Work Text:
It’s uncharacteristically stupid of Gerri to be here at all, a real Karl move, the kind of shit that gets you fucked in the end. Ten minutes to talk Logan down, slow his pacing and stem the stream of obscenities flowing from his mouth. Another ten on the phone with Karolina, doing damage control. Five more to excuse herself and take the long way around to Roman’s room, hoping the route throws Logan and the others off her trail. There’s a sliver of light shining under the door, but no one answers Gerri’s knock. She waits, tries again, gets a muffled: “Fuck off, Ken!” It’s Logan’s intonation, but Roman’s voice is higher, nasal where Logan’s is gruff. The aural equivalent of a child trying on his father’s suits.
“It’s me, Rome,” she says. “Gerri.”
She’s buzzing with caffeine and adrenaline and the sound still rattles around in her brain, interposing itself in the gaps between thoughts. The sickening crack of Logan’s hand colliding with Roman’s skull. She shifts her weight, the heel of her stiletto digging into the faux-rustic carpet.
“Gerri?” Roman’s voice sounds not quite right, the vowels distorted, like he’s speaking around a mouthful of cotton. “Give me a little more credit than that. I know your voice. Biblically.”
Gerri grits her teeth, glances up and down the hall. It’s empty, the conference attendees off brokering deals in back rooms, swilling top-shelf scotch at the bar, but anyone could walk by at any moment. And wouldn’t that be a juicy morsel for the tabloids or Shiv or Kendall or—God forbid—Logan, if he happened by. (A month and a half and seventeen late-night calls from Roman so far, all meticulously logged in Gerri’s head. Roman must trust her discretion. Like father, like son.)
“Roman,” she says, “can you please let me in?”
“I’m flattered, Gerri, but I’m not in the mood.”
“That’s not why I’m here,” she says, keeping her tone neutral, professional, hoping she won’t scare Roman off. The moment plays again in her mind: Roman shoving Kendall away, slamming through the door. He doesn’t want pity, that much is clear. She doesn’t know what he wants.
Maybe there was something more she should have done, she thinks, back there in the room. Would she have intervened if Ken wasn’t there? Interposed herself between Logan and his son?
“Come to tell me what a cock-up that was and why can’t I shut my fat fucking mouth for once and what a disappointment I am to the family after all?”
There’s a bite, a bitterness to Roman’s voice that she’s never heard there before. She looks down at the crack of light between the door and its frame, watches the shadow of his feet move. He’s pacing the narrow space between the door and the wall, turning sharply when the space he’s allotted runs out.
“Not today,” she says. “Maybe later. Only if you want. Now will you please let me in?”
“I’m fine,” Roman says. “You can tell him I’m fine. Peachy as Cyd. Peachy as a Georgia fucking peach.”
“Roman,” Gerri hisses, leaning in to speak through the crack in the door. “I just watched you spit a tooth into your palm. You should be seeing a doctor, not sitting in there drinking or jerking off or whatever the hell you’re doing. Open the door.”
Silence. If he weren’t trapped inside the room, she would think he’d walked away. “Look, Gerri,” Roman says at last, “I don’t know what the fuck you think you saw but nothing happened. And honestly that’s kind of a fucked up thing to make up, you know? God, are you getting off on this? Are you some kind of fucking… tooth pervert?”
“Roman—”
“Technically, this is sexual harassment. Maybe I’ll call security and tell them you’re harassing me. Then we’ll have another scandal and the journalists will jump on it and the stock will tank and it will all be your fault. Is that what you’re going for here, Gerri?”
She forces herself to stand still. One breath in, one breath out. “All right,” she says, stepping back from the door and holding up her hands, a gesture of surrender lost on him unless he’s watching through the peephole. “Message received. I’m fucking off. You know where to find me if…” The words shrivel up in her throat as it hits her, the full force of her inadequacy. Her arrogance, to think that this thing between them—whatever it is—would extend this far.
“If you need anything,” Gerri says.
She’s turning to go when she hears Roman’s voice again, softer this time, barely a whisper. “Wait. No, wait. Gerri. Wait.” The light at the edge of the door lapses into shadow. He’s pressing himself up against the doorframe, inches away from where Gerri was standing to speak to him before she pulled back. “Wait,” he says again.
There’s a Shakespeare play about lovers who can only touch each other through a crack in a wall, or only speak to each other through one. Gerri thinks she read it as part of her liberal arts education, so many decades ago. It ends badly for them, she thinks, a pile of bodies on stage. Or maybe it was one of the comedies, ending with some lesser disaster. Something to make the audience laugh.
“I’m here, Roman,” Gerri says. “If you want me to stay here, open the door. This is conspicuous.”
Roman’s voice issues plaintively through the crack in the door. “Don’t you have some femicides to cover up or whatever?”
“Roman, I swear to God, if you don’t open the fucking door this instant—”
The lock whirs and the deadbolt thuds back and the door swings open. “You’ll what, Gerri?” says Roman, swirling a glass of whiskey in one hand. “Will I like it?”
She shakes her head and rolls her eyes, pushing past him into the room before he can change his mind. She still can’t figure out what he wants from her, doesn’t know if he knows himself. She’s felt his gaze on her in the boardroom, prickling the hairs at the back of her neck. He’s still with that leggy blonde with the expensive-looking hair who told Nan Pierce’s dweeby cousin all about how Roman never fucks her. If pressed about her actions, Gerri will insist that she’s never let Roman touch her, but it might be more accurate to say he’s never tried.
