Chapter Text
Amanda opens the front door to hear yelling coming from the kitchen. Yelling, and banging and what sounds like something or someone getting thumped around.
She’s still on high alert after the fight at the house even though that was weeks ago now, but even as she’s dropping her laptop and running towards the noise, she’s already registering the lack of damage along the way, that nothing actually sounds broken, and that the only voices she can hear yelling are Daniel, Sam and Anthony.
So maybe it’s just those LaRusso genes flexing their Italian roots – it seems to be food-based, anyway, she realises, taking in the scene unnoticed among all the shouting and gesticulating.
Her husband and children are yelling at each other, the refrigerator doors are wide open, and half the contents are scattered over the kitchen counters, like it’s just exploded incredibly neatly from the inside.
And as soon as she thinks the words, incredibly neat explosion, she realises, oh right. This is Daniel. Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t intruders or a karate attack or a genuine household emergency: it’s Daniel, losing his shit at the kids about the proper way to store chicken and broccoli being not underneath soda – a fair point, being made with totally unnecessary force.
Such unnecessary force, you’ve got to wonder if it’s not a substitute for something else.
Or rather, maybe someone else would have to wonder, but Amanda doesn’t. She’s been married to Daniel for 20 years now – she knows perfectly well. She also knows exactly what the chilled food evisceration is a substitute for, because in all those 20 years she’s never known Daniel lie to her or keep a secret. When something’s going on, he tells her, and on Sunday night, in the tone of voice another person might use to inform you your dog was dead or your car was a write-off, he’d said:
“I think Johnny tried to kiss me last night, right before we passed out.”
“Really,” she’d said, surprised, for sure, but since that sentence didn’t sound like it was ending, and I’m leaving you, the kids and our business for him, mostly intrigued rather than mad.
“Yeah,” he’d sighed, and sank down on the couch next to her, everything about him radiating despair like this was the worst day of his entire life.
“He’s that bad a kisser?”
“Amanda!”
“What, Daniel? You want me to be mad?”
“Aren’t you?”
She pauses to consider this. Why isn’t she mad? If it had been someone else, would she be mad? Women are always into Daniel, laughing at his jokes and putting their hands on his arm, and he’s always nice back. He loves when people like him, but he’s never come home and told her one of them tried to kiss him. Not that women wouldn’t try it – she’s sure they would, if Daniel ever gave them the slightest opportunity, but she’s seen him dodge those opportunities without seeming to realise he’s doing it, a shield of oblivion keeping him safe. Or maybe that’s not quite fair: if he was the sort of man who wanted to have an affair, he’d cotton on pretty quick, but since he doesn’t – well, the easiest way to decline an unspoken invitation is by making sure you never notice it in the first place. Every woman knows that, and apparently so does Daniel.
It’s hard to imagine him getting jumped by one of the glossy blondes at the club, but yeah, she thinks she probably would be mad if they made it through his defences and tried it. Some hot young yoga instructor looking for a meal ticket, or a jaded wife wanting to use Daniel for a bit of fun? Yeah, she’d have been spitting mad.
But Johnny Lawrence – that guy’s different, somehow. Daniel’s high school bully, defeated opponent, lifelong rival, his name a LaRusso family legend thanks to the number of times Daniel told those stories about ‘84; spectre haunting the Valley, still up in Daniel’s face after 35 years, provoking him, making him laugh, staring at him across sports arenas, dance floors and dinner tables: this is not the same as Daniel’s other admirers. For a start, Amanda actually really likes him, and she gets the feeling it’s mutual.
So with the information she currently has, she’s not mad, no.
“Ok. I’m mad if you didn’t want him to and he did it anyway, for sure. But that’s not how you sounded.”
He looks worried. “How did I sound?”
“Mmm…like you’ve reached the existential dread phase of the hangover?”
He glumly concedes that one. “Oh yeah, I still wanna die but now I’m afraid I’m not gonna.”
“So, what happened?” she presses. Normally Daniel doesn’t need any encouragement to tell a story, but apparently this one requires more gentle handling.
“I don’t really remember. It just came back to me when we went to get the car, I left it last night ‘cause I was too drunk to drive - ”
“Good decision.”
Daniel’s staring straight in front of him, like he’s trying to bring back memories the alcohol killed. “I remember we were on the beach, and I think we fell over, and he – he just planted one on me.”
“So what did you do? How did you react?”
“I, uh -” he pulls one of his most expressively New Jersey faces, shrugs with his whole body. He looks utterly miserable. “I can’t – I really don’t remember.”
“Oh babe, that’s too bad. You’ve been obsessed with this guy since high school, and when the sexual tension finally breaks you can’t even remember it?”
