Chapter Text
They’ve repainted the door jambs, she notices, in the day she’s been away. Koyome is on duty, her mailbox is full, and Roman Roy is asleep on the couch in the foyer.
“I’m sorry, Ms Kellman,” Koyome says, “He wouldn’t leave.”
Gerri has been thinking of Roman pretty much non-stop for the last twenty two hours, but not particularly favorably. She clacks her way over to him in her heeled boots and stares down at how he’s contorted against the decorative cushions on the chaise lounge. It’s for display purposes only, pretty much. He looks like he’s been there a while.
He’s asleep. His brow is screwed up. The sight of him resting triggers some bizarre Pavlovian response of electrocuting tenderness.
She wakes him up.
“Roman, what are you doing here?”
He makes a disgruntled, confused sound and blinks at her in the light of the foyer. It’s nearly midday. She supposes he may well have been here all night.
“Hanging out with my pal the door-douche, what are you doing here?” He manages, smarmy, limp, as he re-lubricates his mouth. She thinks he might also be hungover.
“You can’t camp outside my door, are you insane?” She hisses, but not too harshly. There’s a constant line to tread with Roman: train him with punishment that isn’t too enjoyable.
“Ken already knows, Ger, who gives a f*ck?” He scratches through his hair, sticking it all up on end, rubs a palm across his five-o’clock shadow, cracks his neck and stares up at her. He gets this absurd, doting expression on his face sometimes when he looks at her. Like she’s his father or something. It’s too much.
“Come on,” she chides, and he follows her into the elevator.
He doesn’t try to touch her then, or in the corridor, or even when she lets herself into her apartment and he enters after her. He leaves it until she’s padded into her bedroom to put her luggage down and take off her heavy gold earrings, closeted in her inner sanctum, until he pounces.
“Roman-” she snips. He pinches her waist in his grip, his nose in her hair, his arms stalling then winding around her middle. It’s not a nice embrace, not a welcome home cuddle: it’s possessive and angry and presumptuous. He’ll bruise her. She wriggles out and backs away.
“Roman, what’s gotten into you? Can I not leave you alone for five minutes, hm?”
“Well, I thought Steve might have slipped you something, and it’s always better to check, right?” He says, full of spite and venom, so f*cking transparent. So, he knew she was with Steven. Ok.
“You knew where I was, there’s no need to terrorize my staff. And I told you we need to be more careful now Kendall is suspicious-”
“With the utmost respect, Ger, I really don’t give a sh*t,” Roman says, peering at himself in the mirror over her fireplace, swatting at her peace lily, glaring at her family photos.
“You do care-”
“Uh uh,” he interrupts, sing-song, “Used to, maybe. You should be proud of my growth.”
She watches him warily. He’s pacing like a caged animal, the nasty, flinty lines of him wrought with anticipated pain. Tread careful, G.
“This is crossing my boundaries, Roman. I won’t have you making a scene whenever I leave you alone for a night.”
“I feel like we talked about Philly, right?” His eyes are cold. Very cold. It’s bizarre trying to reconcile this tantrum-throwing chauvinist with the person she’d like to curl around, the sleeping, seeping thing she apparently now longs to be near to, for whatever f*cking reason. “We talked about Philly and you didn’t say Steve Steak was on the f*cking menu.”
“He surprised me at the hotel, I didn’t know he was-”
“Wow. How thoughtful of him,” he interrupts, rudely, “How very romantic. It’s kind of disgusting, actually. f*cking happy-sappy cliche as sh*t. You go in for that? You should have said. I would have sprinkled some rose petals on the bed while you snapped my fingers off with your c*nt.”
She tries to steady him with a firm, hard glare, but he’s off again, peering at her bookshelf flippantly as if this is another clandestine strategy meeting crammed in between Logan’s temper tantrums, swaddled in an empty meeting room. There are more plants in her bedroom than ever, more even than her college room when she was battling anxiety and stress with $20 peace lillies. His nagging affection has spread like a green, gorgeous rash across her whole apartment, blooming bright and overbearing in her bedroom.
“And we signed, did you see? I guess not, but your out-of-office was very understanding. I might even think you deliberately ditched to avoid getting blood on your shoes.”
“Roman, we agreed-”
“I know what we agreed, Geraldine, I’m just saying it’s polite to make eye contact while you f*ck someone.”
Not that you’d be an authority on that, Gerri thinks. She chews her lip, watches him pace and twitch. He’s got her number, but perhaps she shouldn't be surprised. They know each other now. She forgets how it can go both ways.
“Would it have made a difference?” She asks, crossing her arms and immediately regretting it. She doesn’t want to lean into listen-to-teacher. She wants to talk to him like a f*cking adult.
“Maybe not, maybe f*cking not, right? Like, we knew the terms, right? You said so yourself? And what’s the rest got to do with it, huh? We should have told Bartholdi to keep his big, blue broad and saved him the sea fare. What’s ninety meters of goodwill compared to litigation, anyway?”
“I didn’t want to muddy the waters.”
“Should have thought about that four months ago. Sheesh.”
“You knew I’d be away, right? We talked about it.” She lightens her tone, tries to steer them back on track, “You don’t need me to hold your hand while you sign on the dotted line, surely?”
He peers at her, head tilted like an animal that’s heard its name, eyes low and shady. He drops a string of pearls he was fingering back into its dish, slowly and noisily, like something that’s sprung a leak.
“How long do you think you can keep this up, huh Ger?”
She puts a hand on her hip. Her back hurts from the plane ride and she wants to rest, wants him soothed and settled and pleasant so that she can sleep.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Ha,” he snorts, loudly and rudely, his grin sharp, “Heard that one before. It’s getting kind of worn, though, not up to shine. You should try something new.”
“Could you please just tell me what the matter is?” She snaps.
“Is it because I can’t f*ck?” He says, and it sounds ice-chilled, “Truly? Actually? You’re really that f*cking shallow?”
He’s manic enough that it doesn’t require that much willful ignorance to project continued confusion at his ramblings. He’s standing still now, though, mirroring her unintentionally or otherwise, hands on hips and brow set low. She has a flash of him at three, at thirteen, at thirty, clipping through the ages. Always peripheral. A squealing, wriggling thing at her ankles, slinking in and out of palatial rooms, cramming into closets and doorways and treehouses and company cars. Chewing his t-shirt, breaking his toys, pinching his sister, picking up scraps from his father’s huge hand. Roman, bent and beaten, quick and queer, skittish and rabid at the same time. Chin up and hands down. A nasty little nuisance that she tried and succeeded to mostly avoid. A couple of sweet things, too: the marble he gave her once in lieu of an apology for nearly knocking her over that Christmas in Berlin, the apathy to disguise his deference when he was a teenager and she asked him to do something, the f*cking tortoise debacle, the way the fighting always stopped. What did she expect, really, when she saw how he grew up? In snatches and drips, out of the corner of her firmly-averted eye, in the deep end of a swimming pool she wouldn’t let her girls near.
