assignment: facade

He was late. Was tonight the night?

She paced the little space in front of the door, curling her fingers into her palm to stop from turning the knob and running out to find him.

She’d found him once, she could do it again…

“No, just hold yourself together, Cara... He’ll be back. He always comes back.”

And it was true. He’d never once NOT COME HOME. He’d disappear for the majority of the day, until well after dark, and then he’d come dragging his feet back to the modest apartment they shared (in all honestly, calling it modest was being generous). His expression was always the same: haunted… pissed off… blank. And she’d always be there to make it better.

Always.

“Dante, where are you…?”

Cara went through the motions in her head: when he finally got home she would sit him down in the busted down recliner and she would run her hands over his shoulders. She would pull the tension out of his muscles if it killed her (he rarely did) and then she would make him a cup of tea to drink while she made something to eat for the two of them.

He never drank it.

She had to pull her hand off the doorknob once more, and she forced herself to walk to the back of the dingy and cold apartment all the way to the very back wall before she could allow herself to walk back to the living room and resume staring at the door. She counted backwards from thirty (why thirty?) and tried to make each breath successively longer and deeper than the one before it.

“Fuck! Dante, if you don’t walk in this door NOW I swear to god I am going to lose it!”

She really and truly hoped that it would work. It didn’t.

Cara dug her fingernails into her palm (a move she’d noticed Dante doing many a time before) and desperately tried not to cry. She sat down on the freezing and dusty wooden floor, with her back to the wall, facing away from the door so she wouldn’t have to see it NOT OPENING anymore. Something must have happened. Someone must have seen him. Maybe he was locked up downtown somewhere. Maybe somebody got to him first - a gang shooting, a drive-by… a mugging? Maybe HE was dead? Maybe he was never coming back and she’d never see him again… What would she do?

She’d lived her whole life just fine on her own before she met him… Could she really go back to that? Would she really have to? Wouldn’t he do whatever he could to come back to her? Wasn’t she important to him? She was all he had, of course he’d fight to keep that… So why wasn’t he home yet?

Cara fell asleep as she sat, with her knees drawn up to her chest. She had no way of knowing how long she was out, but she jerked awake the second she heard somebody scrabbling at the door. She was on her feet almost immediately and she tore at the chain holding the door closed and flipped the deadbolt allowing him to come inside.

“Dante! Where have you been?”

He stared down at her. There was something different about him tonight. He hadn’t killed, that wasn’t it… Something wild and desperate still hovered just beneath the surface, that hadn't changed...

“Dante, what happened?”

He didn’t answer her, he just stared a moment longer then moved past her to sit in the recliner. He pulled a crumpled pack of 100’s out of his pocket and pulled one out of the package before tossing the rest of them onto the overturned milk crate that stood in the center of their living room. Cara went to the kitchen and pulled a mug out of the strainer, filling it with a teabag and some hot water from the faucet. She brought it to him, setting it down alongside the squashed pack of cigarettes. She put her hands on his shoulders, and worked his muscles just as she’d imagined earlier in the evening. He paid no attention to her, made no move to indicate he even knew she was there, and just stared across the room at the cracked wall while pulling long drags from the stick held between his fingers. When she was finished, she picked up the remote and turned on the tv, setting the control on the arm of the chair he sat in, and returned to the kitchen to make him something to eat.

She was glad he was home.