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He avoids looking at her but all she can seem to do lately is stare at him. In fact, she catches herself doing it so often it’s giving her tension headaches. It takes so much muscle control and dogged determination to look anywhere but directly at his face that it's begun to torture her. Even when she manages to glance away, her eyes flit right back to him like two heat-seeking missiles, target locking on what they need most in the room to explode. Kaboom! Like his failed rocket launch, discharging him out of her orbit to end her long suffering.
She makes him go weird? Fuck, he makes her feel like a freak. Weak-willed, undignified, all hung up.
She’s obsessed. A robot scanning and assessing his every movement, trying desperately to parse his every thought. Her pupils dilate every time, that much she can’t help. She loves and hates what she sees in equal measure. Enormous hazel eyes, typically so expressive and intense but strangely haunted now. Almost empty and punctuated by the darkest, greyest circles beneath them. His skin is pale, paper thin. He's looking so frail beneath Logan's old cable knit sweaters. She wonders if they've been washed since his passing, can't seem to get close enough to Roman to discover the answer. His once heart-piercing, pirate smile looks pained. When he laughs, it’s a dreadful sound. Hollow, rotted out, non-committal, not all there. As if his body has confused amusement for despair and isn’t sure how to produce the right reactions anymore.
He’s a broken down Brightstar rollercoaster, entirely come off his rails.
He still can’t sit like a vaguely normal human but she’s tracking any deviations in that, too.
The longer she ruminates on it, she must admit that this is not how she thought he’d handle Logan’s death. Never in a million years had she let herself imagine him behaving so removed, so closed off. Not her dramatic, emotional, irritable, squirmy, deeply sensitive Roman who begins to physically itch when all the ideas and expletives bouncing around in his head take too long to shoot out of his mouth hole. He’s so still now, says so little, doesn’t make all his idiosyncratic noises she pretends to loathe but secretly delights in. She'd wanted him to take things more seriously, be a more serious candidate for the job, but this is hell.
She knows he is observant enough to work out what she’s been doing but he doesn’t seem to care. Seemingly all of life's little quirks no longer interest or inspire his characteristic mirth. He won't even bother acknowledging how fucking impolite, how reckless she's being with her eyes permanently super glued to him. She'd give anything, in private, to hear him tell a nasty joke at her expense and help put her back in line. Just a hit to absolve her of the nagging sense of dread lurking in the pit of her stomach about his apathy and his rattling carry-on bag by pushing her to the brink of homicide with his sass.
It's easy to make it all Roman's fault. She's been spending more time in front of mirrors, never particularly vain or finding time to before. A million years on this planet with a simple, perfected beauty regime out the window whenever she knows she'll be in his proximity. There are suddenly so many more steps. Time she used to spend exclusively working, she spends grooming. She can do both. Another version of her would balk at this newfound compulsion, but she persists. The fact that she's always had an inkling that Roman prefers her hair long wasn't of any consideration, surely, but maybe it has crossed her mind. Once or twice, when her stylist offers to trim more than the dead ends.
She perfumes more liberally, knowing he's catalogued all her scents in the past. Recalls that he liked to walk behind her while she sat at her desk, lean down and inhale a whiff from the top of her head. So irksome, but lovely. Maybe it will jog a memory for him. An aroma that transports him to Nan Pierce's guest bedroom on Long Island, Gerri's mind and body tired and begging to dream while he stood in front of her and placed his lips where her lips were on the rim of her whisky glass. Let him float away to when she smelled of sea air and sunscreen, her body casually sinking into his shoulder as she read a book on a yacht in Croatia. Even if it hurts him, let him remember her fear and anxiety tinged sweat as she sat across from him kneeling on the floor in front of her, in Italy, begging for her help. It'd taken her weeks to rid herself of the acid and the grapes.
She tells herself she doesn't dress for him but she's not not dressing to get his attention. Her pay raise and visibility as CEO as well as her robust dating life afford her some deniability that it's for Roman. Everything she owns is now tailored within an inch of its life, her soft curves on display for the world. Including Roman but not for him but also not not for him. It's another weapon in her arsenal, one she's already had some marked results with.
