Chapter Text
His mother has threatened to get remarried several times, and each time it comes with the same tired wash of dread-like resignation that Roman is so sick of playing off as flippancy. When she left, Roman thought it might be because she had another family she liked more, or she’d decided that she wanted to try again to make a new one, like when you’re in kindergarten and you fucked up in pottery class so badly that it’s easier to lump the bits of clay back together and start over. Caroline didn’t leave Logan for another man, or another set of children, she just left because she didn’t like him anymore. She couldn’t bear the heat of it, Roman always thought, shifting away into a climate more temperate and predictable. He could endure more than his mother could.
He isn’t sure why he should have to endure her wedding, though, especially in this heat. And it goes on for ages. He gets bored of cockblocking Greg, bored of tormenting Kendall, bored of guessing what his father is thinking and accepting he’s probably wrong, bored of probing the weeping wound of Gerri rooming with Laurie. He drinks a lot and sits in the sun, feels the heat, burns with it.
He must applaud Gerri’s commitment to the cause. There’s no way she’s actually getting her kicks from that old badger, when Roman saw him tie his sweater around his waist earlier, and move from red wine to white and back to red again. He’s reading Sapiens for fuck’s sake. Either he has a pneumatic dick, or Gerri is lying back and thinking of Logan Roy.
Her attention has been waning, and so Roman has been sending her pictures of his cock. It started off as a drunken joke; the outline of it in his boxers when she’d been texting him about rising bonds packages. Not the only thing rising. Ha. He thought it was passably funny considering how much tequila he’d had. Mostly it was because he’d tried initiating another conference call copulation, but she wasn’t biting. In fact she was so cool to him he kept checking his legs for assless chaps.
He knew he was testing it, but the water felt great and the sun was shining on him for once and so he kept sending them. Unflattering photos that could be jokes, could be Google searches, but then the Pavlovian response would kick in and high-contrast, blurry photos of him flaccid turned into well-lit, flattering angles of him hard. She never responded to any of them. Not ever. Not even with a thumbs down emoji, or the vomiting one.
And he’s a tiny bit humiliated when she has to confront him in person - no paper trail, smart move, Elle Woods - and he gets the delightful experience of reconciling the pictures he’s taken with the face he’s been sending them to. It’s wrong that it doesn’t feel wrong. It feels good, if anything. The rightful order of things: Roman being given something potentially great and pissing it away for the chance of an orgasm. If he wanted to be taken seriously, he’s fucked it now. Oh well. No way back but the business. That’s why it’s easy to come to the company’s aid when they pack into a mercifully air-conditioned meeting room. The see-saw of pride and shame gives him whiplash, but also makes his tummy tingle, and so he sends her another, riding high, a glittering, golden, hollow statue he’s about to take a mallet to.
The aftermath is…yeah. No, it’s bad. He doesn’t remember much afterwards. It takes him a few weeks to remember what his father said. He also called Roman a ‘sicko’ when he was eight, and the maid found him wearing one of Shiv’s dresses. He didn’t tell his father that Shiv and Kendall put him in it. He just looked at the floor and popped himself out of the back of his head like a pill from a blister packet.
He thinks if he were braver, he’d throw himself over the front of the speedboat and let himself be dragged through the propellers. Maybe that makes Kendall brave. That thought alone is enough to dissuade him. Afterwards, he wants to find his mother, but then comes quickly to his senses. He follows his dad instead, close at heel like something desperately trying to make up for time spent away.
He wonders if the problem is that he isn’t good at having things. The getting is the interesting bit, and the throbbing thrill of victory, specifically victory over the vultures he’s related to, is what pushes Roman Roy to get out of bed in the morning, to eat and breathe and shit and smile. Then comes the having. That’s harder. He doesn’t know how to wrap his hands around something valuable hard enough so that he doesn’t drop it, but not so hard that it shatters. His fingers look bloody and tattered now. It’s almost nice, knowing that the ax has fallen. It loosens the tension in his shoulders to be plummeting off the drop he knew was coming at the top of the rollercoaster. It’s almost worth fucking himself over so that he doesn’t have to wait with this acid in his stomach for a second longer.
So when his father and his mother - united on a front for the first time in decades - take everything away from him, he might even be a little bit grateful. I belong on the floor here, begging. Gerri slides the knife in but doesn’t twist it. He takes it from her grip using his own body. Maybe now I can gather it up again . The best bit of building a house of cards is blowing it down, after all.
It doesn’t mean he isn’t furious. The fury of all three of them combined is something fiber-optic. They slink off to lick each other’s wounds and make plans for the future, a future that, for the first time, looks like it might actually exist outside of Waystar. He thinks about the treehouse that Kendall used to bar him and Shiv from, and the one time he let them in after being scolded particularly brutally. Roman remembers them crouched together in the dark around a wind-up lantern, shivering and scared, grinning at each other. He remembers thinking that if the breeze picked up and knocked the tree down, their father would have to pick their crushed bodies out of the rubble. He might not be able to tell right away which limb belonged to which child.
After they’ve strategized themselves off the ledge and into armchairs, Roman’s still twitchy in a way the others aren’t.
“What about Tom?” Kendall asks, hot and woozy.
Shiv’s face is set like a sculpture. “He’s not my concern right now.”
Roman smirks. If Shiv kicks Tom out of bed for this, it might almost be worth it. But Kendall’s question makes him think of Gerri, and the fury comes back so efficiently and inconveniently. How can I use this anger effectively? How does this anger serve my interests? Perhaps this anger would like a three-course meal, I’m more than happy to provide.
Laurie is gone. Roman wonders when that happened.
They’ll be gone soon, too. Fleeing with their tails between their legs. LA, probably. Roman would like to not be in New York for a while.
When he lets himself into Gerri’s room, she’s packing her suitcase.
“Still room on the lifeboat for you, huh?” He says. When she looks at him her face flickers like changing slides in an old projector: surprise, fury, something like shame, something like pity, and then settling nice and comfortably into ambivalence.
“A conversation now isn’t wise, Roman.”
“I thought you might like the opportunity to apologize.”
There’s a beat where she emphatically zips her suitcase shut, and then she stares incredulously over her shoulder at him.
“Me apologize?!”
Roman shrugs, lets the glare sit on his face, surly and shut, and then ambles around the edges of her room, touching the empty glass on the dresser, the mirror tilted towards the window, the Italian books left unread, used only for decoration, stacked along the shelf. He wonders what the walls have heard, wonders if he should envy them.
“Yeah, it was a bold move, you know, hitching yourself so convincingly to my wagon only to tailgate my dear old Dad the second the lights change?”
