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Catherine isn’t sure what she’s expecting when she opens the door – they’re not exactly prone to visitors, her and Jason, not these days– but it sure isn’t the sightly visage of her husband's ex-girlfriend.
Sheila’s pretty. Is the first thing she notices. Pretty in the way of natural disasters, like her beauty promises violence. Glacier cold eyes, strong brows. Sharp nose like a ski-slope, and made up rhubarb lips. A face worthy of retribution, Catherine thinks.
Sheila lazily scans her face, like Catherine had just moments prior. Catherine hopes that whatever she’s looking for, she sure as hell doesn’t find, just for the sake of it.
They lock eyes, and Sheila’s face sours, before it makes itself up again, carefully, deliberately neutral. Silence lies between them like a landmine, a dead man's switch.
Sheila’s mouth twitches up, into a wry grin, and it’s a warning shot, preceding a barrage of bullets; deadly and prone to worming through flesh. And here Catherine is, standing at point-blank range.
Still staring at her mouth, Catherine realises, and pointedly looks away. Looks back too, because there’s no point in keeping your eyes off a weapon, and Sheila’s lips peel apart, into a smile, a grotesque thing, with too many teeth to be anything but cruel.
“Heya, Catherine.” Sheila says, voice resonant. Her coiffed, apple-blonde hair bounces as she nods, once.
Catherine huffs. There’s a butterfly in her throat, wrestling the lilting ascent of words out of her larynx, but when the words reach her lips, they fall out of her mouth like rocks.
“Sheila. Give me just one. One good reason to let you in.”
“Look,” Sheila says, very quickly, “I don’t even wanna be here. Okay? But I’ve been promised house and home by a certain incarcerated sunuva, and I’m here to cash in. C’mon Cathy. Let me in.”
The flash of teeth behind her lips as she talks is intriguing. Feels like staring into the belly of the beast.
“ Willis,” Catherine says, invoking the name neither of them have yet said, even as her stomach necroses, “Isn’t here. And I don’t owe you shit.”
Sheila just stares. Unrepentant, though she really should be. Lips pressed flush against each other, drawing out into a flatline, as she waits.
And Catherine’s not gonna let her in. Really. She’s not. Catherine Todd has zero pity for Sheila Haywood and never has. The cold hearted bitch who abandoned her own goddamn baby doesn’t get a fucking pity party.
But the doors already open; the stone has been cast, and is very rapidly approaching the dappled surface of the below water. Point being, Catherine is lonely, and stressed, and Sheila is interesting. Somebody who means something complicated to her, a tangle of hurt and gratitude and anger by proxy, and Catherine needs to know more. She feels the rush of interest like rot in her veins. She shouldn’t let her in. There is no world where this ends well.
Catherine pulls further open the door, despite it all. Cowed under the intensity of Sheila’s undivided focus.
Doesn’t move though.
In the way of Sheila’s oncoming entrance, just shy of the doorway, she stands her ground, with all the certainty of the sun.
Derision flicks across Sheila’s features, and Catherine watches the shadows formed by the movement ripple on her face, entranced. Before it stills, the way water never quite manages.
Sheila exhales, forcefully, before she shoulders past Catherine. The doorway, even with the door straining at its hinges, still isn’t wide enough for two full-grown women. So as Sheila strides past, they touch. Two tectonic plates, shifting past each other, causing mass casualty. Their clothes rustle like the leaves of felled trees.
Catherine’s left standing, looking out at the barren expanse of piss-yellow hallway. The air feels colder, now Sheila’s lifted her occupation on the place. Catherine turns, pulling the weight of the old oak door behind her, and follows the echoes of Sheila’s footfalls inside.
The lights are off inside. Catherine had been reading solely by virtue of the solitary lamp in her room, about to go to bed when Sheila had knocked, and hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on in the cramped living room. Still, it’s not quite dark, streetlights making their valiant effort to push as much light as possible through shit-poor, basically transparent curtains, in dappled tones of dusky orange. Painting the room a much lighter scene.
