Chapter Text
After Italy, Roman doesn’t come back to the office.
She expects him to pop his head into her office that Monday, sound off some heinous sex joke, and go about his day. Because that’s what he does. Every other time Roman’s met some humiliating failure, he’s been right back at it the next day, shit-eating grin on his face, acting like everything is fine and he’s oh-so-oblivious. Can’t hurt me, the whole transparent game.
But his absence is total and complete. The world rumbles on as usual.
No one removes his name plate or changes the elevator keycode—so he hasn’t been quietly fired. Logan would never let a kid out of his orbit so completely and totally, anyway.
Maybe this time is different. He’s used to betrayal from his siblings. Alright, Logan’s never been a sure bet, his love as conditional and whimsical as the wind. But maybe even Roman Roy needs some extra time to recover from getting stabbed in the back by his father and his mother (and his business partner, a traitorous voice reminded her, putting scarequotes right to work).
He’ll be back. Just like every corporate Waystar dog, hungry for the affections of the C-suite. (Herself included. A smarter woman would have ripped herself away from this place while they were still lowering Baird’s coffin. And yet—she just couldn’t. Logan has taught them all to salivate at the ring of his bell, hasn’t he?)
Roman will poke his head in there again. She’s sure of it.
One day becomes two, and then twelve.
And then the text.
Gerri sees it at 5 a.m. on the dot, because the second her side table alarm goes off, she always turns her phone on before she can think about it. Lately, she’s been paging to her text messages, watching the little R drop lower and lower in the “recent conversations” list each morning.
Except this morning, the R is at the top.
byeeeeee. 2:53 a.m. No follow-up. No jumping dots.
Sue her, if she’s a little worried.
Literally, probably, because now she’s standing in front of Roman Roy’s door.
Three raps. Quick, abrupt, perfunctory. Professional, even.
That’s what Gerri tells herself.
Except she knows that there’s no professional explanation for why she’s here, just not even two weeks after he tried to wrest away control of… well, technically, he tried to upend her company (even if she’s CEO in name only).
The legal implications are dizzying enough that she takes a deep, steadying breath.
Something rustles inside, then thumps. It doesn’t sound entirely graceful—maybe like someone just fell off something—but the noise sends a rush of relief through her. Shame and fury follows the relief. She can hear something like footsteps.
But Roman doesn’t open the door. The footsteps have paused.
Gerri could walk away now. She knows he’s alive. That’s all she wanted to do, here, really.
If he’s standing, he hasn’t idiotically drowned himself in booze or pills—not that that’s ever been his vice, as hard as he tries to make people think so.
So, he’s okay, probably.
But she has to know. Visual confirmation.
(She doesn’t miss him.)
“You alive in there?” she calls.
“What?”
The voice inside is cracked, irritated, but undeniably Roman’s.
She holds her phone up to the peephole. Who knows if the damning text is visible through the fisheye distortion.
“’Byeeee’?” she mimics. The overwhelming relief, and her fury with herself for feeling it, threads cruel disapproval into her tone.
“Ugh,” Roman says. “You’ve never written a drunk text, Gerri? Of course you haven’t. You avoid mess. Miz Perfect, here, mess-free, hasn’t sent a stupid text in her entire life. Yeah, whatever, I’m fucking—fine. That was—look, it was a cry for help, but not that kind.”
“Well, if that’s all.” Gerri clips her voice. She’s already turning away.
Sometimes he makes it so easy to walk out. She appreciates that about him.
“No, gah. Hang on, hang on.” The door swings open. It’s pitch dark inside, but the building hallway lights illuminate a pale billionaire who squints and blinks at the intrusion of the light, looking like he hasn’t had a proper meal in weeks. “I’m sorry about that, seriously. I was—you made yourself clear. I should have left it alone.”
She could still go. He wouldn’t follow.
But something about his apology rings sincere. Like he understands how badly he fucked them.
“Sorry,” he says again, filling the air at her silence.
Her body angles to leave, and that must be obvious to him, and it should be obvious to her, that she should leave. But she’s rooted in place. She’s sure, suddenly, that if she turned away now, it would end this thing between them. Completely, irrevocably. Forever.
He quirks an eyebrow at her hesitation. Then leans against the doorway, one arm braced as high up on the frame as he can get it—the sort of move larger men use to show their height. Look at me, I can reach a doorframe. Except he’s not large, and nothing he could do could really make him feel large. His forearm doesn’t even get close to the top of the door. From him, the posture’s just insouciance. A kindof off-kilter come-hither lean.