He won’t be dismissed now, unfortunately. He stands like a stain in the middle of her cream carpet, a slash of black petulance with a scar over his eyebrow and a rolodex of her body behind his sleep-haunted gaze. This is just great, she thinks, ever the eye-rolling Icarus, confused on the way down as to why the wax is so wet. He’s a man in her room, and he feels wronged. She tries for a morsel of optimism. Perhaps this will loosen the knot in my chest.
She thinks now that perhaps she’s been over hasty, miscalculated, and misunderstood something quite fundamental. Through these memories, she catches the edges of his respect. Perhaps he does respect her, perhaps he has before they got involved. Perhaps always, or rather perhaps he used to. She wonders if he’s conscious of that, and how long it’s been, and how strange that is coming from the man that has a cache of esteem so meager it goes to his father twice and whatever is left can be snatched up by the nearest psuedo-fascist who gives him a hard on. But he’s respected Gerri, historically. Never really mocked her like Shiv or patronized her like Kendall. He has, as long as she can remember, listened to Gerri. He has treated her with as close to dignity as Roys can get: a knock-off brand that frays more easily but looks convincing enough. The pictures of his penis came as such a slap in the face because she didn’t think, after years of being an annoying little prick but mostly decent with her, that he’d debase her so. She thought she was above his line of fire of sperm and slurs, his exhibitionist self-flagellation that by design makes it easy to grind him under one’s heel. She supposes that’s the worst of it, the summit of it, even: she didn’t know how much she valued being respected by him until she didn’t give him what he wanted, and he retracted the courtesy.
“Are you talking about Steven? Is that what’s bothering you?” She cuts to the chase.
He glares at her like she’s being deliberately cruel. She isn’t, but she could be deliberately kinder, she supposes.
“You can take the f*cking mask off, Gerri, the pandemic’s over.”
“He’s not a mask.”
“Are you in love with him, then?” He sneers.
“That’s none of your business,” she says curtly, tries to keep out any indication one way or another.
“You see, it is my business, I think, because I am in love with you, and so it matters to me if you are wet and wild for the crypt keeper, since I want to know if there’s any chance you’ll ever take me f*cking seriously or if I should just take a long walk off a short balcony tonight.”
“Roman-”
“And it’s my business because we’re f*cking - we are f*cking - and I don’t think Steve-the-Stud agreed to ethical non-monogamy. I certainly didn’t, and so you’re f*cking at least one of us over. The only excuse I can scrape together for this is that you don’t think we’re f*cking, which means you’re either going senile or you need my literal penis in your literal vagin* to have literal sex like goddamn Mormons for it to f*cking count.”
He makes a good point. Gerri’s been compartmentalizing for so long that she may have forgotten where she left her keys.
“What exists between us is complicated, I’m aware of that, but you can’t come stumbling back into my sphere after the sh*t you flung at me during the takeover, accept my help, and then dictate what I do with the tiny potion of my life that doesn’t have you in it.”
“I’m not f*cking dictating, you commie f*ck, I’m asking. That’s different.”
“Your interest in me has always been immature. Possessive. Quite frankly, ridiculous. Forgive me for not signing off all other options the second you decided to try and get your dick involved again.”
“‘Other options’?”
“What? Yeah-”
“Right, I see. Options. So I’m an option?”
“I’ve been-” she swallows, looks down at the carpet. She’s still wearing her shoes. “I’ve enjoyed reconnecting, of course I have, and I’m glad that I seem to make you better, but you’ve got to understand that anything serious between us would summon a sh*tstorm for the both of us, and I don’t find your infatuation with me to be particularly compelling cornerstones for a partnership.”
‘“Partnership’, listen to you. You’re more f*cking jargon than I am and they gave me the Financial Times instead of blankie.”
“Fine. Relationship. Whatever.”
He’s lit by the sun where it hits her windows, the skyline on fire, his figure a sharp, dark cut-out against the rest of it. “You think I’m gonna bail, that’s it?”
“There’s nothing to bail on.”
“Right, right, sorry, Steven Noname is your one true love, and after you birth him a brood of crusty old miracle babies, you’ll retreat into housewifery and want nothing more to do with my shriveled little shrimp.” He’s adopted that hideous, mocking whine that she hates, that sets her teeth on edge, clenched and grinding in her jaw. “I’ve gotta say, f*cking me is the stupidest decision you’ve ever made, considering you don’t seem to be getting anything out of it.”
Gerri couldn’t agree more. “I warned you of the impending mess-”
“And you walked right into it with your eyes and legs open.”
“We have a…a chemistry that I underestimated.”
Roman looks at her like she’s cracked open the window and let him feel the searing breeze. It’s a sudden, dark, desperate look straight out of a gothic horror.
“I want you so bad,” he pleads, like a hopeless case, “All the goddamn time. It’s awful. I’m f*cking full of this f*cking… rot and acid and sewage and sh*t and f*cking…f*cking pain that makes me feel like I’m going crazy, like I’m literally seconds from the straight jacket. And I’m so f*cking tired, and I’m sick of this, and you and f*cking all of them and I need to like…” he gestures at his torso with his hands, his eyes glittering, his cheeks a little pink, “I need to get it out because it’s ruining everything like a f*cking oil spill, like anything I try and do well or good or just because it’s f*cking fun gets all slick and dead and f*cking…toxic and I don’t know how to fix what’s wrong with me, where the f*cking leak is, where they buried the lead. Maybe I did it myself? Probably. It's the f*cking waterworks again, right? I don’t know, it always…it’s always like - it always comes back. And wanting you and loving you and hurting you all the time makes me feel f*cking sick but also kind of godlike, and like I want to be better so I don’t get you all gross and f*cking oily. And then I want to lock you up but also chase you out and I don’t f*cking…”
To his credit, he isn’t crying. Gerri feels like she could, though. Feels like if she were twenty years younger, she’d be shushing him and stroking his hair. But she needs to hear him out. She wants him to come to her, shaking and bare and brave.
He sighs out a little wetly, tugs at the hair near his temples, and stares at her like he wants to be put out of his misery.
“I’m f*cking tired, Gerri. I’m tired and jealous and probably f*cking spoiled, like literally spoiled, doomed from the f*cking start or whatever, grown from sh*tty soil, but I think that what I need is for f*cking someone to love me back. I don’t think it’s so unreasonable to ask for someone to love me back.”
He’s standing still again, a few feet away from her, breathing heavily. The pink parting of his lips makes her think of a wound again, as it often does. The place where the blood comes out. The gentle, vulnerable tear that she is compelled to stitch shut with her own.
“Could you f*cking - do you love me, Gerri?” He sputters out a laugh, bitter and breathy. “Do you even like me?”
She’s yanked by her navel to a cold room on a hot evening in Italy. Sunburn and flat tonic. Sweating through a dress she’d been in for nearly twelve hours. About to put a sick dog down. Roman’s hand outstretched - surprisingly small, slightly effeminate - curled around nothing.