“Hey,” Catherine calls to Sheila's back. She’s stuck herself at the kitchen counter, nails loud against vinyl as her fingers come down in a repetitive motion, pinky to index, like waves. The noise is grating.
“Sheila, Hey.” Catherine gets closer, reaches a hand out, to draw Sheila from her stupor, but pauses. Sheila’s got some feral lean to her body, like an ensnared mutt, willing to chew through the both of them to cast free, and Catherine’s not willing to run the risk of touching her.
Sheila turns anyways, regardless of Catherine’s failed rousing, and her eyes leap to the arm hanging in the air, abandoned three quarters through its mission. Catherine hastily pulls it back to her body, tucks it against her side.
Sheila’s eyes follow the offending limb, and then painfully slow, like the shifting of glaciers, they drag themselves across Catherine’s body to meet her eyes. Catherine holds her gaze. Doesn’t blink, not even once. She’s drawn herself into some kind of desperate contest, Catherine realises. Some childish attempt at intimidation on Sheila’s part.
Sheila’s eyes cut away, and it doesn’t feel like winning. They’re cloudy, her eyes; like disturbed water, clay kicked up from riverbeds. She looks oddly vulnerable in a way she hadn’t outside, aggressively swaggering charisma lost to the dusky fancies of dim lights.
“Hey yourself,” Sheila drawls, verbs stretching with her mouth into a half hearted sneer.
Catherine startles, what is she- Oh. She’d. Well. she’d forgotten that she’d spoken, herself. Sheila’s only responding. She abruptly realises how warm her face is, and shakes her head.
“Yeah. Sure.” Catherine offers, and then with all the delicacy of a rabid dog, “Look. Sheila, what are you even doing here? I mean-”
“-I killed someone and I’m fleeing the country. No one's gonna look for me here.” She’s still, completely deadpan, for a moment. Two. Then that smirk reemerges, and breaks out into a full grin, and that soft vulnerability that made her look anything human has been steadfastly buried someplace in Sheila’s skin.
Catherine stands there, uncomprehending. The maybe, maybe , tiny bit of empathy Sheila had gained by looking so fucking lost, has been trodden underfoot, flattened like roadkill. She’s sure she looks the fool, but Sheila is such a- God, such a fucking ass.
“Cathy, honey. I’m kidding. Don’t worry about it, okay? You’re too pretty for that shit.” She flicks her hair, and stands up straighter, shoulders cutting a fault line across Catherine’s kitchen, “ I’ll be out of your hair in a couple days, and you’ll go on with your life of domestic tranquility, hey?”
Catherine considers her inquisitional endeavour, and declares it unsalvageable. Whatever’s got Sheila at her place, acting like this, is apparently completely unknowable by any human means. Catherine hates that it even sounds fond in her head.
Catherine sighs, “Okay. fine. Do you wanna move your-” She takes another look, “ Aw, geez- have you got anything Sheila?”
She doesn’t know how she missed it, in all honesty. Too surprised by the appearance of a woman she’s only seen in pictures, she figures. The statue she’d become in her mind. Willis’s first love, Jason’s real mommy.
Sheila works her jaw until it pops, the noise like a potshot into the silence of the apartment. She shrugs her shoulders, defensive-like. Shifted very abruptly onto her back foot and not appreciating it. “Well.” She starts, but falters, sputters like a shitty engine.
Catherine can’t fucking believe it. She is being made to take pity on the woman who tried (and failed!) to baby trap her husband. This, is frankly absurd. She scrubs a hand against her face, in hopes of hiding the look she’s harbouring between her brows.
She wonders absently, what sort of thing drives a woman to a stranger's house in the middle of the night, without anything on her person. What would Sheila have done, had she turned her out into the night, like lint from a pocket?
Sheila tucks her hair behind her ears, not meeting her eyes. There’s a smear of blood in the shell of her ear, Catherine notes. Dark and sticky, recently coagulated. Missed during a hastily executed wiping away, Catherine would guess. Lends some measure of believability to the murder, but Sheila’s a doctor, right? In all likelihood, she comes home with blood on her every day. Catherine doesn’t know enough doctors to say.