He leaps to his feet, his face a picture of outrage.
“I have not been obsessed with Johnny Lawrence since high school! How could you even say that? And, and - if anything it would be the other way around, a bunch of people last night were saying he used to be obsessed with me – and anyway there wasn’t any sexual tension! Me, with Johnny Lawrence? That asshole who started all of this by bringing back Cobra Kai in the first place? Do me a favour.”
She holds up her hands to count her points off on her fingers. “Yes, that incredibly hot asshole,” (one finger) “Who’s obsessed with you,” (two fingers), “Shares an intense…karate bond with you - ” (three fingers), “And knows how to push all your buttons?” (four fingers). ”Yeah, there kinda is.”
He gapes at her, incredulous. He’s so shell shocked he can’t even form words for a second, so Amanda presses her advantage.
“Babe, you spent all day cuddled up on the couch with him, and everything you ever say to each other is like, a come-on wrapped in an insult! Like the fight-dancing in that Jumanji movie Anthony loved, only yours is fight-flirting – if anything, I’m relieved one of you finally manned up and tried something other than violence.”
“You let me start teaching karate with him when you think I’m flirting with him?”
She lets her face and her exaggerated shrug say, ya got me there!
“Honey, I honestly – I don’t know where everyone is getting this from – even if I had thought about him it was probably only once or twice and that really isn’t the same as - ”
He’s pacing, gesticulating, words tripping over each other – textbook protesting too much. She stands up too, takes him by the shoulders and makes him look at her.
“Ok, ok, ok, Daniel – Daniel? Just breathe: fine, you’re not flirting with him! I’m not accusing you of anything. At the end of the day it’s just one drunken kiss! If you say there’s nothing except a high school rivalry between the two of you, then my bad, I’m just – misinterpreting this. He was drunk off his ass and so were you, maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”
His whole body seems to slump. He looks away from her. “Yeah, maybe. He’s probably just messing with me.”
Again with the dead dog voice. You’d think he was used to Johnny messing with him – the opportunities he gave him, you’d also think he kind of liked it.
“Maybe he is. What did he say in the morning?”
“Nothing. I only remembered later, maybe he doesn’t remember at all.” Now he sounds like he’s got a terminal illness as well as a dead dog. “He was way drunker than me, he couldn’t even remember his address, how’s he gonna remember a like, two second kiss?”
Sure, thinks Amanda. If I’d just kissed someone I’d been hot for for 30 years I might forget my address too, if I thought they’d take me home with them. Maybe not deliberately, but the drunken mind has surprising flashes of insight that the sober mind can only dream of. At least, in her experience.
“So are you gonna talk to him about it?”
“Talk to him? You think I can just go up to Johnny for an emotionally mature conversation about whether he remembers kissing me and what he meant?”
“How many things can it mean when someone kisses you? I mean, what are the options there anyway?”
“I mean, if he did it to mess with me! Like, if he thinks the same as you, that I’m – into him or something, so he was fucking with me."
Ok, not totally impossible, but it doesn’t seem likely. Just the two of them, late at night on the beach after they chose to hang out all evening? Fine, Amanda isn’t an overgrown high school jock-slash-former bully, and she can’t claim special insight into how they think, but it doesn’t sound like the set up to a prank to her: it’d take a crueller, much more calculating person than Johnny to start playing mind games like that. Drunk you does what sober you wants to do but doesn’t dare, it’s as simple as that.
She shakes her head.
“No, because when he’s fucking with you he jumps on stage at Valley Fest, or draws a dick on your face – which I’m now looking at in a totally different light…”
Daniel groans and buries his face in his hands. “He probably doesn’t even remember. He didn’t act like he remembered today.”
“No? If I’d made a move last night and then you brought me home, lent me clothes and made me breakfast - ”
“- you made him breakfast, not me.”
“ – snuggling you on the couch all afternoon is exactly how I’d act too.”
“For god’s – we were not snuggling! He just went to sleep on me, so then I couldn’t let him think I was some kind of – I don’t know, human pillow he could just lean on, so I had to do it back.”
“Oh, so you were messing with him?”
“No! You know I wouldn’t do that, I just – couldn’t let him think I was his little bitch or something!”
Amanda takes a deep breath and draws on all her reserves of patience. She puts her arms around Daniel’s waist, tilts her head until he’s forced to look at her.
“Daniel? Babe, if you didn’t bring it up and he didn’t bring it up, this sounds like something you can totally ignore if you want to. Just, ask yourself if it bothers you this much because you think he’s messing with you, or because you’re afraid he isn’t, ok?”