What have you got in your hand?
It’s the same look here. It's all the f*cking same. He never f*cking learns, never changes, never saves himself, throwing himself onto broken glass again and again because the blood might keep him warm. She always thought that night in Italy was one of the cruelest things Logan had ever done. He saw what was in Roman’s hand and sank his teeth into it. f*cking Abraham basking in the heat of his great pyre, ignoring the voice in the clouds telling him to stop.
She does love Roman, but that’s not the crux of it. Of course she loves him: it would be absurd to tangle herself back together with him like this for any other reason. Love is incidental, maybe an inevitability that she was sliding towards from the start, but it isn’t productive. She’s had her great romance, and it lasted nearly thirty years before she said goodbye to him in a hospital with her phone buzzing and a crick in her neck. She loves Roman because she just does, because in some way she must, because he practically demands it and she doesn’t do things by halves. Roman is difficult to love, but not as difficult as he thinks he is. She humors him and handles him not out of duty or intrigue or morality, and she wonders if he knows that, if he’s ever given a thought as to why she is twice-bitten but still not shy. More important than love is trust. She isn’t sure if she trusts Roman, and can’t be certain she ever will. Ay, there’s the rub. Without trust, the love is superfluous.
His love for her wasn’t enough. It didn’t drown out the voices in his head. He’s an adult - dare she say an intelligent adult - and he still torpedoed their relationship over a whim, a twitch, a stint of stupid jealousy and a few words from his father. She can’t live like that. She won’t. If they are to be anything to each other, anything real, he will need to steady himself, and she will need to trust him. She isn’t sure which must come first, or which is the most likely.
The concern is also the state of his love. His infected affection. She can see it in him that he doesn’t know what to do with it. He doesn’t know where to focus it or how to use it effectively. He’s fit to burst with it, always has been, but the Logan suit he’s strapped in doesn’t allow for that kind of give. In his father’s shadow, love turns sour. It festers. It comes out in jabs and slips. It’s a whetstone for one’s influence if hardened and cooled. It is not something to be indulged in or revered. It is not something to be exchanged equally. Someone has to come out on top, and it’s never Roman. He knows that. He’s prepared for that, with his sharp little teeth and his bare, open throat.
Perhaps this will be another thing she has to teach him, then. Perhaps she can borrow some of that potent, pathetic feeling for herself. She’s done, now. She’s out. She doesn’t need to be cold anymore. As he so eloquently put it: they’re both so f*cking tired.
The thought will occur to her later, in the dark and the warm with him, that she doesn’t know what to do with it either.
“Of course I like you, Rome. I’ve told you so before.”
He does an almost-passable job at hiding his rush of relief, turning away to an invisible audience, which she takes as an opportunity to school her features.
“Well then f*cking act like it.”
“How would I do that then? By inviting you into my home to spend time with me? By answering your constant barrage of often-nonsensical messages? By stroking your hair or your co*ck until you fall asleep?” It comes out harsher than she intended, but she feels not entirely comfortable, not entirely secure, as they edge out onto unmapped ground together. “By forgiving you?”
He scoffs at her, hands twitching. She wishes they had drinks to sip from to divert the sizzling scrutiny away from one another. “Sure, you’ve f*cking forgiven me. As if.”
“I’ve made multiple accommodations-”
“Sneaking me in here at night, keeping me like the dirtiest f*cking secret because it gets you wet to do something so f*cked up and revolting as shacking up with Roman No-Brain No-Game Small-Frame Roy. Do you laugh about it with Steven? Leaving me behind like a bad dog while the adults go out? Does it get you off quicker knowing you can take your f*cking pick? Or is this-” he waves his hand emphatically between them, the gesture very close to his characteristic jerk-*ff mime, “literally nothing to you?”
“It has taken a lot of trust on my part to let you back in, Roman. You must understand, I’m not impulsive like you. I never had the luxury of recklessness. I need to think things through, feel them out, f*cking strategize, even things like this. Especially things like this.”
“Please, you’re post-truthing -“
“This isn’t one of the screenplays you flick through and throw a couple of million at: there’s no curtain-down or fade-to-black here. I’ve got to be realistic. You have got to start being realistic. There’s nothing of any substance that could come of this.” As she says it, something shiny and pliable deflates behind her ribcage. Doesn’t matter.
“There’s something here though.”
“You say you love me but you don’t seem to be listening to me.”
“There’s something real here.”
“You’re letting your dick speak for you, Roman.”
“There has always f*cking been something here.” He moves a little, a mini-prowl, towards her. Not quite a prey animal. More like a scavenger.
“That’s disgusting,” she says, to try and combat the rush of guilt.
“I‘ve always looked at you. I’ve always listened and been a good little boy, right? Always did what mommy said.”
“You absolutely, categorically have not-”
“We were always headed here, Geraldine.”
“Jesus Christ, you little freak, not always. A year at best, and that was because you were bored and your supermodel girlfriends weren’t nasty enough with you. You liked my lashings, that’s all.”
“Since Japan, then.”
Japan was the first time they’d ever been properly alone together. The first time they’d worked as a duo. The first time they’d been the sole and combined face of the brand in enemy territory. It had changed things, that’s for sure, but it can’t have been all that drastic, could it? Gerri remembers being mostly just annoyed that she was the new Frank, babysitting the most incendiary of her boss’s smug, iracible progeny. But Roman had seemed genuinely chagrined, flippant and arrogant, sure, but with contrition in his willingness to listen and learn. He’d performed well. He’d made her laugh. He’d snapped at someone to help her with the door when they flocked to him and left her with her bags. He’d been deliberately butchering the native tongue to amuse her in the back of the car. He’d nagged and needled and bargained until she agreed to go for dinner with him - an apology dinner, he’d said - and it had been pleasant. Fun, even. She’d let a bit loose and he gave her his full, kaleidoscopic attention for once. He may have flirted a bit, but she’d let him, and it was all in jest. Stupid little comments about her suit or her pearl necklace or her hair in the humidity. About their suites being near one another and the possibility of their key cards being switched. The usual Love Hotel routine. It wasn’t real. None of that was real. It was a kindergarten fever dream swept away with sake. It was only a couple of days, only a couple of thumbs, and then the real war started.
But, she supposes, it might constitute the beginning of…whatever this is. She remembers coming down to the lobby the first morning and Roman was sleep-bleary and sweet before the coffee embittered him right back. She remembers the brainstorm in her lounge area, laptops open, sleeves rolled up, barefoot and frazzled. Her bed right there behind them. Her suitcase open but still packed. Him splayed all over her couch, passing a single glass of whiskey back and forth, sighing and stretching as the night drew on. The first time since he was a child, she thinks, that they were vaguely domestic around one another. Privy to the creases and wrinkles of real people, so to speak. They weren’t in the office, they weren’t at home, but some middle-ground that theoretically could access either. That is perhaps where the boundaries blurred, that liminal landing strip where she was personal as well as professional with him, and he met her every step of the way.