“I warned you, Roman,” she hisses, and she sounds actually angry and Pavlov’s fucking dick pipes up again as it always does at the worst times, “I told you to find another outlet. And now we’re up against it. You’ve humiliated me and yourself. You got everything that’s coming to you.”
“You just shanked me in front of the hungriest fucking sharks in the Atalntic, Gerri, I thought we were fucking allies.” He still can’t really bear to look at her, and so he picks up some stupid brass sculpture from one of the shelves and drops it back down heavily enough to make an appropriately ugly clanging sound.
“We could have been, if you had just listened to me and kept your penis to yourself.”
And it’s so funny, really, that his dick might be his downfall. Never powerful enough when I need it to be but it’s certainly got potency now. The thought makes him want to laugh, giddy and disgusted with himself, drunk on his own repulsiveness. That, and the fact that Gerri just said “penis” . Ha. The little Roman free-falling through his head hits the ground, splattered against concrete with his ass in the air. He does actually giggle. Gerri’s face darkens like an approaching hurricane.
“Of course you think this is funny,” she says, low and quiet, fucking deadly.
“What I think is funny is how it’s all sunshine and rainbows, keeping me as your little chew toy, until my dad waves some cash at you and you hang me out to fucking dry.” He stops pacing, forces his fingers to stop twitching by putting his hands on his hips, and looks at her across the room. He wants to punt her over the balcony. He wants to drop to his knees and bury his face in her skirt.
“You threw me into the lion enclosure, Roman,” she says, voice tight now, “You left me stranded with a portfolio of pictures of your genitals, and you can run back into your family wealth no matter what you do, but I am old news with a dead husband and an incredibly precarious position at the narrow apex of this company. The suggestion , no, just the fucking idea that I might somehow be involved with you will ruin me, and so of course I cut our ties. Publically. Where everyone can see. You made that necessary.”
Gerri rarely gets angry like this. Her face is pink and her eyes flash behind her glasses. It’s like Broadway in his head; bright lights beaming the words “You fucked it!” over and over.
“And now you’ve robbed me of my inheritance. Some compensation, I’m sure. Put me down like Old Yeller, mistress, it’s the kindest thing to do really.”
She’s leaning against the bureau behind her and at first glance it looks like she’s stabilizing herself, like the great hulking presence of Roman Roy has her cornered, but no, Roman can see the white of her knuckles on the edge of the wood. She’s restraining herself. Roman wonders what he’d have to do to get her to hit him.
“You should leave,” she says, her face all set and stony, and Roman hates her, he realizes. He hates her and it bubbles fresh and sweet up through his trachea. “I’m leaving,” she adds. It sounds final in her quiet, certain voice.
Roman nods, because he should, and he will. This is over.
This. It.
He gets his hand on the doorknob before swinging his body back around to face her. He can’t resist one more touch of the burner, despite the blisters.
“Was this ever real?”
Gerri doesn’t even frown. “What?”
“Was this…” he gestures between them, “Did this ever mean anything to you other than a stepladder to the throne? Or chopping block. Or, you know, whatever.”
Gerri swallows. He watches her swallow.
“There is no this,” she says, soft like the words aren’t ice all the way through, and then she keeps speaking, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There’s the concrete. Oh boy.
Dragged out to sea, the only course of action he can think of to rescue himself is to take five and a half strides across the room to her, put his hands on her face and plant one on her like they’re in those stupid fetid wank-fest Merchant Ivory movies that his mother used to watch when she was hungover.
The slap doesn’t come. She jerks her face away from his after a cruelly short fraction of time and glares at him incredulously. He doesn’t move back or give her even an inch more space, but she doesn’t physically force him to do so, so he’s taking that as a win.
“Roman- ” She hisses, a bit breathless from the shock, eyes wide. She smells like sunscreen and gin up close. Her face is soft under his filthy fingertips.
There’s this tension in his chest like a rope fastened at either side, pulled so taut he’s almost buckling in on himself, and the way she freezes on the spot makes him wonder if she has one too. It’s painful . He wants to lean into it to give it some slack. He does. She moves her head away again but nowhere near far enough. He drinks in her breathing like they could be some fucked-up simbiotic lifeforms that subsist on a constant loop of inhale-exhale, dependent only on each other, growing twisted together. He knocks his nose against hers and thinks about her holding Shiv over the font at her baptism, promising to guard and guide her through life, to step in should her parents falter. He thinks about her spitting cruelty down the phone at him and ignoring him in the office. He thinks about Logan looking at her with disgust because, despite the marriage to his old friend and the daughters and the youth he must have watched fade from her, despite covering up a sex scandal by letting an ex-DOJ slobber all over her, it clearly blows his mind that Gerri could be fuckable. That people might want to fuck her as she is, now. That his youngest son might want to. It wasn’t a possibility. This was never a possibility.
And can Roman blame Gerri, then, for going along with that narrative? She has all the plausible deniability in the world. She humored Roman for his insight and his name, and then put distance between them when Roman pushed and whined for more attention. But it’s ok, it isn’t serious, it was never going to be serious, because Gerri is serious. And sensible and in her sixties. And Roman is notoriously fucked up, a pervert with a broken dick who is just kidding , just looking for a reaction, just doing what would piss his father off most, what would disgust his siblings most. It was never going to happen. It was a joke. Of course it was just a joke. Not real. Is this what empathy feels like?
He kisses her again, slower, and this time she sort of lets him. He’s got a whole Thanksgiving Day parade stomping through his bloodstream now, screaming and chanting and pounding the pavement. She doesn’t move much but that’s ok, he’s insistent. He presses her back against the bureau and tilts her head further and kisses her mouth open like he has any idea what he’s doing, like this is something he does regularly, willingly, happily. This is a new experience for him: wanting someone in his mouth. Normally it’s off-putting, all the texture and moisture and whatever. He’d be so fucking lucky with Gerri, though. He’d sort of like to suck on her. On any bit of her she’d allow. Like a fucking piglet. She grabs at his collar, slow but tight, and he thinks she’s going to throttle him but she just hangs on there instead, hovering on the cusp of deniability. Her mouth is slack and warm and he seeks out her tongue, pulling her bottom lip between his teeth, and the rope in his chest tightens even further, and then tears. The release brings with it a flood of pain - white hot and perfect like the hate - and he catches a noise in the back of his throat as the tension snaps and suddenly it’s all real, yes, fuck. I’m kissing Gerri. Haha, what the fuck. Jesus fucking Christ. The parade stops, sliced off abruptly, and for one long, awful, incredible moment, everything is silent. He’s worried he’s gone deaf.
Then she moves her head back again, and this time she is pushing him, her little hand on his chest, forceful. He’s so stunned he doesn’t even want to jam his erection against her. He steps away and stares at her, changed.