Gerri, for her part, has tried coldness and distance and disdain and still Roman circles around, like the stray dogs in Greece that follow you down the street no matter how often you kick them—though this time, she realizes, she’s the one circling, pushing in.
“You’re bleeding,” Gerri says, and he is, a little trickle of blood from the edge of his mouth.
She could have gotten between them, she thinks. Logan might be angry but he’d never lay a hand on Gerri, it isn’t in his nature. Then again, it’s not in Gerri’s nature to take center stage in these scenes. She credits her survival at Waystar with her knowledge of when to hang back, blending into the scenery like a sturdy piece of furniture.
“Gerri, Christ,” Roman says. “Overprotective much? It’s just a tooth. I’ll fucking… grow another one or something.”
He grins. There’s blood smeared along his teeth, slicked along their artificial white.
She drops her purse on the coffee table, turns to face him. “You are—biologically speaking, at least—an adult. You can’t grow another one.”
“Came here to rub it in, did you?” He tips the last of the whiskey back, and when he grins again the film of blood has washed away.
If she’d put herself between them, held Logan off—but the more she thinks about it the more the scene decomposes until she can no longer recall the sequence of events, what Roman said, what Logan said, where any of them stood in the room. If Gerri was next to Roman or next to Logan or blocked by Kendall or off on the other side of the room with Shiv.
“Roman, sit down,” Gerri says.
He obeys the command immediately, dropping down into the armchair, one leg crossing the other, jiggling anxiously. He’s looking at the carpet, won’t meet her eyes.
“Stay there,” she says, and wets a cloth in the bathroom, running her hand beneath the water as she waits for it to warm.
Back in the room Roman is still seated, one arm folded across his chest, hand squeezing his shoulder arrhythmically. Clenching, unclenching, the knuckles white.
“Hey,” she says, bending over him, “let’s get you cleaned up.” His eyes flicker up to meet her gaze then flutter shut. She dabs at the edge of his mouth with the washcloth, watching his blood seep into the terrycloth, turning white to pink.
“Right,” Roman says, tipping his head back against the back of the chair. “Can’t have me walking around all bruised and bloody in front of glitterati, now, can we? Fuckerberg might see.”
“If that’s… if that’s how you want to think about it,” Gerri says, “then yes. It’s a PR disaster waiting to happen.” Roman squirms against her hands. “Hold still.”
Roman holds still. “So what was your role in all this, then?” he asks. Compensating for his limited range of motion by gearing up for a verbal strike. “Gerri Kellman. More like Gerri Killman, am I right? Killwoman? Or is it more of a—someone else does the Killman, then you get tagged in for the Coverupman?”
It’s Roman, she thinks. He doesn’t know. He’s flinging shit against the wall and hoping something sticks, so she’d better not show how sticky this particular shit is starting to feel. She’s done nothing to be ashamed of, Gerri tells herself. It’s dirty work but someone has to do it. She didn’t hire Lester, couldn’t fire him, and what she doesn’t know about Logan can’t hurt anyone. She was top of her class at Yale (or would have been if they got grades), shiny summer associateship and a lifelong unpaid internship in staying impassive in the face of men who shouted and stomped around and needed their secrets kept. So if Waystar wants to pay her in the high six figures to do that same job then—what was it Logan said, the Shakespeare?—take the fucking money. Shit happens and someone cleans up. It’s the way of the world. The way she does it they all keep their jobs, no one goes to jail, the families get paid off and everyone’s life is easier in the end, or at least more flush with cash, which amounts to more or less the same thing. Win-win.
“Very funny, Rome,” she says. “Maybe if that comedian chokes on his green juice they can hire you to do the roast instead.”
“Just doing your job, then, Killman?” he says. “Where have I heard that before?”
She presses the cloth to Roman’s cheekbone. The flesh is swollen, a bruise beginning to bloom beneath the skin. Roman flinches away from her touch, shifts in the chair, drawing one leg up against his chest.
“Still hurts?” she asks, and he makes a strangled noise that she takes as a yes. He looks so small in the oversized chair, small and compact, doubled up on himself like the other Roys ate up all the nutrients, sucked up all the air, and Gerri wants to fold him into herself, keep him somewhere safe.
She flinches away from the thought like it’s burned her. Suddenly grateful that Roman isn’t looking, she says: “I’ll go get you some ice.” She drops the washcloth in the bathroom first. There’s a little smear of blood on her hands. Literal blood on her literal hands. He’d make something of that if he saw, she thinks, running the water until it gets hot then lathering her hands. Lady Macbeth, getting your little fucking screwdriver in. He thinks she’s a ruthless person, a bitch, which she is. She looks at herself in the mirror as the water scalds her hands. Underneath the layers of foundation and lipstick, she looks old. Her face wan, her hair escaping its bun.
There’s an ice machine down the hall. She fills a glass with it, and back in the room, not sure what else to do, she pours it into a pillowcase and twists the top shut. Roman is slumped in the armchair still, one hand thrown over his face, covering his eyes. He holds out his other hand when he hears her approach and she presses the makeshift ice pack into his palm. He holds it against his cheek. From his usual frenetic activity, he’s gone boneless and limp, a puppet whose strings have been cut.
“Bet you did this all the time for Steph and Madison,” he says.