And Daniel just shakes his head like he can’t decide which of those options is worse.
She pulls him a little closer, whispers: “Well, for what it’s worth, I think it’s kinda hot.”
The tiniest, lopsided smile comes out then.
“It’s worth a lot,” he said, breathing her in and burying his face in her neck.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about it after that, all the ways it might have happened. If Daniel can’t remember, then she’s free to imagine it, right?
Maybe Daniel was too surprised or too drunk to react, but then again maybe he wasn’t. Perhaps he sighed and gave it all up, pliant and willing in Johnny’s arms like he is in hers. Maybe Johnny got in a quick grope, up his shirt or down his pants, as they tussled on the sand. And if this is her fantasy, there’s no need to adapt it to reality: maybe they both got hard rather than passing out a minute later. Maybe they made out on the beach for hours, hot and heavy and putting their hands all over each other, getting each other off like they’ve wanted to for years.
Daniel says there’s no sexual tension, but the way he watches Johnny says something different.
Well, he’s nice to watch, Amanda can admit that. She watches him too; watches the two of them together, and there’s definitely a spark of something in the air that seems way too intense for just an old high school rivalry.
She can’t stop thinking about it over dinner, either. Miguel stays to eat with them, and it’s only because Daniel’s hangover has left him physically and emotionally fragile that she doesn’t try to grill the kid about his Sensei’s intentions. She could totally have found a subtle way to ask if he’d ever said anything about sleeping with guys, but it would send Daniel into a meltdown.
Johnny tried to kiss me, he said, like it was all one-sided. Not that she wants her husband to be making the first move with a hot blonde without her, but the more she thinks about it the more she’s sure that he wouldn’t just lie back and let Johnny call the shots. He’ll let her, he loves letting her, but with Johnny he’s always jostling, always pushing, asserting himself in a way he doesn’t feel the need to do with anybody else.
If that kiss lasted more than a second, Daniel would have taken charge. Pushed back, set the pace and ended up on top. Isn’t that what Johnny’s looking for from him? Half the Valley knows it was Daniel who beat Johnny, and yet Daniel’s the guy he seeks out even after all these years? He probably tells himself he wants to even the score, but one night of heavy drinking was enough to cast serious doubt on that line of defence.
God, imagine if she’d been there – not in real life, when it would never have happened – but in fantasy, when she’d have been right next to them watching everything, and Johnny would’ve said, hey, you mind if I – and Amanda would have told him, sure, be my guest, but you’re gonna have to let Daniel drive, you know that, right?
“Mrs LaRusso? Can I take your plate?” Miguel asks, and she snaps back to her dinner table, to Sam and her boyfriend scoring points by clearing the table, Daniel heavy-eyed but indulgent, and Anthony –
Miguel stumbles, drops the plate with a crash.
“Anthony! I saw that! Miguel, don’t worry about it – a broken plate doesn’t matter, but you tripping up guests in this house is a very big deal, young man – Sam, Miguel, why don’t you guys sit down, Anthony’s gonna clear up for us tonight, isn’t that right?”
Kitchen cleaned up by Anthony after her dire threats of Nintendo removal are backed up by his father, Miguel dropped home by Sam with what Daniel calculates is only a 10 minute makeout delay – and he should know, he claims, having been dropped home in Reseda by an Encino girl a time or two when he was Miguel and Sam’s age – both kids not necessarily asleep but safely ensconced in their bedrooms and highly unlikely to want anything from their parents:
“Someone needs to put you to bed too,” she tells Daniel, and even in his weakened state he looks up at her with a gleam in his eye and follows her upstairs.
She watches him in the mirror while he brushes his teeth. She’s slipped into a silky nightie with lace over her tits that’s just decent enough to be sleepwear rather than merely a sex aide, but she trusts Daniel to get the point.
He does. He straightens from where he’s leaning against the sink, lets her see how appreciatively he’s watching her.
She loves this about Daniel, that even after 20 years together he’s so gratifyingly responsive to her, like he’s the luckiest man alive to get to see Amanda’s 45 year-old, had-two-kids body in a negligee. He ducks close over the sink so he doesn’t kill the mood spitting out toothpaste, even though she’s seen him spit out toothpaste thousands of times.
Amanda talks to a lot of married women her age and she knows what she’s got here. She keeps discreetly quiet when the usual complaints start a couple of drinks in, about monthly appointments in the shared calendar to remember to have sex, about men who get off and fall asleep, who can’t get it up or at least not at home so you start to wonder if someone else is skimming the cream, but you don’t ask because it’s not like you wanted it anyway.