You eat me, I eat you.
“Get out,” she says, voice a little hoarse, and he’s more than happy to oblige. He’s small again; a pocket-sized Roy that she will carry around with her whether she wants to or not. He pictures her forgetting, sitting down, crushing him against her office chair.
He flees her room with a sense of loss that doesn’t match the sweat on his palms, the persistent stiffness in his crotch that might have tanked this whole thing in the first place.
--
Roman had a recurring lucid dream somewhere in the tiny space between bed-wetting and wet-dreaming: school age definitely, but he can’t remember which bedroom he dreamt it in. He’d be watching a cactus grow, sped-up like in a nature documentary, excited that his was going to be the biggest the fastest, and there was this strange slanting light coming in through his windows, orange-y and apocalyptic, and he could hear shouting down the hall but couldn’t understand what was being said, couldn’t rip himself away from watching the cactus grow, and eventually it grew too big for its pot, for the windowsill, for the room. He never knew how big it grew because he was always awake and panting before it crushed him against his wardrobe.
The crush, if it was real, might be an appropriate comparison for the loss of a father. He supposes it’s more than a father; a figurehead, a giant, his boss, his prison guard. Roman Roy’s whole fucking world. But it doesn’t feel like being skewered by his own spines of hubris. It feels like what actually happened with the dream instead. It feels like waking up cold, confused, and empty.
There isn’t really time for it, for the huge, hollow pain of it, and that’s good because it means the baby of the family has no time to bawl and brood and instead has to launch a new era of a media conglomerate on the three unsteady legs of him, his brother and his sister. Things move past him. This ghost along the surface. Salt stings. He feels like someone has ice-cream-scooped out all of his insides. He rushes and rushes to fill it.
He’ll fill it with his siblings, then. That will be enough. The Father, the Son and the Holy Shitlick. When they tell Connor, Roman wants to shield his eyes from it. He wants Connor to shield his eyes. He wants him to peer down Roman’s throat, say “ok, buddy, I see it”, and extract the agony out with a pair of tweezers. Instead Roman sits on a private jet, not a word in his head let alone on his lips, and waits for the crush.
The vacuum draws parasites, as it was always going to. Matsson’s smirk doesn’t seem so seductive, now. Roman fucking hates them all. Picking at bones. Sifting through limbs in the wreckage of a treehouse.
Firing Gerri Kellman twice should bring him some relief, and it does. The pain is more localized and more fleeting. More ridiculous. Dad’s last wishes, bozo. Sorry about all this. The regret is good, too. He starts to tally up the things he’s cramming in his empty stomach: guilt, regret, triumph, pills, money, power, adrenaline, oysters, oxygen, schadenfreude. It’s not the same as grief, but it’s something . It’s nearly as dense, put together. If he stitched himself back up and buttoned his blazer, you might not even be able to tell the difference.
He agrees to do the eulogy. He crushes a mouse under his shoe on the street. He jerks off thinking about Gerri’s face crumpling. He doesn’t call his mother. He hugs his siblings. He puts a fascist in the White House.
“See you in the Oval Office, sir,” he says, at the end of a terse phone call that felt like a sparring match but he thinks actually might have been him reassuring Mencken he isn’t going to court.
“I’ll have to house train you first,” he says, sounding the exact flavor of smug-smooth that Roman knows he can so easily be convinced is charisma. I wonder if I got it right this time.
“I just follow orders, Mr President,” Roman says, and it feels good to say it, and it makes a black hole open up in his lower stomach and his dick twitch.
“Good,” Mencken hangs up. Roman wonders if he would actually fuck Roman. If the surface-level flirting is corporate smoke-screening for a genuine desire to pile-drive a Roy into the ground until he’s crying.
He’s at the top, and there’s no one around to tell him to come down, no one to buzz around his ear, no one to push him off.
Except himself, of course. Ha.
He’s there at the start of all three thirds of his father’s funeral, but at the end of only two. The tide of black tar rising behind his eyes fills the emptiness, too, but he’s still not sure it’s grief. He is a tortoise spinning on its shell. He is the runt of the litter shut in the cage. He is one of the most powerful men in America and no one will meet his eye. He is insane, he thinks. He thinks he might actually be about to die. He might be about to choke. Maybe he’s already doing it.
If another person floats around the edge of him, peering at him, poised to ask if he’s alright , he might go for the jugular. He might burst into tears again. He might tank the company with a single word. So he leaves in search of a beating that’s more honest, more straightforward and justified. Cleaner. A beating that feels like a punishment for misbehavior, rather than a random act of forced kindness. He’d like to taste the inside of his own cheek. He’d like maybe to be trampled into nothing. He’d like a strong backhand to the jaw, loving and precise, soothed afterwards with guilt. He’d like every fucking fag-loving libtard in New York City to kick the shit out of him out of pure envy. I’m your God. Come and fucking get me. Kill me if you can.
--
He was hungry a lot, growing up. When he was really young, he ate like a fucking labrador; everything on his plate, even if it made his father glare and his siblings wince. Even if he threw it all up afterwards.
“Growing boy,” Caroline would say, and then, when his appetite outgrew his body, she’d say, “All that richness isn’t good for you,” and take his plate away.
He doesn’t eat much now. Military school was pretty good for quelling the ol’ appetite. It was easy, for a lot of it, to mistake the swooping sensation in his empty stomach for hunger. The yawning thing inside just wanted some food, that’s all.
It’s not elegant to eat too much. It’s not polite to zero in on your food when it comes, instead of continuing conversation. It’s unseemingly to swallow it without chewing properly. You eat like someone’s going to take it away from you.
He likes watching other people eat while he is not. He likes ordering the most expensive thing on the menu and leaving it to grow cold untouched in front of him. He likes watching his father eat. Logan eats like someone’s going to take it away from him, too. In private, of course. He eats like a starving boy from Dundee.
Ate. He ate like a starving boy from Dundee.
--
He makes it to Gerri’s, because he knows where she lives now.
She didn’t tell him. He forced it out of HR. Fucking squeals. He’ll fire the whole department, if they ever let him back in the building.
The front desk rings up to her. It’s three in the morning and he imagines she’s in bed. He loves it when he wakes her up, and she meets him in her pajamas. He loves ruining the precious few hours of sleep she gets.
The call rings out for a long time, and Roman can barely stand, so he slumps against a marble statue of a naked person near the elevator and waits for the Emperor’s decision.
“Roman Roy,” the man on the desk says. There is a long silence. “I think he needs a hospital.”
He puts the phone down and Roman thinks that it might be a relief to have the last bit of hope quashed tonight.
“You can go up.”
The elevator ride to her floor takes years. The walk to her door, centuries. He’s fossilized by the time she answers.