Gerri purses her lips. They were almost one family once, Gerri and Baird and Logan and Caroline. Summer holidays at the beach, Christmas together sometimes, Thanksgiving. Always the gaggle of children underfoot. Their bruises and scrapes and skinned knees. The little injuries children dealt to each other, the little injuries they accrued from bumping up against the world.
“Well, not this, exactly,” Gerri says, settling herself in the chair across from his.
“What was the strategy?” Roman says. “Kiss it better?”
Privately, she’ll admit to herself that she always hated that part. The tumble off the bike and the rising wail and the weary voice within her that said: oh, not this again. Gerri is efficient, practical: she knows how to disinfect a cut, bandage it up. But on the emotional side of things, she always felt like she was running down a checklist. Kiss the bruise, that was step one. Rub a back, touch an elbow. Maybe a hug if the scrape was really bad. When steps one through three failed to stop the wailing, Gerri would say: “Oh, sweetie, you’re going to be all right.”
“Oh, sweetie, you’re going to be all right,” she says, and grabs her phone to find the number for the nearest emergency dentist.
“Back home I’d always—” Roman begins, and Gerri looks up from her phone. Roman’s voice is strangled, one hand still draped over his eyes, the other pressing the ice to his cheekbone. “Mom kept this bag of rhubarb in the freezer. It spanned, like, the entire duration of my childhood. I don’t know why she had it. I mean, you’ve met her. It wasn’t like she was, I don’t know, barefoot and baking us pies all day in one of those Mormon-child-bride dresses.”
Gerri, who once chipped a tooth on some buckshot in a pigeon that Caroline shot and served for dinner, nods and says: “Uh-huh.”
“The maid would clean out the fridge every week but she never touched it. No one would touch it. It got to the point where I thought—like, it practically had my name on it. Sometimes I wouldn’t even have to get it myself. It would be like, Roman went and got his teeth knocked in again, and there’s Ken outside the door with the bag of frozen rhubarb, like some kind of… gangly labrador retriever with acne.”
It’s still in the room, and Gerri holds her breath. There’s a buzzing sound, from the lights or the heat or the building’s electrical grid, she isn’t sure. She feels it in her skull, a pressure like a migraine. She feels she needs to say something, fears breaking the spell, fears what will happen if Roman continues.
“Then one summer I’m home from boarding school and she decides to make this fucking crumble,” Roman says. The hand on his forehead squeezes his temples as though trying to dispel a headache. “It was fucking—it was nasty. You know what happens to rhubarb when you keep it in a freezer for five years and melt and refreeze it every other week?”
Unbidden, the memory surfaces: sitting in the office that used to be Baird’s a month or so after his death, paging through his binder of research on jurisdictional issues related to missing persons lost at sea. She’d meant to take at least a month’s leave, came back after only two weeks when Logan offered her Baird’s old job. Anything to get out of the house in Scarsdale, away from the detritus of their daily lives and the girls’ empty rooms and the creaking sounds at night as the bones of the house settled. All the advice for the newly bereaved said to wait before sorting through Baird’s things, to sit with the grief and then go slow, starting with the less fraught objects with the least sentimental value, but Gerri wasn’t sure where thousands of pages of NDAs and settlements paid to the families of disappeared girls fell on that timeline. It shocked her a little, in spite of everything, to learn that Baird had kept the coverups secret even from her. Gentle Baird, who picked clover in the park for the tortoise, who always reminded Gerri of their daughters’ teachers’ names. Gerri had always thought that between them, she was the cutthroat one.
Across the hall, the light was always on: Logan working through his divorce by gutting a media conglomerate in Shanghai, eating up a chain of resorts in Cancun. They drank together at the end of their respective late nights, scotch from the bottle Baird kept in the desk’s bottom drawer. By the time it happened—Logan shoving her back against the desk, hiking her skirt up around her hips as Gerri fumbled with the buttons on his shirt—it seemed the inevitable outcome. She felt along the lattice of scars on Logan’s back before she could parse what they were, their ropy texture strange beneath her hands. Then Logan’s hand closed like a vise on her wrist, pulling it down, and Gerri felt the atmosphere shift. It bruised the next morning, a faint discoloration that Gerri hid beneath the French cuffs of her shirt.
That winter, she took to thinking of Waystar as a corridor full of locked doors. A few more opened with every promotion. Some of them had surprises inside. She thinks she got the metaphor from some old story, a fairy tale, meant to discourage an audience of women from doing a particular stupid thing. Only now Gerri can’t recall what the moral was meant to be: you die if you open the door, you die if you leave the door shut.
The hand on Roman’s face drops down to dangle off the arm of the chair. His gaze meets Gerri’s, his eyes dark and shining. Fathoms deep, like oil wells.
“Jesus, Gerri,” Roman says. His voice is lifeless, flat. “That was a joke. This is the part where you laugh.”
There’s something ugly and rotting inside him and Roman thinks Gerri is looking right at it. She’s looking right at it because Roman pulled the ugly lump of sludge from his chest and held it up to the light between them, foul and stinking and oozing filth. He held it up for Gerri to examine, because Roman is an idiot, and now it’s too late to take it back. The air in the room is hot and close. He thought he’d catalogued every quirk of Gerri’s eyebrows, every pursed lip, but now there’s a look on her face that Roman has never seen before. She looks stricken, discomposed. He can’t bear to look at her face. He folds his arms around himself as though he can hide the ugly thing inside himself from view, as though he’s not the one who pulled it out and set it down between them. For all that Gerri tells him he’s slimy and covered in shit, for all that he wants that, Roman never wanted her to know know.
