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0.5. – ?
The first one doesn’t count, really. After all, it isn’t Roman’s decision to call her his girlfriend. She is just a girl who happens to be his age and in his proximity, the youngest daughter of someone on the board, a nameless, faceless little thing. He smiles at her, pulls on one of her very pullable pigtails, and suddenly he is a shameless little flirt. Folding of his arms, a scowl forming on his face, aw, now that’s adorable.
“Are you in love with her, Roman?”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
Protests lead to more laughter and claps on his back. He tries something different when his brother approaches him from the side, bending with his mouth close to his ear.
“Come on, man, just admit that you like her. They won’t stop until you do, trust me, dude.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I do.” A loud proclamation. He plasters a grin on his face, swallowing the resentment against the girl, who did nothing wrong, really, and holds his hand out to her. She giggles, and he feels a twitch of disgust low in his stomach. This one does not matter in the moment, just one of many strange conversations he has when his father’s colleagues are in the room, Roman only half understanding what the adults are implying and playing along to the best of his abilities to reactions ranging from condescending laughter to badly concealed contempt.
Another clap on this shoulder, though this one is welcome.
“Well done, son.”
He smiles before he looks up, an involuntary and bewildered thing, replaced by a self-assured grin as he tilts his head towards his father. The expression isn’t returned but he could swear he sees something like a satisfied twinkle in Dad’s eyes a second before the gaze is averted. Not that he would ever put that down in writing, but still his stomach gives a satisfied little squeeze. The hand disappears from his shoulder, leaving nothing but a warm imprint and a half formed thought behind.
– Georgia
The memory of the hand on his shoulder comes back crashing when he is way into his teens and Kendall brings home his first girlfriend, a skinny model or actress or something like that whose name Roman forgets the minute he hears it. He tells his mother about her when he calls her later that evening, summarising her weak efforts to impress Dad with an article she probably read on the way to the apartment. The response is just what he expected – high laughs at just the right moments, egging him on to do his worst to this snooty little American, who is probably on drugs, anyway. When he is done recounting multiple dinner faux-pas, the line is silent for a few seconds. He hears his mother gathering her breath, then a question follows with calculated nonchalance.
“And have you any girl that I could meet, Romey? We don’t want to let your father have all the fun, now, do we?”
He swallows and concentrates his stare on the muted TV, showing – stocks? Maybe? He doesn’t really know, he still has time to learn all that shit. And he will, if he just tries hard enough, because he has to. He takes a breath.
“Not really, no”, hoping that she hasn’t noticed the pause on his side of the line, but who is he kidding, “but I’ll tell you the minute I do. Should I pick someone who’s really shitty, so you have something to laugh about?” The joke works, kind of. In the way that a tinny laugh reaches his ears. Not in the way that she drops the topic.
“Well, don’t take too much time, love. You’re – what – fifteen now? You know that I would keep you to myself for as long as I could, but people are going to talk, you know. Your father makes enough comments about the two of us as is.” He winces inwardly at the last one. Clearing his throat, he answers, “Quite. I assure you, you will not be waiting for a daughter-in-law for long, mother”, exaggerating the English accent. The reply that he has become so dreadfully American is anticipated and thankfully, the conversation moves onto Shiv’s newly developed behaviour of calling Caroline mom.
But Roman can’t stop thinking about it. So when one of his old roommates from military school introduces him to his sister, a girl with wispy auburn hair that is at least half a foot taller than him, he asks her out. At first she thinks he’s joking, what with his taking a bow before her and sarcastically batting his lashes, but then that was kind of the point, wasn’t it. Hard to turn it off. Once she gets that he is, in fact, serious and asks him when will he pick her up and where will they go and how old is he, actually, he feels a familiar twist in his gut. Interesting. He will not be thinking about it.
Her name is Georgia and Dad likes her. That much even Roman can tell from the appreciative look he gives her, starting at her low-heeled boots and ending at the glasses pushed into her dark hair. Roman doesn’t get it. She looks similar to Kendall’s actress/model/something like that girlfriend to him, if maybe a little taller. And she doesn’t have anything interesting to say. Not that Roman talks to her, really. Their dates (he sort of loathes the word) consist of him picking her up in a limousine, going to a restaurant that is probably expensive and in which he is by far the youngest customer and not really eating all that much. He bores her with jokes about military school that seem tired even to him, and she plays along with polite laughs. They end with dry-lipped kisses in the back of the limousine, her seeming weirdly into it and him counting down the seconds until he can pull back and say, actually, he has school tomorrow, and could she please get out.
