Chapter Text
The first three lessons he learned were:
Think before you share something.
Only try to lie when the truth is much worse.
Don’t disturb Dad or his guests when he’s in his study.
The last was particularly emphatic. Roman was seven, and angry. And more importantly; bored . Roman was bored a lot. He was supposed to be at polo, but this rash had been spreading along his midsection and he was milking it for all his worth. Left alone to his own devices, he meandered down the grown-up wing of the house and pressed his ear to his father’s study door. There was the sound of talking. The talking was talked in a register lower than Roman was used to; muttered, thrown back and forth in a careless way that never existed at his family dinners, or his terse, tremulous schooling. It was the sound of ease. He pressed so close to the door he let himself in.
His father spotted him immediately. Roman felt a wash of cool, clear despair from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
His father was a great, known horror, then. He was like looking up into the sky and seeing another planet in the atmosphere. It was like summoning something by speaking its name but still cowering from it when it appeared.
“Wait outside, Romulus.”
And Roman did wait. He waited for three hours. He was still angry, and still bored, but he didn’t leave. He waited in the hall, staring at his shoes, unable to move, until every last man filed out of the study, and then eventually his father emerged. Roman thought about Paddy’s paws, and Shiv’s broken Barbies, and the sound the little fountain in the frog pond made. He thought about the toy soldiers lined up beneath his desk - a bunker he’d made for them - and his clothes folded and his sheets clean, always clean. He thought about the people that came into his home and left again. He thought about the school that scared him so much that he cheated on tests to get straight A’s just so that it would be over with as quickly as possible.
“Roman, never come into my study,” his father said, like an earthquake. Roman nodded dumbly, and braced himself.
But Logan Roy straightened his spine and ambled off down the corridor, his hand drifting close enough to make Roman retreat against the wall but not close enough to touch.
“Would you like to go and live with your mother?”
A sharp shock of panic, dread following the space the relief carved out, and Roman learned his third lesson.
--
Roman was small, and that was not a good thing, and so he was louder, and faster, and naughtier to make up for it. He thought if he ate more steak he might grow, but the nanny didn’t let them eat too much, or too richly; orders from On High. Instead he picked up instead of down, and got bloody noses and bruised ribs for his trouble. He climbed too high up trees. He spoke to his father with too much cheek. If he couldn’t be big, he would be bold. He would be near-big. Big by proxy. He’d swell if he couldn’t grow. All bark and no bite. He was always more of a dog than a lion.
Dad’s a lion. Mum’s a peacock. Shiv’s a snake. Connor’s a monkey. I don’t know what Kendall is yet.
When he was nine, he was left alone in the airy bedroom of a Spanish villa with Baird Kellman’s tortoise. Baird and his dad were friends, Roman thought, even though he wasn’t sure they liked each other. His dad’s friends often seemed eager to come but even more eager to leave.
Baird had brought his tortoise and his wife to Spain. Baird’s wife was Shiv’s godmother, but Shiv didn’t like her very much, because she thought she was trying to get promoted to just mother. Roman told her that that was stupid: “She already has a husband, dipshit.”
The tortoise was called Laertes, which Roman couldn’t spell, and didn’t care to. He was hot and tired from lack of sleep and like Laertes, he wanted to sit in the shade for a bit. He watched the slow stone of his shell shuffle across the wooden floor. When Baird came back in half an hour later, he found Roman lying on his front, chin propped on his hands, watching Laertes on his back, his legs pedaling uselessly as he tried to right himself.
“Roman, what are you doing?!” Baird was angry, but he reached his hands right past Roman to set Laertes back on his stupid, slow feet. Roman didn’t flinch, and even if he did, Baird probably didn’t see it anyway. “He could die if you leave him on his shell like that!”
“Why?” Roman asked.
Baird was his dad’s age, he thought. Roman wasn’t good with adult ages. Everyone was either younger than him, or a grown-up. Baird’s eyebrows were thick and ridiculous, raised as they were in anger, or horror, or…?
“Because he’ll suffocate.”
“Why?”
Baird sighed. Roman knew himself to be annoying, but didn’t have the will to change. “If you don’t help him stand upright, he won’t be able to breathe properly. His shell is too dense for his body.”
“His shell doesn’t fit him properly?”
Baird shook his head, and then he did touch Roman. He gripped his wrist and hoisted him to his feet, marching him to the door.
“It does. It’s meant to be like that.”
“Why grow a shell so heavy it will kill you?”
“I don’t know, Roman. That’s just how they are.”
Roman wasn’t scared of Baird, or his tortoise dying. He was scared that Baird would tell his dad, but he didn’t. That’s the main memory he has of the man; his eyebrows and his tortoise and his pathetic anger, lacking volume and conviction and follow-through. It made Roman understand that he was his dad’s friend because he was weak, and because his dad liked that he was weak. But Baird didn’t tell on him. Roman wondered why.
--
Roman gets into drugs in his 20s, mostly just for something to do.
Not, like, Kendall levels of ‘into drugs’, but a healthy cocktail of uppers at the club and downers at the after party. There are women by the dozen and men by the way. His personality still outgrows his body, stretches his skin over all of the hot air, and sometimes the temptation to puncture is overwhelming, so he takes a hit or a line or a pill and waits for the world to slow down.
He attends a premier on an empty stomach and a gram of coke. He twitches under camera flashes and fidgets through the film. He thinks about the huge expanse of the sky and all the buildings piercing it, fracturing the emptiness, ruining it with the light and noise and fucking smog and people and he suddenly, abruptly longs for the clarity at the top of a skyscraper, looking down rather than up. He wants to leave once the credits roll but Harriet holds him still and they sit through another hour of overblown production executives sucking each other off via Q&A: however did you do it, my good sir? Why, just look at the splendid material I provided you with, old sport. Roman’s the purse. He can sit at the back in the dark, because no one cares what he has to say. No blowy for me. Hey, Romulus, just jerk off into this cup, will ya? We’d rather not get too close.
And then the stirring starts and he needs an outlet and he’s clicking his teeth and slouching into a car and the after party assembles itself around him and Harriet says something about Sharon Stone and Roman is hungry, and so he takes two more pills and let them scorch him there, in the bowels of him.
Lots of people speak to him. He does not remember a word he says in response. He throws his phone into the pool, unplugs a string of fairy lights and wanders off into the Hollywood Hills without any of his possessions, and without telling a soul.