“Rome, I…” Gerri says, then stops.
Roman fidgets in the chair, pulling his legs up and bracing his feet against its arm. Wraps his arms around his knees. The thing is still there between them, vulnerable, exposing, sitting in the center of the room. It’s foul and black and Gerri is going to look at it and say something, and if she does, that’s it. Something deep inside him will crack.
“Gerri, don’t say anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Gerri says.
“Sorry for what?”
“I’m just sorry, Rome.”
“Shut up, Gerri, just shut up.”
He rests his forehead on his knees. It feels like someone has turned him inside out, like he’s underwater and can’t see which way is up anymore. She’s going to leave and he doesn’t want to see her go. He wants to cover his ears so he doesn’t have to hear it either, but he thinks it would look too silly. Gerri might laugh at him as she goes. He grits his teeth and closes his eyes and waits. There’s a humming from the heating ducts and someone passes by outside the door, shouting into a phone about derivatives.
When Roman looks up, Gerri is still seated across from him, but her face is different now. The vulnerable look—can he call it that, is it fucking crazy to call it that?—is gone. Instead, she’s wearing what Roman thinks of as her touring the facility and picking up slack look, a look he’s seen on her face a thousand times.
“Rome, I’m going to call the emergency dentist,” Gerri says, all smartphone and cheekbone and brisk efficiency. Roman blinks and nods his assent, disoriented, soothed.
As Gerri places the call Roman shifts his weight in the chair, touching his fingers to the bruise on his cheek, lightly first then pressing down. The twinge of pain starts in his cheekbone and spreads out along the rest of his face. When it hurts all he can think of is how much it hurts, which means all he wants to do is press on it and make it hurt more, to sync the sensation up with the sensation of thinking about the sensation.
Pressing harder on the bruise, he tries to swim back up. Get from halfway present to maybe three-quarters. Gerri’s voice on the phone comes in and out of focus. She’s chopping through the phone tree in record time, a diminutive MILF Paul Bunyan—which Roman thinks is honestly kind of hot—until she reaches what Roman assumes is the tooth man himself, or maybe an assistant to the tooth man.
“A little swelling,” Gerri says. Then, cupping her hand over the speaker and turning to Roman: “He’s asking you to rate the pain.”
It’s an opportunity for him to do his part, pull them back onto familiar ground, and Roman scrabbles for it. “Out of what?” he says. “Five stars?”
“Scale of one to ten.”
Things are still fuzzy around the edges, like watching the world through a thick plastic sheet, but this is low-hanging fruit. Roman could do this in his sleep. “I’d give it between a… 4.20 and a 6.9?” he says.
He’s phoning it in—figuratively; Gerri is literally phoning it in, a perfect metaphor for the division of labor in their partnership—but it gets the desired effect. Gerri arches an eyebrow and Roman stands, stretching his arms above his head, rolling his head back until he hears his vertebrae crack. There’s a dull ache in his jaw and his tongue feels swollen, cottony. He prods at the missing tooth with his tongue, tastes blood, metallic and warm.
“A four,” Gerri says, then: “He wants to know if you still have the tooth.”
“What are you, Gerri, the fucking… Waystar Royco general tooth fairy? I leave it under my pillow, you sneak in while I’m asleep and leave me a hundo and a little baggie of coke?” He laughs to himself. “The tooth Gerri.”
She gives him what he thinks of as her nun confronted with world’s impiety not angry, just disappointed look.
“Yes,” Roman says. “I have it.”
“Show me?”
It’s mine, he wants to say, but instead he says: “You freak,” hunching in on himself, feeling around in the pocket of his pants. He stares down at the carpet as he holds out his hand, not wanting to look at the ragged root of it, the blood flaking from the white like rust.
“Yes,” Gerri says, “he’s got it. It looks like the root came out.” Then, covering the speaker again, glancing over at Roman: “Just—put it down. No, not there! Just… try not to touch it for now.” And back on the line: “Mm-hmm. I see.”
He’s not even sure why he kept it, just that he couldn’t bear to throw it in the trash with the empty coffee cups and half-eaten danishes and yesterday’s Financial Times. This part of him, this little lost part. There’s something unique about the shape of a tooth, he thinks, or maybe they just don’t burn like other parts of the body do. It’s how you catch a killer, like in that documentary.
“Yes,” Gerri says. “On the hike. He tripped and fell.” Her face looks the same as it always does. No tells, no shifty eyes. Roman files the information away. Gerri lies like breathing, like she’s been doing it all her life.
He pushes into the bathroom and shuts the door, runs the faucet until it drowns out the sound of Gerri’s voice. He still isn’t sure why she’s here, thinks maybe Logan sent her. Another round of damage control. He's known her since he was preverbal and cried for attention and pissed in diapers (so not so different from now, says the internalized Shiv voice that lives in his head), but Roman still has no idea how to read her, failed to pay attention for the first thirty years. It’s like an exam he had all semester to study for but he fucked around instead, and now he’s desperately trying to mainline the information into his brain, struggling to hold it all in focus through a blur of Red Bull and Adderall for $20 a pill—the Roy tax, he called it, the upcharge on illegal drugs just because his dad’s name was engraved on three, four plaques on campus—and the fug of fluorescent lights in the library basement while the sun was coming up. And he desperately wants to get an A in Gerri Theory but it’s like micro or calc, an endless stream of data overwhelming his addled brain, refusing to take on a meaningful shape.
