Katherine looks a little swollen today. Her face, her mouth, her eyes, which seem a little glassier than usual.

She has a cup of coffee in her hand, looking a little more than tired as she stares at the eggs in the frying pan.

Russell doesn't remember the last time he saw her eat breakfast. 

He doesn't play music anymore, not since that first incident in the kitchen at the beginning of the summer. Curiosity burns at his stomach. Not the morbid kind...okay, yes, the morbid kind. What happened in that house?

He sees flashes of blood. Pools of it, coagulated, spattered, smeared...he hears sobbing.

Katherine sips at her coffee. It's black.

Without the sizzle of the stovetop, it's almost silent in the house. 

This is how they spent their mornings, if they happend to be up at the same time. Someone is cooking, the other is on the countertop. Silence. 

"I took off from work today," he says. Piercing blue eyes dart to him, but her head doesn't move.

"How come?"

Russell scratches the back of his head before placing his hands in his lap. "Spend more time with you, I guess."

She doesn't say anything. She just stares at the eggs in the pan. Russell's gut turns a little.

"Patrick comes back soon, doesn't he?"

"A couple weeks," Russell hums. "I guess."

He doesn't know why she's asking about Pat. He doesn't want to ask. She seems like she's in one of those moods...Tiny spark, big explosion.

Katherine pulls a plate from the cupboard and dumps the whole pan of eggs onto it. Three of the four strips of bacon. Two sausage patties. She passes the plate to Russell and grabs a fork from the drawer.

She never sets her coffee down. It's got a weird color to it...

"Can I have a sip?" Katherine's brows flash in confusion for half a second before she frowns. 

"Make your own."

But she knows by the way his eyes soften...he knows it's only half coffee.

She takes the fork from his hand, stabs a bit of egg, and pops it into her mouth before handing the fork back to him. Then she takes the last piece of bacon from the paper towel and starts to nibble at it, almost to appease him.

He's said something about her not eating much. 

Then she wiggles her eyebrows at him. See? He offers her a tiny smile, but it doesn't warm those sad brown eyes. 

She loved his eyes.

Bile fills her stomach as she thinks of another pair of brown eyes. She closes her own and takes  along pull of her whiskey coffee. Irish people do it all the time. Or something.

While she hoped her comment about Patrick sounded throw-away, it really connected to a whole tree root system of split-second thoughts.

Russell has a job, and she's lived here the entire summer, jobless. Not contributing to the house, to the bills, and certainly not to the morale. Russell can't play music in the house anymore without sending her into a panic attack. She's drunk or high or both half the time. She's not nice. She's not Katherine. It's got to be exhausting. Patrick comes back soon, and then she can leave. Russell won't be alone.

The thought of him being alone twists at her heart, like wringing out a washcloth. It takes her breath away.

She could try Sam's phone again...she could go stay with Bobby, even. Or you could look for the fuckers who did that to Charlie, you coward.

She takes a swig of her coffee again.

"So what do you want to do with your day?" Katherine asks, leaning on the countertop beside Russell. Their arms touch. He's warmer than anyone else she's ever met. It was nice, the other night they slept in the same bed, if not almost too warm.

Russell's eyes briefly dart to their touching arms. He watches her long fingers bring that small piece of bacon to her lips, and her teeth take the smallest nibble from it. Blue eyes don't meet his. 

"What do you want to do? What do you normally do?"

She sighs as she chews, looking like she genuinely has to think about it. "It depends," she hums. "But usually, I start my day at eleven with three shots of tequila." He frowns. "And then I'll have a cup of coffee. And then I'll call a couple friends from Thermopolis and they come over and we have a huge orgy with coke and shit." She shrugs. Russell scoffs and shakes his head. "Usually I just sleep all day," Katherine admits, softer now. 

"Wanna go for a walk?" Russell asks. She smiles after a moment. 

"A walk sounds nice."

It doesn't, but to Russell it did. And his idea of a walk isn't on the side of the street, it's down the worn path in the woods off to the right of the house. 

She's breathing a little heavier not even a quarter of a mile into their walk. "How far are we going?" She pants. 

Russell stopped on the edge of some drop-off to the left of the path. 

"This is where I found you," Russell murmurs. 

Katherine moves to stant beside him, staring down into the shallow gully. Water is flowing quickly over rocks and logs, disappearing around the bend twenty yards to her left. Staring down into this dirt pit, she wonders what she must've looked like to him. Bleeding, freezing. Dead.

That would've been too kind a fate for her.

"I don't remember a lot of it anymore," he admits. "Just how scared I was."

He remembers the hue of her lips, the smear of her mascara on her cheekbone. How heavy she was, waterlogged, all muscle. The dark polish on her fingernails. 

Katherine gnaws on the inside of her cheek as she reaches for his arm. He turns to look at her, lips pursed to one side. Her roots have grown out a good ways, a cool brown like her eyebrows. Her long bangs swept up into her ponytail fall down and are tucked behind her ears, revealing a furrowed brow and wrinkled forehead.

She's almost unreocgnizable when he thinks of the woman he found in that stream, but familiar in other ways.

He nudges her to keep moving. "Let's head back. You're panting."

Blue eyes snap to his, and she makes a mocking face. "I am not."

Later that afternoon, he found her on the floor by the sofa with a bottle of pale pink nail polish. Her head is bobbing a little as she stares down at her fingernails. She looks up without him having made a sound.

"I found some nail polish in your bathroom cabinet," she murmurs, reaching for a plastic cup Russell brought with him from one of his frequented college bars. "You think Paula will mind?"

Something peculiar happens. Russell stays perfectly relaxed. 

"Paula and I broke up."

Katherine, dazed, blinks at him, but he offers no further comment as he turns towards the kitchen.