Chapter Text
Molly doesn’t know why she picks Will that first time.
Probably because he looks comfortable at the bar, watching the locals line dance. Probably because he looks good, and she’s already three pints in and tired of sitting at the bar alone too. She’s been reliably informed that someday she’s going to have to move on from the greatest tragedy in her life for her and her son’s sake, and Will Graham’s the first man she’s prepared to rebound off of because forty-eight ounces of beer says that she’s still got it.
It would be nice to be out on the floor again, like she used to do.
“Dance with me?” she asks, leaning against the sticky wood of the bar, shirt sleeves rolled up and skin itching where the dried beer pulls it tight.
He seems to consider it, mouth gently pulled into a smile that leans too heavy to one side. He’s handling a beer delicately - condensation dripping over the skin of his thumb joint.
“Dance with you, or take you dancing?” he replies while turning his glass on the bartop, the two presumably different to him. He wipes his hands clean on his jeans, and she warms his fingers with hers when she grabs them.
“Dealer’s choice,” says Molly with a wink. “Whatever you think I want.”
Molly’s not ever been shy about asking for that.
—
She doesn’t rebound. He doesn’t really give her a reason to want to.
“You always do just the right thing,” Molly sighs into Will’s shoulder, smiling, sweat cooling on her lip. It’s the same night. It’s months later. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s been true since the first time they met, and she can almost pretend that she was never widowed and that everything is exactly how she wants it to be.
Will closes his eyes. “I try to,” he says.
He rubs the bones of her wrist a little harder than a massage, like he’s considering where they connect rather than if it feels good, before pulling his hand away.
—-
Molly knows men.
Not always Will, who explains in a half-hearted way that he doesn’t really think like most men, and Molly occasionally catches glimpses of when he isn’t being perfectly, unobjectionably companionable, but usually.
It’s been eighteen years now that she’s worked at a little metal desk at the lumber mill up the road from home - a solitary female responsible for the accounts payable and receivable, hiring, benefits, salaries. Human resources, they teasingly say when the pay stubs go out. The owner’s granddaughter, like a curse or explanation when something is out of their hands. The bitch up in the office, dissatisfied with her authority, or dissatisfied with themselves, and they don’t know a productive or graceful way to relay that.
Molly, practical, well-versed in dealing with the dirty mouthed, the rough handed, knowing that they are all secretly soft-underbellied children, asks what kind of snacks that they want in the breakroom for the next supply order, and how their spouses and children are doing, and takes no offense that she has yet to meet a man that actually knows how to gracefully say anything, no matter that their intentions are usually benign.
Even her husband, both before and after they marry, his ability to do things just right ending somewhere between being self-aware and actually being himself.
Her Second Husband, she amends with distinction, pouring soap into a basin of hot water until it stinks of lemon and pine. She remembers sometimes that she still doesn’t quite think of Will Graham first when she says that without footnotes - sequential titles - asterisks.
He tries though, when not self-conscious of any display of himself.
“Don’t you ever get tired of being held at a distance?” he asks, drying a plate with an old cotton dishrag.
It looks misplaced in his hands, a big embroidered poinsettia on its bottom corner, December written in cursive with heavy black thread. It’s February already, but there’s no matching dishrag, and neither of them are impractical enough to give drawer space to linens that are only used for thirty days out of the entire year.
She doesn’t answer right away, handing Will another dish. He dries that too - anxiously productive. He’s unable to sit still even when they’ve been together for one year, married for three months, maybe still attempting to prove he’s useful.
“All the frowning,” Will continues. His fingers are very tight on the ceramic - they squeak as he turns it. “Not wanting to meet your friends. No big Valentines surprises, no strong desire for family portraits to send out during the holidays.”
“I don’t want those things right now anyway,” Molly shrugs. She doesn’t. Not really.
“You know what I mean.”
Molly nods. She does.
“You know what?” she adds with a smile, flicking dish water at him unseriously. “You’re not as mysterious and unknowable as you think.”
Molly guesses more so than she knows that Will likes that - being treated like a normal human being who never has done something strange in his entire life. Or that he did like it once, and still does occasionally. Sometimes he doesn’t like it at all, but not when he’s trying his best to be what she wants.
He smiles with half a mouth, and kisses with one too, flicking her hand deftly with the dishrag’s wet edge - unaccustomed to either expression, or keeping them to himself. Molly thinks this is fair. She hasn’t been able to share properly either, and can’t envision what she, Will, and Wally would look like on a postcard other than pasted together, like they’ve cobbled together old photos that someone is obviously missing from.
They dutifully fuck each other - it’s Valentines Day after all. It’s not unpleasant. Not all duties are agonizing, even when done with a sense of obligation. Molly likes to feel good in her body and it’s something that she’s always had between First Husband and now Second. She knows Will wants to do what’s asked of him, and thanks to each other, neither is lonely.
—
Knowing herself, and occasionally willing to meet that head on: she is still neck deep in grief every other morning that she wakes up and sees her life is different from just a couple years ago, no matter how talented Will is at making her forget that.
She calls him baby, and hotshot, and handsome - names that belong to another time. She delivers her orders to exacting specifications, trying to recreate it, and tells herself she’ll make room for things that don’t match up later.
Knowing men, and that they are often allergic to honesty when it comes to themselves but are willing to dish it out in spades to other people: she thinks he is toeing the line of morbidly depressed, and just relieved to occasionally have something to focus on.
Will receives his field orders with gratitude, seemingly content to live in a different world. He makes her laugh, and writhe, and warm. He is a quick study, and whatever doesn’t match the expectation, he is quicker to erase.
But above all things, they’re not lonely.
—
It takes her a while to pick up on the depression, beyond the usual kinds. The seasonal kind she expects from everyone with as far up north as they are. Listlessness she expects from any person between jobs.
This is what she initially suspects of Will if she discards all the things she’s learned instead of heard about him - that Maine is boring next to his extensive involvement in the investigation and arrest of Hannibal Lecter. Repairing boats and winterproofing cabins can’t replace that kind of life-altering experience. It can only dilute the intensity of the memory.
But Will’s the one that throws himself into her life after that first night listening to the rest of the town stomp boots and laugh. He’s the one that takes over teaching her son to fish, and suggests they put up Christmas lights, and defrosts her windshield in the mornings. He’s the one that sells his house in Virginia and moves lakeside with her when she gets brave one day and tells him he should. He’s the one that proposes.
Molly doesn’t resist it, ready to be loved again. That he’s able to do it so perfectly the way that she remembers it the first time around only makes her more greedy for it.
“Coffee?” he asks, reaching to get her a mug next to where all the cancer medications used to be. She’s glad she doesn’t have to ask for this anymore, that he just knows, and asks in just the right cadence and tone - bemused, affectionate, a little deeper than his normal voice, six in the morning on the dot.
“Please,” she says, pressing her lips to the narrow scar above his brow - wincing when she feels the intensity of his flinch.
He stares out the front windows towards the driveway until Molly leaves for work when she does that.
She finds him in the same spot that night when she comes back.