The strangest thing is that she seems to like him. He doesn’t understand why she would, and Lord knows he doesn’t reciprocate, and honestly it makes him feel kind of dirty. Like he’s cheating her. Every time she asks him through the lowered car window when they’ll see each other again, he considers pressing the button and keeping eye contact while the window is slowly closing. It would be kind of funny. But he doesn’t do that, of course. She hasn’t technically done anything wrong, he knows that. Even if it feels like she did. So he tells her a date far enough in the future that he can fall asleep without a pillow over his head for a while and near enough that it doesn’t seem like he’s blowing her off, and when she puts her head through the window for a goodbye kiss, he bears it.
The inevitable end comes, as it often does, unexpectedly. He thought he’d become quite good at putting all his feelings into a tight little box locked carefully each time he picked Georgia up, but the whispered I love you in the insufferable silence of the limousine makes the box spring wide open, and he pushes her off his lap, opens the door and leaves her and her accusing eyes in front of her doorman building, the cold February wind blowing through her spindly legs, and isn’t that poetic.
He says he’ll call, and he doesn’t.
– Troy
After Georgia, he shuts down a bit. Questions about her remain unanswered for the most part, as much as he can afford to do that. His assurance to his father that “she was just after the money, obviously, and the bitch wasn’t even trying to hide it” is met with a disparaging look and an uttered, “and how is that a problem, Romulus? Make it work for you.”. Okay. Good to know. Shiv’s self-assured guess that he probably couldn’t get it up for her hits a tiny bit too close to home to be funny, even if he said the same thing almost verbatim about Kendall’s last breakup, and even if that wasn’t the problem, not really. Although at least half of his brain power has gone into vehemently not thinking about it, he has come to the conclusion that his body is just peachy, thank you, the dick works fine. It’s his head that makes alarm sirens ring behind his eyes the second he thinks about his hands on her waist, her lips on his jaw, her hips on his thighs. Whatever, it’s probably just screwy hormones or something, anyway.
His mother’s reaction is the best one, on paper, but also the one that makes his palms all itchy. “Glad to finally have you back to myself, love. You barely had time to ring your poor old mother with the girl hanging around all the time.” A Christmas spent just the two of them and whatever employees are still haunting her place, Kendall off at college and Shiv refusing to come to England, what with their mother telling her over the phone that she has gained weight in all the wrong places. And it feels nice, Mum and him, and he wants to do this forever, kind of. Never change. The perfidious idea that that’s not normal, though, keeps popping up in his head at the worst of times. When he goes to his bathroom after drinking an ungodly amount of red wine out of a shared bottle, the smile slips from his face upon seeing his reflection. “This is not normal”, he repeats to himself in a whispered tone, wiping his stained mouth on a white towel. This can’t go on forever.
But it kind of does, for a bit, at least. He doesn’t stay in England, but he’s happy hanging out with his siblings and sometimes even his father, when he manages to make it to dinner on time. Okay, maybe happy is saying too much. He feels fine. And he is genuinely not missing anything. Sometimes he gets that sick feeling in his stomach again, when Kendall sneaks out to meet a hook up (he has stopped bringing girlfriends home, after the last time), or when Shiv starts talking about the guy from school whom she is helping with his homework. But that is easily ignored, shoved deep down in his head along with the other shit he is currently ignoring. The closing mechanism on the box that Georgia blew wide open has been repaired, and sure, maybe that was done with hot glue and hope, but it’s closed in any case. Swallowed the key, he has.
But time flies and without much of his own input or due to any of his skills, Roman finds himself at college, sharing a room to give him some experience of the real world, in his father’s words. And, wow, if he thought Kendall was annoying with his girlfriends, get a load of his roommate. Literally. Everybody’s getting a load of this guy, it seems. He giggles to himself the first time he thinks of that one, his roommate’s bed empty but Roman’s ears full of his moans, sounding muted yet unmistakable from the thin wall next to where he is pressing a pillow over his head. The guy is loud. And really not that picky when it comes to his conquests, Roman notices. People seem to be streaming in and out of their room, of varying shapes, sizes, and genders. He cannot be sleeping with all of them, who would have the time for that? Not that Roman is annoyed, nu-uh, he would just love it if he could sleep through one night, that’s all.
