Delirium

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Translation

Liv and Robin walked back into Scoops Ahoy. Liv self-consciously rubbed at her bruising arms as she walked in. Her fingers tapped along the forming bruises to hide them as they approached Dustin's booth. Steve spotted them and walked around the counter to join them. 

"Hi." Dustin looked from her to her arms. "Are you okay?"

She forced a smile and felt it shake unsteadily. "I'm okay, Dustin."

Robin patted her back, then left right as Steve walked up. "Liv-"

She turned to him with the same smile. His green eyes explored her face, taking in the red around her eyes, the swollen, rawness to her lips, and the splotches of irritated blotches on her cheeks and chin. "We should finish the Russian translation, yeah?" She gripped her biceps and tried not to wince as she squeezed them too tight. "Robin said you have some of it done, but not all of it." She looked down at Dustin who held the same frown. "That's why you wanted to come here, right? So we can finish the translation and see what the Russians are planning?"

"Liv-"

"It's in the back?" She stepped around Steve as she headed for the back room. Robin invited her back once, so she felt it was okay to go in again. "We should-" she didn't finish as she walked toward the door. She spared Robin a single glance before she pushed through the door and walked into the room by herself. 

She hugged herself again and rubbed her arms. There was a heat around the middle of her bicep, as though his anger lingered right under the skin. 

The door pushed open slowly behind her. She didn't turn around as she stared at the whiteboard to try and read what little of the translation they had completed without her. She tried to ignore the Russian altogether to make it less confusing, but the spacing between the Russian letters and English letters nearly disappeared entirely. The longer she stared at it, the more confusing it became. She felt like she had to decode the code all over again just to make sense of it.

"Liv?" Steve's voice was gentle. "Can we talk about what happened?"

She turned, still rubbing her hurt arms, as she faced both him and the whiteboard. "Can you read it to me?" She asked. She blinked and looked over to see him watching her. "It's harder to read when I'm upset, or tired, or stressed. Something about the emotions makes my brain scramble the letters more."

His shoulders dipped as he refused to move his eyes from her. 

"Steve... it happened, alright? I opened my fat mouth and said the wrong thing and had to face the consequences."

He stepped toward her so suddenly that she sucked in a breath and took a small step back. He stopped and gave a mortified frown. "Are you scared of me?" The pain in his voice made her regret moving back, but it wasn't intentional. It was an instinct of self-preservation. 

"I-" She swallowed and pulled her bottom lip between her teeth to wet it. She tasted leftover blood from her excessive picking earlier in the bathroom. She let her bottom lip go and watched as Steve's eyes cast down to it. "This guy at work the other day touched me while I was bent over his table. It-it was between my thighs while I was wearing shorts." Steve's eyes lifted to hers and planted there as anger darkened them. "Then, that guy-" she ticked her chin toward the door. "Grabbed me because I made a bad joke and threw me on top of the table. They- they touch me and think... it's fine, she's just a girl, it doesn't matter." She blinked and looked away so she wouldn't have to see the anger building in his eyes. She focused instead on the whiteboard and hated that her head kept messing up the letters. "It matters, Steve."

"I know it does," he consoled her quietly. "No one deserves to be touched like that. Ever."

She could hear the raw truth in his voice. He believed it as he said it. She knew he would never touch her- or any other woman- in the same way they did. She thought that was why she stepped toward him right then, because she knew he would never treat her the way the others had. She lowered her hands to her elbows, just enough for Steve to see the bright red rimming her biceps. He looked for a long few seconds before returning his gaze to hers. "I don't want you to forgive me because of what happened," she spoke slowly to give him time to understand what she was trying to say. "I don't want you to-to feel sorry for me and forget about the shit I put you through." She took another small step toward him until she was close enough to small the Farah Fawcett hair spray. "If you forgive me, whether it's tomorrow or the next day, or weeks from now when you're tired of me showing up at your work, I want your forgiveness to come from within you, not because you feel sorry for me."