Roman settles himself on the floor, leaning back against the cool porcelain expanse of the tub. Prods at the gap in his mouth again, tastes blood. It feels like elementary school, the parts he still half-remembers: fidgeting on the floor, crossing and uncrossing his legs, wiggling a loose baby tooth. Caroline would slap his hand and send him back to his room whenever she caught him biting his nails, finally coated them with a clear, bitter polish to force him to stop. But teeth were better than that, better than drawing on himself or ripping paper into little shreds or erasing marks from a page until the paper thinned and tore or stabbing the inside of his knee with a pencil fresh out of the sharpener. Sometimes he pulled the loose ones out, transfixed by the twinge of pain that came before the root and the flesh pulled apart.
It’s quiet in the bathroom. Not peaceful, but quiet. Normally his thoughts run along at least five different tracks at once. Now everything moves very slowly, or maybe too quickly for him to keep up, like a film sped up until sound and color blur. The door to the hall opens and shuts and Roman thinks Gerri has finally gotten bored and given up, but then he hears her moving through the room again.
The minutes pass like reels of film played in reverse or sped up or slowed down, discomposed into images. When Roman pushes back into the room, Gerri is unscrewing the cap from a heavy glass bottle of milk.
“Thanks, Ger,” Roman says, “but I’m good.”
“Doctor’s orders,” Gerri says. He waits for her to pour a glass but instead she picks up the tooth from where he’s dropped it on the table, holding it gingerly, her fingers avoiding the root, and drops it into the bottle.
“It keeps the nerves alive, or—something,” she says. “I don’t know. I went to law school.”
“Are they going to put it back in?”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” she says, “but apparently sometimes it’s possible. It has to stay moist but water does… something to the cells. His other suggestion was to spit on it.”
“Really?”
Gerri holds up a hand. “Don’t start.”
She’s quiet in the car on the way over, scrolling through her phone. Every so often something amuses her and the corner of her mouth quirks up. Roman stares and stares. The expanse of the middle seat between them, the driver quarantined in his airless space. The car smells of oxygen and air freshener and Gerri’s perfume, something densely floral and dark.
Something happened when she put her hands on him. The thing in his head like a dog that chases its tail around and around settled down.
He watches her hands. They’re ordinary hands, veined, clear polish on the nails.
The driver makes a hairpin turn around one of the high mountains roads. Roman presses on his cheekbone again, thinks he can feel something squishy and bruised deep within the bone. He pushes down harder so he can really feel it. He wants to crack a joke. About what, he isn’t sure. He wants Gerri to look at him with the incredulous look or the exasperated one or even the one that feels almost tender, like she’s looking at someone she’d like to touch with gentleness, even love.
“You ever have those dreams?” says Roman.
“Hm?” Gerri looks up from her phone. Her eyes are piercing and blue.
“You know, those dreams where you’re fucking—you have to find, like, a specific guy who has some thing you need and also fuck the president’s daughter but all your teeth are falling out and you’re in some kind of cross between your old boarding school and the set of Planet of the Apes and you kind of just wander around with your dick out pulling more and more teeth out of your jaw until you don’t have any left, but it feels so fucking good that it never occurs to you to stop?”
“Not… that, precisely,” Gerri says, “but variations on it, yes. Usually it’s a cross between the Yale law library and downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Insofar as it has a downtown.”
“Downtown where? Do they even have cities in Kentucky? Dwellings?” He tries to picture Gerri doing whatever it is people do in Kentucky. Walking around a tobacco field wrapped in a Confederate flag, her tits hanging out. Wearing a floral arrangement on her head while she stakes her decaying family’s fortune on a plucky horse that breaks its leg a meter before the finish line.
Gerri gives him the haggard dean of students confronted with donor’s kid. “We can’t all be born on the Upper West Side with silver spoons in our mouths,” she says, looking back down at her phone. As they step out of the car in the lot outside the urgent care, she hands him the bottle of milk from her purse.
It’s clean and efficient, all very Gerri. She leads him by the elbow through the waiting room, past the dregs of human misery: the woman with her eye swollen shut, the man with his mangled hand taped inside in a plastic bag. Roman keeps his eyes on the floor and tries not to hurl. It’s stupid that they’re here. It’s only a tooth. It’s only Roman. He still isn’t sure why Gerri cares. They’ve barely sat down when the nurse calls him in, waves him through the door and inside. He’s out of the waiting room before anyone can recognize him, if anyone has even heard of Roman Roy out here in bumfuck Altitude Sickness Conference Center and Methland, Colorado.
The on-call dentist looks like Frank, which predisposes Roman to hate his guts. Like Frank, he doesn’t think Roman is funny. Tough crowd, Roman thinks as the man’s gloved finger presses into the fleshy part of his gum. He tips his head back and closes his eyes and tries to imagine it’s Gerri’s hand, but it doesn’t work because not-Frank keeps yammering on about resorption and tissues and dental avulsions. Roman half-listens, gathers enough to know that the root is fucked, the tooth won’t reimplant. Not-Frank wipes the gum with something numbing, washes out the wound and digs around for what looks and feels like a bit of bone, washes it out again and turfs Roman to a nurse who checks for a concussion, shining a little light in his eyes. “You might see signs of brain damage,” Roman says, “but I want you to know it predates the injury, so, you know”—he taps on his temple—“nothing to worry your pretty little noggin about.”
Like real Frank and not-Frank, the nurse doesn’t laugh.