He comes back to something resembling consciousness in a bush off a side road. He’s torn his pants up the leg seam. He checks for his phone and remembers it’s sitting face-up in the shallow end. He stares up at the sky and it’s purple like a bruise, blemished with dawn, stars drowned out with the obnoxious glow of the city. He feels small and huge all at once, and mostly like he’s trying to settle something that he jumpscared in the first place.
Back against the dirt, dust in his hair, he slips through several layers of awareness, each one smacking him a little softer than the last. He wonders how long he’d have to lie out here before something started to eat him. He wonders if he’d have to be dead first, or if a wild dog or a particularly brutish bird would start picking while he breathed, still. If his screams would put them off or encourage them. If he’d even scream at all.
He’s grazed the skin on his right palm, and spends the night staring at the sky and peeling it off. When he makes it back to his house the following day, parched and wrung-out, hanging out of his ass, he is so fucked up he is surprised he remembers the way. He is surprised he remembers his own name. Harriet’s look morphs from worried to disgusted to apathetic in what could be seconds or hours, and she shuts him in the shower in his ruined suit. He turns his face to the rainfall and feels around his torso for the intestines he is certain were eaten.
Roy. Roy. My name is Roy.
--
It is traditional to wrestle for the spotlight a little at family functions, and between Kendall’s impending shitstorm, Shiv’s evidently cold feet and their dad just being, Roman’s settled in for a pretty close match. He’ll be a strong front runner by the ending of the evening, but he doesn’t know that yet.
He’s been watching Tom closely, more out of morbid fascination than any concern. He can’t picture his sister fucking him, which is weird because he can picture his sister fucking most people. If he did once have an idle, half-conscious contemplation of Shiv fucking Marcia, there would be no way to prove it and no hard drive to distribute, and so it basically didn’t happen. But Tom ? Maybe they lie next to each other and just get themselves off. Maybe she makes him wear rubber gloves. Maybe it’s all zip wires and latex and bits of titanium stuck into various orifices. Gross.
When Kendall got married, Roman was really really drunk. He was also younger, and more stupid, and didn’t have the lovely, fluffy, expensive, heavy, heavy fur coat of his father’s expectation crushing his shoulders. He’s got a big boy job to do and so settles for stirring the pot with the selection box of politicians and corporate criminals his sister has decided need to be present as she legally lashes herself to Wamsbland.
Tabitha presses her long fingers around his wrist and squeezes. She says “It’s feeding time at the zoo,” all aloof and knowing even though she’s been barely peripheral for under a month, and he’d like to secret her away somewhere, would like to make her laugh and think he’s clever. He’d like to be standing near her in the blurry background of other people’s photographs.
Instead, he introduces her to his mother. Caroline is several champagnes down and doesn’t seem to have noticed that her family is collapsing around her, like an Oedipal nuclear reactor in meltdown.
“Aren’t you an elegant thing! Which of your parents is the giant?” She asks Tabitha.
“Wouldn’t know!” Tabitha smiles like a Crest commercial and Roman catches himself on that, on the thought that she might be joking but if she isn’t, she’s like clay molded and unfondled, beaten into beautiful shape by her own hands. Is this pity or envy on mine lips?
“Well you make quite the splendid pair,” Caroline says, barbed, and Roman smiles. “What is it you do?”
Tabitha shrugs. “Not a great deal.”
“Ah, one of those. Professionally pretty, I understand of course.”
“Do you?” Tabitha’s accusation is warm, a shared secret, and so the insult drips off Caroline.
“Better than most. At least you have a brain; Roman’s last was a little squishy around the cranium.”
Roman rolls his eyes. “Grace had a PhD, mother.”
“I said ‘a little’!”
“I’m not the jealous type,” Tabitha notes.
I’m pretty sure you’d try to fuck Grace if you met her, Roman thinks.
“I’m pretty sure if Grace was here, Tabs would be angling for a threesome,” Roman says.
“Oh, you wanna be there too, then? That’s cool, I’ll recalibrate,” she says, and it makes his dick stir. Just a bit. Huh.
“I don’t care for this vulgarity, Roman,” Caroline says lightly with a wave of her hand. She drifts away without saying anything else, and Roman remembers why he was always so scared of staying with her for any length of time as a child, why his father’s threat of sending Roman to live with her hit home so hard. Nothing ever ends with her. Nothing is ever solid or final or complete. She floats, and things slip off her. She sees right to the soul of you and then shrugs as if she’s seen it all before, and she’ll see it all again.
“She seems nice,” Tabitha grins, biting her lip. Roman’s neck aches from looking up at her when they stand this close.
“She’s thinking about her champagne’s fucking calorie count and the fastest way to get us all out of her country.”
“I can’t imagine where you get your flightiness from.”
Roman frowns. “I’m not flighty.” He’s stalwart. He’s huge. He’s fucking George Foreman in a riptide, fucking Atlas asking if it’s in yet.
“You don’t like looking at people for too long,” she observes, attempting to hold his eye contact, making her damn point.
“I’m just easily bored,” he stabs, gaze flicking away, roaming the room, expecting to see his sister in tears or his brother in a pile of his own vomit or Cousin Greg eating his canape wrong. Instead he sees Gerri Kellman, squinting down at her phone. She’s in pale pink and she’s not wearing her glasses. He almost didn’t recognise her.
“Only boring people get bored,” she says, sing-song, relishing the cliche, and suddenly his skin crawls with her knowing, her peripheral judgment. Get in the pit or fuck the fuck off.
“Keep yourself amused, will you?” He says, hears his own derision. “I’ve gotta go see a man about a rocket.”
--
Three press conferences down, and Roman thinks he’s fucked Japan slow and proper and put it to bed with a glass of water. He goes to Shibuya with a motorbike display team and gets right royally shitfaced on some of the sourest sake he’s ever tasted.
“Like fucking douching with battery acid,” he cheers, slamming his glass against one of his new drinking buddies’ own.
“あなたがこれにお金を払ってくれることを願っています.” He replies, which Roman takes to mean “What wit you have, handsome American.”
He meanders past businessmen sleeping on park benches and a group of cats waiting patiently outside a fish market’s closed shutters, up through the clean streets and loud traffic, until he stumbles into the hotel. He thinks he remembers his room being on the twenty fifth floor. Or was it the twentieth? Or fifteenth…
He tries to shove his keycard into the slot of his door, jamming it in like when he’s trying to convince his dick it wants to be involved with this vulva, actually. He’s exhausted most of his cache of curses before the door swings open and a very angry General Counsel is on the other side.
“Roman, it’s three in the morning.”