And then there’s Amanda who does want it – from Daniel, specifically – and she gets it too. They’re overwhelmingly compatible, no need to put sex in the LaRusso’s shared calendar (see: conceiving an unplanned second child on the dojo floor; how would you even schedule for that? Happy accident, Saturday 3pm?) and definitely no rolling over and falling asleep from Daniel, who still makes an effort to charm her even with a toothbrush in his mouth and half dead from alcohol poisoning. Sometimes she teases him that the cuddling afterwards is his favourite part.
No wandering eye or hands for her to pretend not to notice; she’s rock solid sure of him, down to her bones and marrow. So sure that when he says someone made a play for him, she can think, yeah, I don’t blame Johnny Lawrence for wanting some of what I’ve got. If he really wants it, I might even say yes.
Daniel shuts off the faucet and puts his toothbrush down. Gives her his best big brown eyes smile in the mirror and turns to her.
She walks him backwards into bed, and he’s half-smiling at her with that little challenge in his eye like he’s going to let her do exactly what she wants with him.
So she does.
When he’s under her, gasping and desperate, she leans down and whispers, “If you don’t remember it, I wanna be there when you get a do-over from Johnny.”
Daniel throws his head back on the pillow and comes with a groan.
But what turns him on in bed isn’t something he’s necessarily handling well in the cold light of day.
Sunday night was one thing, but today is Thursday and he’s been at the dojo with Johnny, hasn’t even changed out of his workout clothes. Right now, he appears to be working through…whatever it is he needs to work through (not sexual tension with Johnny, fine, sure, Amanda will believe him if that’s what he says!) by getting angry about capers, and the contents of the fridge and the kids are collateral damage.
He doesn’t even hear her come in.
“And why are there capers here with the yoghurt? Sam? Would you ever look for the capers next to the yoghurt?” he continues, back still turned.
“I guess I’d just look…till I found them?” hazards Sam, obviously not sure what’s wanted of her but not interested in escalating whatever’s going on here any further than it’s already escalated.
“Capers are disgusting,” declares Anthony. “Why would I be looking for them?”
Sam does hear Amanda come in. She meets her mother’s eye and shoots a significant look at her father’s back. Sure, teenagers make you feel old, but it’s so nice having an ally in the house when Daniel gets like this – an ally who loves him, but who knows how annoying he can get when something’s bothering him.
Daniel’s almost disappeared inside the fridge in his sudden commitment to restoring order. (Obvious, much?)
“Hey babe,” she calls over the sound of condiments being violently re-arranged. “Why are we mad at the refrigerator?”
He startles, spins with a jar of pickles in his hand. “This was in the vegetable drawer!”
But now she can see his face, she really doesn’t care where they store the damn pickles: his left eye is swollen and red, a vivid bruise already forming on his cheekbone.
“Oh my god Daniel, what happened to your face?” she gasps, and then kicks herself for not keeping the alarm out of her voice.
“Oh, this? This is nothing, I’m fine, bit of ice and it’ll hardly show – ha ha, you should see Johnny!”
Of course: Johnny Lawrence happened to his face, everything makes sense now. She doesn’t look away from Daniel but she can feel Sam’s eyes on her, drawing her own conclusions.
Amanda sighs. “Your childhood karate rival also having a black eye isn’t the trump card you think it is.”
“His nose was gushing blood,” says Anthony with relish. “It went everywhere!”
“How do you know that?”
“Dad picked me up but then we went back to the dojo.”
“So now Anthony’s joining the karate war too?”
The three of them deny this at once. Anthony scornfully, like he’d ever join an activity with his sister and his father; Sam sounding like she wants to reassure her, which Amanda appreciates, and Daniel like it would be fine if their 12 year old was joining a karate war, but he happens not to be.
“No, honey, of course not – it was just so we could finish training – hey, I’m surprised you even noticed the blood, you barely looked up from your game the whole time,” he complains, like Anthony’s video games are the problem here.
“I heard his nose crunch when you kicked him in the face. So I looked up, and there was blood all over him. It was amazing.”
“Oh c’mon, it was hardly all over - ”
Amanda interrupts: “You kicked him in the face? Aren’t you supposed to be on the same side now?”
That little hope bit of hope she’d been nurturing that the fighting would stop now they’d decided to team up finally gives up. This is just what she’ll have to contend with: Daniel in the dealership with a black eye, scaring away the customers, Johnny with a broken nose, and no mature conversation about where to go next after beach makeouts in sight. Everything they have to say to each other, they can apparently say through karate.
“We are! I was showing him crane technique,” Daniel explains. “He’s not mad, don’t worry – and his nose didn’t crunch, Anthony, he’s fine! It was just a little nosebleed, Johnny’s face is just as hard as his head.”