Gerri doesn’t laugh at anything, not really, but sometimes when Roman speaks she’ll grin or smirk or occasionally even do something with her face that looks like genuine amusement, like Roman’s frenetic clowning has managed to tip itself over from annoying to endearing.
Gerri’s not in the waiting room so he walks back past the dregs of human misery, back out into the parking lot. For a moment he’s disoriented, blinking into the halogen lights. The sun has gone down and the moon is out, full or something close to full. The car isn’t by the entrance and he thinks once more that she’s given up and left. Then he sees it parked at the edge of the lot, Gerri emerging from the back seat, lit from behind by the halogen lights. She’s luminous, her plain linen suit and her milky skin. The moon and Gerri, Gerri and the moon.
“How was it?” she asks and they move toward each other, through the empty lot.
“Awful,” Roman says. “The dentist looked like Frank and he didn’t laugh at any of my jokes.”
“Did they give you a lollipop at the end and tell you you were very brave?” She reaches out a hand. “I can take that.”
He’s still toting around the bottle of milk, clutching it to his chest with one arm like a relative’s floppy, funny-smelling baby that Roman has been instructed to hold without adequate preparation. “Jonesing to destroy some more evidence, Ger?” he says.
“No, Roman,” she says, “I’m just carrying a bag and you aren’t,” but he’s already holding the bottle off to the side, opening his hand. The glass shatters on the asphalt, milk spreading out along the slick of oil and yesterday’s rain. The tooth and its mangled root float in a pool of oil and fat, haloed by shards of glass. Roman steps on it with his heel, grinds down.
“Oopsie-daisy,” he says.
Gerri looks at him with another expression he can’t read. “It’s late,” she says.
“Long day’s work, Ger?” Roman says. “Lots of mess to clean up? Maybe you should get the lollipop.”
She looks down at the pavement, shakes her head. “They couldn’t save the tooth, then?”
“I don’t fucking care about the fucking tooth,” he snaps, and humiliatingly, he hears his voice crack. Just his fucking luck to start sobbing like a baby in the parking lot of the Meth Mountain, Colorado urgent care in front of Gerri Kellman, whose emotions, as far as he can tell, exist on a spectrum from irritation to ironic detachment. Gerri, who’s about as demonstrative as a cube of ice.
Roman is starting to turn away when she folds him into her arms. It’s awkward at first, like their bodies don’t quite fit, Roman stiff as a board, arms flat at his sides, Gerri seemingly unsure of what to do with her hands until she brings them up to press against his shoulderblades. She’s touching him, he can’t believe she’s touching him, and he exhales deeply and buries his face in the crook of her neck. Her skin is hot to the touch. Tentatively, he brings his arms up to circle her back. She feels solid and real, flesh and blood, a shock of temperature so unlike her cool, collected voice at the end of a phone line, heard through a door. He isn’t crying per se but he’s tearing up a little, something within him unraveling, and he wonders if Gerri can feel the dampness through the thin silk collar of her shirt.
Her hand traces lines along his back and he breathes in the scent of her. He doesn’t know how long they stand there, folded in each other’s arms. Time doesn’t exist anymore, nothing exists but the shock of her body pressed against his, her chest rising and falling with her breaths.
After an eternity that still isn’t long enough, her hands fall away. She takes a step back but Roman follows the movement, walking them back until Gerri’s back is pressed up against the car door. He dimples his fingers into the flesh at her waist. Gerri blinks at him, the expression on her face unreadable, and gently, experimentally, Roman presses his lips to hers.
It’s clumsy, the left side of his mouth still numb. He waits for her to slap him, shove him away, rake those manicured nails down his cheek, knee him in the groin. It’s what he deserves. Instead, her mouth parts against his and Roman tastes his own blood.
His hand is in her hair, encountering pins and a film of hairspray, when her phone starts to ring. He feels it vibrate through the pocket of her blazer. He’s half-hard already and Gerri must be able to feel that too, but she still isn’t shoving him away. She pulls at his bottom lip with her teeth and the shock of it tingles along his spine. The phone goes silent and he feels along her scalp, nudging a bobby pin out of place. Beneath the thin film of product her hair is silky, soft to the touch. He tangles his fingers in it as her phone rings again.
“Rome,” Gerri whispers, pulling back, pressing a finger to his lips. There’s a hitch in her voice like he’s stolen her breath. With her other hand, she picks up the phone, nestling it in the crook between shoulder and ear, where Roman’s head rested a moment ago.
“Where the fuck were you? Nan fucked the deal.”
Roman tenses. Doesn’t want to pull away, can’t bear to break any points of contact between his body and Gerri’s: their heads bowed together, his hands at her waist. He holds still as though if he moves, Logan will sense him through the line.
“Family emergency,” Gerri says. She’s back to her usual slightly sardonic stone-cold-professional businesswoman tone. Her hair is half undone, a little smear of lipstick at the edge of her mouth. “Madison. She’ll be fine.”
“I need you here, now. The Pine Suite, second floor.”
“Right,” Gerri says. “Just… give me a minute to freshen up.”
Experimentally, Roman nuzzles her neck. Gerri inhales sharply. He wonders if Logan can hear it over the phone.
“Romulus?” says Logan, and Roman feels it in his limbs, a tingling in his fingers and toes. The sick sensation of being caught out.
“What about him?” Gerri says.
“Have you seen him?”
“Not since the panel. Do you want me to look?”