“Hmn. Thought this was my room.”
She looks weird. Maybe it’s the light. Or the three bottles of top shelf sake. On closer inspection, she’s got these sort of see-through tape/band aid thingys carving out her cheeks and brow, tucking under her chin like a snail trail down her neck…
“Did you get botox, Mrs Kellman?” He asks, slightly scandalized, because he’s curious.
She blinks at him like he’s an idiot. “When in Tokyo.”
“Indeed. Smart gal. It’s better here. Probably cheaper. Is that why you came with me, hm? Knock a few years off?”
“Only because you’ve been piling them on,” she says back. Roman looks at her cream silk pajamas and her bare feet. It’s weird. Like seeing a teacher outside of school. Like the first time Shiv wore a bikini in front of the rest of them. Like when you accidentally take the TV remote into the bathroom with you.
“You need something?” She asks, and it’s less scathing and more genuine now. She moves herself a little behind the door, like she’s also just realized she’s in nightwear.
“Nope,” he pops the ‘p’, pushes himself off her door frame, “Sorry to disturb your slumber, clearly you need a little surgical support with that beauty rest. I’ll just be going.” He’s not slurring as much now, but his head is swimming and he thinks he might be sick.
He pivots on his heel and sways down the corridor.
“Roman?”
“Hmmmm?” He spins around again and the world carries on for a few seconds after him. Yep. Definitely gonna be sick.
Gerri is peering at him from around her door, and Roman has the fleeting impulse to kick it so the handle jams into her stomach.
“Your room is that way. 703.” She points down the opposite end of the corridor.
“Mm. ‘Course. Just checking if you know where I’m sleeping. Gotcha. I’ll make sure to lock my door.”
He slouches past her and into his own room.
Later, half-asleep and sweating, dizzy and sick and pent-up from the alcohol, he squeezes his cock and conjures up his usual assortment of lurid, dark web stuff. He’s got a good pace going thinking about the snuff film he accidentally saw when he was at boarding school, stiffness running through him, when he thinks about some Japanese doctor sticking a syringe into Gerri’s cheek and inflating it, her sagging skin stretching. He thinks about the irate twitch of her eyebrow, and how the doctor might have set her expression that way permanently; an eternal look of frustration and displeasure at Roman Roy. He thinks about coming on her swollen, sensitive face as his climax knocks the breath out of him.
In the morning, he’s forgotten what his imagination cooked up for him, and at breakfast she looks normal - fresh, maybe - and he doesn’t stare too closely.
--
His dad decides to sell the company instead of speaking to his children, and Roman isn’t even surprised. He’d blown up a rocket just to give Shiv something to glance at for a few seconds on her wedding day, and he’s long accepted that his family will always use passwords and paperwork to express their feelings.
“It’s overkill, but it’s a solution,” Shiv says down the phone. Roman wonders if Dad’s got someone pointing a gun at her on the other end.
“Overkill? It’s fucking shelling a shanty town. When we regroup I’m having a doctor shine a flashlight in his eyes.”
“You’re extra cranky; you still on Japan time?”
“Fuck you, I’ll see you later.”
The thing about having your name on the building is that the building becomes your body. Too many foreign objects in your bloodstream, and your immune system throws a pissy party. He doesn’t get how normos can roll their eyes and ask why he cares so much, why they all care so much. Your high horse is a fucking amusement park pony. They came from the company and unto the company they shall surely return. It’s the fucking lifeblood; the money, the power, the occupation of it all. It’s everything because it has always been everything. How often do other people get criticized for trying to stop themselves getting knifed in the guts?
He’s got that bug again, that chronic confidence that grows like a cyst on the pulsing inside of his skull; it could be me. It could be him. It should be. He’s the most like Dad. He’s not a flimsy lib like Shiv or a weak-willed junkie like Ken. He’s smart and slippery. Gerri said so in Japan. Well, she said “you talk so much that some of it is bound to be good”. Snide bitch. When he’s in charge she can choke on his dick as she tries to apologize for talking down to Logan’s son.
They’re on the fucking merry-go-round again, the whole clown possie of them, trading spaces close to the edge, clinging to sweat-slicked plastic. This is the ringmaster’s latest attempt at shaking them all off just to see who can hang on the longest. He’s mixing up his metaphors, but the sensation stands.
And it spins and spins. Faster and fucking freakier. He tries to sidle on ahead and gets kicked back again for his troubles. You’re a moron. He’s that too. Smart but stupid. Slippery but conspicuous. Less of a snake and more of a worm. Or a lizard without any legs, or something.
He thinks Shiv knocks on his door that night in Hungary, at some ridiculous fucking hour when of course he’s still awake, a few more whiskeys in and feeling less kicked and more angry. It’s probably Shiv. It might not be. It might be Ken. I absolutely definitely do not want to speak to him. So lies on his front with his face pressed into the mattress until exhaustion or booze or the lack of oxygen rocks him to sleep.
In the morning it’s Gerri who comes to find him when he’s late for breakfast. He guesses she’s his new minder, now he’s pissed Frank off one too many times. Let the pig squeal some more. His head is banging and he’s gone hydrophobic again, like drinking anything would be throwing water on a chip pan fire. Gerri’s all wrapped up and none of his clothes will cooperate. She buttons up his shirt and tries to avoid looking at his face. She smells sort of floral and she’s a teensy tiny bit taller than him in her heels. He voices his intrusive thoughts like he normally does and she tosses it back at him. The flirtation falls like dead leaves between them and he wants to kick it afterwards.
“Next time you need business advice, ask someone who knows what they’re talking about.”
“What, you?”
“Yeah,” her arms are crossed, corset and armor, “Like me.”
It settles something, looking up at her, unmoved and immaculate, while he reassembles himself on the floor. He reaches for his floating debris around the base of her lighthouse.
--
Roman wasn’t good in school. It’s insane to expect someone to follow what you’re saying if it’s this fucking dry. All words he knows, just in an order he hasn’t heard before, imparting new information that doesn’t feel needed. Or wanted. He retains things, remembers details, often useless and innocuous details but he’s not stupid. He just doesn’t like being in a room with a bunch of other kids being told facts by someone poorer and uglier than him; it’s a sure way to lose credibility. Management training isn’t much different. Go on, tell me more about the company I grew up in, why don’t you? You missed the bit about using board seats as a stick to beat your loved ones with.