Ever the provocateur.
He doesn’t make space for her to enter. She pushes past, anyway, and catches a whiff of unwashed body.
“You’ve been doing well for yourself, I see,” Gerri says.
“You know me. Out all night, partying it up. Fucking chicks. Doing… fucking… not running the family company. Waste of space, et cetera.”
Years ago, she might’ve believed it. But she’s seen him as COO. He’s good at this. He can read people. He wants to do good work. If just because someone might pat him on the head at the end of it.
He shuts the door, then turns around and leans back against it, as if he’s trying to inch as far away from her as possible without moving to the other side of the room. And now that she’s standing here… she doesn’t have anything to say.
“So,” Roman says, folding his arms. He looks closed off, small. His shirt hangs off him; his hair’s strung in all directions. Sparse leg hair scatters across his thighs, peaking out from boxer shorts that have seen fresher days. She feels overdressed in her office clothes. “How’d you, uh, know where I live?”
“It’s listed in the company intranet. If you know where to look.”
“Should I be creeped out?”
Sometimes he makes her want to flash every single one of her teeth. But instead she just raises an eyebrow and backs up, making room for him to circle around into the room. She slaps around on the wall for the light switch she spotted on her way over, not breaking eye contact with him. When the lights flick on, he shields his eyes.
She wants him to—take up space. To walk toward her. To make a disgusting joke. To put everything in her hands, in that way that takes everything out of her responsibility.
He doesn’t take the space. The line of his throat is sharp and pale. His eyes are watering.
“Why am I here?” she snaps at him, suddenly overwhelmed with impatience, irritation—at herself, for being here, at him, for letting her in, at this whole stupid mess she can’t seem to untangle herself from. This fucking child, who wants everything but never learned to ask for it.
“That’s a weird question from the gal who hunted down my address and showed up without an invitation.”
“Why am I here, Roman?”
He throws his hands up. “Ooh. Scary Gerri.”
She ignores the inane comment. “Why did you invite me in? Why do you keep doing this?”
“Why don’t you stop it?” he shoots back. “You were leaving.”
And that’s it, isn’t it?
Shiv’s snide words twist through her: You wouldn’t want people to think you encouraged him. Would you?
This would all be oh-so-easy if she didn’t like him.
He steps away from the door, flourishes at it. “Walk out. Do it. Leave. Or am I in your interests, now?”
“You’re in my interests, Rome.” Her voice is too soft. She wants to grab the words back as they tumble off her tongue.
She shouldn’t have said that.
It stops him where he’s standing. “That’s a fucking—come on. Why are you here?”
Does he get that if he’d given her just one good reason, she would have flipped on Logan for him? Does he understand how much that frightens her?
“You texted,” she says, instead of that.
“You do housecalls for my dad, too?”
Of course she does. She almost says as much, but she can feel this conversation stumbling toward something fragile, and every instinct in her bones wants to veer away. Instead, she jibes, “I wanted to make sure you weren’t choking in a puddle of your vomit.”
“Flattering.”
She doesn’t move. He’s still standing by the door, frozen in his theatrical gesture, except his arm is hanging mostly limp in an awkward mirror of the pose.
This isn’t one of their sexy spats. He sounds genuinely aggrieved. She’s pissed off. She wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, but she’s afraid he’d just tell her how much she hurt his feelings, how he thought they had something, or he thought they were going to rule the evil empire hand-in-hand, or—
She doesn’t want to hear it.
“Now that we’ve established you can’t tell me apart from the no-good junkie brother who’s hanging from the wagon by his necktie, feel free to leave. And fuck you and fuck yourself on the way out.”
“I don’t think that,” she corrects. She’s overheard his careful recommendations to his siblings, the way he always seems to know dosage and limits. He comes off as more of a dealer than a user, if you listen. Like the 3Ls fencing Adderall to younger lawyers-to-be. (Did he study up, to help Kendall get clean? She’ll always want to ask, but he’d never admit and she never will.)
“Don’t do that. Don’t—placate me.”
“Oh, you want me to humiliate you while you jerk off, instead?”
“Well,” Roman shrugs, “yeah.”
“Oh,” she says, like it’s a fucking surprise. Of course it’s not a fucking surprise. It’s the whole stupid deal.
Normally it’s… a game. A word game, and a puzzle of expressions and implications, body language mixed with instinct.