So Gerri came of her own accord. The knowledge feels sharp, something jagged in his chest, pressing up against his organs, nicking the muscle that pumps the blood through his heart. Whatever it is, he doesn’t want to feel it. He pulls back slightly, fingers tracing along Gerri’s neckline, the ridge of her collarbone and the strand of pearls. (“No.” Logan’s voice, gruff, commanding. “I’ll handle it.”) The pearls are warm from lying against her skin. He takes one into his mouth, sucks at it, scrapes his teeth against its surface. It’s gritty like sand against his teeth, smooth against the tongue.
“What exactly am I walking into?” Gerri asks. “Nan?”
Roman touches the hollow between her collarbones—“Nan is gone, the slippery cunt, won’t take my calls”—trails his hand down.
“I can’t imagine why,” Gerri says, and Roman snorts, the sound escaping his mouth before he can catch it. Gerri presses her palm against his lips. Shakes her head silently, staring at him, eyes wide.
“Well, where the fuck are you? Stop dicking around and get over here before Sandy manages to jam his syphilitic cock into another one of my orifices.”
Gerri’s eyebrow arches up. “Well, when you put it that way,” she says. Roman’s hand is on her breast now, palming it, and miracle of miracles, Gerri still isn’t kneeing him in the crotch or pushing him away. She shifts her weight slightly against him, keeping her hand on his mouth. “I’ll be there in ten,” she says. “Maybe closer to fifteen.” And she hangs up the phone.
He can’t meet her gaze, realizes he’s staring down at her chest instead, which if she’s angry will probably piss her off more. “Rome,” she says, withdrawing her hand, but he doesn’t want to speak. Acting on some obscure instinct, he drops to his knees. Presses a kiss to the inside of her thigh, just above the hollow of her knee. Her nylons staticky-plasticky on his lips, asphalt digging into his knees.
“Rome,” she says again. “It’s late.”
He shakes his head, his face still pressed against the soft flesh of her thigh. Feels the muscle tense against his cheek. His hands inch up the backs of her legs. If Gerri wants to leave, go back to the conference center, back to him, she’ll have to shake Roman off her first.
“Rome,” Gerri says. “We have to go.” She holds still, pressed up against the car, for long enough that Roman thinks she’s changed her mind, decided to stay. Then she steps to the side, pulling neatly out of Roman’s grip.
He pulls his hands back into his lap. Stays kneeling on the asphalt, face turned away. He wonders, if he stays here, if she’ll haul him to his feet. If he waits long enough, if she’ll touch him again. Instead, the dull click of heels, walking away. She’s circled the car and opened the door on the other side, slammed it behind her.
Roman pulls himself to his feet. In the car, she leaves the middle seat between them once again. It’s a fifteen-minute drive back to Argestes. He stares at her as she pulls a little compact out of her purse and fixes her face. Moistens a finger with spit and swipes at the lipstick stain at the edge of her mouth, reapplies the color, a muted red. Purses her lips against a tissue, removing the excess pigment, leaving behind a little ghost of a kiss. It’s like against all odds he’s managed, briefly, to dishevel her, and now she’s making a show of shevelling herself again right in front of him.
The car makes a hairpin turn, climbing up the shitty mountain road, and for a moment Roman wishes he could tell the driver to just keep going. Past the conference center and higher up the mountain or down into one of the valleys dotted with trees where Roman could find a cabin somewhere and close her up with him in a little room forever. The two of them bubbled away from the world, hidden from view by the trees and the methheads. Roman could take up farming, grow pot. Raise llamas. Learn to ski and become a ski instructor. Whatever the fuck people do in Colorado when they need jobs to survive. But the fantasy dissipates almost as soon as it forms, a shape made of clouds breaking apart. Gerri is put-together and perfect and she’d never live on the side of a mountain with Roman and a bunch of methheads like some kind of kale-snorting hippie.
Gerri is pulling the pins from her hair, cupping them in her palm. The compact goes back into her purse and a comb comes out and she runs it through her hair. Through the window Roman is starting to see signs of civilization again. They must be a few minutes out from Argestes. Now or never, he thinks.
“Gerri, I didn’t—” he begins. “I thought you—I mean—it seemed like you—I didn’t mean to—fuck.” He makes a strangled noise, shakes his head, waving his hands in front of his face.
“I’m not made of stone, Roman,” Gerri says, twisting her hair back up behind her head, sticking it with a pin.
He isn’t sure what he was trying to tell her, or what she thinks he was trying to say. They’re in separate conversations, two feet of space between them. Roman can still smell her perfume, musky and dark—maybe now he smells like it, too—and there are stains on the knees of his pants from kneeling in the parking lot.
As Gerri exits the car she adjusts her skirt, smoothing it over her hips. There’s a long moment when she’s turning to go and turns back and Roman doesn’t know if she’s about to tell him off, tell him she wants him, tell him she never wants him to touch her again. Her lips purse and her gaze flickers between him and the ugly wood lodge.
“Goodnight, Roman,” she says at last, and starts down the covered walkway to the door.
The meeting runs late, less because they have things to do—no one from Pierce will pick up the phone, so there’s not a whole lot they can do—and more because they’re waiting for Logan’s rage to burn itself out. He barks out instructions and Gerri nods, faking taking notes, sure he’ll reconsider it all in the morning. She’s overheated and off-balance all the while, toying with the pearls at her neck. She hopes if Logan notices, he’ll chalk it up to her “family emergency.” He doesn’t ask her about it, which is probably for the best because Gerri hasn’t come up with a convincing lie, because she knew he wouldn’t ask.