Still, he tries to focus. It makes him feel counterintuitively child-like and grown up all at once. Tabitha sends him memes and her thoughts on the reality TV she’s watching. Shiv sends him deliberately opaque updates on the office. Gerri sends him emails and encouragement. He’s a bad dog sent away to borstal, but at least he feels somewhat missed.
The scheduled phone sex is a disaster, of course. If he can’t fuck Tabitha when she’s in the room with him, what are the chances it will be more successful with just her voice? It’s like calling a porn chatline but he has to go to dinner with her afterwards. Tabitha’s voice is low and sultry and makes his skin crawl. When he looks at her he can picture the independent parts of her, like pulling apart a Barbie, and then when he reassembles them he can see how she is beautiful. He knows how everything lines up and fits together. She’s flat and smooth and perfect and he occasionally feels ashamed standing next to her. No. Not ashamed. Maybe just mismatched. But it’s a good match. Everyone says so. She’s hot like Willa and smart like Rava. She’s dry, and funny. Logan said it was a good match.
The idea of her touching him is hilarious. Initially taking her out was a jab at his new brother-in-law, and fuck it all but he found something strangely intriguing in her connection to Tom. The semen-spitter herself, feeding Wambsgans like a baby bird, and Roman tucked himself right under her wing. She tried to blow him once or twice, with varying degrees of success mostly shucked down towards the ‘failure’ end of the spectrum. He doesn’t know if she makes him nervous, or if she doesn’t make him nervous enough. So, half-aroused but mostly exhausted, he calls Gerri. Just to check.
It’s fucked up how she talks to him. “You are a piece of shit” - where does she get off?! He likes that about getting to know Gerri better; he’s realized that her professionalism goes as far as it will get her ahead, and then she throws her vulgar hat into the ring with the rest of the men. She’s foul-mouthed and brutish when she wants to be, cushioned with silk and supported by research, of course. Slap-and-soothe. So assured and level that you’d believe her if she said you were a zit-faced turbo-tit without a slither of respectability. If she said it to you in that steady, sweet voice that knows everything, apparently. He can even conjure it. The thought is enough to knock him over the line from possibly-horny to actually-horny, and he’s holding enough of a conversation with her that he doesn’t have the brain space to untangle that right now.
When he was younger, he must have figured that if he was going to be the one to get hit, he might as well make a game out of it. He always pushed a bit too hard, ignored the warning signs and barreled forward, then forward some more, as far as he could go before the proverbial bite came to his often literal ass. “Enough is enough!” Logan knew he was a freak even back then. The stick oranged until it was indistinguishable from the carrot.
He nudges and inches until Gerri brings up masturbation, playing into his image of a randy little flea buzzing around the serious people. Hearing her say the word is a nice blow to the back of his skull. It’s like the room gets a bit darker. Something simmers. He wonders if she feels it or if he’s actually losing it. He won’t let it slip away, though. His brain goes fuzzy. He lies back and lets her hear the clink of his belt buckle.
“You disgusting little pig,” and oh this is new. This is a new tone from her. It’s not throaty and deliberate like Tabitha. It’s genuinely derogatory, just a little smug, and controlled only in that it’s ironic: professional despite the unprofessionalism. It never felt like this when his parents or his nanny or his teachers berated him. His brain whirrs and clicks into yes, this is how it’s supposed to be. The change is irreversible, but he doesn’t know it yet.
He’ll wonder, in the future, if that first time was the last time he was normal. If he’d just changed a few things, exercised that restraint he was famous for not having, he might have saved himself. And her. Too big for my cum-stained steel-toed Prada boots. It’s so easy to be himself, or whoever it is that he’s pretending to be right now. It’s nothing to encourage her disgust, her dismissal, her sweet speculation that’s painfully on-the-mark. It’s nothing to ask her to shrink him down to actual size, and then it’s everything afterwards. It’s fucking everything.
--
There's a moment in Tern Haven, the morning after, when Gerri smiles at him on the veranda during breakfast, tight-lipped and thin-gazed, and then dips near him as they pass through the door together to refill on coffee.
"Don't try that shit again, Roman. I'm serious."
"Hiding in plain sight, G-Money. Oldest trick in the book."
"Cutting it too close. You're in deep shit as it is."
He rolls his eyes, sees Tom and Shiv having a similarly low-spread, half-angry conversation across the room.
"Sorry, madame, I didn't mean to get your nightie dirty."
She glares, but it can't stay there for long, what with all the eyes everywhere. They'd both better get used to being scrutinized. He has a feeling Logan won't alleviate the suspicion until Roman's kicked back to LA and Gerri's worried herself into a not-quite-so-early grave.
"Keep your ears pricked," she says, and he smiles a little, knowing she has forgiven him, "something's coming."
--
It’s gone midnight but if he wasn’t in his office pacing, he’d be in his apartment pacing, and so he slams his laptop shut and goes to find Gerri. Her new assistant is easy to intimidate and he tracks her down in a meeting room on the Press Floor. When he enters without knocking, she’s surrounded by the detritus of a meeting that clearly ended a while ago. She looks frazzled, meaning her eyes are a little red and her hair is slipping out around her temples.
“What’s happened now?” She asks without looking up from her keyboard. Roman climbs onto the table and sits perpendicular to her.
“Thought I was in dire need of a DOJ update. What’s ol’ Laurie spewing between courses?
Her eyebrow twitches behind her glasses, but she still doesn’t look up at him. She’s wearing black today, which means she wants to avoid attention at work but draw it in public. Her skirt is shorter than usual, too. Only the most dignified of sluts to save us from this noble shitstorm. He’s staring at her which he knows annoys her but she still won’t dignify him with a glance. Fucking Lot’s Wife playing hard to get.
“We’re in murky waters,” she offers, and he listens, sliding down into one of the chairs, the pull of the floor suddenly astronomical, “They’ve added a couple more seats at the execution, but nothing we can’t outperform with the board. I’m concerned they might prioritize the spectacle over the money; win some credibility back, and so on.”
“What happened to money always wins, Lorelei Lee?”
She sighs, and there’s truth in it. “For them, the power is in the post-mortem. They can wait it out, we can’t. Hypocritical Hippocratic.”
“Mn,” Roman sluices out of the chair and onto the carpet. He watches Gerri’s lips purse but otherwise she’s still emailing. He ducks his head and stares at her shoes under the table, the matte veil of her nylons. He can see the beginning of cellulite in the overhang shadow of her pencil skirt. The suggestion of the veins at the back of her knees. As he stares, he sees her press her legs together, tucking one foot behind the other, and a smirk like sewage spreads across his face where she can’t see.