She isn’t in her pajamas. She’s in the high-necked, long-skirted black dress she wore to the funeral. Roman’s throat closes up.
“Jesus Christ.”
He must look bad because she lets him inside. He sits on her couch and stares into space as she brings him a clear tupperware of medical supplies and starts dabbing away at the gash on his eyebrow. He is barely aware of her hands on his face. She says nothing, and so he doesn’t either. He stares at the skyline from her flat and thinks that she doesn’t have as good a view as he’d maybe expect. No wonder she never leaves the office. You can’t even see Central Park from here.
She works on his face with detached diligence that’s honestly fucking applaudable. He blinks at her, struggling to keep his eyes open. The pain is coming, now. Good, grounding pain from his body. The roiling inside is drowned out. He’s tired and hungry, he thinks, and his head is throbbing from a kick or two. If those noodle-dicked high-horse-fucking freaks weren’t so wet and woke, they could have killed me. Wouldn’t that be a victory?
“Breathe,” Gerri says, and it isn’t soothing, but rather an instruction. Roman does as instructed. She leans close, her ear to his mouth, and he gets a lungful of her, and her familiar perfume, and her old lady makeup, and the clean fabric of her new dress, picked out and pressed especially for his father’s funeral.
His breath gets stuck, so he clears his throat and tries again. She doesn’t mention the hiccup.
“Your airways sound ok. No broken ribs. Do you think you might have broken a rib?” She’s speaking like she does to her secretary. He shakes his head, and even that hurts.
“Where did this happen?” She asks, moving to her kitchen island, pouring him a glass of water. He sees a half-drunk martini on the counter beside the tap. Drowning your sorrows on this most momentous day, huh Geraldine?
“Protest,” he says, because he can’t be bothered to obfuscate.
“Well, you certainly got the fight you were looking for,” she says, moving close again, pressing the glass into his hand. He drinks some and it’s the first physical thing he’s put in his body for around twelve hours.
“Fucking pansies. They barely bruised.”
“They bruised plenty,” Gerri says, butterfly-stripping his forehead together, “You’ll need stitches there. You should go to a hospital.”
“Yeah, well, I’m here. So.”
Gerri sighs, and sits next to him on her couch. “I’m sorry,” she says, and Roman closes his eyes. “I’m sorry that this has happened to you kids.”
He swallows hard because that tide of tar is making progress up his throat and he’s worried about what will come out if he opens his mouth.
“I’ll call you a car.”
Roman nods, then shakes his head.
“Can I stay here?”
Gerri’s hands are folded in her lap. She still wears her wedding ring. Or maybe she just put it on for today, because it goes with her other gold jewelry.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you fired me. Twice. And I want nothing more to do with you.”
Roman nods. “Ah. Yeah. Right. That.”
“Yeah, that.” She doesn’t move to call a car immediately. He stares at her hands some more, and only then does the sensation of them on his face catch up with him.
“I fucked it,” he parrots.
“You cried at your father’s funeral.”
“I shouldn't have.”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Personal weakness equates to holes in the hull when you are the business and the business is you.”
“I’m not sure I am, actually,” he says, and he can’t believe he’s saying it, “I don’t think I am actually the business. I don’t think it’s-” he shakes his head again, vision swimming, “I don’t know. I fucked it. Maybe I was never meant to not-fuck it.”
“You’re grieving, Roman. You’re not made of stone, any of you. Some things must be excused.”
“Some things?” He asks, hopeful uptilt about as subtle as a fucking gun.
“Some things,” she clarifies. She looks tired too, peering at him suspiciously through her glasses like he might collapse or explode at any point, and she’s trying to figure out which option would be best for her. She is beautiful, he thinks, in closely-tailored black and with her blown-out hair deflating after the day. Her pretty face, all round blue eyes and button nose, having to be hard and severe despite itself. She is magnificent. He is so sick of trying to topple gods. Whatever was the point?
“Are you going to hurt yourself some more?”
“Why, worried about the market opening in three hours?”
“I should call someone, if that’s a possibility.”
“I don’t know Gerri. Maybe. My dad died. I’m a fucking husk. An empty fucking replica. I’m Walmart Logan, you said so yourself.”
Gerri licks her lips. Most of the color has rubbed away. “You never should have tried to be Logan. None of you.”
“Bit late for this advice, Gerr, are you writing a retrospective?”
Gerri fixes him with a firm look, and for the first time that day, Roman settles on stable ground.
“You will never be your father, but you could have been something different. Something just as good, if you’d only taken things seriously, and stopped punishing yourself for your own nature.”
He’s breathing a bit heavy, like he’s waiting for something, like he’s exhausted from staying upright, like he’s descending into panic.
“I wanted to be good for you.”
She smiles, small and ironic and it twists the knife.
“Just not enough, I’m afraid.” She stands and he watches her walk back to the island and pick up her phone. “I’m getting you a ride back to your place. No stops on bridges along the way.”
“I don’t want to go back to my apartment.”
“You’ll feel better after you’ve slept.”
“I want to sleep here.”
“I’m not comfortable with you here.”
“I’m sorry, Gerri. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I know, but it isn’t that simple.” She looks across the room at him, one leg bent at the knee, one heel off the ground. “You can’t just say the right words and make everything go away. I thought you’d know this.”
“Yes I can,” he frowns, feels the pain from the motion, “That’s our job. That’s your fucking job.”
“You’re repeating the same cycle of behavior, Roman, and I’m not getting caught in the orbit of that again.”
“You fucked me over too.”
“Yeah, well, I had to protect myself.”
“I was going to protect you.”
“You couldn’t,” she turns to face him now, hips against the countertop, “You proved to me that you couldn’t do that. You were losing focus. You’d just as quickly move on to the next thing that got your attention.”
He rolls his eyes. “Jeez, Gerr-bear, kick a man when he’s down.”
“You didn’t come here looking to be kicked?”
“No. Those placard pronoun fuckers did that.”
“So what did you come here for, hm? To ease your guilt? To tape something back together today? To soothe your battered ego and have Mommy kiss it better?” She sounds bitter and disgusted. Roman can see clearly, then, how he has hurt her. What the last few interactions with him have done to her. It’s unavoidable, even for him.
“I love you.”
She scoffs, turns back around, picks up her unfinished martini.
“No you don’t.”
“Oh, you got a search alert on my fucking feelings, now?”
“You think you do, because I gave you positive attention and affirmation.”
“Sure, and the various leaking of bodily fluids was just because I was really fucking enthused by your corporate vision for me, right? It’s a wonder that I wasn’t spewing everywhere in management training when Jeanette said I had a creative outlook on business.”
