Chapter Text
Gerri gets a text from Roman the night after the deal goes through.
It’s short enough that she doesn’t need to open it to read the whole thing.
I’m sorry.
“I bet you are,” she mutters darkly, to make up for the feeling that fills her.
***
The text sits unopened on her phone. It’s a busy week. At the end of it, she’s settled back in her office for the long haul, unscathed by the threat of leaving.
Safe and sound behind her desk where she belongs, free of the recklessness of Roman’s grief, she opens the text. She hasn’t been able to stop thinking about him since the funeral. She wonders if he thinks she hasn’t thought of him at all. Probably. It was brave of him to text. Since Logan died, he’s been so determined to steer clear of her.
Let’s get lunch, she responds.
***
“You didn’t have to–” he says, seated opposite her the next day. He’s staring down at his salad, poking a slice of cucumber with his fork. She wonders what it will take to get him to start looking at her again. “I mean, thank you, obviously. It’s nice of you to want to, uh, catch up or whatever. But this is unnecessary. I wasn’t trying to make you hang out with me. I just wanted you to know I’m not, like, just strolling through life feeling all cool about what happened. That’s all. So we can make this short.”
Little fucker. He breaks her heart.
“Maybe I wanted to see you,” she answers.
He laughs. It’s nice to see a smile on his face, even a weary one. “Yeah, I bet that’s it. You couldn’t go another day without your favorite bundle of jizz and neuroses.”
“Something like that,” she agrees.
Finally, he looks at her. She isn’t used to his face with the cut above his eyebrow. Or the loss in his eyes. He looks older.
“You don’t need to be nice to me,” he says. “In fact, please don’t be nice to me.”
“I’m not being nice to you.”
“Yes you are. Why are you even still willing to be in a room with me? Doesn’t it burn, staring right into the hideous visage of the one thing you’ve ever failed at? I know you, Gerri. You’re a perfectionist. This must be torture for you.”
“There was no lasting damage done,” she says. Surreal, but true.
“Oh, yeah, okay.”
“I’m still in my office. You’re the one who’s gone. You didn’t do anything to me, really.”
“Didn’t I?” He looks caught between hopeful and insulted.
“I was hurt,” she admits. “For a little while. So what?”
“See, that– Not that you could probably tell, based on my heinous conduct, but you’re like– You matter. I don’t want to go around hurting you.”
“So why did you?”
He scoffs, an ugly sound. “My dad died and you wouldn’t give me a fucking hug.”
“You’d just fired me on his orders. I’m so sorry if I wasn’t feeling cuddly.”
“You stabbed me in the back in Italy. ‘Stick with me, Roman; stick with me, Roman,’ stab –”
“You wouldn’t stop sending me the pictures, even after I told you–”
“Yeah, well, how was I supposed to know when ‘Stop sending me dick pics’ means ‘Stop sending me dick pics’ and not ‘Keep being a bad boy, Mommy horny’, huh?”
“I don’t know, Roman, have you heard of fucking context clues??”
They glare at each other. The pleasant chatter of the surrounding diners whines in her ears like tinnitus. She can’t tell if she wants to laugh or scream. His mouth twitches.
“I think I liked you more than him,” he says then. He spits the words out, an awful confession.
She sips her ice water. Tries not to feel that one. She keeps her eyes trained on him, so he knows to keep talking.
“It was okay when he was alive. It was even sort of interesting. Like, hey, where’s this going to go? A life beyond Dad? Oh, the possibilities! But then he died. And maybe he died knowing I liked you more than him.”
“Parents are supposed to be okay with the fact that their kids will like people more than them. That’s what happens when your kids grow up.”
“Oh, okay. Do you think he would have been so super cool with it?”
“No,” she says. “No, he wouldn’t have been.”
“He wanted you gone. That was the last thing he ever asked. The last thing he ever said to me. Get rid of Gerri.” He stares hopelessly at her. “What else was I supposed to do?”
She almost cracks. Just for a second.
But she’s not about to forgive Logan. Not for how he treated her. Not for how he treated Roman. If Roman’s not going to hold it against him, well, someone has to.
“Hold a seance,” she says, “and tell him to fuck off.”
She wonders if it’s too soon to be callous. She half-expects Roman to get up and storm off. All they do is storm off these days.
But then he smiles, and the smile blooms into a laugh, and he’s looking right at her, his eyes bright and appreciative.
“You’re such a bitch,” he says.
“Takes one to know one,” she replies.
***
They see each other a few times a week after that. (Making up for lost time, even though neither of them will ever admit it.) Roman has an uncanny ability to detect the moments when work gets to be too much for her, even when he’s on the other side of a phone instead of watching her through the glass walls.
She hasn’t admitted it to anyone yet, save for Karolina in long-suffering glances, but she’s starting to wonder if she was too hasty in taking the job. Logan was one thing; she understood his temper, and had faith in his vision. They had been on the same side, working toward the same ends. Until they weren’t. Now Tom defers to her in a way that Logan certainly never had; Tom is many unattractive things, but he isn’t stupid, and he knows what it means to have Gerri on his team. But there’s something so obsequious about him, so mewling. Gerri cringes inwardly at the thought of anyone looking at the two of them and seeing them as a unit. It’s made worse by the fact that Tom is proud to have her by his side: a feather in his cap, a head mounted on a wall. The best of the old guard, endorsing his reign.
And Matsson’s a fucking joke, all Logan’s bad qualities and none of his good ones, with a uniquely tech-bro flavor of unhingedness that gives her a constant migraine of the soul. The more she observes him, the less she likes the company’s long-term chances. But she can’t come out and say what needs saying about the shit that needs to change. Logan, at least, would’ve been willing to listen, especially if she’d held her tongue until the exact right moment.
All these younger men, they know just what script to recite about respecting women and disavowing sexism, but their disdain seeps through. She’d critiqued one of Matsson’s points in a video conference recently, sure to couch it gently, and Matsson had chided her about taking on too much emotional labor. He’d actually used those fucking words: emotional labor. “We’re all grownups here,” he’d explained. “Even the boys. Trust us. We can handle it. You’ve done enough for us already, yeah?” Then he’d pursed his lips in a kiss at her through the screen. This from the same man who wants her legal advice on how to put a positive spin on sending Ebba his blood.
She misses the good old-fashioned open misogyny she came up in. That, she knew how to deal with. These days, she feels out of her element, or maybe just too fucking old to keep a placid smile on her face while idiot boys fling shit at her like monkeys and then wait for her to clean it up.
Soon, she finds herself doing what she’d vowed to never do: missing Logan. She misses everyone who’s gone, really, and the energy that sparked to life when they all worked together toward a common end, steering the ship from peril, all hands on deck. But there’s something particularly niggling about Logan’s absence. Frank was always her closest confidante; it should be him she automatically looks for in a room. But it isn’t. Logan made sense to orbit around, for all his beastliness. He had real might; a rare trait these days. Working with him felt worth her time, worth her cleverness. Being essential to him meant something. After him, Tom is a bad joke, an impending heart attack in a fine suit he still wears like a costume. And of course, that was why Matsson picked him. And here she is, the winner, unkillable, being told to leave the real work to the menfolk in the name of fourth-wave feminism. Some victory. She’d always been so sure that her loyalty was to Waystar, not the man who created it. It’s humbling, having to reassess. She doesn’t care for it.
She has too much pride to tell all this to Roman. He was the one who’d taken her job, and most of the reason she’d taken it back. But God, is it nice to have someone to sneak away to.
She takes more breaks in her first month than she had in years under Logan’s tenure. Fuck it. If Tom has a problem, he can say it to her face, or piss himself trying.