“So what do you think? Charm offensive? Hardball? Divide and fuck?”
“I think we’re on…well if not the right track, then at least we’re on a track. I don’t want to undo it all over whispers. It will make us look spooked. Guilty. Guiltier.”
“Right, of course. Roger that.” He says, British, barely listening, inching closer to her.
“Roman, can you please sit up at the table like a grown up?”
“Why?”
“I would hate to accidentally kick you in the throat.”
“Then don’t move.”
“I’m trying to work. It’s really late, can you please give me the room?”
“It is really late,” he observes, genius that he is, “It’s bedtime at the care home. I’ll summon your mobility scooter.”
“Are you just here to rugrat me into sending the press secretary an ableist slur?”
“Hmn,” Roman hums a laugh, loves the way her voice pitches high and airy when she’s fed up with him, the last dregs of her good humor before her patience runs out and she goes all cold and clinical and mean. Hmn. He puts his hand on her knee and she startles. First time for everything.
“Roman, I mean it.”
“You gonna call security? Lock me up for the crime of speaking to a colleague in my place of work.”
“It’s like you want to fuck everything that I’ve just spent weeks cleaning up.”
He does. He really fucking does. He wants to watch her knit an elaborate sweater and then pull on the end thread until it all unravels, so that she’ll weep for the loss of her hard work, slap him until his ears ring, and then take up the wool and start all over again, hands busy, gaze focused, sitting at her desk in the office he owns, the kingdom he practically has the keys to.
“Something distracting you then, Gerr-meister?”
She jolts her leg away from his touch, but the movement just parts her thighs further and Roman gets that deep, glorious red feeling, heavy and suffocating like crushed velvet. He contemplates the inch - the inch given down a phone line months ago that only looked like an inch in that it wasn’t nothing - and immediately charges ahead in pursuit of the mile. Creature of habit. Chip off the old apple tree. Whatever. Fuck.
He pushes her legs apart himself, insinuating himself there so she can’t snap him out, which she immediately tries to do, of course, but his shoulders don’t buckle under the clench of her knees and she doesn’t skid her chair back far enough to dislodge him.
“Roman-"
“Tell me about the vote. Do we make it?” He keeps his voice even because business talk gets her all hot and horny. Or at least, it’s more likely that she’ll let him stay here if she thinks he might be absorbing any useful information at all.
“Currently, it doesn’t look great, but it never does. Instability always crops up this close. I think if you and Shiv keep steady, we have a chance.”
“Uh huh,” he mutters. He tilts his head, resting his cheek on the inside of her knee - he can’t help it - and if it’s possible she gets even tenser, but she’s not kicking him. She’s not even pushing him away.
“We need the Sandies. What’s Shiv’s read on it?” Is she fucking typing?! The minx. He drags his cheek along the inside of her thigh, stubble catching on the nylon, and feels her opposite foot land on his hip, pushing, holding, heel digging in just right. He’d like to claim to have never been so hard in the office before, but, well…
“As if she’d tell me anything,” he says, thinking about Shiv’s stillness, how twitchy he feels next to her, and then takes a deep breath in of Gerri so he stops thinking altogether.
“You need to work harder as a united front, I’ve been telling you since Croatia. There’s promise in it. It’s easier to steer the ship when you know the captain’s not thinking about jumping overboard.”
Her voice is perfectly steady. Roman’s head feels nice and empty, here on the floor, knees against the coarse carpet, and maybe that’s why she allows it. She shouldn’t allow him to touch her, really. He hasn’t done anything to deserve it. He’d better listen, then, better make it worth her while. It’s hard, though. It’s nigh on fucking impossible to cling to any coherence when her skin is so warm, and her clean, sweet smell is all around, and he wishes she would just snap a collar around his neck and drag him out into the street by it. He wishes she would run her cold fingers through his hair. He wishes she would look at him. He wishes he didn’t have to beg, although he has a suspicion he would beg forever. Would quite like to beg forever. God. Bitch. Fuck.
She’s talking strategy, and he hums his engagement as he puts an unsure hand on her thigh, slipping upwards to the edge of her skirt. He feels like a kid again, stealing a macaron off the table when his mother’s back was turned, hiding away and eating it quickly like a fucking raccoon, meringue around his mouth. He’s scared of what’s between Gerri’s legs. He can’t stop thinking about it.
He yelps as she digs her heel into his hip, hissing like a punctured lilo.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Of course, what else would I be doing?”
“Well? What’s your read on Kendall?”
“He’s looking for his next hit, that’s all. This will blow over. His balls lay snugly in a little silver box on Daddy’s dressing table. He’ll be back.”
“Well sure, but in the meantime?”
“In the meantime, you should clock off,” he hears himself say. He shuffles closer, slowly, as if she won’t notice he’s doing it. He didn’t lock the door. How long could she pretend she was alone if someone else came in looking for her? Roman thinks he might go for the Achilles tendon of anyone who tried.
“CEO isn’t all fun and games, you know that, right? In fact, it is precisely no fun and zero games.” She sounds less professional in her hedging. He turns his face into her skin and kisses the inside of her thigh; only a dry drag of his lips but that still fucking counts as a kiss. She doesn’t react, but he can picture that eyebrow twitching up again. He wonders how noticeable it will be if he comes in his suit pants and has to take the elevator down to his car.
“So clock off.”
“Roman, you-”
“We’re a team, right? Let’s tag team, then.”
“I told you, we need to establish boundaries, or it will spell the end for both of us.” She pushes him harder with her heel. He slides both his hands to her upper thighs, holding her there, and he’s got a handful of Gerri and it’s honestly fucking insane. He feels fucking insane.
“You’re tired. I’m dying. Like I think I might actually fucking die if I don’t-”
He feels like he’s choking. She’s frozen where she holds herself. He inches her skirt up higher.
“If you don’t what, Roman? What do you think you are doing?”
Bitch.
Gerri has made it clear that she thinks he’s a limp-dicked, knock-kneed virgin with little to no understanding of female anatomy and whose enthusiasm is inversely proportional to his ability. Only half of this is true. He’s had to learn stuff, learn to be good at stuff, to keep his reputation without actually having to stick it in anything too often. And as much as he gets off on the assumption of his uselessness, he can’t help but wonder if she isn’t shooting them both in the foot here.
“I dunno. Following my nose. Do let me know if I’m making you uncomfortable.” He speaks quickly, briskly, like hopping over a curb. He shoulders his way further into the teepee of her legs and unashamedly sniffs her skin. It’s a bit less real with the material between them. He thinks that might be for the best at this stage.