He’s presumably moved, signalled by the clean coffee maker and the happy dogs. Wally is home from school, which means Will dutifully picked him up from the campus thirty minutes away, as he does sometimes on the days that there’s no after school programs or grief counselor appointments that Molly and Wally dutifully still attend, but there’s no one behind the curtains, or if there is it’s a shadow of them. His eyes drift - blue, green, grey - and they do not come ashore.
That, there.
That’s the kind of depression she’s talking about.
She didn’t expect to find sleeping in bed next to her. It looks the same as when there was nothing sleeping there at all, which is confusing, like trying to identify poison oak or poison ivy and finding out they make you itch just the same.
—
“You gonna bring your new man to the season opener?”
Molly shuffles papers on the desktop, the mill manager leaning in the doorway of her little fluorescent-white and laminate brown office. Their yearly team-building ritual. She clicks the calendar open on the computer screen, like she is seriously contemplating it.
It would make the other guys at the mill happy if she did - give them a chance to see into her life for the first time after her husband passed. It would make her human to them again instead of the office widow. They would make sure in their typical blue-collar manly way that Will is treating her well, that she deserves spoiling, that he better be careful to not rock the boat of their workplace stability by making her unhappy.
She imagines it - his slender shoulders sloping under the burden of their attention, his half-smile trying to keep pace with his full frown, once again trying to please her. He’d do it, if it was important to her - he wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He doesn’t really care about what any of them think of him, so long as she was happy about it.
“Nah,” she laughs, twisting the simple wedding band on her finger - it’s new, but similar enough to the old one that she doesn’t remember that it’s new unless she looks at it. “I don’t think it would be best for Wally just yet…he’s not ready to watch a pro game without his dad.”
It’s true, if not necessarily the entire reason. If it were about what’s best for Will, she suspects that no one would be happy with that answer until he was dragged before them like a greenhorn in need of hazing. In a similar vein, if it were what’s best for Molly, she’d be told that it’s not enough to move on anymore, and now she’s gotta live. Since it’s about what’s best for a kid, no one else asks.
Good luck, grown ass adults, Molly thinks, and makes it a point to be too busy that day.
—
“Relationships are work,” she remembers saying early on when they were dating. “Most of them, anyway.”
“Should I have offered to split appetizers with you instead of each ordering our own plates after all?” he teases, looking carefully across her face. He is leaning back in his chair, arms crossed. He looks deceptively young. “I didn’t realize the emotional burden skipping the crab wontons was going to cause.”
Molly feels welcome when he teases, grinning, at ease in her own skin. She doesn’t mean to reward him each time he does the right thing, but Molly has never been selfish with her happiness, and Will strikes her as someone who deserves a gift basket full of it since it doesn’t seem to come naturally to him.
Will reflexively grins in reply - the positive reinforcement continuing another day.
“No, you dork,” she snorts, schooling her mouth into something more serious. “I just mean that I think relationships don’t come easy, even when you’re super into someone. Give and take. There’s always something you have to compromise on, eventually. Like kids, or giving up time to their hobbies, or-”
“The crab wontons.”
“I take back everything I said in the past - you are the worst,” she says, and grabs a walnut shrimp from his plate with her chopsticks.
Will uncrosses his arms and leans into the palm of his hand, watching her rob him blind of his entree. He makes a good effort to not complain through most of the meal, beyond talking about a brief stint on a trawling boat in his youth where the shrimp were fresher, and that someone had once made him you bao xia after a long night working on a case, pronunciation perfect, but that the walnut shrimp here at the local place is good - glad that she likes it - can he drive her to his place?
She thinks in hindsight that he looked sad, but his face wears melancholy so well that at the time, it just looks like Will.
—
Molly wonders sometimes what would be best for Will.
Not in the constant existential sense, like she does for Wally, but it’s often enough - usually soaking in a bathtub, or weeding around the front entry of the house, or between punching in her zip code at the gas pump and the sound of the gas nozzle cutting off at a full tank. Five to thirty minutes at a time. Manageable doses. Bi-weekly tasks that recur at unspecific times when convenient.
She doesn’t worry about Will’s health, which is questionable after what sounds to be a rough decade of law enforcement work, but that he has a handle on. Not about his feelings either, which are a pretty obvious mixture of occasional contentment, pensiveness, and broad apathy for what happens outside the boundaries of the cabin house and Molly and Wally’s immediate sphere of influence.
But she does wonder what she could ask him to do.
What would excite him - what would weaponize that desire to please in a way that would get results instead of deflections. Make him feel more present in their life. Make him a real boy, instead of what she thinks is what he thinks he should be. It can’t be healthy to constantly be someone else, even if Molly misses them and takes advantage of ways to keep them alive.
“Show me a good time?” Molly says that night, and enjoys the warm palms of his hands reaching under her sleep shirt to tease the underside of her breasts.
Neither of them have much of a sex drive beyond what Molly thinks of as being touch-starved and persuadable, but he pleases her as deftly as he does everything else - her very sweet Second Husband, making guesses at what her First would do, because that’s what’s been best for Molly up to this point.
Is Will a generous lover because he likes being one, or because it’s what she projected needing? Is it deflection from his perfunctory arousal, or is it perfunctory because there’s something that he would prefer? She’s just not sure - maybe she’s overthinking things.
Molly licks her lips, wondering if a good wife would ever actually have to think about it first.
“Maybe let’s try something different - flip the script,” she teases, feeling guilty and making jokes to cover it. She rolls him onto his back - relishes the feeling of her thighs catching on the folds of the sheets, and all the coarse hairs of Will’s legs - that her breasts are still heavy and gently cupped as she does this, the rough-skinned run of index finger to thumb perched and waiting command. She can still see the condensation from that first glass of beer she saw him drink roll down it sometimes.
Molly smoothes the curls from Will’s face - grazes the side of his forehead scar because it’s unavoidable when she does.
“Are you already bored?” he asks, tickling across the tips of her nipples - something she shyly confessed to liking some months ago. It doesn’t feel quite like the tease it’s meant to be, though, with a brittle anxiousness starting to wrinkle the corners of his eyes.
“Missionary after Sunday fish fry for the next decade can’t be particularly interesting.”
“Are you worried I’m opposed to the facing-forward while fucking, or that I’m opposed to the routine of doing it?”
“It’s that you had an entire life before we met, and that I can’t imagine you don’t have things you want to do that aren’t what I would suggest first.”
Will swallows, delivering one of his tight smiles. “I worked in profiling extremely depraved people’s preferences. What do you think I was into before that I might be missing?”
“What were you into that you’d think your wife wouldn’t be willing to indulge it? What gets you going?”
Will’s face takes on a wooden quality even as she kisses his hair - that it will split if pressured. That he is looking down the long shaft of an axe. He seems ambushed by the question in a way that neither of them expected.
He is quiet, and then he is not.
“What do I have an appetite for?” Will asks distantly.
He is not graceful in how he pulls his hands back to himself, his appreciation of her body turned to a stove burn. The span of thumb and index finger tremble and retreat. They are foreign and long fingered and dry when she considers them in the dim light of the bedroom.
It shocks her a little, if she’s honest.
Will and Molly both stare at the roof for an indeterminate period of time. She considers what someone says when sexually rebuffed - it’s a new experience, an ungodly embarrassing one. Her good intentions crawl back to where they came from, and she wonders again if she’s a good wife, if she is still attractive, if she can make him happy.
