on the couch and they do not have to dwell on it to remind themselves why that could be. He missed Shannon's funeral for being in the ICU at the time and he is not in any state to return to work and his sister is coming to stay with him during Thanksgiving. She'll be back at the end of December when she's done with her final exams.
At least Molly does not still feel possessed. She doesn't look it and doesn't act it. A squeak sounds from the bedroom and Nate turns his head towards it.
"Yeah?" he calls. Here comes Lucy, hesitant but bold all the same, her mouth open wide in a silent shout. "Well come out here, you little shit. I'm not getting up."
The cat will do what the cat wants to do. In the meantime Nate clears his throat and picks up his coffee cup and takes a sip. Everything he does is with great purpose. As if it takes both energy and pain tolerance to lift his arms or shift positions.
"You might be right," he says. She also might be noticing by now that the young man hasn't blinked much since he got out of that wheelchair. Blame it on the medication. "I'll try that, next time I'm out that way." He puts down the cup and asks, "Did... wait, you heard them?"
Molly Toombs
Lucy comes out and squeaks then silent-cries at Nate.
You left me and didn't feed me and I was all alone at night and now that you're here I want to climb your pant leg but I'm not gonna because I'm supposed to be mad at you.
Cats are such assholes.
Molly watches Lucy for a moment, trailing after the cat while she doesn't come as Nate suggested she do, but instead goes off and does her own thing. Then Nate slowly reaches out and sips his coffee, and says he'll give that a try the next time he's out in the area. Then a though occurs to him, and he asks for clarification. Molly had stated that the ghost told her not to burn the envelope, but in order for that to happen she'd need to hear them too, right?
Her answer is preceded by a humorless chuckle, and Molly shifts how she's been sitting. Her elbows were beginning to dig into her knees unpleasantly, so she leaned back into the couch instead with her heels planted on the floor and the cup of coffee resting in her hands and lap all at once, cradled and protected from spills when she isn't drinking from it.
"Well, yeah, in different ways. One of them decided to--" and she lifts a hand to tick each occurrence off with a finger to match-- "shoot fire at me, douse me with water, throw books and your couch at me, and nearly tore the ceiling down upon me. The other one sank into my bones and tried to take me over-- I heard her--" she assumes it's a her, "--because she spoke with my voice and mouth."
Nate Marszalek
He and Lucy live together. It doesn't hurt his feelings when the kitten decides she doesn't feel like coming out and gracing them with her presence. He scoffs as lightly as a man with three broken ribs can scoff and turns away from the corridor where she'd come and gone in as much time.
Fine, his silence says, you want to pretend to be mad at me I'm going to pretend not to see you ignoring me.
Nothing like what she described has ever happened to him before but Molly can tell Nate imagines it. A slow ice-water horror creeps up his spine and gets into his head and his eyes widen but he does not leech color and he does not apologize again. He'd already said it once and she wasn't hurt. When she gets to the part where the other one spoke through her his nostrils flare with the sharpness of his inhalation.
"Jesus Christ," he says when he breathes out again.
He looks over at the envelope sitting innocuous on the island and reaches up to drag his hand down his face. He wears the expression most addicts wear right before they declare themselves to need their substance but he neither makes that declaration nor reaches for anything. Molly is sat on the same couch that nearly killed her and little more than a cushion separates them.
Distance is a thing greater than space though. For as long as they've known each other something has kept them from meeting each other in the middle. With the coffee set on the table again Nate rests his thick-veined hands in his lap and tries to find a way to plant his feet so his back doesn't bark at him. He does not normally fidget like this. When he looks back at her he doesn't know what to say.
"So you had a good Halloween, then."
Molly Toombs
It's easy to picture how terrified Molly must have been through the episode that she's explaining to him. Nate will remember how she had grabbed and held onto his arm to press the fear out from her chest while they were scoping out the apartment above her own. All she'd experienced there was cool air and a smacking door and the cutting of lights. That had been amplified tenfold when she came here to destroy a mysteriously gifted envelope. It would be easy to imagine that she may have cried or had some other similar sort of breakdown in the midst of the chaos, when books were whipping toward her head and she had to dive to avoid being smashed by a large piece of furniture but managed to catch a glancing blow anyways.