“Could you follow your nose into some other corner, perhaps one in the corridor?” Gerri says, but he senses the lilt of curiosity in her voice and grabs onto it with greedy hands.
“C’mon, you’re a much more interesting corner than the corridor, Gerri.”
“We need to figure out how we’re going to-”
“Yeah, I’m not gonna be able to do that right now. I’m just gonna - I’m not -”
“Are you having a stroke?”
Yes. “I’m trying to be a good little lapdog, Mrs Megabitch.”
“Then sit.” She pushes with her heel and it’s painful enough to bring tears to Roman’s eyes. It’s so good, crammed under a table, curled over on himself, skewered by her shoe, panting against her thigh. It feels so fucking perfect he could throw up.
He crosses the mile marker and all but dives head-first under her skirt, hitching it up as he goes, and he knows he has seconds and so he makes the most of it: meat of her thigh clamped between his fingers, the wall of heat slamming into his cheeks, the rough of nylon against his face as he presses his mouth over her clothed cunt. He crashes into the plunge pool of her, ringing in his ears, panic like something sweet and scalding on his tongue, and he hears her intake of breath, feels it too in the ripple of tension through her body, and then he is harshly ejected from her crotch as she kicks him away, making a wordless sound of shocked disapproval that will be playing like an unskippable ad in his head for the foreseeable future.
“HR wouldn’t even know where to fucking start with you,” she hisses, and stands from her chair, collecting her laptop and her papers before marching towards the door.
“Be fucking sensible, Roman,” she says, steadying her voice, color in her cheeks, and she slams the door behind her.
Roman curls up like an insect in the sun, presses the heel of his hand over his erection and comes white hot like the flash of an atomic bomb, drooling into the carpet.
--
From then on he can’t stop thinking about it.
‘It’ meaning several things. Most notably the Interim CEO’s cunt, and how best to acquire access to it. It slinks around his subconscious like Freddy Krueger and he’s half scared shitless and half feeling like maybe his organs would be better on the outside after all. He wonders who the last person to see it was, other than herself, if she even looks down there anymore. He’s never seen a cunt over thirty five in the flesh. Ew. Flesh. Hot. He wonders if she showed it to him if he’d piss himself or just come on the spot. Maybe he’d die. He wonders if he’d even be able to do anything with it, or if he’d just short-circuit like plugging a Nokia 3310 into a Macbook.
‘It’ also sometimes means this thing they do, or rather did do before she scored the top job, where she’d insult him down a private phone line or through a bathroom door and he’d jerk himself off over his Armani suit pants. It means whatever state their relationship is in on this particular day; if she’s paying him some attention or cock-blocking him with her new DOJ-branded vibrator. It dictates his mood more often than he’s proud to admit, and even someone as dense as him can admit that it has changed since Croatia, since Kendall stomping around over everyone else’s sandcastles. Probably because it was all fun and games when he was the shit-spewing runt of the litter and she was part of the furniture, but now there are so many eyes on her and he might just be the heir apparent in the absence of his older brother. He gets it. He does. Doesn’t mean he likes it.
It is also, even more tragically, the thing that grows in him now, the weed that’s coloured like her lipstick and pungent as her perfume. It creeps up from his stomach and twists around his lungs until he’s nearly suffocating. It feels scratchy and sharp and kind of difficult to ignore, despite all the lovely practice he’s been stacking up over the years when it comes to strange and uncomfortable sensations in his chest. When did this fucking happen? Every now and then he’s claw-machined out of his body for an attempt at an objective view of things and he can’t believe it. It is Gerri, now. Gerri Kellman. Fucking teapot Gerri. Short-and-stout. Here’s my prestigious law degree and you’ll never see my spout. Shiv’s godmother Gerri. He doesn’t remember meeting Gerri, that’s how long she’s been in his life, and sure she wasn’t around much when he was growing up but honestly, who was? She was still alive. And an adult. And probably working for Waystar. And maybe fucking his dad. And now she’s old and austere and run-through with something softer than stone but harder and colder than everything else. And it’s not like she doesn’t look her age. Not like she doesn’t act it. There’s something actually pretty admirable about how she wears her experience. Pearl necklaces and diamond-drop earrings. She’s all frumpy and neat in her gray skirt suits. So fucking sensible in her low heels and her clean nails and her clipped, pretty way of speaking, the way her silly Minnie Mouse voice spews out the frilliest filth when she’s playing rough with the boys. God. Fuck. Gerri. He thinks about her arched eyebrow, her radiating disapproval, the soft skin loose around her eyes and elbows, the light cloud of her hair, bleached and blow-dried within an inch of its life. He thinks about how it is nearly impossible to move her, to surprise her, to unseat or defeat her, and how on occasion he thinks he might have gotten close. He thinks about her in the bath, chewing her thumb while she reads her emails, her silk pajamas and face creams, her low, ironic laughter, her grown-up children and dead husband and blank, clean history that he knows nothing about. He thinks about her eyes and her mouth and her shoulders spilling over the neckline of her dress and the perfume on the inside of her wrists and the concept of her small, clever hand between her legs, the way he guesses her face would compress a little and then smooth out if she ever got any damn pleasure, any damn peace. He’s saturated with her. She’s trying to get him to focus and he wants to, he truly does, but he’s never been good at quashing urges, and so he overindulges in the safe space of his own pathetic mind. A mind full of this serious, sexy old lady and her insults and her jargon and her precise, precious approval. God. Gerri. Fucking Gerri?! How the fuck did this happen?
And she clearly thinks it’s a joke. He scared her in the meeting room the other day, spooked her out of her seat like a greyhound at the starting pistol, because she didn’t think he’d actually touch her. He wonders if perhaps she’s convinced this is all a game, some low-brow pulpy tactic-turned-fantasy that he’s spewing in order to distract from his broken dick and his glaring professional pitfalls. To be fair to her, Roman has only recently admitted to himself that it’s more than that, that he does in fact want to man up and follow through, as it were. Take her out and shake her out. Wed her and bed her, wine-dine-sixty-nine et cetera. That he might actually want to do something, be something, with her and to her and for her. It’s taking shape like a stormcloud in his head, but she’s all boarded up in her castle, and he can hardly blame her. Silly little Roman with his silly little crush. What folly of his shall befall me today, hm? What nonsense shall his tiny shrimp burden me with before my lunch?