“You’ve been deprived of true, honest support for much of your life, and-”
“Yeah, I know: ‘Mr Freud called, he wanted to speak to your mother, so I told him to go blow me’,” Roman’s voice bounces all over his range, and he glares at her when he’s done, “It’s not like that, either, before you claim I want you to breastfeed me or something.”
“Can you let me speak?” She says, and Roman rolls his shoulders back, acquiesces, because of course he does. She crosses her arms, looks him dead-on, and knocks the little remaining wind out of him.
“Roman, we work well together. We have a good dynamic. Rockstar and Molewoman was a convincing proposition. When you meet someone like that, someone on your wavelength, or someone that’s compatible with you in that way, it can feel powerful. Overwhelming, sometimes. I saw real promise in you, and I-” she looks away, pressing her lips together, “I shouldn’t have let it get so far. It was unprofessional, and maybe this could have been saved. But I liked making you laugh.” She shrugs as if that statement isn’t the clouds fucking parting. Sure, he’s still getting rained on, but at least it’s sunny now. “I liked making you happy. We were…we were friends, Roman.”
Wrong. Roman has friends. He thinks. He has never had a friendship that felt like this.
“And your Dad just died. And I’m sorry for the pain it has caused you. It doesn’t justify what you’ve done; to me and to,” she sighs, crosses her arms tighter, “To the fucking country, but I am still sorry. It’s a lot of emotions, Roman, and you’re ill-equipped to deal with almost all of them. I was a sturdy support for you to imprint on. A familiar port in a storm. You got confused, that’s all. And now we have to move on.”
Roman absorbs it in the way wine spreads through a plush carpet, thinning and settling. Staining. He nods, purses his lips like she’s made a good point. He sighs and heaves himself to his feet.
“Ok. Yeah, alright. Can you, uh, let me speak now?”
Gerri shrugs, runs her tongue along her teeth, nods like she doesn’t care, like he can’t possibly have anything else to add.
“Every time I hurt you, it makes me feel good.” Wow, ok, interesting start. She looks skeptical and he plows on, words falling out in this tide of tar that he can’t push back any further. “It felt like revenge at Connor’s wedding, and like…fucking retribution in LA. Watching my words hurt you made me feel good. Like…like when you’ve got a mosquito bite and you scratch it until it bleeds? Like that. Like drinking on a hangover. I don’t fucking know. The point is, hurting you felt good because it felt like hurting me. It was literally like I could feel it on myself. And not because I was projecting or anything, it wasn’t even about me. It’s because doing that shit to you was like doing it to myself, and I wanted to hurt myself a bit, you know? You’re, like…a part of me. Or several parts of me. And I can’t rip myself away from you, even though I have tried. You think it’s an inconvenient little crush? Oh boy, just you wait until you see what’s going on in my head, Gerri Kellman.”
She’s frowning at him, mouth tight, her entire, golden attention locked onto him, so he keeps talking, tries to make it sound right. Too much and she won’t believe him, too little and she’ll kick him out. Come on, Logan Jr, where are those negotiation skills now?
“You’re fucking brilliant, and you scare me shitless.” He watches her curl her fingers around the stem of her martini glass. “I’ve been with models and actresses and princesses and anyone my dad could pay to throw themselves at me. I’m a notorious pervert, and what I did with them looks like Sesame Street compared to what I want to do to you. You make everything work, and fucking,” he waves his hand at himself vaguely, daring to move closer, “implode at the same time. I fucking love you. I’m serious.”
She swallows. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
“Uh, yeah, ha. Did you forget which family you’ve been working for for the last thirty years? ‘Hurt the ones we love the most’ was our second option for the company slogan.”
That makes her smile, just a bit, and he’s lightheaded with it. Or blood loss. Could be either.
She throws back the dregs of her drink and then pushes herself away from the counter. He moves out of her space, ducking his head. He thinks he’ll die if she gets near enough to touch. He wants to sit at her feet and weep.
“You should really get some rest,” she says, and the Sword of Damacles swings. “You can stay in the spare room.”
She gives him some pajamas to sleep in and he only puts on the bottoms. He examines himself in the mirror of the ensuite in the guest bedroom. She’s done a good job, as ever. He’ll have a crackwhore bruise on his cheekbone tomorrow, he guesses, but his eyes aren’t as bloodshot anymore and he feels less jittery. She settles me. He cleans his teeth until his gums bleed and then spits pink down Gerri’s drain.
He’s in bed for about an hour, he’d guess, head buzzing gently, the open window letting in sirens from the streets below, before he gets up and crosses the hall.
Gerri’s room is dark. There’s a sliver of light around the edges of her not-quite-blackout blinds. She’s a lonely lump in her super king, almost indistinguishable among the pillows and ten tog duvet. She doesn’t stir when he closes the door behind him with a click.
The unoccupied side of her bed is cold. The sheets are crisp and smell like her, but not as much as he’d hoped. I bet that side smells like her. The pillow she sleeps on. He shifts a little across the endless expanse of empty mattress until he can finally feel her body heat. She’s facing away from him, breathing deeply. When he sits up to peer at her, he can see her hand curled on the pillow beside her face, like a dead bird’s. There’s a furrow between her brows like she’s calculating net profit projections in her dreams.
His heart is pounding as he lies back down. He feels like he might be scolded and sent to his room with a slap at any second.
He’s swimming in it, wading in it. It. There is a fuzzy warmth spreading through his body like the second before you realize you’ve pissed yourself. His fingertips tingle and his temples throb. He moseys closer still until he’s near enough that he can press his nose against her hair, loose and spread out behind her. He sniffs at it shamelessly. The blood roaring in his ears rushes south to his dick.
My dad is dead, he tries it on for size, the unfiltered truth, in his head rather than out loud so he doesn’t wake Gerri. My dad is dead. He’s locked in his tomb, with space enough to stack me and my siblings there with him, later. My dad is dead, and the last thing he heard might have been me calling him a cunt. My dad is dead, and I am alone. My dad is dead and it was all for nothing.
He touches Gerri. They don’t do that. Other than the desperate attempt at flinging himself into her lifeboat in Italy, he can’t remember ever really touching her before. He does now, though - my dad is dead - he puts his arm around her, hand resting lightly by her stomach, and shuffles until he’s up against her back, the rolling landscape of her. She’s smaller than he expected, slightly curled in on herself, and she’s wearing silk like before. My dad is dead. He breathes her in again and the tide of water it brings crashes against the tar in one loud, sparking stalemate. My dad is dead, and I’m in Gerri’s bed. They’ll never hear what I almost said. Let’s play a game called desire or dread.