It would all be a lot easier if the guy was an asshole. Then Roman would feel no regrets at complaining to the dean about him, claiming something like oh, I woke up and he was pissing all over my stuff, I don’t know what I did to him either, or he tried to join me in the shower, or even something simple like he’s a fucking kleptomaniac, he stole my first edition copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. Not that he even owned that, in the first place, but it seems like the kind of think someone like him might have, and with Dad donating a hefty sum to the college just last fall they wouldn’t dare question him more, and the guy would be gone within the week.
Sadly, he’s really nice. And a dork. Which Roman hates, but also finds somehow charming. “Do you think they put us together because of our names?”, he says on the first day, after shaking Roman’s hand in a gesture that’s weirdly formal for a couple of college guys. “You know, Roman, Troy …”, responding to the incredulous look he gives him, “… like, ancient empires and shit, yeah?” Roman can’t help but snort, thinking he has never met a stupider person before, then remembers Connor. This seems like a thing Connor would say. Which makes him warm to Troy more quickly than he likes to admit to himself.
Lying in bed, hearing Troy’s moans through the wall, he starts picking at the lock of the box. Maybe that’s a kind of solution to the whole thing, not one he likes the look of at all, but still, a solution. He tries to picture Troy in front of him, smiling at him, and monitors the beat of his heart. Was there an increase? He’s not sure. Getting up with a groan, he rubs his eyes and starts moving into the direction of the bathroom. Because of course they have their own bathroom, sharing a room is one thing, but a Roy having to take a communal shower? It’s unheard of. Then, come to think of it, he did do that in military school, and Kendall had to share a shower. Maybe his father has the same suspicions he has and that’s why Roman doesn’t have to wash himself in front of a bunch of other guys. Well, he’ll take it.
Standing in front of the mirror, he turns on the overhead light and waits for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. Then he leans forward, his own face filling as much of his vision as he can stand, and tries to think of Troy naked.
He knows what he looks like, of course, the guy never missing an opportunity to show off his scholarship-approved body. Nothing like Roman, who always takes towels and a change of clothes into the bathroom, changing so quickly that his skin is barely dry and his pants cling to his shins. He gulps when he thinks of the one time he forgot to bring his pyjamas with him and had to come out wrapped in a towel. Troy definitely looked at him then, for just a split second, with an appreciative glitter in his eye. Then he turned around so quickly his shoes made a little squeak on the hardwood floor, mumbling a sorry. For what, exactly? Roman’s not sure.
There! His pupils undeniably widened then, along with a familiar squeeze of his stomach. He takes a startled breath. So that means … what? He’s gay? He’s gay. Probably. That’s not ideal, but workable. He wonders what sucking a dick feels like, and he’s not totally disgusted. Neither is he turned on, but that’s neither here nor there. He could at least try. You never know until you try, or some shit like that. And Troy’s probably up for it, and he thinks that it wouldn’t be horrible to have sex with Troy. He could imagine some things that are worse than that, like listening to Shiv talk about politics or looking at Connor’s weird historical artefact collection. In fact, Troy is probably his favourite person right now. After all, he gives him plenty of space, doesn’t ask if Roman has a girlfriend, and tries to look away when Roman dresses. That’s three qualities no one in his family possesses.
Okay. So he’s gonna fuck Troy. Which turns out to be harder than he imagined. First of all, he does not have the slightest idea how to flirt. So you reply make me to someone telling you to shut up and then what? You start swapping spit immediately? It does not seem to work like that, Roman learns after a few attempts at flirtatious conversation are immediately shut down by Troy. Maybe he’s just not into him, although he is into literally every other person, which, doesn’t that do wonders for Roman’s self-esteem. It’s only after he overhears a conversation Troy has over the phone that he works it out.