They’re both good at it, all things considered. He asks, she rebukes. He grins at his gold star when he hears the difference between a real no and a you should be ashamed.
It’s not so different from a legal contract: the words are there, and they’re important, a single adjective the difference between a binding signature and a meaningless farce. But it’s also about the structure of the thing, boilerplate—what’s not there is just as important as what is. And you have to know the framework to spot the absences.
She’s written a half million contracts, but she doesn’t know the shape of Roman Roy half so well.
There are so many ways it could go sideways—one of them could overlook a crucial absence, or hear a yes where there isn’t one. (The dick pic—proof enough.)
But when it works… When it works, he says, I’m horrible, and she says, you sure are, then drives a screwdriver straight into the heart of his worst fears and makes them better and worse all at once, until she’s exhilarated and grinning and half-mad about how fucking horny it all makes her, to be the focus of such strange attentions, to have him hanging on her words and at her mercy.
If only everything between them were so simple. Entertaining this again is a death sentence. She should leave things as they are. He made it so, so easy for her to end it, to stick the knife in him in Italy while he begged her on his knees.
It should be easy to walk away right now, too.
“Everyone already knows I send you pics of my dick,” he offers at her long silence. “You sided with my father. I’m out, one way or another. I’m dead. How much worse could any of this get, for either of us?”
So, so much worse. She thinks about how to tell him so, what words to assemble to get him to understand just how precarious everything is, for all of them. Value, criterion, evidence. The simplest building blocks of a convincing argument.
But all she can see is that same miserable loneliness in the lines of his shoulders. That desperation for someone to see him.
“You need a bath,” is what comes out of her mouth.
Confusion clouds his face, for a moment, but then his eyes darken. It’s like Tern Haven all over again, him desperate and unmoored in front of her—except this time, she knows, she isn’t going to send him out of the room.
Now he moves, like she’d wished he would at the beginning.
It’s jerky, like he’s trying to hurry and force himself to look at ease, and the effect is just vaguely humorous—overeager and self-conscious all at once. It’s disappointing, somehow, though Gerri’s not sure what she’d hoped for.
He doesn’t turn on any more lights, just moves through the dim penthouse like he has the layout memorized. He pauses at the threshold of what must be the bathroom. Gives her that look, the one she used to think was simple permission.
Now, she’s not totally sure what it means, but she nods anyway.
The bathroom is huge. Once, she would’ve thought the glass thermostatic system and full-length soaking tub (probably imported) were near-criminal in a city where most people can’t afford a studio apartment that size. But that woman is forty years behind Gerri, and now she just dispassionately notes that it’s not as ostentatious as Logan’s.
As he starts to strip, she takes a few moments to admire him. Roman’s the only one of the kids who inherited Logan’s stockiness. It’s like he’s running away from his genetic fate, between his personal trainers and all those salads.
Too bad—for both of them—he doesn’t try quite so hard to escape all the rest of it.
The gather of fat at his waist, the gentle curve of his shoulders where they meet his neck—she wants to run her hands over it. It would give under her touch, she knows. He’s lovely. She’s never really liked the toned gym types, or the rangy Kendalls. But some instinct tells her that Roman wouldn’t like hearing about how his softness compels her.
The water’s running, now, and she can’t quite sort its roar from the rush of blood in her ears. Roman pauses naked, crouched at the edge of the tub, and sends her that look again. The one that makes it so clear that
Part of her aches at how small and miserable he looks. Some other vicious instinct whispers, look what I did—brought a Roy to his knees, in self-satisfaction.
She shakes them both off. Bringing a Roy to their knees isn’t that hard, anyway. Logan does it every day. It’s nothing.
Roman’s still looking at her, face pale and open. Gerri knows she should move—step forward, say something, insult him, shift this away from uncomfortably intimate and toward familiar, depersonalized ground.
But she can’t. The water splashes into the tub, and steam rises in the air, and her tongue, for once in her life, feels truly frozen in her mouth. Her skirt, damp with steam, is starting to stick to her legs; the distant itch of her silk blouse has become hard to ignore. She’s wearing earrings, rings, two delicate gold chains. She’s decked in them, these symbols of her station over him, as he kneels naked at the edge, waiting for her instructions.
Gerri waves a hand, hoping desperately that the motion carries some sense of command and poise that seem to have otherwise deserted her.
But she didn’t need to worry.
Roman steps into the water.