“Guess it’s a bit late to get started on that kind of undertaking?” she jokes good-naturedly, and reaches for one of many novels on her nightstand. They treat it like any other night that one of them might not be in the mood.
“Something like that,” he says.
Molly sees a couple of times that Will tries to push out a sorry, or an answer, and not quite able to say either, and just clicks off the bedside lamp.
—
Molly tries to remind herself that this kind of quietly-controlled outburst from Will is good - that it is authentic, if puzzling.
If the quiet starts to feel uncomfortable as an hour turns to two, and that rolling to meet Will’s eyes in the dark finds him still staring upwards, resolutely himself and alone in an occupied bed, the grief counsellor would say that at least it means that they’re just both holding space for truth.
Molly hates that phrase - holding space. The way it’s explained to her sounds less like healing, and more like unaccountable, emotional hoarding - space that nothing is allowed to occupy until its contents have grown, flourished, and died in its own time.
She rolls back to the edge of the mattress, careful not to touch a cold foot to Will’s leg, or pull too much of the sheets to her side. She doesn’t understand exactly what she’s invited into their bed that has him floating somewhere invisible to the naked eye, but she understands that she invited it regardless. Self-inflicted, safety turned off, improper handling.
It’s lonely - and god, she hates that.
—
Molly is of course not an idiot. She is not the type of parent to let a man she doesn’t have some basic awareness of into her house, or teach her son beginner’s algebra or fly fishing alone. She’s read all the papers. She’s gone through the blogs. She’s aware Will Graham has a checkered past. He was incredibly upfront about it. It’s just that she’s never felt he’s a threat to her son or herself. Having what is probably a post-traumatic stress response to the way Molly phrased something is hardly a crime.
But she’s been willing to entertain if some of the rumors are true, just based on observation.
Like if Will Graham was violent.
Like if Hannibal Lecter made him that way, or if he was a long time before that.
Like if Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham had a relationship that was a little more close than the trial testimony suggested, and the violence is all secondary to the significance of them being thrown together and separated with several opportunities to avoid it, over and over again. That they had developed appetites, context significant.
The first rumor seems certain. Will’s hardly shied away from parts of his story that most people would be afraid of polite company hearing, reactive to imminent danger from other people or not. Maybe it’s why he avoids the mill workers. It’s certainly why he’s avoided meeting the Fosters’ grief counselor, and is shy of her parents’ company.
The second and third, well - Molly couldn’t say, and Will won’t.
She lingers for awhile on that thought.
She thinks of his trembling hands in the dark.
It’s not as if Will has ever truly disavowed his time with a cannibal serial killer in so many words. It’s silly that he needs to when it’s clear that the experience broke him to the point of deleting his existence outside of Molly Foster-now-Graham’s small, raggedy world at the edge of Moosehead Lake.
The doubt settles in, regardless.
It gets cozy between them - tangles their sheets - looks out from beside the bedside clock that tells her how long they haven’t slept thinking about it. Its shadow is dark and formless and creases the linens.
It’s tempting to ask Will directly to deny it, silly or not. Maybe just to dispel the unease, because what sane person wouldn’t be uneasy? Will can always be counted on to be blunt if there’s no clever way to be vague, or if he’s annoyed by the question. He’ll tell her if she presses it out of him eventually.
Do you still think about that time?
Do you want to hurt people? Do you want to hurt?
Are you attracted to that? Or men? Or both? And if not men or women as objects, what are you hungry for? What gets you going? What gets you going?
Molly wakes up the morning after asking him, thinking she’ll actually do it. That she’ll open her big mouth and ask seriously and not laugh it off. Maybe she’ll do herself one better and instead laugh while she asks because of how insecure and stupid and afraid she feels wanting to ask at all.
But Will throws himself into productivity the night after their ruined intimacy. He clears leaf debris from the edges of the driveway. He checks the gutters for clogs. He catches, cooks, and cleans brook trout for their dinner to give her a break from the responsibility. He fixes all the door hinges except the one connected to their bathroom - a creaking alarm when either of them is coming in or out, and something nostalgic for Molly who can’t remember a time it didn’t sound that way.
“Coffee?” he asks every morning after as he did every morning before, pitch perfect, sinking deeper into the character of First Husband, grasping for all the things that Molly finds comfortable and Wally finds inoffensively familiar. It is six in the morning, and there are rings under his eyes, but he is up.
“Yes please,” says Molly, who discovers she is a coward, and it wouldn’t be a laughing matter to bring it back up, and grasps for the comfort of the routine.
She doesn’t know if she wants to know how attached Will Graham was to his life before, if it was Hannibal Lecter or something else. Will dances away from being whatever Will Graham is so skillfully that she can’t decide if it matters, that this is a different person who lives a hundred years away from when it did, and that she and him love each other in the way that they need at this point in their lives, and that it looks like what she’s into instead of what he is.
—
Once it’s a question, it’s a problem. It compounds with interest, making more questions and problems that she has time to idle over, and because Molly knows men if not always Will, it means it’s statistically likely to worsen if it’s left up to Will.
It’s tempting to leave the first question and all her questions that come after it right there, dying and gasping on the dock near the house the way the fish do. It can be another one of life’s great mysteries that the human race just functions mindlessly around. Do fish feel pain? Is there life on other planets? Do animals experience love? Does Will Graham remember what it tastes like to kill and eat another man, and did he enjoy it? Did it make him feel good? Did that get him going, or was it the person who suggested he give it a try?
She remembers it being easy to convince Wally to try clams by showing how much she liked it. Her First Husband did the same to her with black coffee. Would it be so different for someone to try the same with Will - loading up a fork full of a parking attendant, or portfolio manager, and say it’s good, he promises? And Will - good boy, sweet man, desperately willing to please because he is lonely the way that Molly is - obligingly opens his mouth?
—
Molly sips noisily from her travel mug, adding three rows to her reports for the month, listening to the keyboard loudly punctuate with the space bar. The tables populate with formulas and placeholders. Twenty-eight days of February light up with empty cells, awaiting numbers from the production manager and sales team.
She resolves to give them a couple hours to figure it out. She can entertain herself.
Molly’s got different problems to work on right now.
She opens two browser tabs on her work computer, making sure that they cover the entirety of the spreadsheet, and reads tabloids and psychiatric journal article headers for a couple of hours while she waits. One keyword, hundreds of pages exploding onto her screen: Hannibal Lecter, cursor blinking behind it, asking if she really wants to proceed.
She mostly just reads the headers and summaries - Molly doesn’t pretend that she knows anyone directly involved beyond Will, or the academic language related to the field, just that the tabloids and published journals share a lot of the same subject, sometimes the subject bothering to be the author by means of dictation.
Hannibal Lecter is guilty of murder. Hannibal Lecter is insane. Hannibal Lecter is of sound mind. Hannibal Lecter himself thinks that all of the articles are missing the je ne sais quoi of what it means to be either of the prior two things, and philosophically suggests modern humanity doesn’t have a punishment suitable to his liking, which also sounds insane, or that he’s a self-important asshole.