When she felt that cold magnetism seep into her bones and start to move her like a puppet.
If any of this had been the case it doesn't show here in this conversation, though. Molly is a willful person, and has a way about her that seems very 'in control' of herself, if not the situations around her. When she couldn't be in control of what happened around her she would just do her best to look cool and calm and hope that it made her seem less like a victim. So, whatever reaction the possession and violent activity had caused in her, it certainly wasn't going to show now. Not even just to peek through curtains.
Nate is uncomfortable, uncertain. He isn't sure what to make of the story or, more than that, how he's supposed to react to it. Should he make light? Should he be reassuring? Should he praise her for going through it, thank her for agreeing in the first place? Should he close that constant gap of distance between them to try and comfort, on the off chance that she was masking a lot more stress than what the simple tightness of her eyes and tone displayed?
He has no idea, so he makes a comment about how it was a good Halloween instead. This draws a small laugh that surprises Molly and prompts her to look over at the man on the couch beside her. With his back brace stiff under (or over) his clothes, with his eyes somewhat glazed and slow-blinking from the muscle relaxers that he was on.
"I suppose so. Scarier and more convincing than any haunted house I've ever been to, and I didn't even have to pay a nickle for it."
She pauses, sips at her coffee some more, and then works to steer the conversation once more. She was pretty good at that, and seemed to do it more often than Nate, which she found a little amusing somewhere deep down because he was supposed to be the journalist, right? Shouldn't he be good at driving conversations where he wanted them?
"No wonder you look exhausted most of the time-- no offense, pal, but you do. I mean, how frequently does shit like this happen?"
Nate Marszalek
No offense is met and Nate takes none. He has a perfectly good mirror in his bathroom and the restrooms at the Denver Post are lined with them and half the women he talks to in social situations feel the need to ask him what he does for a living and then follow it up by asking if being a crime reporter means he doesn't get much sleep. He would have to never look in a mirror or talk to a woman to not know that he has bags big enough to carry groceries home beneath his eyes.
Molly has to think by now that he does never look in a mirror or talk to a woman. His social skills leave something to be desired. He has a decent sense of humor and he's filled with enough life experience and worldliness that he can tell stories when he chooses to tell stories.
Mostly he asks questions of people who already realize they're being interviewed but his technique is minimalist. She can attest to this. What few questions he had asked the day they'd met for coffee had resulted in her spilling everything she knew. What dulls his senses now and slows the questions and keeps him on his side of the couch is the fact that he's drugged and a little over two weeks gone from his own brush with death.
Were not for the fact that he knows her to experience fear just the same as any hot-blooded person with no previous experience with the paranormal Nate might have thought her to possess nerves of steel. She's an ER nurse, after all. Nothing much rattles her and seeing blood and innards and people on the verge of death has prepared her for the fleetingness of life and the finality of death.
They both appear to have well-intentioned misconceptions about each other.
"I've never had one try to hijack my voice box," he says. "They just don't ever stop talking. It gets to be like anything else after a while. You get used to it. That, though..."
His eyes flick away from her to find the small aged thing atop the island and then find her face again. Nate chews his lower lip and puts his left arm up on the back of the couch like to affect an air of nonchalance.
"The envelope must be what triggered it."
Nothing to worry about. It won't happen again. Hah, hah.
Molly Toombs
The reassurance and experience that Nate has to offer her is that a.) he hasn't experienced what she did that night, because no one's every tried to hijack his voice to talk through him before, and b.) you'll get used to it. Molly's glance toward him is quick, and her eyebrows hop up on her freckled face to show something akin to skepticism, but there's enough friendly humor there, filtering through the thought and worry that he can read on her, to soften it. It's a quick really, now? look, but it doesn't cut him.
His next assessment, that the envelope triggered it, is met with a small shake of her head. Another somewhat longer drink of her coffee (because it's growing a little cool and nothing's as disappointing as room temperature coffee) she replies.
"Well, clearly."
Wow, nice, Molly.