“Well, there’s still Eduard,” she says at one point. “Roman is across it. We spoke last night.”
Shiv smirks, leaning against the arm of the couch. “Propaganda news for a foreign power? Is that really how we wanna play this, dad?”
“Well, ethical concerns aside,” Gerri says, “we’d stand to make a killing,” and over speakerphone Karl snorts. Shiv’s eyebrows go up to her hairline. Gerri feels Logan’s gaze on her before she turns to see, more attuned to his moods than her own. He’s on edge tonight, reading implications into things.
“Metaphorically speaking, of course,” Gerri says, tightening her cashmere wrap around her shoulders.
She’s assumed for years that one of them will dick the other over in the end. When it happens it won’t be personal, because nothing is personal for Gerri—though she’ll admit to hoping that when the time comes, it’s her knife in Logan’s back and not the other way around. Above all else, Gerri is loyal to herself. Logan knows it, everyone knows it. Paradoxically, she suspects that this is why he trusts her. Surrounded by sycophants and yes-men, he knows that Gerri will be solidly beside him for as long as their interests align. As their interests have aligned for the past thirty years, a solid half of her life.
Not loyalty, then, but a kind of bone-deep familiarity. Logan was there in the hospital when she got the news about Baird, watched her body crumple in on itself. He didn’t have much to say, but he put his hand on her shoulder and he was there, a stolid presence. Logan is there, like a planet that creates its own gravity or the sea or the federal income tax. Not like mercurial Roman, who’s quicksilver, who changes from day to day.
(Whatever it was with Logan, she broke it off after a month, sure by then that she didn’t want the promotion to third Mrs. Logan Roy. “Some legal advice from your general counsel,” she said as he wound himself up. “You really shouldn’t fire an employee you fucked thirty minutes ago.” Fifteen years later, she thinks of it only when prompted by circumstance: Roman’s voice echoing on the other end of the line, his mouth pressing a kiss to the hollow of her knee.)
The meeting breaks up a few minutes after midnight, all of them running in circles until they can’t stand to run anymore. “Madison?” Logan asks her as she’s walking through the door.
“What?”
“Madison,” Logan repeats. “Is she all right?”
“Oh.” Gerri’s hand goes to the pearls at her neck. She thinks she feels the heat of Roman’s mouth there, the slick of his spit. “She’ll be fine,” she says. “Just a little overwrought. Well, I’d better—”
“Right. Goodnight, Gerri.”
“Goodnight.”
She’s restless in the cavernous room, fixing herself a drink then pacing, sipping at it as she moves around the overstuffed furniture, the gloomy wood decor. The heating is on full-blast, dry air pushing through the vents. She goes to open a window, changes her mind halfway through the motion. Pulls on her coat instead and goes out to the path that loops around the conference center. Walks around the ring of buildings, some of the windows dark and some lit, shapes moving hazily within. Through thin cloud cover, the moon is almost full.
Gerri’s thoughts are jumbled, nothing in its right place. She tries to remember when she decided to fuck her entire life. How she got to this point, the seemingly endless cascade of Karl decisions and the neediness, the way she can’t stop replaying the feeling of Roman’s hand on her breast. She’s always imagined him pawing and greedy, or puffed up with bluster and bravado—though it’s a testament to her tangled thoughts that she’ll admit to having imagined anything at all. Instead, Roman touched her gently, like a fragile object. Like he was afraid she would break, afraid he’d leave fingerprints. (Logan fucked like he lived the rest of his life, in a single-minded pursuit of his own ends—but that she’s making the comparison at all might make her worse than Karl. Stupider, more reckless when she should be twice as smart, two steps ahead.)
Gerri sips at her drink, swallows a mouthful of brine.
The path branches off ahead of her, first to the woods—too dark—then down to the water. She follows the latter, which terminates in a little wooden platform over the lake. It’s March, the seasons teetering on the knife’s edge between winter and spring, and cold rolls off the water in waves. The water is black, an image of the moon forming and refracting along its troubled face.
Gerri bites through the olive at the bottom of her glass, spits the pit out into the water. Watches little ripples splash out. Mostly it’s been a whole lot of nothing since Baird died. After Logan she dated around a little, but the landscape was bleak. Half the men her age dating women half her age. The rest stuffed-suit widowers hung up on their dead wives, high-society divorcees seeking perfect-on-paper second wives to fuck around on with whatever it was they really wanted. The ones who got attached were almost worse: the limpet-like attentions of men accustomed to having wives, suddenly thrust into the world on their own, mewling and scared. Now if anyone asks, she says: “I’m married to the job,” and sometimes when she wants to twist the knife she plays the widow card. It’s been fine, she’s been fine. Even with Baird, she kept her exit prepped. Maybe she loved him—Gerri isn’t sure—but she knows she didn’t need him. In fact, she’s been fine without him, because she doesn’t need anyone.
This is the danger, she thinks. It’s less that Roman is unpredictable than that she’s unpredictable with him. She can’t anticipate her own next move. Like standing on the shore while the ocean pulls the sand out from under her feet.
Another loop around the path and she tells herself that she’s going back inside because it’s cold, it’s late, because she’ll need her wits about her to fight the proxy battle tomorrow. And if she’s walking past Roman’s door it’s only because it’s on her way back. And when she knocks, it’s out of disinterested concern. It’s late and there’s a sliver of light shining beneath the door.