Molly takes another noisy sip of her coffee, nose wrinkling at the bitter taste.
“Not looking into a second career, are you?” asks one of the foremen when he comes in to scan some copies for a safety training meeting tomorrow morning - an unfortunate necessity following a degloving accident. “You’d make a miserable shrink - you’re too nice.”
The smell of the toner and hot printer paper relaxes Molly the way the coffee normally does. “God, I couldn’t,” she says with a snort, grabbing the warm copies from the tray, tapping them against her desk until they are a tidy square in her hands. “Imagine having to start all over again, or with people like that.”
—
Will plays fetch with the big dogs and Wally after Molly comes home from their counselor’s appointment for the week. This works for Molly - Will looks like he could use some time outside, and Wally’s been counseled to find things to do with Will that don’t remind him of his father so that they can build a relationship, and the dogs always need something to hunt down.
She suggests it because when she asks Will what he did all day before that, he says something to the effect of the same thing he did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. He does this in the kind of tone that suggested it was the same as her going to the office, or Wally going to school, and that it’s a monotonous progression of normal weekdays, instead of looking vacantly out the windows into the tall trees between finding things wrong with the cabin, or the surrounding property, or how the internet tried to define him today as opposed to last month in new unflattering terms and he tried to not let him bother him.
“Sounds like Maine’s not that different from Virginia,” she hums, stacking grocery bags on the counter. “You even kept the same schedule.”
“More moose, better fishing” Will replies cheekily. “Probably a more environmentally proportionate number of deer in your front yard than mine to scare you when you go out to the carport.”
“Ours,” Molly corrects him with a little noisy kiss to the cheek. The counselor has counseled Molly herself to think in terms of communal property with her intimate partner instead of the one that she was previously intimate with, and that it’s healthy to reframe spaces to include change instead of just holding them. Less yours or mine, they say serenely over the smell of a lavender diffuser, and ugly overstuffed beige couches.
Molly shakes a box of macaroni towards Will’s face, deflecting from the feeling that digs up. It lessens with each noisy rattle. Watching Will’s eyes crinkle at the corners in benign amusement instead of anxiousness almost makes her happy.
“Hope you’re in the habit of chasing the deer away from the house, or they’re going to eat all of our damn roses again. Then you’ll have me to be scared of,” she warns him, and sends both him and Wally out with carrot sticks to give the dogs.
She reorganizes the cabinets with the dry goods - leaves it while the macaroni water boils - changes it back. It’s a bit too much to take on so late on a weeknight. She’ll make time when she doesn’t need to be thinking about what’s for dinner this week.
—
They’re not the type to argue, but they’re both the type to drink and poke at things that they’ve had on their mind.
Molly generally excuses this in herself, and tries to extend that grace to Will. She’s had to watch one person she thought she would live forever with die slowly. Will’s had to watch several of them die fast. Sometimes as a bonus, he’s had to think he might too, if article reports of his previous illness and gutting are as bad as they sound.
She thinks the last few weeks merit alcohol, like drunken bickering is something that can be earned by overthinking and suffering the consequences of it.
“Do you think you’d ever go back into the force?” she asks, already tipsy.
Will sees the shape of the question - probably pointed on both ends - but doesn’t hesitate to reply.
“No.”
Molly scrunches her nose, reaching for the half-drank bottle of red wine between the two of them on the sofa table. It is of no particular domain or variety beyond that - scarlet in a pair of cheap glasses that have different wineries etched onto their sides.
“Really?” she asks, pouring herself a little extra. It must be nice to feel things so decisively, she thinks. To be receptive to permanent change.
“No chance whatsoever,” she skeptically says into the bottom of her glass, before watching him.
Will shrugs, lips already a little purple-stained.
“I have been told that it’s not good for me,” he says, “not to speak of how miserable getting a referral contact or letter of recommendation would be with my history.”
Molly nods, humming in amusement. “Very important stuff, having all the documents to pass the recruitment software filters. Screens out all of the people who can’t read the instructions. Sometimes if I’m unlucky, the ones that can, too.”
“Or screens out the ones that can’t imagine working for a place insufferable enough to require a letter of recommendation on top of submitting a cover letter, resume, and personality test, like those convert in any way to competency.”
“Myers Briggs and enneagrams are kind of like astrology for corporate middle management, yeah,” Molly hums. “I’m probably an ENFJ Taurus in an Enthuasiast Moon Rising - take from that what you will - but I’m going to defend the cover letter if nothing else as a show of professionalism.”
Will sours a little at that word. Molly feels the shift in him - how his arms stiffen, how he swirls the wine in his hand to pretend that they didn’t and everything’s fine.
“Call me an Investigative Aquarius Descendant with a history of failing to choose between thinking and feeling,” he snorts. “But sorry, based on your criteria, I don’t think we’d be working together…I’m pretty sure I can’t name three contacts that would recommend me in a professional capacity that wouldn’t be deliberately lying about my competency, obstructionary paperwork or otherwise.”
Molly smacks her lips, sucking wine between her teeth to avoid saying anything.
She knows the broad strokes of this story. She’s revisited it a couple times just in the last week between all the Tattle Crime articles and internet forums. Beneath the buzz of the drinking, she feels the simmering of impatience that Will won’t just say who he means. Curiosity too - it’s the closest he’s come to mentioning the whole ugly business in any sort of detail since his first time warning her about his past.
“I think most people just put whoever they trust to say nice things about them, no matter what they work in” Molly speaks into her glass, watching the wine ripple. “Doesn’t really do much to filter out people who are going to crush a car with a log accidentally. Larry’s best friend Ted is hardly going to tell me about how they stacked and tied ladders as teenagers to windsail a tree for a couple hundred bucks, only that he has experience.”
Will’s mouth thins. “If you get away with it, it’s a wild success, and if you get caught, it’s a regrettable mistake that you’ll never do again.”
“Scout’s honor, God as his witness, cross Larry’s heart, hope to die,” says Molly, toasting the room with her glass in one hand, the other officiously pressed to her chest. “Sorry about the company insurance policy, Ted just wants what’s best for Larry.”
Will closes his eyes, his head thrown against the back of the couch, toasting the room with Molly without looking. “Scout’s honor,” he repeats, annunciated with scorn.
They clink glasses and drain them. They fill them again. There’s plenty still left to fill with, so Molly doesn’t think much about if they should or not. Two of the dogs jump from the floor to crowd between them on the couch, narrow heads burrowing to rest in the creases between cushions and warm legs.
Will rests a hand on the splotchy orange and white of the shepherd dog’s head, fingernails rasping the fur there. Molly pulls a curly haired terrier into her lap. Somewhere upstairs, Wally’s video game controller clicks, television muffled from far away. The shepherd dog sighs, eyes closing beneath wispy white eyelashes, Will’s hand clasping moon-shaped around the curve of his head.
“You ever think Ted just really doesn’t like Larry?” he asks.
“Nah,” says Molly. “Unfortunately Ted just really thinks Larry is never going to mess up enough to drop something. He’s going to learn on the job and be great. They’re going to tell each other about it while watching the game next week and recommend each other’s company to everyone they know that asks until the moment that everything changes - but you know that because you know some Larrys and Teds around Moosehead.”