"I don't think that I've... I don't know, picked up on what you have. I doubt it rubbed off on me, it doesn't seem like a contagious thing that you could give anyways." There's a pause here, like she's trying to decide whether or not she wants to say what she was planning next. Being who she is, though, she naturally decides to go ahead and say it. She just needed a second to restructure it the way she wanted in her mind.
"I don't think it will only be this envelope, though. Nate, I don't know what you have to say on this matter but I do intend to stay around you and be in touch. Be friends, but more than that, be allies. I've got no one else to relate with on surreal and supernatural shit like this, except the things that don't breathe or have heartbeats anymore. With that, I don't think this envelope story here is gonna be the last chapter in your book on ghosts. I'm pretty sure that there will be a lot more to come on that front for the both of us."
Nate Marszalek
And Nate doesn't do so much as flinch at her response to his assessment of the state of things. He does take his arm off the back of the couch like putting it up there in the first place was what led to the tone of the conversation going from exploratory to -
He can't gauge the tone of her voice. She can read the openness and the confusion and the worry in his eyes. Like Molly he is capable of concealing his emotions and his motivation when the task calls for it but right now he's exhausted and he's bruised. Sitting up is taking enough energy as it is.
All that is keeping him from announcing that he wants to go lie down is the fact that it's obvious Molly wants to talk about this and has things she wants to say. If he goes to lie down that precludes their having a discussion. It would be far too much effort to ask her to come lie down with him. 26 years old and Nate is more comfortable in the company of his laptop than a woman with a heartbeat and some semblance of hope for a future where they have each others' backs.
When she reaches the end of her appeal to him Nate lets out a strained breath and a frown appears between his brows.
"Molly," he says and his teeth flash in what amounts to fear-laughter. "It... I've never had anyone around to 'relate to'--" He uses air quotes there. "--about the fact I can't hear myself think sometimes because a dead person wants to talk my ear off. The only 'relating' anybody would've done would be to relate my ass into the psych ward. It's..."
It's not easy to admit to being lonely after finding a lifestyle that enables him to function despite his misappropriated gift and at least pretend he can function in spite of it. And it could be a gift. But to borrow Molly's parallel he has treated it like a disease instead of something to unwrap and he addresses his next sentence to her wrists, her coffee cup, instead of her.
"I don't know what you're asking me to do, here."
Words thrown out, Nate looks back up at her face.
Molly Toombs
Both are decent at reading one another, because they are good at reading people in general. They're both pretty good at masking things from one another, again not because they knew what spins to give their lies or feathers to adorn their masks with specifically for each other, but simply because they've practiced it before with so many others before.
That might be a part of what makes this exchange feel so raw, for Molly at least. She can be callous at times, and not completely realize (or sometimes even care) that what she has to say will impact someone in any way beyond simple enlightenment. So when she sees his face change expressions to something that's strained and almost cornered, she feels a twinge of immediate regret in her chest. He looks down at her hands instead of holding her eyes when he says, plain and bald, that he doesn't know what she's asking of him.
When he looks back up at her face, Molly looks like she's smothering some strong sentiment or another, because her eyes are wide but refusing to be wet, and her nostrils are a mite flared from the deep pull of breath she was bringing through them. Then that passes, and her lips press together to make a thin line out of her mouth. Fingers loop through the small handle on her mug with her right hand, balancing the mug on top of her leg. The left hand settled palm-up onto the couch cushion that sat between them. It's pretty clear what that hand asks for.
"I don't want you to actually do anything. Just... Maybe offer some kind of reassurance or road sign or something? I can't tell half of the time if I'm a bother to you or if you actually want me to keep coming around."
Nate Marszalek
He does not reach out and snatch up her hand right away. As Molly talks she may think that means he is going to let it lie there ignored and that he will tell her as a matter of fact she is a massive bother. That's why he never asked her on another date after the coffeehouse meeting. Not the fact that vampires formed the centerpiece of their first date or that the second time they spent time together was not a date at all but an excursion into a haunted apartment.
His eyes flick to her hand but he focuses more on her face and the light in her eyes and the fact that she looks stung and laid bare and more scared than he's seen her in months.