But was it sexual? Was it - god help her - romantic? No, of course not. That would be absurd. Unless there was something she missed. Unless he planted something so deep in her she didn’t notice until he was jeering down a phone line at her and she first heard the clink of his belt buckle.
“I don’t know how you expect me to form some sort of permanent attachment to you when you’re so given to sending it up in flames,” she says, because he’s making her out to be heartless, and she isn’t heartless. She’s careful. She’s normally so f*cking careful…
“The f*cking picture again, Jesus, look: I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry. I was f*cking insane. I was on a wire’s edge with my nuts on a taser.”
“And then it happened again.”
“Because you stabbed me in the back.”
“Twice. ”
“Because my dad was f*cking dead-”
“All perfectly good excuses Roman, I’m sure, but you cannot blame me for recognizing a pattern and adapting to it.”
“You’re a f*cking sociopath, you know that?”
“And you’re a spiteful little boy that thinks he’s owed everything he asks for.”
“So why the f*ck did you get into bed with me, if you’re so f*cking genius as to have noticed that incredibly subtle character trait of mine, hm?”
He has maybe got her there. She still doesn’t know why herself, is the truth.
“I wanted to help,” she settles for.
“Pretty f*cking stupid of you, Gerri, all things considered.”
“Are you trying to berate me for not trusting you, or ridiculing me for trying to?” She asks.
“Stop f*cking lawyering me and give me a straight answer, woman!” He’s practically shouting now, and she doesn’t appreciate the dramatics. It’s making her heart race. It’s making her conscious of her complexion.
“What do you want, Roman?” She hisses back.
“You.” He drawls patronizingly, like she’s an idiot, creeping close to her, wielding that inch or so of height he has on her like it’s an assault rifle.
“I’m not sure I’m willing to give you that,” she says, cold and mean, groping for more comfortable territory.
“Then let me go,” he groans, nearly wails. It’s ridiculous, “Leave me the f*ck alone. Get out of my f*cking head.”
“You put me there, you reprobate. This is out of my control.”
“Everything’s in your control. You’re a manipulative f*cking ice zombie. Slow silent serial killer sh*t, I’m not f*cking stupid.”
“Oh sure, this is all a ploy to gain a seat in the company that kicked you out and begged me to stay. Despite your best efforts on the latter.”
“Unkillable as a f*cking co*ckroach clearly, thanks for all your charity,” he drawls, he half-spits. He’s close. She’s hot all over. She hates how he riles her up, how he makes her want to bare her teeth.
“For someone so desperate for connection, you seem awfully fixated on an ulterior motive, Roman.”
“I suppose I don’t trust you to be straightforward with me anymore. Need a degree in f*cking c*ntanese to understand what you’re actually saying half the time.”
“You don’t trust me, is that it?”
“I’m not developmentally disabled, so no.”
She must look affronted, withdrawing from his space, because his anger leaks into misery again.
“I want to. I think that would be nice. I’m all messed up about it. I feel like I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.”
She doesn’t really know what to say to that. She reaches for something reassuring but comes up short. She finds herself staring at his face, close, perhaps even looming. She tries to find Logan in it but can’t, not anymore. He has a few gray strands along his hairline. She can’t remember what he looked like before the dark circles under his eyes and then wonders if they’ve always been there, and she was just really good at not looking at them.
“I get the impression that you don’t want that, though,” he says, all flippant self-pity disguised as reason. She bristles.
“Earn it,” she says at last. Some sort of order, or challenge, or invitation.
She can feel his breath, the buzzing in her head from his skin so close, and he’s staring at her mouth so intently she prepares for the surge of him there, the Hans Zimmer swell and the answering rage, the relenting, the sick happy-accident of it all that she’ll continue to gaslight herself with until she’s papering the walls in yellow.
But Roman, in his feelings more dog than man, doesn’t kiss her, and drops to his knees instead. He stays there with his head bowed for a few long seconds. Gerri can hear her own breathing. Baird asked her to marry him on a balcony in Vietnam, both of them sitting down, over dinner stolen between endless meetings with an Asian investment firm she never learnt to pronounce the name of because she wasn’t important enough at the time to meet them and Logan referred to them using a racial slur. A man has not kneeled in front of her before Roman. His forehead knocks against her right thigh and his hands only move to help her out of her shoes. She lets him, oddly curious, away from herself but not free of her righteous yet confused fluttering of anger. His deep breathing is vaguely shaky, like he might be crying, but when he presses his face against her legs again, his face seems dry.
His hands are uncertain, sweeping up the back of her knees. His touch is light. Little zaps of it along her spine. He speaks with the barest hint of bite.
“It’s all in my head. What I’m supposed to do. What I want to do.”
Gerri touches said head. His hair is a little tangled from his night on the couch in her lobby. The strands catch on her rings and she doesn’t try to be gentle.
“Well I’m not in your head, Rome.”
“Mmn,” he hums. “Mmmnh…” he sighs.
He’s nudging her onto the bed and she’s not sure if this is what either of them want but they’ve been talking in circles and so she’ll humour him with his display of pathetic deference.
“You are. Making such a f*cking mess in there. Noise and ji*zz and deals with the devil and f*cking…” he sighs, half-a-sob, squeezes her hips as he crawls up her torso to breathe wetly on her neck.
“Messes are your speciality,” she murmurs back, embarrassingly tender, hand on his neck, nails digging in.
“Dad would’ve killed me,” he says, not for the first time, “he would have cut my dick off and fed it to the f*cking wolves. He would have crucified you in the town square. He’d have sent me back to f*cking Scotland.”
He might have cast us out. We might have been free. We might have starved together, eating one another.
“We could have killed him,” she says, doesn’t know if she believes it herself, but wants to say it, wants to jam the final blade into the back of the buried titan, wants to flay Roman with a final test. “Together, we could have made it, overthrown him, if you’d just listened to me.”
He makes a quiet whining sound, almost doubtful, definitely the sound of something in pain, and pushes her back onto her mattress. His head is still dropped low, but with him unnaturally above her, she feels the thrum of engines and generators in her chest like a machine whirring back to life.
“You were using me. The whole time.”
She smiles a little, lets her teeth show, lets him pierce himself on the point of them.
“Isn't that what you wanted? To be useful?”
Isn’t that what love is to you?
The noise that follows is almost a growl. His shoulders are so tense. He’s not really touching her anymore, just loitering close to her throat.
“Was I?”
She looks at the tips of his ears, the thin skin of his temples, the lines just emerging on his forehead. She wonders if, one day, he might allow himself an indulgence. A true indulgence, done out of pleasure and delight and not masochism and self-punishment. An ice cream sundae. A collar. A plea. A few words of honest feeling. She tries to picture Roman fifty and fat, spreading into himself, later life, letting go, the tension unwinding at long last. She struggles. She abandons that exercise for now.