Admitting he’s a pain in the ass is surely the first step to change, and so he decides to call it there. He sends her diary invites that she rejects. He brings her coffee she doesn’t drink. He asks her to lunch again and again and she tells him she’s busy. He follows her around the office like a horned-up duckling, climbing over her furniture, knocking on her glass like he’s at an aquarium, sulking when she’s with someone else, however unthreatening and irrelevant. He calls her and she answers, but she’s losing interest in his rambling and he can tell, but he can’t stop. It’s like reopening a scab every time it starts to heal. Itchy . He sits across her desk from her, splayed in the chair, a scourge in her orderly timetable, and is generally a nuisance until she barks at him to go away. He makes her laugh. He throws shit at a wall, and watches her peer at the stuff that sticks with consideration. He tells her what he really thinks. He peacocks around until he sees his window of patience close, and then stays a couple of minutes longer to make sure she definitely dead-bolted it.
He offers his throat for cutting, surreptitiously like he was just stretching his neck, when he hands over the photos of the poor fucker with Ken’s initials permanently rendered on his forehead. She hands them back, clicking the razor closed. They have a secret , now. And not like a ‘I know exactly what it takes to get you to ejaculate’ kind of secret.
She’s kind of killing it, too. This CEO thing. She’s tired a lot and she’s not particularly power-hungry, which makes her a great fit. When he’s feeling particularly masochistic he’ll picture her fucking Laurie for the sake of Logan and his Empire of Blood and Rehypnol. He thinks about her opening herself up after nearly a decade of widowhood so that Shiv’s fuckwad husband doesn’t go to jail. Atta girl.
So when they kill Ken, or Ken kills himself, and Shiv gets bored and pissy and menstrual and decides to go fellate an iceberg or something, when they all shut up and fuck up and leave Gerri to sort it out, he’ll be right there, at her heel, leash between his teeth, staining more of her Louboutins.
--
The streets gleam shiny and new, slick with petrol and discarded needles as he completes his victory lap of Manhattan. He spits into the gutter to add to the sheen.
He should get a new phone. A non-piss phone. He should pop a pill and fuck Matsson’s secretary all night long. He should buy a coral reef. He should go to Central Park Zoo and tip all the tortoises over.
“What is it?” His piss-phone says into his ear.
“Are you home?”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, and you’re a slave to office hours, did I interrupt a debrief?”
“Are you high?”
“As a kite,” he giggles, hears himself actually giggle, “On Triumvirate Tragedy rather than whatever Ken scored by the kilo. I tugged Matsson off and then pushed my brother over. It was magical, Gerri.”
“Are you going home, Roman?”
Ugh. He loves it when she says his name. All clipped and curt like that. Roman. His stupid fucking name all grand and proud, and she makes it sound like a coffee order. Even better when she says ‘Rome’. Rome… Ah. He wants to get her to call him Rome again.
“At some point I imagine I’ll wander into it.”
“Are you walking?!” She says with the same cadence as 'are you joking?!'
“Sure am. Regular flaneur I am today, like those queers in London. Or Paris. I should go back to Paris.”
“Call a car, Roman.”
“You call a car, Gerri.”
“I’m not your PA.”
“You’re not my mom either.”
There is a beat too long after that where the implications of the accusation sit pretty, but he’s too giddy to care and he plows on ahead.
“Can I come over?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“Are you coming this way now?” She asks, sounds genuinely scared.
“Pft. I don’t know where you live. I thought they sealed you back into your cryo-chamber in the Waystar basement at the end of each working day.”
“I’m calling you a car,” she’s tipping over from personable to irate, now. Roman dithers.
“Meet me. Please.”
“What?”
“Come meet me now. Please.”
“Wha-” She’s actually speechless. He takes that as a win. “Absolutely not.”
“I’ll kill myself if you don’t.”
“It’s nearly four in the morning.”
“So meet me at five. Isn’t that when you’re normally up?”
“I’ll see you in the office, Roman.” He can feel her go for the evil red button at the bottom of her phone screen.
“Six then. Before work. I wanna go over the details with you.”
She sighs, huge and heavy. He thinks about her pajamas again, how she must sigh taking off her work clothes, rubbing imprints left on her waist and shoulders, shedding her skin in her own domain. He thinks about burying his face in her and suffocating.
“Alright, but covert, yeah?”
“As ever. Sergeant Subtle, that’s me. I won’t even wear my harness.”
“Goodnight.”
She hangs up, and he’s grinning even wider now. He doesn’t know why he called her, doesn’t really have anything to say to her that’s urgent enough to warrant calling, but he’s out of options. Clinging to the top of a swaying tree, trying desperately to stop the sunset. He doesn’t go home; wanders thoughtlessly until he finds the shittiest, greasiest diner he possibly can downtown and texts her the location. He half expects her to come, half expects her to send a response team.
In Croatia, there had been that wonderful first night. That gift of a first night, delivered gratefully back to his people in one piece. Imagine that. Gratitude. Nothing like a hostage situation to teach you the true meaning of Christmas. He’d missed his shithead brother and his bitchtits sister. His crumbling behemoth of a father, and all the others. And Gerri, eyes flicking, checking him for bumps and scrapes like she might be personally blamed.
After all the talking and the drinking - not-eating and euphemisms; a Roy classic - he managed to slink away to the bow and find her nestled in a nook like a roosting hen, book mostly-abandoned, staring out at the water like she was a million years old, which could have been true for all he knew.
He sat on the deck at her feet and let the breeze loose the hair on his brow like he was Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans . The sea was black all around them, murmuring like an old ghost, nearly invisible but for the muddy smears of yellow light cast on it by the boat. He blinked at what he thought was the horizon and wondered if he was a few degrees off.
“Are you alright?” She asked, which was expected and unprecedented in equal measure.
“Sure,” he said after a beat, voice croaking, “Peachy keen, Billie Jean. Just some light hostage negotiations on behalf of myself and I’m ready to play in the pen again.”
It didn’t sound hugely convincing, he will admit, but she didn’t patronize him with a follow-up.
“Big day tomorrow, I suppose,” she said, quiet and contemplative like he had never heard her before. He’d wanted to look at her then, but was oddly ashamed to show her his face.
“It won’t be you,” he said, because he knew.
“It might. It makes sense.”
“We’ll make it not make sense.”
She laughed a little, a graceful little snort, and shifted against the cushions. The deck was hard and Roman’s back ached, but he didn’t move to join her on the seat.