'You look well,' he'd said, for the first time in months. It had pleased and stroked her ego until she realized he was buttering her up to be butchered. She'd spent weeks choosing her attire for Connor's wedding — her jewelry, her hat, her shoes, her lingerie. Her date, another accessory. She'd wanted Roman to follow her around all day, right on her heels, loud about missing her, grumbling jealously about Martyn. All the planning would've been worth it. But then Roman fired her, Logan dropped dead and the hat she'd chosen just for him to gawk at sits in her closet, totally blameless but nevertheless unloved for the rest of her natural life.
In Norway, she noticed there was still a synchronicity to some of their movements. She'd tried sending him telepathic messages; whatever might cause a disturbance in his force. She feels like it’s something they used to be good at. A raised eyebrow used to suffice between them. Occasionally a nod or a jut of her chin. A differing opinion, a private joke. She makes an increased effort now. She bores right into his soul, her forehead creased in concentration as her blue eyes urge him to let her in. Let her be a good job-doer. If only, with an affectionate gaze and exasperated sigh, she could urge him to arrive back to being the brilliant, beaming prick she knows he can be. The pesky, puny piece of impulsive shit puppy she has begrudgingly come to love.
But just when she thinks he's received her signals, when his eyes do land on her — they swiftly dart away, leaving her cold.
She's noticed him starting to lump her back in with Frank and Karl. She treats it as every bit of a slight she knows it is. She used to be more to him, longs to be more again. No matter how angry she is at him — and fuck, she's angry at him — she could still find a way to put it all down. In time, she could rebuild their team. They had been such a good one. She knows she still has fight left because something feral happens inside of her every time her colleagues open their mouths to give Roman advice. "He doesn't need it," she wants to snap, wants to push Karl right out of the funicular to go skydiving to his doom. "I taught him everything he knows." Her body aches during these uncomfortable moments, Karl's constant interruptions about what Logan would or wouldn't do making her cheeks burn with fury. She wants to pull Roman aside, put him on his knees and remind him: "Don't forget, Rome. You've learned things from me, too."
Instead, she writes him abundant, above board, business-related texts and emails. Boring bits of nothingness. A lot of them inquiries about matters she already has answers to and wouldn't normally need or want his input on, simply to over analyze his replies. Long text walls of corporate jargon, bad. Curt one-liners, good. A sign she's wearing him down. She comes up with any excuse for a conference call, an in-person meeting, anything to have him there in front of her — to dissect his attempts to circumvent her.
‘Why are you not looking at me?’ It plays on a loop, a record cueing whenever he enters a room. It’s her most intrusive thought swirling around her brain every night as she sits in her bed, next to Martyn, furiously typing out another email before she closes her laptop and fucks him to sleep. Just a thing she’s been trying, to carve out the hurt from Roman's unending indifference. "No, no, close your eyes," she demands through clenched teeth as she rides her date, pinning his arms above his head and grinding him into oblivion. "Don't fucking look at me, you sick fuck." If Martyn notices her being more aggressive with him than usual, he doesn't dare comment. He's a lawyer, knows it's better to observe before making an argument. Even if he did disapprove, she's flying to Los Angeles tomorrow morning. She can easily forget his face and his number depending on how things go.
Afterwards, she lies awake in the dark, staring at the ceiling. Frowning, completely unsatisfied and unmoored. She can hear Roman's voice in her mind, louder than Martyn's snores, repeating, ’I will stare at you as long as you want, if that’s what you so desperately desire.’ She wants to scream that she does desire it. It's only her every thought, all consuming. If she had only abandoned her pride, he'd be the one sleeping next to her now. She'd be his big spoon and she'd kiss him awake just to fuck him again later. She could hold him to her breast, the way he needed to be held after Logan died. They could laugh easily about the day ahead of them. They could gossip, about everyone they both can’t stand. Then they would make love, in their special way, or not... but it would be worth trying, to see his toothy grin and his eyes alive again.