“To a point,” she answers vaguely, “In some areas more than others.”
“I’m sorry you picked the wrong prince,” he mutters, which is absurd, because Shiv was already Tom’s meal ticket and Kendall’s just as much out on his ass, if not more so, so what other options did she have, really? It was her fault in the end, for deluding herself into thinking she needed a Roy at the helm at all.
“I picked all the same,” she says instead, and then, because that’s a bit too much for them, she rakes her nails slowly over his scalp and adds, “Uninspiring as you are.”
He groans. Back on track. “You’re f*cking lucky I have a thing for Hilary Clinton.” He’s at least a little interested in something physical: she can feel the nudge of it against her thigh. He kisses her neck dryly, deliberate and light.
“Ha. Lucky? Interesting word.” She responds dryly. “Lucky I didn’t end up sectioned with a cleaning bill the size of Central Park.”
“Early days, Gerri-Baby, early days,” he says, and bites the skin on her shoulder through her shirt. She yanks his head away indignantly.
“No biting.”
“Oh yeah?” He grinds his erection into her and she grinds her jaw in response.
“Weren't we having an adult conversation, Roman?” His hips jerk a little at his name. She licks her lips as his breathing deepens.
“Yeah, you were saying what a useless f*cking tool I am - chocolate teapot - f*cking waste of space and your Machiavelli-Matriarch time. Say less. Say more.” He rolls his whole body down onto her and she closes her eyes briefly, thighs pressed together.
“And you kept whining about your feelings, yes?
“Yeah, and you kept denying yours, that’s right.” He’s panting on her again, it’s revolting. She maneuvers their faces close together again and asserts herself beneath him, not wishing to be passive, aware he probably doesn’t want that either. His eyes are lit coals in his slack and shameful face.
“You hate that we are something to each other,” he says, he whispers in fact, and it’s pining but a little too co*cky. It rushes right through her like the coldest, sharpest water, like good vodka, like sulphuric acid.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says, words cracking, crushed and calcified between them as she kisses him, or he kisses her. There’s kissing, and then the whole f*cking freakshow comes crashing through the door as well.
She touches him like she’s trying to put a fire out: great grabs of his shirt and his hair, palming at his shoulders and arms and pressing and pushing. He’s all hands too: on her hips, then her ass, then waist, then back. Her neck and face. It feels sort of cannibalistic. They rip their fill of each other, from each other, panting like animals at each other. It’s absolutely insane. Yes, her heart screams. God. Yes.
He wrangles her out of her blouse pretty quickly and she manages to get his shirt open so the playing field is a bit more even. Then go his slacks, then hers, and it’s daylight and the most mutually naked they’ve ever been around each other and she feels briefly sliced open on the autopsy table before the hot sweep of his gaze fires her into something permanent. He's leaner than she expected, and quite hairless for a man of his age. Her body wants to cant up into his like it expects something, like it thinks it might get something out of this argument, or whatever it’s turning into.
Roman briefly sticks his fingers in his mouth and withdraws them with a sizable amount of saliva coating the tips. He sticks them between her legs, no grace or technique, and the rush of revulsion crashes into a slightly larger rush of arousal as he gets rid of her underwear.
“Drooling on me again, huh?” She hisses.
“Shut up,” he says guiltily, like a teenager caught in the act. Two of his fingers slide through her, and then into her, and her hips flick up against it, the buzzing in her ears aligned and harmonious for a single second.
“Not my fault you can’t get wet anymore,” he mutters darkly, and she’d be furious - maybe she is - at his insolence, if he wasn’t so visibly, pathetically turned on, pressing against the shackles of his fly.
“All the hormones and time machines in the world couldn’t help you in that department,” she throws back, one hand scraping her nails across his shoulder blade, the other working its way into his hair.
“Oh yeah?” He grunts, f*cks into her harder, his head dipping closer, and her body contracts like a concertina around the pressure, the pleasure…
His hips grind up against his wrist, thrusting in time like they’re connected, and he’s staring at her breasts like he’s stoned, or hypnotized, or brain-dead. He reaches for her bra but she uses the hand on his shoulders to bat him away.
“You don’t f*cking deserve it,” she says, panting, halfway gone, but with enough force to make him stop in his tracks. He’s heavy above her. It’s unnatural. She’s almost afraid, but mostly exhilarated. In total disbelief.
“You feel good,” he gasps, probably to reassure himself, against her clavicle. He’s got a thumb rubbing somewhere near her cl*t and he’s two knuckles deep. She reaches for her nightstand and he gets the gist, does it for her, knocks around pill bottles and earplugs and phone charges until he finds her lube, before clumsily coating his hand to keep things moving. He’s shaking like a leaf. She thinks she could come from this, probably. Maybe. If she tries.
His co*ck is pushing up against his boxers and she’s aware of it, vaguely, rubbing against everything else like a pistoning part of a production line she’s the final product of. It isn’t until he whines, chokes on his breath, and ghosts a hand over her breasts to his groin that her attention is pulled back. That, and his rhythm has fallen away slightly.
“Can I-“
She assumes he means jerk off, so she rolls her eyes, conveniently allowing herself a groan as he nudges her g-spot with the pads of his fingers. But he doesn’t go for the flash finish, he edges his waistband down, staring at where his hand moves between her legs like it’s the final f*cking frontier, and she understands.
She laughs and lets the giddy, disbelieving feeling bubble up. She laughs and sharpens the edges, makes it hurt as it scratches against him. He bucks a little at it: her perfect responsive pet.
“I want…I’m gonna...” He still sounds unsure, but less frightened and more like he’s found himself on a rollercoaster and the bar has locked over his lap.
“You can’t,” she goads, because she knows him.
“f*cking watch me.”
She shifts her hips to let him shuck his underwear off but doesn’t look at him, doesn’t give him anything, as a countermeasure. He cants close and kisses her, his tongue this invasive, wonderful thing that makes her feel mapped, cataloged, excavated. He bites her bottom lip and she groans, makes it sound exasperated, and doesn’t have to try that hard.
His fingers slow, withdraw a little. Her org*sm slinks back into the shadows.
“Roman-“
“Yeah?” He chokes it out on a moan as he grinds against his hand. His hand against her. His fingers ripple against her cl*t as he presses his co*ck against his own knuckles.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Didn’t you go to Yale? I’m doing what you want.”
“I want you to put that thing away and get back to it,” she lies.
“Ok, I’m doing what I want.”
“What a f*cking surprise.”
“I can’t-“ His speech is broken against her open mouth, exchanging the same breath as they pant, and he drops his hand from her c*nt and then his dick is up against her, hot and hard, his hips seeking friction of their own accord, and she only just manages to stop herself from overtly seeking it back. He looks into her eyes, pretense dropped, and she nods at him.