“I know some Teds in DC too,” Will huffs, pulling one of the ears beneath his hands tenderly. “And I know some people that take advantage of Jacks that want to see it all go wrong. They recommend calamities to keep the bar talk interesting.”
“Those aren’t normal people, baby.”
“Those are my people though.”
“People being Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter? Or just the latter?”
It’s out of her mouth before she’s really thought about if she wants it out. Too much time wasted at work reading his name, pretending that she hasn’t, maybe. Tired of waiting for him to volunteer. It feels a little worse knowing she’s the one who keeps volunteering him to talk about it.
The fun of drinking dissipates slightly under the pressure of the question like the last time in their bed. Molly swallows, and scratches the short white curls of the terrier in her lap. She reminds herself that direct is best - another outburst will be healthy, taking steam out of an overheated engine. She holds her breath, heartbeat thick through the skin around her neck and ears. She wonders if Will is going to go mute and unreadable again.
Will swallows and shrugs, gently pulling at the shepherd’s muzzle, black lips stretching to uncover teeth and tongue. The alcohol-ruddy skin of his cheeks redden further. He forces his face to relax.
“Hannibal Lecter is in the business of people succeeding,” Will says tightly. “Contrary to popular opinion, to a very particular standard and outcome. Any failure is just collateral damage. He’ll happily recommend you afterwards if he likes you, tree dropped on a passing car and all.”
“Sounds like a real hardass instructor I had once from the state. Glass half full kind of guy, but big fan of pointing out unintended consequences between the margins with the grading pen. A for effort, but now your whole team got crushed by an unstable hillside so F for efficacy.”
Will’s face doesn’t get any less red despite his best efforts, though he does laugh in a choked way - through his mouth, like he’s out of breath, or holding it.
“Are we really going to talk about this?” he asks. “Him? Or just my tendency to show up on the equivalent of a workplace incident report as a regrettable hire?”
“Seems like it’s what’s on your mind, handsome,” says Molly, a little too fast like her mouth knew it wouldn’t make it out if it didn’t run.
She drops her eyes to the coffee table. Will’s meet them, somewhere - probably over the condensation ring warped copy of the local newspaper, doing a compare and contrast of a school district levy beneath a photo of the high school library. A restaurant is opening on the west side of the main drag. A red light is being considered for a junction between two county roads following a t-bone collision two months ago. They can read more statements from the family on page 4.
Will puts his drink down to clasp his own hands and lean forward. He pops a thumb absently. He chews the inside of his lip. Molly hopes he is thinking about the levy instead of her.
“I’m sorry,” Will says. “We were having a nice night in.”
“I thought we were,” Molly replies. “We still could.”
“It’s my fault.”
“It’s not. If you can’t complain about work to your spouse, I don’t know who you complain to.”
She sips at her glass, head still halfway between the newspaper, webpage tabs, and half of the bottle of wine that she’s already drank. To the left, she imagines her First Husband on the couch, close enough to touch, but politely listening - a mixture of hospital gown and the sweats he liked wearing at home.
To the right above the dogs, she imagines doubt as a mugshot, clipped neatly from a paper - she’s seen it in a few older articles, the subject waving officiously at courtroom news reporters, but the pride in the face standing in front of the height chart is memorable enough to erase the rest.
To your therapist, it says. You complain to your therapist.
The sediment pours out into both their glasses when she goes to top them off again. Yeast, nitrates, grape solids. Unlike First Husband, who would shy away from something he doesn’t recognize amongst the twenty or so things he liked, Will downs it easily - hardly the worst thing he’s put into his mouth. He still doesn’t answer, the split of the corners of his lips dark from the drinks, or maybe just from cracking.
First Husband sits thin and watery, a memory that is losing detail, fiddling with the cuffs of a hospital robe like he is cold. Doubt keeps smiling, the mugshot pinned to the couch she picked out with her parents after her first honeymoon the way the receipt had been. Something for other people to keep track of.
—
Molly turns up the heater on the way to the bedroom that night, and listens to Will lick at the mouth split from time to time. She knows he means to apologize again, and keeps losing his nerve, as men trying to apologize for something they don’t entirely understand often do.
She holds Will’s hand, rubbing the rise of the veins across it, and hopes this tells him he doesn’t need to. That he makes her life run the right way, and she’ll figure out how to do the same for him.
But the hand lays inert beneath her attention. She pictures the wine sediment slowly settling again in the bottom of their stomachs, and that the air of their bedroom will be dark, quiet, and clear as long as neither moves to contradict it.
—
Molly sees a picture of Hannibal Lecter’s business card somewhere in her searching online. It sits as a little solemn square next to his attractive Johns Hopkins headshot, and comes with a list of accepted provider insurance, patient feedback, and areas of interest because Psychotherapy by itself doesn’t quite net the specific variety of people he’d like to meet.
She laughs a little when she sees them, because she doesn’t quite expect to see Personality Disorders and Grief Counseling sitting right next to each other, tagged as Most Relevant by an assortment of “verified reviewers”, only that they are.
The profile is frozen, as politely mentioned by an administrator asking people to stop leaving fake reviews, because how could it not be, but the real patient feedback isn’t even very old - just a couple of years since the last one, and so very flattering.
Doctor Lecter is as attentive as he is capable, says one Anna H. without a profile picture. I thought I would never recover from the loss of my mother to an abusive household, but a few years of patience, mindful practice, and light-hearted conversation to break up the thick misery of it all made me functional again.
Molly supposes it would be strange to put a profile picture on a review of a psychiatrist. Without one, it feels like Anna H. could be an unremarkable socialite, or one of the dozen or so serial killers that Doctor Lecter has made a habit of advertising to and delivering therapy amongst - Christ making loaves and fish for his disciples to share. Maybe mindful practice is euphemistically doing some heavy lifting. Maybe the mindful practice is converting grief into the aforementioned personality disorders.
There are others - twenty or so. The perverse desire to read through them like ratings on a local restaurant knocks from behind her eyelids, but Molly makes it a point to close the browser window. Wally’s coming into the den. Will’s sullenly crunching along in the gravel outside. She can’t think about grief outside of the appointed hours of her own counseling session, or it starts to look like that thick misery that Anna H. is functioning in spite of.
—
Will goes for long walks for the following week, seven dogs dancing beneath as he goes.
This is a part of him that Molly has come to understand is entirely his, completely divorced of her, First Husband, the FBI and accompanying media circus, or Hannibal Lecter who seems to have found a way into everything else. The dogs they have love Will guilelessly, and Will cares for them in exchange for that, and no one can rob him or them of their authenticity.
Molly doesn’t try to compete. All married couples should have some things that belong to only one of them, not just complaints. She feeds the dogs, combs them, calls them sweet, keeps them from running too far ahead alongside Will. She suggests getting more. She fantasizes about adopting the entire county’s worth of strays, and them both really starting over the way they say they want to.
It doesn’t bother Molly that they haven’t yet. She doesn’t need to comfort herself with anything, fantasies or not. She has Wally, who was her baby before Will was a thought, and more important than even her belated First Husband once her son became a reality. She is grateful for Will’s help in modeling patience, persistence, and stoicism to him in his father’s absence - but Wally is hers, and Will respects it, and if he ever doesn’t, then Will can be a gone but not forgotten partner too.