He wasn’t eavesdropping, swear, but he notices the covert look Troy gives him over the rim of his glasses before he turns around, and presses pause on the music blasting through his oversized headphones. And he doesn’t hear all of what he’s saying, but he definitely picks up “roommate rule” and “super rich”, isn’t that interesting. So that’s what’s going on. He considers switching rooms with somebody, but concludes that that’s maybe a bit desperate.
Ultimately, it’s alcohol that does it. Maybe half-calculated by Roman, who brings home a ginormous bottle of Whiskey and unceremoniously plonks it onto the beer crate covered with a plank of wood that passes as their dining table, Troy gets absolutely shit-faced. Roman pretends to keep up with him, letting the liquid slosh against his closed mouth again and again. He’s not sober, he couldn’t be for this. But he’s not out-of-his-mind wasted, either. So while he’s sure his own face is fuzzy around the edges to his roommate, he can see his as sharp as if the morning sun was shining on it when he leans towards Troy.
His courage leaves him almost immediately. His eyes drop to Troy’s mouth for an instant, but then he does nothing but rest their foreheads together, his fingers dancing an uncertain rhythm on Troy’s shoulder. He breathes in the breath that Troy exhales, and closes his eyes.
So it’s up to Troy to press their lips together, for just a second, and Roman keeps his eyes closed. When Troy doesn’t move, he reluctantly blinks one open, and finds him staring at him with a horror he feels mirrored in his own chest. He squeezes his eyes shut again and angles his head forward to kiss Troy, not exactly panicked but frantic. Troy’s lips begin moving against his almost immediately, and he thinks that he can do this.
He thinks that for anyone but him, being in a relationship with Troy would be easy. He is kind, courteous, thoughtful, all the attributes of a fairy tale prince. He stops sleeping with anybody else the minute he and Roman start what he calls dating and what Roman calls experimenting, trading daily hook-ups with evenings spent in front of the TV, pointedly not making out. Every day, he brings something home for Roman. Whether it’s pizza, a DVD, a newspaper with an article that he thought Roman would find interesting (he doesn’t), or even fucking flowers one time. Roman never knows what to say. He feels like a thank you doesn’t cut it for the things he puts up with. Because they don’t fuck. Ever. And Roman knows what a fucking disappointment that is for the playboy slash slut Troy who probably hasn’t ever gone this long without getting his dick wet. It’s just that every time Troy’s lips move from his down to his neck, or his chest, or just to his ear, he feels a shudder go through his entire frame. Not one of the pleasurable variety, thank you very much. And he pushes against Troy’s chest or shoulder or forehead, or pulls his hair, anything to get him away from him. And of course, Troy goes pliantly, because he’s just so fucking nice.
Maybe it’s because his dad called him a faggot once, and he hasn’t processed that correctly. He’s heard of people like that, who can’t fucking deal with their daddy damage and let it affect their every decision. Pathetic. It’s probably what his therapist would say, if he hadn’t fired her over some braindead accusations of, like, shell shock or something. But he’s not like that. He can deal with his shit.
Which is why this time, he’s the one who is shit-faced. Having drunk all the liquor his skinny frame could possibly hold, he throws open the door to their apartment, stumbling in the general direction of Troy’s bed. He looks at Roman with a question in his eyes, and that’s when he knee-walks towards him, leaning towards his ear to whisper, “I want you to blow me”. Troy looks startled and unsure, but complies. And Roman doesn’t hate it. When he closes his eyes, it almost feels like he’s just having a really detailed wet dream. The real issue reveals itself after Roman comes and Troy looks at him with pupils blown so wide he thinks he must imagine the thin line of light blue around them.
“Just, um … Do whatever you want, man. I don’t give a shit.”
He thinks Troy interprets this differently than he meant it, because he moans and starts mouthing at his neck again. Great. When he takes his hand and jerks himself off with it, Roman thinks of Christmas in England, and the time Connor dressed up as Santa Claus in an oversized garishly red costume, and when he feels warm come hit his wrist he swallows bile and tastes roast turkey.
Pulling his arm back, he wipes it on Troy’s bedding and crosses it with the other in front of his chest. He glances at Troy who is now lying on his back, his legs spread across the edge of the bed, and thinks that he can’t do this.