It’s a small step, a slip, really. And she wants it. She wants so badly to be taken properly, to be f*cked like she used to be, to have someone be honest and earnest about it, instead of just doing it professionally, metaphorically, in their heads, bending her over and plowing her until it hurts because she’s a stuck up, arrogant shrew who needs to learn her place. The word’s meaning is so skewed she forgets it can be an act free of violence, or even better, violent on her own terms. She aches with her apparent emptiness, but she’s not about to let him know that.
“You can’t what? We all know what you can’t do.”
“You’re such a f*cking bitch,” he gasps, lines up on the drawback, nudges against her like a knock on her door in the middle of the night, like the questioning chime of a phone she still hasn’t put on silent.
“Yeah? And you’re a failure. You’re a waste of an erection.”
“Uh huh?” He’s misty-eyed. His lips are red and wet and she wants to chew them off his face like candy. He’s got both hands on her hips, lifting, tilting, drawing her closer.
“I told you to stay put…” she’s losing the thread, now. He’s close. He’s mouthing wetly at her collarbone, her shoulder, and she shudders against him and tries to hide it.
“Can’t,” he says, “sorry. f*ck.” He doesn’t sound sorry. He nudges forwards and slides into her.
It’s embarrassing how easy she takes him. She lets him make the decision, scared to look at him, scared to make a noise, as he inches further until he’s holding himself half-sheathed, and Gerri thinks she might go insane, thinks she might be mad already.
“f*cking piece of sh*t, you’re not even wrapped,” she spits instead, face towards the heavens, fisting his hair like a lifeline. She can feel her back bow as he holds himself still. She needs him to stay. She genuinely isn’t sure what will happen if he loses it now.
“Yeah, like I’m gonna get you pregnant,” he says, and it must do something for him, saying that, because he jolts forward more, groans between his teeth, face against Gerri’s shoulder, arms moving from her hips to support himself on either side of her head. He’s shaking even more now.
“It’s not that, I’ve got no idea where you’ve been. Little weasel,” she says, and runs out of patience. She lifts her hips up, wraps a leg around him, and takes him all the way into her, forcing a noise out of both of them that she’d say was undignified if she had the capacity to register it.
“f*ck you,” he gasps, like he’s seen God. Their hips are flush together. Gerri hasn’t felt this physically close to someone in almost ten years. Her insides thrum at the unexpected intrusion. He feels thicker, heavier, more real and solid than she would have imagined, if she’d ever imagined this, which oddly she hasn’t. She never thought this would happen. She squeezes her eyes shut at her heartbeat thudding in her groin and focuses instead on the wet puffs of his breath as he pants against her neck.
He adjusts, arms visibly trembling where he holds himself up over her. She stirs her hips downwards - lets them stir, as if she had a say in it - and he chokes, thrusts a little, like he’s so far out of his head he can’t control his motor functions.
“f*cking Christ …” He’s got one hand on her ass cheek, almost cradling her, strangely tender. He’s murmuring incoherently near her ear. She fists her hand more firmly in the roots of his hair and yanks his head back, rolling her hips up to meet him, moving where he appears to be unable to. God, it’s good. She must be desperate. She must be out of her mind.
“I’m falling asleep here,” she croaks, scratches her nails down his spine, and the ripple of sensation makes his hips snap suddenly. She makes an involuntary sound as he knocks the air out of her, losing her grip on her vocal chords. He can’t seem to decide where to put his hands as he pushes in and out of her, and they briefly flutter across her face, which makes her want to slap him and also bare her throat.
“Eat your f*cking words, woman,” he forces out. A smile flashes across his face as he shifts his thrust and the new angle causes a flush to spread from her cheeks down her chest, which she imagines is visible.
“A f*cking blind man playing whack-a-mole,” she hisses, eyes screwed shut, but still it’s so good, it’s fitting and fulfilling, it’s a f*cking victory…
“You bastard,” Roman grunts with glee, a strangely male adjective to choose, and Gerri grabs his ass like she’s wanted to for months and encourages his movements, feeling his sweat-slick skin and still his shaking. She wonders if she’s fixed him or broken him. Either is fine by her.
“f*ck, Jesus f*ck, you’re so…” he moans incoherently, “Gerri - oh god - you feel so -“
His rhythm is lapsing again and he’s groaning and vibrating and she can feel him losing the thread, all lashed tight in it like a plastic bag caught on a fishing line, garroted.
I have to do everything myself, she thinks.
She surges, doesn’t know where the energy comes from, wrestles him onto his back, which isn’t hard, since he’s gone ragdoll-limp and he’s whimpering like he’s injured. When she settles across his hips, his co*ck hits something in the core of her that makes her breath stammer and her eyelids flutter. She can feel herself clamping around him like she’s physically forcing him to stay hard, stay in her, and she feels like sobbing, like screaming. He’s staring up at her in open awe, his lips parted, his brow furrowed in disbelief. He looks like she’s slapped him. Delighted. Shocked. Hurting perhaps, like the pleasure comes with pain, like hurt is the first flat to leap towards. He’s gorgeous, she thinks with revulsion, with shame and resentment and delight. He is gorgeous like this, shut up and told what to do, eager to please but scrappy all the same, conquering and yet submissive. A boy and a man and a dog and a monster and a sacrifice. f*cking Iphigenia if she was guilty. Hamlet if he’d made up his mind in Scene One but still f*cked it somehow.
“Come here.” Her voice isn’t her own. He sits up, listing towards her obediently, head tipped back with his expression all open and reverent. He bucks up into her and she feels it reverberate, her arms over his shoulders and the strangest part is his slung around her waist, his hands warm and wide on her lower back, like he’s holding her steady, like a real man. He’s breathing like he’s having a panic attack - pathetic - and it makes her feel more powerful than when Logan gave her CEO, than when she first caught Baird’s attention and knew she’d won, than when Tom begged her to take her job back after the sniveling little runt had tried to rip it from her. Her knees are going to ache tomorrow. All of her is, probably. She hopes she’ll be able to feel it in her guts. It’s been a while since she’s carried the aftermath of someone with her the following day.
“Stay,” she says again, she keeps saying that, “stay, ah - Rome -”
She grinds against him, setting her pace, doing the work for him as always, and he is still so good, gasping and thrusting underneath her, eyes so very dark and unfocused, gazing up like she’s a mirage, like he’s blinking in the sun. She tugs his head back further with a not-so-light grip on his hair, and rips another tragic noise out of him.
“There - yes…” she sighs.
“It’s ok, yeah?” he sounds pitiful, needing reassurance.
“Yes - yes, Rome, it’s good. You’re doing good.”
He makes a broken, beautiful sound at the praise, eyes all wide and wet and adoring. And he’s babbling still: “You’re so good - f*ck I feel-”
“Focus, Roman-“
“God, you’re…I’m f*cking - I’m - we’re - f*cking hell, Ger-”
He’s losing focus. She wants to make him come more than she ever has, more than she thought she was capable of. Spoilt f*cking brat. She presses down harder, feels him twitching, knocks their foreheads together and holds her open mouth so near his, breathing in his breath, lightly grinning at each other.