“You feel like eating?” Catherine says instead of asking about the blood, instead of asking ‘bout her baggage, M.I.A, because some things are just better left unanswered. She’s primed to migrate to her beat up couch, and tries hard to signal with the swing of her head. Sheila finally meets her eyes, and nods, unusually demure.
“What? Chinese, Indian? ‘talian?” Catherine pauses, “I’ve nothing in the fridge, so it’s take-out any way you spin it.”
“Italian. You got delivery this side of the Alley?”
Catherine stares, flat, and then says, “Oh fuck off.” You’re Park Row too, y’know.”
Which, clearly by the way Sheila sneers, was a misstep, “Doll, I’m not even from New fuckin’ Jersey. Don’t lump me in with your shit.”
Catherine’s anger, so carefully buried, ever since Willis was arrested, rears its ugly, ugly head and she half shouts “Well fuck off then, with your- the fuckin’ way you say it. Alley. It’s not- we’re not some different fucking species who you have to lower yourself to. Fucking hell.”
“Whom.” Sheila says, real quiet and sly, looking at her feet even, but then she’s looking back at Catherine and she’s smiling, all teeth, cloyingly sweet. “It’s whom. Species whom you have to lower yourself to.”
And Catherine hadn’t even realised she’s stepped closer, not til just now, but she has, and now she’s close enough to grab Sheila by her shirt, her cream fucking blouse and shake her, and she might just, but.. But.
That cast stone has since sunk to the bottom of the lake, far below and the shrapnel of disturbed water have made their own, smaller efforts at a ripple, dwarfed by their origin. Sheila’s here, and she’s fucked up, and so’s Catherine. In either of their lives, what difference makes one night?
They’re both breathing heavy, eyes locked on each other like soldiers opposing, and Catherine turns away.
“I’ll get a menu.”
“Sure.”
And she does so, and then she shows Sheila, and they choose a pizza that will taste like ash, cause it comes from a twenty-four hour pizza place, for Christ's sake, and she calls’em up, that pizza place, on her landline.
Then she sits in limbo on her shitbox couch, for what must be under half an hour as promised by the company, but feels like forever. Sheila’s moving around some place in her periphery, but Catherine’s too damn tired for her shit so she’s ignored, delegated to the part of her brain for absent surveilling and not much more.
Three knocks on the door, uniform, and it’s like history repeating, folding in on itself like dough, Sheila gets up though. Leaving Catherine to fuse with the sofa. She can hear her speaking softly, to some surely besotted teenager, charmed by the secrets tucked in her smile, as she takes the pizza off his hands, and he leaves, dazzled out of a tip.
“Gotcha meal, hon.”
Catherine looks up. Sheila’s got the pizza box tucked against her hip. Where a baby goes, Catherine can’t help but think, and then scolds herself. My baby. Catherine cracks her neck, and beckons her downwards towards the couch. Sheila acquiesces, sitting down next to her, the flesh of the couch dimpling under their weight.
She’s moved the pizza box to between their laps without Catherine noticing, and the greasy warmth on top of her thighs is welcome. She hadn’t realised how cold she was until she was warm. Stupid as it sounds.
The pizza’s ashy, and the cheese is faker than normal, maybe, but it was to be expected and had been so, and it’s fine. Sheila’s been steadily leaning heavier on her for the past three-quarters of an hour, and Catherine’s fine with it, likes that she’s warm even, and the weight of her body is enough to keep her on the couch, lying down further and further, wilting like a flower in to the couch cushions.
There’s something up. She’s not stupid. But for now Sheila Haywood is sleeping on top of her, in a banged-up couch instead of a bed, and it’s fine. Tomorrow she'll be sore. Tomorrow there'll be questions and arguments and Jason’ll be back from his friends’, and there'll be more questions, and more arguments, but for now there is them, and the orange of the streetlights, and a pizza box abandoned on the ground. Catherine swipes her finger over that lick of blood in Sheila's ear, and closes her eyes, curls into Sheila's body, retreating to the infection like fever of warmth that Sheila heralds.