And maybe Nate is thinking of how he came up with some bullshit excuse to leave her apartment after they got back downstairs again. How he'd talked her down as fast and rote as he could and then once he was sure she could get to sleep and make it to work the next morning he'd pulled on his jacket and left. Maybe he's thinking about how he let her walk out of here without thanking her for warning him of Mr. Flood's agitation over his snooping or telling her the hell with work, stay a little longer.
It isn't a stretch to suppose he thinks of things like this. He doesn't. He made his decisions and he lives with the ones that came before these ones. He has to live with the fact that if he and Shannon had come back five minutes later they would have missed that tractor trailer and Shannon would still be alive. But Nate extricated himself from a grieving sister's embrace and they got back on the road.
Now is all anyone ever really has. Molly can't tell half the time what he wants. This revelation has Nate sighing another hard breath out his throat and he doesn't go for her hand but he doesn't shun her either.
He steels himself to move from one cushion to the next. The movement does not wrack him with pain but he does flinch at the movement and its impact on his lower back. She can read the Velcro fixtures on the back brace through the loose fit of his t-shirt and she knows the Velcro rubs the stitches on his navel where they went in to operate on his vertebrae. Though he's uncomfortable Nate tries something novel.
He uses his words.
"Right now I'm going to put my arm around you," he says, "and then, ah..."
Nate does not look like much on the outside. He's slow and young and pale and speaks in a tired drawl. But he does what he says he's going to do. She already knows that lurching physique of his is solid and he's stronger both in body and in spirit than anyone gives him credit for. When he puts his arm around her he tugs her in against his side.
"If you don't have to be back, if you could stay, for a bit." He tries putting his hand on her shoulder instead of awkwardly gripping her upper arm. He sighs again. "Don't ever think I don't want you to come around. Alright? That's not true."
Molly Toombs
He's right, Molly does look scared and bare. This is different, though, from what he saw of her fear while chasing ghosts with him. It's even different from when she sat pale and trembling in the passenger seat of Flood's own personal piece of automotive history. It's not fear of the immediate, or what had just gone by, but rather it's fear of what's to come. More precisely, it was what happened when you looked into the yawning maw of your future and have no guardrail to help walk you through it. It was how you look when you reach for that guardrail but find that your hand had missed.
Nate reads this, though, because as has been established they're both good at that. He scoots over so he's sitting on the middle cushion of the couch instead of the far left one, and Molly's hand moves out of his way, lifts like she's bracing the air around him, refraining from either stopping or helping the motion. She planned to coach him on better protecting his bare skin from the brace later-- wear something to pad it, because it's rigid and will rub you raw-- have you ever had crutches? There's a reason people wrap towels around the pads after several days, and you'll be wanting to do the same thing with that stupid brace before long.
For now, though, she gives him her attention and waits for his move. He settles in beside her and explains, simply, that he's going to put an arm around her and that she's welcome to stay for a little while if she wants to. Her mouth goes from that thin line to a small, oddly grateful smile that only just pulled her lips upward, but did succeed in stopping them from pressing together so tight with worry and caution and uncertainty. He looped his arm around her, hand settled on her shoulder, and tugged her in against his side. Molly accepted this with no protesting or blatant rejoicing either. She simply turned her torso when he pulled, so she would better fit under his arm and into his side, so her shoulder would go behind him rather than into his ribs and armpit. This has her sitting a little lower, so that she may rest her head against his shoulder.
The coffee mug was still balanced on her leg with her right hand, otherwise she may have found something more involved to do with that one too.
"That's good," she answers. "I didn't want to have to find someone else who just happens to know the things we do."
She'll stay with him for a bit longer, but not much. Perhaps another thirty minutes or so. For a time she'll stay where they are on the couch and just enjoy the simple comfort of warm human affection for a while. Then she'll switch the topic to his work-- when he was going back and the like. Before parting she would advise him what she was planning to about that brace, and educate him about the wonders of plastic cling wrap since she's sure that he wants a shower like a man in the desert sun wants shade.
She takes some of his offer to stay, but does not trespass upon or take advantage of it. She knows he wants to rest, between the discomfort and the medicine that was a given. So she'd see her way out and leave his keys on the counter for him when she went.
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