“Ridiculous,” she laughs onto his tongue.
“You love it,” he forces out between gritted teeth, which he then buries in her shoulder, “You love me.”
She makes a sound at that, the muffled accusation, and pulls his hair harder, f*cks herself onto him like she means it, and the cold glimmer of his spit on her skin feels so sharp and real as he pants and sobs against her bra strap, tense and trembling.
“Gerri, I’m gonna-“
“It’s fine, Rome, it’s fine…” she sighs, like a weight’s been lifted. He is oddly choked and silent as he comes inside her, like he’s holding his breath in disbelief. She doesn’t believe it either. He constantly surprises her. She’s exhilarated by it, by the constant hope of it, be it thwarted or fulfilled.
She shifts off him, and they collapse in the aftershocks. They lie side-by-side and stare at her light fixture.
Eventually, he stirs and speaks, slipping up against her and stroking, sounding slurry and satisfied and so so warm.
“Christ. You are f*cking magic. Are you sure you didn’t conjure Shiv a Porsche out of a pumpkin?”
“Get me a towel, Roman.”
He does as he’s told. She feels sore and tingly and triumphant. She knew the sense of victory would come, but she didn’t think it would be so deep, so comforting. She takes her own scoop of self-worth from the vat she’s made for Roman.
He looks like he might dab at her himself, but hands the damp flannel over to her instead. It’s her facecloth which makes her sigh at his ineptitude. She wipes between her thighs, feels undignified, and Roman makes a needy little sound.
“f*ck. I ji*zzed in you. That’s…so much.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Did you…uh…?”
She laughs at him again. “You were there for less than a minute, of course not.”
“Mmn. Ok,” he looks distracted, staring strangely at her crotch like his eyes just alighted there and he’s stepped back into another space in his head. He leans down to kiss her hip.
“Nu-uh,” she slaps him with the damp, ji*zz-soaked towel and he yelps. “Get away from there, you’ve done enough damage.”
“I wanna-”
“Yes, I know what you want, and it’s revolting. I need a shower. Lick your hand next time you’re sliming all over yourself, if you must, but don’t involve me.”
He grins, knows she’s ribbing him, and his face is all dopey and warm and it scares the sh*t out of her. “You’re so mean. You can’t shame a man for having kinks that you’ve given him, Ger.”
She gets up, heads for the bathroom, adjusting her bra strap.
“I’m good with a shower head!” He calls after her.
“So am I,” she replies, and shuts the door on him.
- -
It must have been 2004, the dregs of the year, because Ewan was still causing problems and the proximity to the holidays made Logan testier than ever. Gerri wonders now with hindsight if the time of year most people spent with their families made Logan see the sinkholes in his own, or if he was just worried about attendance at his parties.
It was cold that year in New York. Bitterly so. Logan’s Upper East Side place was old and drafty and there was something wrong with the heating because Gerri had worn two cardigans and was still shivering. The kids weren’t around. Well, maybe Shiv was, but Gerri doesn’t remember. Roman was in college and Kendall was in one of his moods, when he’d decided for a season that he didn’t need his father and had made a point of marching off to some girlfriend’s place to torment her and her parents. Ewan was leveraging his stock against Logan’s latest acquisition: a solid yet not particularly scrupulous decision to buy a major live entertainment company (Logan was all cruises at the time, somehow bored of network news and not yet directed towards the oncoming army of apps and AI). It wasn’t a choice Gerri would have made but, as with everything Logan sets his sights on, it proved quite lucrative in the end; cutting costs in on-board amenities and the cross-pollination with Parks had actually worked in most areas. That was Logan, though. He’d buy the elephant in the room and sell it for parts, even when everyone was certain the ivory trade was done for.
Baird had her running legal compliance even though it was probably his job, because he had to try to sweet talk Ewan into not throwing a spanner in the works before they’ve even got the deeds signed. She remembers being camped in an armchair, Caroline’s hideous throw pillows on the floor by her shoes, with Frank and Bill and some lackeys that didn’t stick around long enough to get names in her memories. Her fingers were stiff around her pen, rigor mortis setting in already, and she just couldn’t make the chain of title work without details of an SPV and so had stood from her seat, feeling creaking and ancient at 43, and went to find Logan.
The place was a brownstone of almost comic antiquity, built some fifty years before but filled to the brim with things that had to be separately evaluated and insured. Relics older than America, art depicting horrific battles sitting stalwart over the drinks cabinet, amphora and miniature marbles at the perfect height for a teenager to bruise herself on, sneaking in at night. Most of the rooms were closed and dark, it made Gerri think of England and the night of the storm after Shiv’s Surrey Christening. She found Logan in a side lounge, lit by a single lamp. She’d had to walk through the room dubbed ‘the drawing room’ to find him, and this room didn’t have a name, just a little off-shoot from the main hosting space. Its couch was a little frayed and sinking and its chairs were close together, huddled like secretaries exchanging secrets. The only art in the room was a long, dusky oil painting in sepia hues that Gerri presumed was depicting either a beach or a nuclear wasteland. Logan was holding the landline handset to his ear and grinding his jaw. He had sequestered himself away for a reason, but he’d given Gerri a job to do and communication was pretty woeful at the time, so she knocked and let herself in.
“What is it?” He grunted.
“CoT. I need the original agreement for Mayflower.”
“Ask your husband.”
“He’s on with Ewan.”
“I don’t f*cking…” he trailed off, “I look like Paperwork Peggy to you?”
“Do you remember the executor? I can get it through them.”
“Probably that f*cking piss-shark Millburn…” Logan grumbled, mashing the buttons on the phone again.
He was stronger, back then. Hair thicker. Physically imposing without being particularly tall. Gerri had so wanted him to impress him, at the beginning, a feeling she hadn’t felt as strongly for anyone other than her second year college tutor and her mother. It wasn’t that he was particularly intelligent, although he was, or that he was particularly impressive, although he was that too. It was the standing, sound fact of him. Logan Roy gave the impression that he’d been here for centuries, and would be here for centuries yet. Gerri couldn’t picture him unjaded, uninformed, small or scrappy or hungry in the way dogs are, as opposed to hungry in the way storms are. To move in his orbit, to bump against his moons and rings and comets and satellites, felt like somehow managing to make a sound in a vacuum. Working for Logan had pushed Gerri to places she didn’t think she was capable of going, stretched her brain like taffy and hardened her back stronger. He’d made her richer than the rest of her family combined, made her more important than she thought was possible when she started her law degree, despite her embarrassing dreams that she packaged and sold on as ambition. She didn’t know at the time that she was hiking up an exponential, that it would reach critical mass and collapse in on itself, as all celestial giants are wont to do. She didn’t know at the time that she would stay for the majority of her professional life, cleaning up after him, watching him age, sinking into his inner sanctum but never getting the satisfaction she was chasing. The satisfaction that she couldn’t be sure hadn’t been what she’d denied him, and potentially herself, in an empty tequila bar in 1995, when her girls were still children and her waist still dipped in and the appeal of taking the final thing he could from one of his oldest friends compelled Logan to scratch her cheek with his beard.