“We can try,” she sighed, and Roman’s putrid little heart glowed a bit, just a bit , at the collective pronoun, “We’d better be careful, though. If Logan suspects any kind of partnership, he’ll throw me overboard before Frank even has a chance to put his foot in it.”
Roman frowned. “What makes you think that?” He asked, because he wanted to hear her reasoning, wanted to hear her say it, not because he didn’t think it was true.
“He’ll think I’m weaponizing you against him,” she said, and Roman heard in the clipped ending of her sentence all of the things she knew but wouldn’t voice, didn’t need to voice: he’ll say I’m a cradle-snatching gold digger with my claws in his softest, youngest boy. He’ll say I’m a wicked witch pulling your strings and whispering foul lies about him in your ear. He’ll say you’re a pervert and I’m a soulless opportunist using your weakness of character to secure my spot in the Estate beside him.
“Are you?” Roman asked. He was so tired. He remembers being so fucking tired.
She hummed, amused, through her nose. They stared out over the guard rails together, parallel lines against the outline of a baked coast on a huge floating hunk of million-dollar metal. Roman tipped his head against her knee, and she didn’t move away.
He is thinking of the yacht when she arrives. The diner is 24-hours, and only him, a hobo and a gaggle of half-dressed drunk girls occupy its booths. The vinyl is sticky and Roman is twitchy about it, but he’s dragged her here on a whim and so can’t flail at it now.
She’s dressed for work. The sun is coming up and shining off the asphalt.
“Charming,” she says as she sits down, phone transferred from her palm to the table top. She doesn’t wrinkle her nose or touch the surfaces with caution. She settles herself into her surroundings and sinks into the scene like she always does, and he envies her all of a sudden with something burning hot and blinding.
She waits for him to talk. There are bags under her eyes but her makeup hides the worst of it. I did that to her. He likes that he’s the cause of her sleeplessness. He dreams of keeping her awake all night.
He figures he’d better think of something important to tell her and quickly, so he fills her in on what happened with Matsson. She listens with focus that no human should have at 6 am, let alone a human in their sixties. Roman orders a coffee and drinks it in three spread-out gulps. She takes a bottle of water out of her purse and sips until it’s half empty. She doesn’t take notes but she does pick up her phone and type every once in a while.
“Well, that’s certainly promising,” she sighs, rubs at the bridge of her nose under her glasses, “If not particularly official.”
“We have a Gentlemen’s Agreement forged the traditional way in mutual mental masturbation, sealed in piss, et cetera. It’s done. I did it, that’s what matters.”
He worries that Gerri sometimes doubts his competence. He worries not because he doubts it himself, but because without his corporate functionality she has very little reason to stick with him. I’ll stick with her anyhow. I’ll stick it in her. I’m stuck to her. I’m so fucking stuck.
So he babbles on about stock inconsistencies and AI and tech temperature creeping up to suns-out-guns-out levels of commitment, and she sits opposite him with an eyebrow half-cocked and listens, yes, but listens because she’s paid to. Listens because it might benefit her to be in the know. And Roman realizes quite abruptly that she’s come here not because she thought he might be high, or because she wanted to hear his ideas, but because his troglodyte crush gives her a leg-up on the other old fuckers in C-Suite.
It doesn’t hurt because nothing does, but it itches . He stops talking and she looks up from her phone.
“How are you doing?” He asks, before he can stop himself.
“Huh?” She must be tired, to drop to this level of ineloquence.
“You know. Interim CEO. Sergeant Howie at the top of the Glass Cliff. Dr Milf-i having to check over her shoulder for gangsters while trying to nurse one through a mental breakdown?”
Gerri frowns. She looks old when she does that. Roman swallows heavily.
“I’m fine.”
He nods. “Good.”
She’s still frowning. “Why?”
“Just wondered, jeez, I can’t express concern without signing an NDA?”
She shifts in her seat, licks her lips, looks out of the window at the garbage truck throwing yesterday’s news into its maw.
“I’m good,” she says, and then, praise fucking be, she sighs and shakes her head, looking down at the sunrise catching in her water bottle, “It’s a lot, but I’m good.”
“Well I have a private jet and probably still legally own that island in Bermuda I bought when I was fucked in Chicago that one time, so if you ever need a-” he whistles, waves his fingers around, gestures to the door, anything to keep the blood flowing, to avoid having to stop, “You know, a break. With the shit my dad puts us through we will probably be granted asylum by most developed nations.”
Her forehead smoothes out. Apathy is worse than confusion, worse than skepticism. Apathy is worse than everything. He’d rather she gutted him with his own dagger than ignore him. He’d sooner she walked all over him than skirted around him.
“Do I give the impression of someone in need of a holiday?” She asks, and it sounds accusatory but he’s not fucking stupid.
“Fresh as a daisy, boss,” he says with a grin, because he’s a little shit and he doesn’t know what to say if she asks him for a real opinion that she might not like.
She rolls her eyes but just a little, then checks her watch and reaches for her bag.
He thinks if she leaves right now he might walk off the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Do I scare you?” He asks, reaching for her arm to…still it? To stop it?To hold it? He doesn’t touch her.
She does stop. She’s mercifully still for a second.
“Every day.”
“Tell me how not to.”
A look steals across her face, like she’s watching a drone she spent hundreds on fly confidently and relentlessly into a lake.
“Be less…” she says, and trails off as if she is going to add more, but then she doesn’t.
Roman swallows again. He’s thirsty. And wired from the caffeine. And in so much pain he’s not sure where it comes from. No, that’s triumph. I’m triumphant. I don’t know where the pride comes from.
“You wouldn’t want me if I was less.”
He expects her to say ‘I do not want you’. Instead she looks at him for an even longer moment and says “I guess we’ll never know.”
“Teach me,” he can hear how desperate he sounds, how shattered he must look having been awake for now over twenty-four hours, “Teach me and I’ll fucking do it.”
She stands, picks up her bag, smiles at him again, but it’s small and soft and honestly he could melt into the vinyl, into the linoleum floor of the shittiest joint he’s ever stepped foot in.
“I’ll see you at the office, Roman.”
Roman watches her leave, and feels the uncomfortable, new sensation of wishing he knew more about her. He should have asked her about her childhood, or her favorite fucking color, or what trauma she’s racked up to be willingly taking it from Logan Roy for nearly thirty years. He should have prised her open a little and let the light in. Or the water in. He should have gorged on her when he could and then maybe she’d know that he is interested in her, and not just what she represents.
Am I? Doesn’t she know that already?
Roman throws a hundred dollars in cash down on the table and leaves, walking into a New York just waking up.