It’s never felt like the right time to ask what else was just his - not just in the bedroom, or what his appetites are - if there was once a Wally that he didn’t want to talk about, or a belated First Husband of his own that he didn’t want to remember, only that it felt crass to ask about with all the terrible things that happened before they met still fresh on Will’s mind.
It still feels crass to ask. It feels like he might disappear into the woods if she doesn’t, all seven dogs and the blank look he wears all the time now with him.
It never struck her that some aspect of those terrible things might be what he missed until the moment she let the thought knock on her door, and that she needs to know what it is for his sake as much as hers and her son’s.
—
Molly watches old clips from society events on her lunch break from the front seat of the car. She spills the iceberg lettuce of her chopped Italian sandwich over the console as she does this, feeling very sloppy next to video of the Baltimore Opera’s board of directors awarding outstanding members for their contributions for the year. She feels stupid for watching it at all. She doesn’t think she’s even seen an opera that wasn’t a Looney Tunes episode, much less thought of the kind of people generously sponsoring real ones.
“You flatter me terribly,” says Hannibal Lecter in an attractive bottle-blue suit with tails. “All that I have done is show up and enjoy myself while others do the work. Shall we have a round of applause for the company instead?”
The deflection works. Hannibal Lecter makes a good, if shallow impression on his fellow man once more. His affect is so handsome but textureless from here, designed in a lab to please and entertain. Molly, who has never seen Will not immediately peg someone as a liar if he felt they were trying to bullshit him, doesn’t understand how he and all the rest of the fellow men could have been so taken in.
She watches another five or so videos, hidden in their millions of views, looking for things that someone would miss enough to be bereft of them, and comes back to the office empty handed. There must be something she’s missing that can’t be seen - some of that je ne sais quoi to go hand in hand with his empty pleasantries and emptier glances.
—
“I’m sorry if my head’s been somewhere else lately,” he says, driving them home from Bangor on a Sunday evening.
It’s a tradition predating even First Husband that Molly shares with her parents - a scheduled supply restock conducted once a month, followed by lobster rolls from the food truck near to the hospital. The lobster rolls are timeless. The proximity to the hospital to allow Will an opportunity to visit a neurologist and make sure he’s not about to start speaking in tongues and hallucinating again is new.
“You were in a MRI machine for the whole second half of the day,” Molly says, patting Will’s shoulder from the passenger’s side. “I’d be amazed if you could think of anything other than worrying about if you still have bullet shrapnel in your shoulder.”
“Metal free, for at least another month,” Will huffs. “Let’s hope the neighbor continues to not duck hunt so close to the house, or I can’t promise the same results.”
“And deprive Buster of his chance to become a mighty retriever in his old age?”
“The duck’s the same size as him, and he’s missing half of his teeth - I don’t think he’s retrieving anything other than me from the shoreline to retrieve him.”
Molly nods, smiling. “He looks good for his age,” she insists. “Smart. A little stubborn. Hates new people, but we can work on that.”
Will sighs - lowers his shoulders from their tensed heights. He deconstructs whatever defense he was prepared to play, and becomes easy, playful, sweet.
“Careful, or I’m going to think you’re talking about me,” he says, eyes shining in the oncoming headlights.
It’s not him, not really anyway. Not Will Graham, but Second Husband who is also First Husband, with his mouth so pleasingly soft that Molly hasn’t let it bother her when she can see him pulling on the costume the way he has on and off all day. He smells like Old Spice and lobster sandwich. He pushes the cart in the bulk wholesale store, is friendly with the cashiers, tells her she looks nice today with the sun in her hair. He makes grief look so easy to put in a box when she knows it’s not.
“Nothing wrong with getting older,” Molly says. She grabs his hand to kiss the back of it, grateful but sorry. She’s not as good at pretending as him - she’s beginning to realize few people are. “We’ve just got to keep your head on straight…maybe get you a little more acquainted with the people on our street,” she laughs.
She could be better. She should be.
She could find what essential thing he’s missing, the same way that he picks up and dusts off another man’s personality every time she comes into the room because it makes her feel more like herself. Eventually that would start to feel natural and he would be happy for real, not for her sake. They could both be happy, and someone else, and meet somewhere in the middle as strangers that love each other.
—
She finds only one video of the two of them together - not her and him, but him and him - dozens of cases spread across the better part of a year, and only one that the elusive Doctor Lecter allows himself to be party to in conjunction with the FBI.
Molly thinks it’s accidental that he’s in it. Mostly because of the way his eyes lock onto Will, being escorted home from his office after Tobias Budge is found bludgeoned to death. Everyone - not just men - hate being filmed with all their thoughts on their face. No matter Hannibal Lecter’s daily flat affect, this two seconds of television clouds nothing of the dark, admiring shine of his excitement.
They’re sneaking along in the background, Director Crawford answering questions for the evening news with the same self-satisfied assuredness of someone hammering a commemorative plaque into place. The outcome is absolute. There are regrettable deaths. This will all be forgotten by the time the next madman starts running loose - Will’s next workplace incident report, one after another, until he is the incident. Will knows Teds, as they both said - this one is certainly his.
“I’m fortunate to work with people smarter than myself,” says Director Crawford in a tinny, artefacted voice from her phone speaker. “It’s a full time job keeping up, but it’s a privilege few are afforded to have.”
Lecter’s eyes glint as he steps down from the sulphur yellow of the brick stoop - a stately devil leaving a comfortable corner of hell. Will doesn’t see them, too busy curling three shy fingers around the doctor’s shoulder to help balance him, the familiar long run of fingertip to thumbnail delicately wrinkling the suit jacket. The camera crew cuts to the news desk, where it is reported that Doctor Lecter alongside the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra plan to host a fundraiser in the fallen officers’ honor, and that charitable contributions to their families are welcome through the police department’s public outreach office.
Molly pans back to Will’s hand, again and again. She imagines it beneath her breast, or under her fingers, or ushering her into a car. She imagines through it that she has touched Hannibal Lecter’s suit from across the span of the evening news, and that he would have been disgusted by it more than she is.
“Some of the best men and women I know,” says Director Crawford, muffled by where her pinky finger covers the speakers.
—
“Hey hotshot,” she says, taking his hand from beneath the blanket, room dark.
“Want me to take you dancing?” he says, muffled from his head turned the wrong way, scarred hand trailing habitually from trim hip to full belly to perky nipple. He sounds far away. His palm feels the same.
Molly tells herself that she doesn’t care, and rolls beneath him the way she likes.
—
The mill sends Molly once a year to a construction and materials summit - not because they have any intention of upgrading the office’s software, or innovating a trade as old as agriculture, but because it gets them an attendee list for the sales team. Molly historically accepts, not one to decline a coveted chance to travel on the business account’s dime.
Not lately, since - well - everything.
But historically.
“You haven’t in a long time,” says the mill manager. “Thought maybe you’d like to get out of town - let the boys have a weekend together.”