He presses himself against her. The teasing friction makes pleasure catch and drag in his dick. She’s soft and squishy and warm like a fucking dream, like something freshly baked. He rests his palm against her stomach and shifts his hips against her ass. She stirs, makes a quiet noise in her throat, and settles again. He wonders if she took something before going to bed that makes it harder to swim to the surface.
My dad is dead, and I love you. His mouth tastes like bile. He rolls his pelvis against her and bites back a groan. He thinks he believes she can fix him. He thinks he believes she wants to. Or wanted to. Jury’s still out.
The pleasure is white-hot and insistent, fucking Satan setting up camp in his crotch, and so he thrusts against the cleft of her ass in a slow rocking rhythm until the screaming stops. She’s still asleep, he thinks, or else she’s doing a very good job of pretending she is. She moves drowsily, squirming a little at the external pressure, and it’s so hot he has to bite into her pillow to stop the sounds ripped from him. He slips his hand under her top and her skin - ah, her skin! - feels like clouds and silk and it’s like the first hit of good coke, the contact, like throwing his head back and taking in the sky through engorged pupils. He strokes her there, along the waistband of her pajamas, and his hips buck a little and he bites on his split lip until there are tears in his eyes and my dad is dead my dad is dead my dad is dead…
Eventually he’s basically dry-humping her, and he feels her stir again, with more oomf , and so knowing it’s coming to an end, he buries his face in her hair and presses a long, dry kiss to the back of her neck like he’s scent-marking her. She makes a sleepy noise of confusion, rubbing her cheek into her pillow like a child, and then, and then , voice all thick, she says “Rome… ”
The sound pulled from him is like a sob. He fucks himself against her through two layers of material. Little bursts of light appear behind his screwed-shut eyelids. She squirms as she wakes up and then places her hand over his hand, groping her stomach.
My dad is dead and so I should be too.
She’s slow moving like she’s still half asleep. She drags his hand from her stomach to her breast and leaves it there.
I hope he can fucking see us. I wish I’d told him. I wish I could see his face when he found out how fucked this whole thing is, how far I’ve gone, how I can’t let go of her. The theoretical disgust is enough to drag another sob from Roman. He clings to Gerri, her hips stirring a little against his erratic rutting, and he grabs as much of her tit in his hand as he physically can, mouthing blindly at the curve of her neck like sucking poison from a snake bite. So fucking soft. There’s so much of her, all up in his business, all so real and right fucking here and there is nothing plausibly deniable about this. There is no room for negotiation. He gropes her at her chest like a fucking blind man for another few seconds, salivating, before just going for broke and slipping his hand down again, tenting under her waistband, slipping between her legs. My dad is dead and I’m going to fucking die too, right here, all hot and hard, from being terminally horny. From my fucking brain exploding.
He’s had Gerri on the mind for long enough to do his research so he isn’t expecting Niagara Falls, but she’s wetter than he thought she’d be. Honestly it’s perfect. His more slime-phobic tendencies stay fucking quiet and he’s instead filled with this pressing need to get her off before he comes all over her tasteful geriatric nightwear. He leads with his rhythm and crushes himself closer, probing like a fucking toddler until he gets a better sense of the layout and then he hears her sigh. Not an exasperated sigh or an exhausted sigh or a barely-concealing-her-rage sigh, but something high and hopeful, like a letting go of a balloon. So he stays there, two fingers working over her, brushing then nudging then rubbing, and he’s humping her on autopilot, leaking over his borrowed pants, thinking about her being around him and under him and on top of him and in his mouth and behind his eyes and sidling her way into his disused, vandalized heart like a particularly nefarious form of cancer. She feels hot and velvety between her legs and the texture isn’t bad at all, is better than ok, even. He wants to scream, but he groans instead, muttering her name and a string of colorful expletives into her hair, drooling on her neck like a freshman in a frat house, and then he’s slipping into her and his vision goes black for a second, and he can feel her rocking up into the pressure of it, now, like he’s got the right angle, like he’s doing something good . So he stays there, fucking her through it, panting in her ear while she hums through her lips. He wonders if she even opened her eyes.
He’s at fucking ground zero when he feels her thighs clamp around his wrist and this unbelievable full-body shudder go through her. She makes a little choked gasp that makes his balls squeeze and his teeth grind. My dad is dead and I did something right. My dad is dead and I brought Gerri Kellman to orgasm. Fucking sick. Incredible. Fuck. He’s pawing at her pajamas and she moves her hips up a little, all slow and fucked and lethargic, so that he can drag the material down. He’s dizzy and disbelieving, losing his breath, half convinced he’s going to faint, as he slips his dick between her thighs. It’s like a hug for his fucking soul . He grunts and gasps like a wounded animal. He fucks himself up against her cunt until his hips are stammering and his hands are grabbing whatever’s in reach and the knot of dread in his stomach unravels. He comes triumphantly, tremblingly, over her nice crisp sheets and her perfect, sagging skin.
Shit. There are tears in his eyes. There might be tears on his cheeks, too. He might leave tears on her pillow.
He hangs on tight, is probably crushing her ribcage, panting in her ear. He tries to cry silently into her hair but how much more can he humiliate himself in front of her anyway?
He’s dragged under unceremoniously. His last thought is I am going to be an uncle again.
--
He wakes late. He can tell it’s late because the sun is fully up. He is curled in on himself like a millipede in a huge, empty bed. He wonders if Gerri left in the night, or if she slept beside him, sticky with his jizz. He has bled a little through his bandaids and onto her pillow.
Her apartment is empty. It’s 10:30, so she’ll have been at the office for hours already. Wait, will she? Is Gerri still going into the office? Should he let that happen? Either way, she’s not here. He feels itchy and intimate in her space without her.
He goes through her clothes, of course. He looks for anything incriminating in her drawers, but comes up dry. She has a vibrator in her nightstand but it’s out of battery. His cum has dried on the sheets and on his borrowed pajamas pants. If it wasn’t there, he might think he dreamed the whole thing. He strips out of them and folds them up primly on her duvet.
He tries on some of her underwear, but can’t find her laundry basket to look for any that aren’t clean. He stares at his pale, bruised face and puts on some of her lipstick, smearing it around his chin and across his teeth afterwards like he’s been kissed. Or slapped. He sits in her wardrobe for a while and it makes him feel better, and then abruptly worse. He takes a swig out of the vermouth in her refrigerator and then jerks off in her shower. He goes through the motions, ticking all the pervert boxes she probably expects him to. A year ago he’d do something truly fucking revolting, but the feeling is so tired. Too muddied with respect. He doesn’t want her to be shocked and appalled with him. He wants her to smother him with her tits and tell him none of this is his fault.
He takes her pillowcase, the one with his blood on it, lets himself out and immediately calls his mother.