“That’s good to hear, but he also doesn’t have a day job which requires him to make a good impression on the public in order to sell cars, Daniel!”
He deflates a little. “Oh. Yeah. You’re right, I didn’t think of that. But listen, the only reason I had to start doing this - ” he gestures at the open refrigerator, the food piled up around it “- is because I was looking for the ice pack, it’ll go right down with ice on it, and I couldn’t find it, because it’s, it’s, it’s chaos in here! Look!”
He holds out the pickles. Exhibit A in Daniel LaRusso’s defence: a jar of pickles, your honour.
“They were in the vegetable drawer! And the cans of soda were crushing everything else, we got weeks’ worth of leftovers that no one ate so we just have to throw them out - ”
“Ok, honey? Why don’t you be a working-class hero and just grab a bag of peas for your eye, and we can worry about our food waste problem later, ok? Let’s go, time to put everything back – Sam, pass dad the chicken, Anthony, get all that cheese…”
She follows Daniel into the bathroom when he goes to take a shower. Not to yell at him where the kids won’t hear, although she was tempted for a minute. Sometimes he wants her to lay into him, put him straight and snap him out of himself, but not tonight. He’s wound too tight.
“Everything ok at the dojo today? Apart from, you know, the black eye and crunching Johnny’s nose?”
“Neither of those was intentional, ok?” he says, pulling off his sweatshirt and throwing in in the hamper. “So yeah, everything was fine. Nothing to worry about.”
He glances at her before pulling his t shirt over his head and stepping out of his sweatpants, and first she’s distracted by his messy hair which is cute, ok, he won’t listen but it is – and then she sees the bruises all down his side.
“Oh my god Daniel, look at you! Did you have those last night?”
“Those what? Oh, these, uh, yeah, these are -” he twists, peers at himself clinically in the mirror. “They’re two day bruises, I guess I must’ve.”
How had she missed it yesterday? Oh – yeah, Daniel had slid into bed next to her with a t shirt on, and then he’d slid down the bed and down on her so it’s not like she was paying attention to any bruises he might have had then, and when she took him into her mouth in turn he was so desperate, so ready for it – and afterwards he’d cuddled up behind her, on his side, pulling their bodies close. She’d fallen asleep like that with Daniel’s breath soft on the back of her neck. She never saw the bruises and she never felt him wince because he put his arms around her but she never put her arms around him.
Was that deliberate? No, it can’t have been, he’s just pulled his clothes off in front of her in the well-it bathroom – Jesus, Amanda, he’s not keeping secrets! This is Daniel, he can drive her crazy but he can’t keep his mouth shut to save his life. He’s not hiding anything because he doesn’t have anything to hide.
He’s running his hand over the bruises, watching his reflection with a little frown, but Amanda turns to look at the real him not the mirror him. Comes close and reaches out, brushing her own fingers over the marks. Daniel goes very still and so she presses down, just a suggestion of pressure, and –
“Ah,” Daniel hisses.
He doesn’t make a move to stop her though. For a moment he’s not looking in the mirror any more, he’s looking at her.
“Johnny gave you these, huh?” she asks, flattening her whole hand against the warm skin of his ribs. Gently, this time, like she’d soothe one of the children. (Still. Even though they’re so big now.)
He snorts. “Well, yeah, none of the kids are good enough to get me like this. I wasn’t kidding though, you should see Johnny, he’s got this huge bruise, right here -” he indicates his chest, just below the heart.
“Oh, he showed you, did he?”
Daniel plays dumb, pulls a face like, I don’t get it, what’s weird about the guy who kissed me on Saturday taking his shirt off to show me how I’ve marked him up today?
Oh, nothing’s weird about that, honey! You’ve only talked about him for as long as I’ve known you and now you’re both pretending you don’t remember what happened on the beach in favour of beating the shit out of each other but, like, consensually? What is this, Fight Club?
She shakes her head sadly.
"There has got to be a less painful way to resolve this.”
“Resolve what?” asks Daniel, stepping away from his battered reflection to turn the water on. “We’re cool, it’s fine. I think he forgot about Saturday anyway.”
“Suuuuuuure. Right.”
“What, you want me to kick the hornets’ nest and remind him? I don’t think that’s a very good idea, honey.”
And with that attempt at passing for a responsible adult, he kicks off his underwear and steps into the shower, effectively ending the conversation. Which is something Daniel can rarely be accused of.
Under the water, the bruises on his body look more like hickeys. Wouldn’t that give Johnny a thrill, if he could see it?