She knows he means it kindly. He envisions some ideal where she loosens her hair and drinks at all the women’s mixers, and that she won’t be going to sleep early in a mid-tier hotel along a convention center’s mediocre offerings. Will and Wally will stay on their respective sides of the house, her absence a temporary embarrassment that they must share. She will preplan three-quarters of their meals, supposing the occasional run to town or trip to the docks.
She knows the mill manager will be embarrassed if she points any of this out, that the peace of their relationship hinges on a mutual assumption of his well-intentionedness, and instead grabs the mail-in registration from his hands. Molly Foster-Graham isn’t empathetic to the point of disorder like Will, but as she always says, she knows men.
Despite her best efforts, she laughs when she reads the registration. Her throat tightens. She can’t decide if it’s charmingly ironic, or the start to a bad movie.
“Baltimore?” Will asks, holding the pamphlet that evening. “In May?”
“You could go with me,” says Molly. He won’t, but she wants to ask to let him know that he has the option. “Take advantage of that sweet, sweet per diem - maybe visit the aquarium next door while someone tells me about laser precision felling heads that the mill president would rather be ripped to shreds by than take out a loan to purchase.”
Will hums with a good natured tight smile that doesn’t match the intense press of his fingers into the paper between them. The fingernails whiten.
“I do like Old Bay seasoning,” he says, “but no. Let me know when they want to send you to Key West, or somewhere logical like Atlanta or Vancouver.”
“Big logging industry, Key West.”
“Massive,” Will rasps, eyes rolling, and lets the registration land on the kitchen counter with a too casual hand. “Maybe just as large as Baltimore’s. Can’t they just send you to Vegas or Houston like every other tax write-off disguised as capital investment and continuing education?”
“That was 1999 and 2011 respectively. We have to send everyone to whatever convention center is dying for a large industry event that year, but that we’ve never been to before so that we can call ourselves nationally recognized businesses.”
“Then enjoy your blue crabs, self-congratulatory state flags, and Edgar Allen Poe puns.”
Molly snorts. “I’ll say hello to everyone on your behalf between giving the Babe Ruth statue a visit and overpaying for convention hall food, shall I?”
She kindly ignores whatever Will’s face does after that.
—
He’s not ok with it - he doesn’t say as much, because First Husband is-was-would-be supportive of the summit trips no matter the location, and Will Graham is hardly going to allow himself the honesty of not wanting Molly to go when all appearances suggest that he should be pleased for her.
Baltimore is just a city. Maryland is just a state. The townhouse that belongs to Hannibal Lecter is locked and unmemorable next to the Hackerman House down the street, or Peabody Institute just a few blocks away and shouldn’t be the least bit interesting to her. The Federal District Courthouse that last showed polaroids of crime scenes, open gut wounds, and decoratively festooned human hamhocks is across the downtown boulevard from where the mulchers, rippers, and grapples are for sale, and that means nothing to Molly Foster other than a slightly busier lunch rush mid-week when the employees come out for breaks.
Molly waits a few days, hoping he’ll admit to it.
Tonight, she sinks into the bathtub to the shoulders. The hot water dampens the hair around her neck enough to make it itch. She wonders if it would be good for him to have to say it out loud.
I’d appreciate it if you didn’t casually order a hotel bar margarita across from the judicial building that I’ve been a defendant and witness in, he’d say when they go to bed. I pretend to be many things, but being untraumatized isn’t one of them.
Of course, Molly would reply, one strap of her camisole falling just so from her shoulder. You are a real person with real experiences that I respect. I have not considered for even a second of our marriage that you are grieving an unrealized relationship with your on and off again therapist that left you with two scars I’m not allowed to touch in the light of day, but am holding space for the possibility.
They would kiss softly. He would push the other strap of her top down. They would stare into each other’s faces and bring their bodies together the way that they don’t always bring their full minds. Missionary and fish fry on Sundays.
“Coffee?” he asks in the morning, as though he didn’t lay flat on the bed staring at the ceiling until sleep ambushed him and forced him into tomorrow. Whatever hesitation Molly could see in him is gone - packaged up, or dead the second his eyes closed in the night.
“Yes please,” says Molly, writing a list of things she’d like to get done before it’s time to leave for work, and again in a few weeks.
She pictures his hesitation stuffed under the bed like a body, coming together with her doubt, and feels guilty for unintentionally asking him to put it there. She sees the mugshot from the paper on its face. She pictures Will’s. Neither fits better than the other, but neither doesn’t belong.
—
“So a whole week in Baltimore,” says Will at the dinner table that evening, fingers unusually tight on his knife and fork over his plate.
Molly thinks he is attempting to extend an olive branch by bringing it up first with no Wally there to see his discomfort. Maybe by understanding how she intends to spend her time like normal people do, he will see that other than an unfortunate series of statistics through the nineties and some of his personal outliers, it is entirely uninteresting and not something to feel uncomfortable about at all.
“Even less than that,” she smiles over a bite of her own. “Five days of actual time with feet on the ground. God forbid I might actually catch a game or go buy a cannoli over in Little Italy.”
“Vaccaro’s is decent,” he says half-heartedly.
“Is that an opinion, I hear?” she asks. “Having a change of heart? Maybe want to show your old lady the town after all?”
“I said decent, not travel-worthy,” Will frowns.
He turns mashed potatoes with his fork. He piles them to either side the same way he piles snow from the driveway, cut with fork tines. He has done so for the past several minutes, as though raking a rock garden.
Molly doesn’t take it personally. “Then where should I go instead, baby?” she says with a scrunched nose, laughing as he turns his fork piles. “I have five days to figure it out, and you’re the resident know-it-all.”
“For a travel-worthy cannoli? Probably Boston, but it’s not like I’m the local authority on Sicilian food.”
“You’ve been though - to Sicily. Palermo, right? You’ve been a lot of places.”
“Yeah, I guess I have.”
“And you didn’t eat anything the entire time you were there?”
“No, I guess I didn’t.”
They both take bites of tonight’s entree. This vexes Will, chewing with a harsh mouth, the answer more insubstantial the longer it lingers between them. He flattens his snowfield of potatoes, and takes a bite of that instead of the entree, like seeing it so wholly disturbed reminds him he was meant to eat it.
“It’s not like I was there to eat cannoli,” he shrugs. “Maybe I should have. Or maybe it’s like the adage that the best Chinese food is the one that’s closest to home and we should all just get on board with the bagel place in Bangor that refuses to stop putting the candied cherry in the marscapone, and I didn’t miss anything.”
“See, you have an opinion - it’s just not helpful.”
“Typically true. We can put it on my curriculum vitae between the masters’ thesis and the monographs. ‘Well traveled and full of unhelpful opinions.’”
“You know, Will,” says Molly, beginning to feel her smile thinning, “for someone as well traveled and studied as you, you sure aren’t too curious about places to visit.”
“I wasn’t a tourist, and I generally wasn’t feeding myself.”
Molly’s fork scrapes a little loudly on her plate when she goes for another bite. She tries not to think about who would have fed Will instead. She spends a lot of time recently not thinking about that. She instead envisions diners, drive-throughs, sterile little book shops at airports with white bread sandwiches with too little filling to match.