--
Flying or floating or falling. The turbulence has stopped, at least. It’s cold outside. Cold and quiet.
Between terms one year, Roman arrived back at the Hamptons and found the house strangely empty. Kendall had left for college, and the the latest victim of Logan’s attentions had fled in the night like Roman’s mother had, buoyed by a pay-out she could burn through for the rest of her life. Roman had been around other boys constantly for months on end - noise and mess and smell and scrutiny - and so it was weird to sit alone in a cavernous bedroom and wait for dinner to be called.
Shiv was sullen that year. She was sullen for many years in her early teens. Logan must have noticed Roman’s sapped energy, strange out-of-placeness, because he gestured at the seat to his right.
“You might as well sit here, where I can hear you.”
When Logan was home, which was rarely, he liked to have dinner as a family. Roman didn’t like having to sit still for that long, liked even less his father watching what he left on his plate and what he forced down his esophagus. He inched up from his usual seat at the opposite end to the chair beside his father.
“You too,” Logan barked, and Shiv sat at his left, scowling and rolling her eyes.
Roman remembers the food that night was good. Roast beef or something. Rich sauces. At school the food was disgusting. At 40K a term you’d think they could afford more than mashed things of various temperatures, but Roman supposes it was meant to build character. To indulge is to create a weakness for yourself, or some bullshit. He got used to it, as children always will. But the food at Logan’s table was the best. Even then, Roman rationed himself, remembering the lobster incident, remembering the unspoken rule of greed is good, just don’t broadcast it.
“So, Romulus. How is school?” Asked Logan. Roman remembers it so clearly. Logan had just a mustache then, like a fucking fisherman. Roman wasn’t used to the weight of his presence, now he spent most of his time away from him.
He started to talk, and Logan didn’t interrupt.
If he wasn’t such a dried-up husk he might have even let himself cry again, but he’s not sure his body can physically produce any more saline solution. National television is fine, but fuck me if I’m gonna start bawling in some random bar full of nobodies.
He would like to take the olives out of his drink, but he won’t. He can’t just…Hays Code his martini. It needs to be five parts gin to one part vermouth. Stirred a little with ice and then strained. Not shaken. Dirty. Two olives. There’s no fucking point otherwise.
He could go back to LA. That wouldn’t be so bad. It’s warm there, at least, and there’s no skyscrapers to scrape his sky. He could slip back into his executive role in studios. Not the studios, but a studio. Maybe. He has experience. He’s the only Roy sibling to have sat through a Marvel movie.
Or he could stay here. Carve something out for himself on a scrap of land already piled too high. He could buy something huge and ruin it. He could buy something tiny and make a monument out of it. He could do anything. He’s a beast unchained. He’s a boat untethered.
He stares down into his glass and thinks about what Connor must have seen, looking down into that box. How does Logan Roy fit into a space like that? How did they find a wood sturdy enough to contain him? And what if they didn’t?
The prickle on the back of his neck - is that what ‘hackles’ are? No one ever taught me - is still there. It might be there for some time. How do you page your instinct to stand down? How do you unlearn something you don’t even remember being taught?
He doesn’t see her enter, but she sidles in next to him, lifting herself onto the stool with an elegance that is only just clung to. For all her fucking airs and graces, she’s five foot four and in her sixties.
He doesn’t look at her. If he looks at her, it will all be over.
“I got your text,” she says: no preamble, no fuckery, no fluffing.
“Mn,” is all he can manage, because he is so angry. And so ashamed. And so so sad.
She orders herself a drink. He was going to give her his, but he’s drunk half of it. He sucks an olive off its stick, and then chews on the wood to occupy his mouth so he doesn’t try to fire her again, or something.
“Do I need to call Dr Carragher again?” She asks, sounding bored.
He shakes his head, twirls the cocktail stick around between his fingers.
“Nothing she could do that hasn’t already been done. She’s a couple of editions behind.” His voice sounds good. Strong. Well; not-weak. If that’s the same thing.
He can feel her fucking eyes on him. Assessing the healing, or the damage. Am I healing or hurting? It’s all the same, he supposes; healing wounds opening again. One big fucking Groundhog Day of stuff not suitable for the PG-13 rating.
“What did you want?” she asks airily, receiving her drink, sipping it. He can see her out of his peripheral vision. He can feel her vibrating in the atoms of him. He can sense her shadow in the depths of his fucking soul.
He shrugs, rubs his lips together, looks anywhere else. “I wanted to talk,” he settles for, because it’s the truth, and neutral, and easy.
“We’re not so good at that,” she says softly, mercifully. It’s fucking La Croix to his wasabi-stung eyes. It’s gentle.
I need to be gentle, Roman thinks the words simply, for the first time in his life, I should be gentle with her, because I have been mean, and people like it when you are gentle with them. She’s good for a tussle but I want her to listen. I want her to feel safe. I want to try. So I will try to be gentle with her.
He swallows. There’s an olive stuck in his throat. No there isn’t.
“I’m sorry.”
“So you’ve said.”
“I mean it.”
“I believe you,” she says, spinning her martini glass slowly in a circle of its own condensation, “It doesn’t change things, though.”
“Then why are you here, if not to listen to me grovel and snivel and masturbate my way into the headlines again?”
That seems to floor her, or at least give her pause. She shifts on her stool. He hears it. His atoms feel it.
“I wanted to make sure you weren’t floating in the Hudson.”
His lips quirk despite himself. “I wouldn’t steal Kendall’s thing.”
He can feel her turn her eyes on him, examine his face, his open wounds.
“Was it worth it, Roman?”
He swallows, looks further away, feigns ignorance.
“A lot has happened in the last forty eight hours. I’m gonna need you to be more specific, ex-ex-General Counsel.”
“All of it. The desperate climb.” She clarifies, despite not needing to, really.
He laughs a bit, a bark of something ugly and bitter.
“It’s all I fucking know.”
Her eyes burn. He’s never felt a gaze on him so profoundly. He’s never given a shit what people think of him, before her. He’s never torn himself open so someone would have something to stand on, before her.
“It’s not all you know,” she says, with complete assurance, but in her light, warm tone. It’s so difficult to stand in the sun and not melt.
“I didn’t want it for me,” he says. It rips its way out of him like something barbed, dragging half his throat with it. He intends to finish the sentence, but he doesn’t bother. She’ll know the end, anyway: I wanted it so Kendall didn’t have it. I wanted it because Shiv thought I couldn’t. I wanted it to make my father proud. I wanted it so that you wouldn’t feel you’d wasted your time.
“You didn’t want it,” Gerri says, and Roman doesn’t even know if that’s the truth or not.
