Chapter Text
The first time Richie met her, it had been a coincidence. The weather was bright and breezy in Chicago, and he was sick of the renovations, and sick of Carmy. If he didn’t get out of the gutted bones of Mikey’s place, Richie would have drowned from all the memories. He was still pissed at Syd for putting her hand through Fenway, even though he knew it was an accident. Richie was bitter alone.
“Yo, you got a light?”
His voice was muffled as he held his cigarette between his lips, and the woman looked up from her book in surprise. Sitting on a patio chair outside of the coffee place, she rested her cigarette in the ashtray next to her drink and put down her book.
“Sure thing. Give me a sec.” The woman rooted around in her handbag, and laughed hollowly. “Honestly, I only just put it back in here. I seem to just haemorrhage lighters. Ah. Here you go.”
“Thanks.” Richie lit his cigarette and handed the lighter back to her, smiling a little. “It, uh. It matches your hair.”
The woman touched her powder pink hair in slight surprise, and smiled. It was a small, sweet smile, and it made Richie’s stomach flip. An alien feeling. He cleared his throat self-consciously, scratching his nose with his thumbnail.
“I’m going to have to dye it a more professional colour, so I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. You can sit down, you know. I’m only reading.”
Richie pulled a seat out and set his coffee on the little patio table, sighing as he shuffled himself into a more comfortable position, feet stretched out in front of him as he fidgeted with his box of cigarettes. He didn’t care if it got in the way of any pedestrians. They could walk around him, he didn’t give a fuck.
“What book is that?”
The woman looked at him and then the cover as if she had forgotten what she was reading. She smiled, looking embarrassed.
“It’s going to sound pretentious.”
“Try me.”
“Crime and Punishment.”
“Dostoyevsky? Some Russian dude.”
“Yes!” She brightened. “You’ve read it?”
“Nah. I like science fiction shit.” He took a deep puff of his cigarette and exhaled slowly before sipping his americano. She folded a page of her book and set it down in her lap, fidgeting with her cigarette.
“You ever read Dune? I don’t really like science fiction. It’s not my favourite genre, but I liked that one.”
Richie shook his head with a slight smile in remembrance.
“I started it. I think. Back when I was a teenager. Never finished it.”
“Because teenage stuff got in the way?” She laughed, exhaling smoke, and it pained Richie how right she was, in all her innocence. He had started reading it, right around the time he and Mikey discovered drink, drugs, and girls. And the rest was history. “You should try it again, sometime. Just don’t bother with any of the sequels, they get a bit… esoteric.”
They paused for a moment, looking at their drinks on the table. Richie cleared his throat. Sparrows pecked at abandoned pastry crumbs on the sidewalk and they watched them bicker and squabble.
“I’m Richie, by the way.”
“I’m Dawn.”
She reached across the table, and he stared at her hand for a split second before he shook it like he was out of practice.
“Where are you from, anyway? You sound like you’re two things at once.”
It sounded accusatory, but his bluntness made Dawn grin, and she shifted in her seat, recrossing her legs as she took a coy drag of her cigarette.
“That’s because I am. My dad’s a Brit, my mom’s a Yank. I’m what you call a military brat.”
Richie made a little noise of disbelief and continued playing with his cigarette pack in his lap, shaking his head.
“You and me both.”
He lifted his drink as if toasting, and she did the same. They shared a brief, conspiratorial look as they sipped their drinks. Dawn stubbed out the last of her cigarette.
“So where are you at now? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Hotel up the road. I just moved from London.” She took a deep breath. “I’m looking for a job, I have housing lined up. It’s… groovy.”
There was a sudden, minute shift in Dawn’s expression as she smiled a brittle smile. A fragment of something familiar to Richie was visible for just a moment in her eyes before she looked down, and lit a second cigarette. She was running a fingernail through the edge of the pages in her book, as if to distract herself. Dawn sighed and shook her head.
“Sorry, I’m getting lost in thought. Family drama.”
“You and me both ,” Richie echoed, drinking the last of his americano, and she smiled sadly. He checked his phone and swore under his breath when he saw the messages from Fak. The gritty feeling of irritation and helplessness pulsed through him as he remembered what he would be returning to. “I, uh. I gotta go. Back to the daily grind.”
“Back at The Berf?” Dawn asked, eyes sincere. The shock of her saying those words felt like being doused in ice water. Richie looked down at his t-shirt the same way she had checked the title of her book, and laughed awkwardly.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“It was nice talking to you,” Dawn said softly as he slid his phone in his pocket and drained the last drops of coffee out of his cup. She smiled and Richie smiled back woodenly and sniffed, trying to reconcile his mulishness with the simplicity of the situation at hand. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and tried again to smile like a normal person.
“Same. See you around, sweetheart.”
On his walk back to The Beef, or whatever was left of it when he got there, Richie thought about Dawn and her pink hair. He tried to slow his pace so that Fak would be forced to wait up for him, but something about the simplicity of the conversation buoyed him. She was a stranger in a strange land. He wasn’t going to bump into her again, and if they did she wouldn’t remember him. Yet he held onto that soft sweet smile as he reached the door to the gutted restaurant, and took a deep, steadying sigh before he strolled in.