She’s made pork loin tonight - the kind that comes premarinated, festively seasoned in the bag and promising to be remarkably easy to cook. It cuts in tidy medallions that can be distributed the same as casino chips, or chocolate coins. Stacked and quickly consumed, or buried under paper packet brown gravy. She’s made it because Will doesn’t feed anybody if he hasn’t fished, like it doesn’t strike him to need to eat to begin with if he hasn’t caught, cleaned, and festively seasoned the meat himself.
Molly could ask him to do more, she thinks. She could. He’s good at cooking when he wants to be.
But First Husband didn’t cook at all, and Will knows that, and she’s ashamed to not want him to.
“Fine then,” she says, “Crab cakes for me, and whatever’s close by for you.”
She wonders if she could make a cannoli.
She doesn’t wonder where Will would go for one instead.
—
Molly is watching the evening news video again, chin half-submerged in bathwater, door fully closed and inclined to squeak at the first sign of intrusion. It’s not likely that there will be any - Will hasn’t touched her in a week since she announced her trip - but it’s nice to know she’ll have a warning if there was one.
The video is paused on the two of them again - him and him. She thinks about Will’s shy fingers, chapped skin catching on the blazer’s merino twill. She watches them crumple the fabric, the same rough hands that make her feel smooth and soft in the dark.
She is envious of it.
Her cheeks warm at the idea of them touching her the same way, like he doesn’t - that he hasn’t - if his hesitancy would make the contact sweeter for its rarity - its realness. From the first frame where they step out of the townhouse office stoop in Baltimore, Will Graham isn’t pretending to be anything other than gentle and vaguely hesitant that he could be rejected. Hannibal Lecter isn’t pretending he is anything other than starving for Will’s vulnerability, striking and ungentle as the yellow brick.
Jack Crawford praises them all for the reporter. Will’s thumb smoothes the fold of the fabric at the elbow, same as he has done to her lip, her sensitive tits, her hipbone, her slit.
Molly blushes, struck by the heat of the water and the aftershock of arousal that comes with it.
From the artefacted screen of the video viewer, Hannibal Lecter’s eyes blaze black into Channel 11’s field camera’s lens for the briefest of seconds when he looks its way, and stares at her across the years.
—
She looks at the bedroom ceiling for a long time that night, watching Will’s chest rise and fall - his forehead furrowed, the skin of his shoulder puckered from a bullet wound, the flesh of his abdomen smiling where Hannibal Lecter cut it open.
Did he finger its damp edge before letting Will fall to his kitchen floor? Three careful fingers, plucking at the weft and weave of the abdominal wall?
Did Will, the way Molly might touch herself in the bathroom, sweating in the water, or hesitantly like she’s seen him do to the crook of an elbow he is shyly taking in the shape of?
Molly rubs Will’s stomach in the dark carefully. She does it with no cameras there to see if she does it right, or looks at him darkly. Will doesn’t wake, save to sigh into his pillow, eyelids twitching, maybe no longer afraid of being gutted again. Maybe relieved at the idea that it still could.
She spends an hour comparing the scar tissue to her stretch marks. She’s been split before too - ripped at a seam to let something out. She rubs at her own Caesarian stripe, dead across the center of her abdomen beneath the navel, and thinks that maybe Will just doesn’t feel much of anything at all when the scars heal up, like hers.
Molly pulls the sheets over the both of them and tucks it at their hips, like they are cold and sick - terminal. What gets you going, baby, she thinks, palm wide on the scar, as close as she can get without waking him up.
—
Him and him, she had called them, afraid to put them together in a sentence.
—
Hundreds of minutes in archival footage, web articles, scholarly papers, and publicly released disposition and trial transcripts tell Molly that she doesn’t know Hannibal Lecter, and that until she does, she might not be able to really know Will Graham.
She’s not really had a reason to pursue it before - same as Charles Manson, or Barry Goldwater, or Queen Elizabeth, or Johnny Carson. People from before her time, and only made relevant by passing conversation. Trivia questions. Talking point with other folks. They affect no change on her life that she can meaningfully track. Rural Maine is a long ways away, and Molly Foster is a small town accountant and mother, and never shall they all meet.
Hannibal Lecter’s mugshot stares out from her office computer again, much as it has in recent weeks when she has not imagined it beneath her bed, or on her honeymoon couch.
“There are no men like him,” says the Federal District Attorney when asked how they would seek to punish Lecter. “There is no precedent to the number of crimes that he has committed across a dozen different categories of felony-level violations locally and internationally, and until the truth of the matter is settled in a court of law, it’s hard to even conceive of a punishment that would do the people of Maryland and the United States justice.”
The audience clamors tinnily from the video. They want death penalties. They want electric chairs, the way kids want fireworks on the Fourth of July, that it is expected, precedence or not.
Separately, to Freddie Lounds, and a select few reporters allowed admission to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, he is photographed in his prison orange. His wrists are tethered to the visitation room table, taking occasional pleased bites of a winter tangerine that has been peeled and safely segmented. His teeth are very white, glistening alongside a plush bottom lip. They are snaggled, and sharp, and inescapably there.
“Justice is a flavor that changes with the times,” says Hannibal Lecter without a trace of nerves, mouth quirked. “My tastes are simply of a more timeless, savage kind.”
Will gives the dogs animal bones and deer antlers sometimes, saying that it keeps their teeth clean. Molly thinks about how many Hannibal Lecter has chewed to flash so many pearly smiles, if he breaks them apart to get at the grainy marrow or just eventually eats them whole.
—
“I’m sorry,” says Will on a Sunday evening.
They are drinking again, though in a more reserved capacity than their last evening in. Molly has used most of the white wine already for a serviceable pan of pasta with clams, only occasionally punctuated by sand in the shellfish. There’s not enough for more than a few overly honest comments, which is about all that Molly or Will could stand after a whole week of butting heads.
“For not cleaning the clams for me?” she asks. “Apology accepted,” she smiles and sighs, patting his knee. “I’ve learned my lesson and won’t ask to do it ever again, nor will I try making something new from a Facebook post.”
Linguine alle vongole, the description had called it, and she had watched the thirty second clip of it being made over and over again, thinking it looked within her scope, that maybe it would be remembered fondly and pronounced exactly in the future if she watched enough times.
Will shakes his head, though he does huff out a laugh.
“I could teach you how to clean them, you know,” he says. “But I mean for not being more supportive of your work. You don’t really ask for much from me.”
Molly thinks about disagreeing - that she asks everything from him, and him little from her.
“It’s ok, Will,” Molly says, scrolling on her phone, checking her punctuation on an email. “I’ll go make some wood jokes with the equipment guys, run up a room service tab, and go see the sights - all five of them. And when that’s all done, I’ll come home and we can compare notes.”
Will smiles wryly. “I’m sure the Star Spangled Banner House will thrill you between scenic views of the neighboring Hard Rock Cafe and aquarium.”
“See, you already know what I’m doing,” says Molly, and taps the send button. It has to go tonight, while the white wine is still cold, and Will’s melancholy smile looks like it belongs to him. Before she loses her nerve.
—
“You flatter me terribly,” says Hannibal Lecter in the attractive bottle-blue suit with the tails again over a curl of steam from the bath, her phone propped against the taps and close to muted. “All that I have done is show up and enjoy myself while others do the work.”