The thing is, the hilariously fucking ironic thing is; he could have anything he wanted. He has had everything, his whole life. At the drop of a hat. A single word. Nothing was beyond his reach if he pleased his father enough, if he tried hard enough, if he kissed the right asses and slapped the right taints. There’s nothing in the world denied to him. Except that final fucking word that his dad kept close, kept quiet and locked. That precious fucking thing he could have given so easily, but never did, and never will. Except the things he actually wants. The things he actually cares about.
He tried to have her, because he wanted her, and she wouldn’t let him. He pictures himself, sat splayed on a hallway floor, staring at an empty space in confusion. I want it, so it is mine. If you don’t give it to me, I will kick and scream. If you won’t give it to me, I will ruin it for you.
“How did you ever fucking stand me?” He asks, chokes, desperately.
She laughs; a small, slightly cynical sound.
“I ask myself the same question.”
“But you’re here?”
“Yes, Rome. I’m here.”
He laughs, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“Do you loooooove me, Gerri Kellman?”
He sees in his periphery that she is smirking like he’s made a joke, which is good because he was deadly serious.
“I’m just here for a drink.”
“Me too,” he says, and maybe she finally notices what he’s sipping on.
He glances at her for a few seconds, but she’s too real, so he looks down instead, at It. Crumpled in a twitching, bleeding pile between them. Whining like a wounded animal. Half dead. Still alive. Breathing despite itself, its death-rattle strangely optimistic. They’ve kicked the shit out of It, the pair of them. They’ve stamped down on it until it cried, curled up, begged for it to be over. Stubborn fucker. It lifts its head and pleads with Roman to put it out of its misery. Or to give it a pat, a treat, a chance.
People will laugh at him. It’s bad enough he’s a household meme from the public fucking bungee jump of the election and then the funeral. Little Lord Roy, snapping at his cage door, can’t fuck, can’t fight, can’t speak to a room full of people he knows, can’t even swing an election properly. And it slips off him, or it seems to. He can’t sense his own authenticity. He doesn’t care about a lot of things because he’s taught himself not to. He does care about people laughing, though. Logan never let people laugh. And if he picks It up off the floor and somehow manages to coax it back to life, people will talk. People will talk about her. People will laugh at her. It’s easy to say ‘fuck them’, but in his painfully extensive and personal experience, it’s much harder to actually do the fucking.
He thinks about being inside her again, and all the ways he has been: his words in her head, his twitching in her office, his tongue in her mouth and his fingers in her cunt and his cock between her thighs. His pictures on her hard drive. His heart in her hands. He’s wormed and wheedled his way in. He’s built a bed for himself under her skin and screamed and pouted when she asked him what the fuck he was doing there. He feels so thoroughly in her that it’s cold and strange outside. Like everywhere he tries to stick himself, it is cold and strange outside.
“So what do we do now?” He asks, because she always knows.
“What do you want to do?”
It sounds more curious than deferring. He wants her to hit him, he thinks. He wants her to chip a tooth. He wants to be quiet, and for everything else around him to be quiet, head under the covers and no cactus creaking in the corner. He wants to eat her out until she physically forces him to stop and he wants her to rip his dick right off his body. He wants them to be alone somewhere, far away, big and blue with no one like them around, sitting in the stillness, hovering just a beat behind the future. He wants her to slice him open, mouth to asshole, peel his skin back and examine everything inside, and tell him precisely and clinically exactly what is wrong with him. He wants his fucking dad back.
“Please let me fuck you.” He sounds so fucking desperate. Good.
“No.”
That makes him laugh. Properly laugh, with his chest and his belly. She laughs too, just a little bit. He looks at her again and it hurts. The good hurt. The gorgeous hurt. Righteous and wrong.
“You’re killing me, Gerr,” he whines.
She shrugs, sips, looks like Lady Goddamn Godiva. Minx. Mindfucker. Mary Poppins if she was a white collar criminal and three times sexier.
“Why not? We basically uh, already did?” He nudges but doesn’t push.
She sighs. “You know why.”
“He’s dead,” Roman says, and believes it, “He’s dead, and no one cares. It’s all bullshit.”
“People care,” she says with a shrug, “You can’t even deliver on what you’re offering, Roman.”
“I can,” he says, and he believes that, too, “I know I can. It listens to you. It fucking likes you.”
She laughs a bit again, a chuckle. Good natured. Good sign.
“That thing is what got us into this mess. You’re finally out and you wanna dive straight back in?”
He purses his lips, drops his chest to the top of the bar, squishes his face against the sticky surface and fixes her with a pathetic, moony-eyed stare. Anything to be looking up at her.
“Can’t help it. I’m a repeat-and-rebound kind of guy.”
She shakes her head, looks amused by something he isn’t privy to, and says musingly “Maybe when you learn your twelve times table.”
“That’s the one with sixty nine in it, right?”
He watches with delight as she rolls her eyes, and despair as she settles back into sobriety.
“You need to do something for yourself,” she says.
“Can’t I do something for you instead?”
She looks at him like he’s still joking. “You can’t do anything for me. I thought we’d well established that.”
“Well maybe I want to fuck your brain. Or your heart. You know, your fucking-“
“Career?” She offers. Snide bitch.
“Sure, that too. If there’s fucking to be done, I want it to be me. I don’t want anyone else pawing at you. I don’t want you cleaning up anyone else’s messes. I want you to slam my head in a locker and push me over the smoking terrace. I want you to call me a good little beta and suffocate me with your tits. Like, I kind of want to live in your attic and eat whatever you stick up through the trapdoor, fucking Austen style. That’s Austen, right? Which one has the crazy ghost wife?”
She looks mercifully amused. “Is this proposal attempt number two?”
“If the ridiculously large and overpriced Cartier fits…” he goes for impish, probably just about reaches constipated petulance.
He holds her eye contact for one long moment, even though it’s uncomfortable. She’s clearly just come from the office. Her makeup isn’t fresh anymore. She’s probably back working for the company that just kicked him out, she’s old enough to be his mother, and she’s responsible for just under half of the breakdowns he’s had in the last four months, and he doesn’t care. I don’t fucking care.
“Is this it, then, Gerr-bear?”
Her lips purse at the nickname.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be right here if you change your mind. At this bar. In a puddle of my own drool and tears and jizz.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
He drags in a long breath, feels it work its way through his airways like he’s being irrigated, like something new running through something old.
“It’s just you,” he mutters, not really caring to make sense, “Just you, Gerri. Sorry. Fuck. You can do what you want. I think you might actually be able to do whatever you want to me.”
There, he thinks deliriously, terrified and triumphant, you win, Perfect Bitch Queen of Hell.
Gerri watches him flail, fall, float. She reaches out her hand, takes the remaining olive from his drink, and eats it.