CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

               FELICITY WOODS HAD HEARD once that if one was to fall hopelessly in love with a man that would never return such affection, then it would be a pain worse than every kind of heartbreak. Unrequited love was what it was called, and it was a feeling she had only ever experience once. . . but that was when she was both young and stupid, and love was just a feeble, fickle word that could blurted out more often than it should have been.

Now, she was six years senior to that little girl who thought she knew what heartbreak was, yet she felt that she was hardly any wiser.

Unrequited affection still ran through her veins but this time, it was for another man: a man she had never dreamed of feeling any sort of emotion for, let alone love. Now, though, Felicity had pushed it aside in the hopes that she would forget it ever existed, with the feverish plea that no words should spill her secret from her mouth in one god-awful moment. 

As the girl sat on the quilted duvet on her bed, her eyes took in the wall situated opposite her, but it was although they did not see any inch of the plain, greying bricks. Instead, they looked further and she found herself letting her thoughts run for longer than she had ever done before: exploring each and every whisper that emerged from her mind in tones so hushed so would have missed them. . . as had happened so often before. 

It was not long before she tired of the torment that was beginning to loom before her - growing dangerously fast and she knew it would only continue if she carried on letting her thoughts roll out before her. Felicity let out a weary sigh before she swung her legs off the bed and they hit the floorboards with a light thump, making contact with the cold wood instantaneously. 

She found her feet taking her to the Garrison without her even realising it. Felicity had walked the narrow streets and winding roads of Small Heath so often - for the entirety of her life, in fact - that she hardly thought about where she was headed. . . all that she knew was that she needed a distraction, she needed something to take her mind off the constant stream of torment flowing from her thoughts. If that distraction just so happened to be drunkards and beer spillages, then she would take it as it came. 

As it happened, Harry Fenton had taken the day off once again, and Grace was no where to be found. She had disappeared from the city a week or so ago, still with the claims that she had family to attend to, but promising that she would return as quickly as possible. Felicity hoped that she would keep to her word and arrive back in Small Heath soon enough, because she missed her friend. Keeping to be entertained behind a bar and fending off half-hearted drunk advances was only ever an okay experience if you had someone there to keep you amused, as Felicity had quickly found.

Unlocking the door, Felicity stepped over the threshold and into the room that was filled with nothing but silence and hastily discarded chairs and stools. As she pelted through the room towards the back, where a sink stood, she glanced hurriedly at the clock and found the hands to be pointing at precisely twelve o'clock, which was later than she had expected it to be, in all fairness. Perhaps sitting amongst your thoughts was a time-consuming activity, after all. 

⎯

              Thomas Shelby's head burned with fire and with annoyance as thoughts clouded his mind: dangerous thoughts; calculating thoughts; time-consuming, ever-present thoughts. He avoided the workmen that gaggled together and formed hushed clusters, and sidestepped away from a puddle of oil and grease that only reflected the dismal appearance of the surrounding buildings up into the sky. It was, for once, a picture-perfect day yet that did not stop the cold, burning aggravation that had consumed his being for much of the week now.

He pushed through the frosted glass of the doors and was greeted with the silence of the near-empty pub, which surprised him, to say the least. Whilst he had not been eager to share his aura of annoyance with any others that shared the bar, he had not expected to be met with simply the sight of the blonde barmaid. 

Tommy sighed, decided that there were worse people to drink away his sorrows in front of, and thus made his way towards the bar without another thought.

"Get me a drink," was all the man requested, his voice heavy and ringing with exhaustion. 

Felicity nodded and plucked a bottle of whiskey from where it had stood amongst the others, and easily seizing a glass with the same hand. She dropped the two in front of Thomas and instead of leaving him to his thoughts like she once might have done, she simply remained there, leaning against the wall with her arms folded across her chest, completely unfazed by his outward irritation towards all that the world had to offer.

"Are you alright?" She asked, hoping the concern was not evident in her tone, for fear that it may be angrily perceived as mockery or false consideration. 

Tommy did not answer immediately; instead, he unscrewed the cap to the bottle and did not bother with the glass. His actions mirrored those the night before the races, when he had come in sullenly declaring how he had just put a bullet through the poor horse's skull. Felicity hoped that this behaviour was not an exact repeat of history. . . or an even worse version, at that.