“Millburn, right,” she said, “And would that have been Clarke? Or Mo?”
He was irritated by her presence, not looking at her as if she’d vanish from his peripheral just like that. “You know how to use a phone, right?”
“Right,” Gerri said, deciding not to push it despite the fact it was 2am and neither Clarke nor Mo would answer a call at that hour. She went to leave as he listened to the dial tone on the other end of the phone line, monotone and drawling and dragging the evening down into the lethargic swamp of a long, cold winter night.
But Logan didn’t look cold. In fact, he looked flushed. Sweating a little. She wondered if it was bad news, an approaching tsunami he was blocking from view that would wash her away in the morning, but then his eyes slipped closed, and he dropped the handset, and his face went from sirloin-mottled to snowdrift and his head tipped forward and she was going to him, then, some instinct kicking in as he dragged in a breath that was shaky enough to seize her with further frost.
“Logan? Are you alright?”
She bent over him, unwilling to touch, unsure if she was allowed to sit, as he gripped the armrest and a second sheen swept his face.
“f*cking…hot…”
Concerning. She touched his shoulder. He didn’t appear to notice. The hair on the crown of his head was thinning. She pushed him back into the sofa cushions and looked into his face. It was chillingly distant. She felt like her breath could come in steam clouds.
“I’m fine, I’m f*cking fine, for f*ck’s sake-” he blustered, batting her hand away, pawing at his brow.
Gerri said the first thing she thought. “You should get some rest, it’s been a long night.”
Logan looked at her then. Peripheral no longer, she found being the center of his attention was far worse.
“You’d like that, huh? Think I need some hot cocoa and a bedtime story, huh? f*ck off, Gerri, I’m f*cking fine. We’re not all f*cking menopausal.”
She ignored the jabs and the language, as usual. “Do you want some water?”
“Sure, f*cking…whatever, yes.” He waved his hand at her like she was the maid, his f*cking wife, an irritating buzzing in his ear, as opposed to a senior member of his legal team talking him through either a minor pulmonary episode or a panic attack.
“Alright,” she muttered, withdrawing with relief, knowing she’d have to ask the staff since she didn’t know where anything was kept, didn’t think to pay attention to where the booze and bagels and cigars were materializing from.
She looked back as she left. He’d stripped his cardigan off and had sweated through his shirt. His eyes were closed again, pawing a little at his chest, breathing slowing down. A man, she supposed, not a giant. Even so, he shook but did not topple. The flash of humanity did the opposite of what she expected: instead of someone who could save her, she felt a tremor of something in him that could potentially be saved.
- -
After her shower, she finds Roman still in her bed. He’s shirtless and looks vulnerable in just his boxers. She gets in beside him in just her robe, which he pretty quickly nudges open to sink face-first into her stomach. He sighs long and deep, and she pictures him falling asleep there, pinning her under him all night.
He’s got his nose against her C-section scar, drumming the line of it with each of his fingertips in quick, rhythmic succession. Always twitching and touching. His voice comes blurry and slow.
“Which one was this?”
“Both. Catherine was big. They were concerned about a natural birth.”
“Ha. Sliced along the stomach because your big-ass daughter wouldn’t fit through your tiny little puss*?”
She flicks his forehead. “Don’t be disgusting.” She stretches out a twinge in her neck: too much hunching over her laptop. “But yes, basically.”
“And then they just unzipped you for Petunia?”
“I presume so. I don’t remember much of it, I was pumped full of painkillers. Don’t even remember the drive to the hospital.”
“Only the best for Baird’s child bride.”
“Roman.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbles, mouth against her skin, nuzzling at the scar in a way that’s creeping towards disturbing.
“I don’t even want to know what you’re thinking,” she says, stroking his hair to soothe his squirming.
“Thinking about being inside you, obviously. Mmn. Thinking about what it would be like to be entirely in you, to like…grow in you and sh*t.”
“My god-”
“Not in a weird way, just like in a nice way,” he tries to justify, “it’s kind of like f*cking, right? Stepping into a sauna sh*t. Just thinking about the rest of me doing that, not my dick. I could f*ck you so hard I f*ck myself right up into your womb. I could come out this way like your kids did.”
“You’re making me nauseous.”
“You knew the diagnosis before all of this, surely? Didn’t you f*cking make it?”
“Your Oedipus Complex is truly something to behold.”
“My shrink says it’s normal.”
“Nothing about you is normal,” she says, and it sounds so humiliatingly fond she makes herself cringe, up by the pillows where he can’t see.
“Don’t be mean, Mommy, I’m all ji*zzed out.”
“Revolting.”
He chuckles, high and happy and between closed lips. He clings to her tighter and presses his cheek against her. She is bemused that she’s not more conscious of being naked around him. She is even more bemused that he seems to like her body, seems to want nothing more than to get all up close and personal with her wrinkles and cellulite and stretch marks. He’s blissed out against her belly and it soothes something in her, too. The intimacy she never expected from their relationship warms her up, smoothes her out, slots snugly back into place in a long-neglected corner of her mind.
“Do you think I’m like…a bad person? Or whatever?” He says after a few quiet moments, peering at non-existent dirt under his fingernails.
She has, at some nebulous point in the past, anticipated this question. She reaches for an answer; placating, vague, with just enough nuanced character observation to sell it as uniquely hers. But it comes apart in her hands.
She stares at the place where his hair parts, the way that from her higher angle, his eyelashes look long and dark. The rounded, delicate tips of his fingers as he deliberately doesn’t look at her, waiting for the swing of the axe.
I don’t care, she thinks, with a rather concerning amount of affection. I don’t care if you’re a bad person. I don’t care that you’re a bad person. I’d feel the same either way.
“None of us are good people, probably. Objectively.” Is what she says instead. It feels a bit too honest. He tilts his head to look up at her, not entirely happy, but not insulted either.
“I mean…I know we’re the bad guys, like duh, that was scribbled across my yearbook. I just wondered like…like if we’re the f*cking Dark Side, and I’m like a really sh*tty Jedi, why bother? Why dirty your hands further? Maybe it would be for the greater good if I sleep-walked off a f*cking skyscraper.”
She touches his brow, pinches his cheek in chastisem*nt.
“I’m a bad guy, too, Rome.”
“f*ck off, you’re not, you’re like. A lib.”
She sighs. “I’m not particularly interested in the moral quandary of our profession. I learned a long time ago how to live with myself. You’re not as difficult to stomach as all that, especially after all my practice.”
“Hmm,” he hums, and doesn’t quite seem satisfied. Gerri wonders if she wants him to try to better himself. She wonders if she should want that. She wonders if there’d be any point.
He drifts off holding her, breathing slow and calm, and she thinks that in this state, one could perhaps be convinced of his innocence.