Once finished, he turned his attention back to the blonde that had taken to regarding him warily, blinking through her thick lashes as her brows furrowed ever so slightly out of concern. And it was then that he realised he had made a mistake in coming here, in seeing the face of the girl that he knew should not, could not have.

"As good as I could ever be," Tommy responded.

Felicity raised her eyebrows dubiously at this. "I hope you know that isn't the most convincing of answers, Tom."

His laughter thundered throughout the room. "You're right," he returned, the ghost of a smile beginning to appear. "I suppose it isn't."

Huffed, disbelieving, bemused laughter left Felicity's mouth at this.

"Do you mind if you. . .?" Tommy plucked the cap back up from the bar's surface and screwed it upon  bottle once more. He tilted the neck of the glass towards her, his features slightly sheepish. "For once, this doesn't seem to be helping any of the situations at hand."

Felicity took the bottle from his outstretched hand with another small laugh and returned it to the shelf, before grabbing the glass with the tips of her fingers and sliding the glass away as well so that she could tidy it away as well. A little too fast, she supposed, as it slid across the wood and slipped through her fingers so that it shattered upon the tiles and cracked into large, fractured shards. Felicity exhaled heavily, her good mood suddenly dampened by the occurrence and the fact that she would now have to clear it up, before crouching down to do just that. She was careful to keep the shards from making sharp contact with her skin. . . or at least, she had thought she was being careful, but the cuts that immediately littered her palm told her otherwise. Not necessarily deep enough to hurt immensely, but deep enough to encourage pools of crimson droplets to surface.

"Ah, shit," Felicity hissed beneath her breath, and before any more curses could spill from her lips out of the spark of pain that were biting into her palm, she clamped her teeth upon her tongue in the hopes that it might prevent such a thing from happening. 

Tommy straightened up hastily, his eyes flooding with worry and yet not knowing the extent of the pain. "Felicity?"

"Hmm?" The girl responded as well as she could through her clenched jaw, but realised that this may not be enough to convince the man that she was perfectly alright, as so she glanced quickly upwards and offered a shy smile of attempted reassurance. . . which ended up to be moments away from morphing into a wince, and so she turned her head away again.

"Tommy?" The blonde's voice trailed tentatively as she cupped the injured hand by her chest, watching as blood began to pool from the cuts that littered her palm. "Could you reach for that cloth, please? It's just. . . there's glass, and blood, and I wouldn't want it to get anywhere. . ."

It was not long before she found him by her side. His warm, large hands enveloping hers, gently prying them away from her chest and flat out so that he could dab at it with the cloth he had dampened with a little water. Crimson stained the cream cloth, spreading outwards among the coarse fabric. 

"Are you alright?" Tommy's voice was low, hushed, full of concern as he used a finger to tilt her head up towards his.

Hazel met cerulean. 

Warmth met ice.

Yet the heat was the same; the tension; the overruling, overwhelming, river of emotion was mirrored in both the girl's eyes and his.

A sigh escaped the girl's peony lips, and that seemed to be the millionth time such a thing had happened in the presence of this particular man.

Yet she remembered what she had always heard. She remembered how the old wives would tell her of unrequited love being worse than heartbreak. She remembered how she, even after all of the stories that passed the women's lips on laundry day, did not believe a single word that they said. How could their words be true, after all? Felicity Woods figured that giving yourself up to a man and him knowing you were at your most vulnerable was far more dangerous than a love that the other did not return.

She pulled away. 

Tommy only watched her step backwards. 

He, too, had remembered the stories, but they were a different sort of tale compared to the ones told with laughter and warning. No, these were the one where the devil only ever ended up contaminating the world the surrounded the angel. Where chaos rained hell-like upon their reality and even in the midst of all of the love, all of the affection that was present, he knew that there was always an encircling cloud of doubt and of misery that would forever be present, too.

"I'm perfect," Felicity eventually answered in a whisper.

If only she meant the words that had just passed her lips.

AUTHOR'S NOTE
look look look i'm posting more
often because i'm cool!!! i swear.
also   um  you  know   when   you
spam comment? yeah that makes
me really happy lmao i'm easily
entertained. k bye love you all!!