The overall conclusion is that he’s not gay. Whatever, everybody experiments in college, right? He knows for a fact that Kendall did, something Dad will never let him forget. Just as well that he hasn’t told anybody about Troy, which makes it abhorrently easy to pretend that nothing ever happened. Well, not nothing. He goes with the kleptomaniac complaint.
– Grace
College ends unceremoniously and leads smoothly into what his father calls ‘the real world’. This real world consists of Roman trying out various positions in the company, with varying degrees of success. When Frank is sick of babysitting and Roman is sick of Frank, resulting in him being shipped off to LA to work on a branch of the company that not even Dad pretends is important, he decides it’s time to try the whole girlfriend thing again. Prompting comments on his total lack of one, so far, are replied to with an assurance that he is just drowning in pussy, don’t you know, handwaved questions of who the fuck has time for a fucking girlfriend when he is trying to run a fucking company (is he doing that?), or flat-out told to fuck off. Depends who’s asking, of course.
Having gained a new job in LA, a whole fuck-load of free time, and another disapproving comment from Dad on the functionality of his dick, he puts out feelers. Resolutely deciding against dating apps (he is Roman Fucking Roy, after all), he goes to a number of elite clubs, gets mind-numbingly drunk, and talks to women. If he has to spend time with someone he is in high likelihood not the least bit attracted to, he might as well find someone who can hold her own in a conversation with him.
That proves to be quite a challenge. As fun as it is to discuss the garish plastic surgery mishaps of the celebs at the latest red carpet event with an innumerable amount of actresses and models who populate this cesspool of a city like fucking bugs feasting on a rotting carcass, if one more person asks him how tall his father is, he might be the subject of genuinely unflattering headline news. Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll? Classic lifestyle of the cool fucking playboy nepotism offspring. Rage-induced manslaughter, though, that won’t play so well with the media.
So when he meets Grace he’s fucking relieved. She recognizes his name, sure, but from some executive producer credit on a kids movie he worked on that summer, not from tabloids or the stock market. When he asks her how the fuck she remembers the name of an executive producer, she rolls her eyes and says that her daughter had seen the movie at least twice a day over the last few months. He laughs and wonders if he should keep talking to her or move on to someone else. On the one hand, washed-up single mom who might try to lock him down with another kid or might just be after the money to send the daughter she already has to some expensive fucking boarding school or whatever. On the other hand, this is the first conversation he’s had since he moved to LA that he’s actually interested in. Grace is the first person who recognizes him for something he’s actually done instead of as the son of Logan Roy. And (this thought crawls into his head unwillingly, immediately pushed into the ether again) this might be an easy-access, package-deal family he could secure for himself.
He responds to her question whether he has any kids with a laugh that’s just on the right side of condescending, and they go from there.
It’s not like these last years without any action have left him completely useless in that regard. Flirting with potential girlfriends is not that different from flirting with potential business partners, the only exception being how long you stare at the other person’s mouth. And after spending the majority of his day with Dad during his brief employment at the company, he had gotten extraordinarily good at pushing down discomfort and uneasiness and turning his winces into grins.
So this time, he makes it all the way. Score, or whatever. When he is inside her, he closes his eyes and tries to recall the thoughts he had when Troy was blowing him, but that is harder to do when there’s a full person beneath him, whispering yes and please and oh god, running her hands up his sides and scratching along his back. Without really thinking about it, he grips her wrists and pins them above her head, which earns him another moan. He swallows a don’t and focuses his gaze on the pompom of one of the decorative pillows littered over her bed.
With Grace, he makes it a couple of years. He likes her, her easy feet on his knees while they sit on the sofa together, and he likes her daughter, who thinks he is a big-shot movie producer and tells all her friends that her mommy is dating a celebrity. And if he has a reminder in his calendar that reminds him to fuck his girlfriend which makes his heart hit his stomach every Monday it slips onto his phone screen, well, no one has to know about that.
He doesn’t think she likes him very much, at least not in the way other people tend to like him. When she laughs at his jokes it seems to be against her will, quick snorts through her nose followed by an aversion of her eyes. But fuck it, their relationship is mutually beneficial. Grace gets a big apartment, expensive dresses and – Roman suggests it himself – tuition to the best Californian school money can buy for Isla. And Roman gets to pretend to be normal. He gets to bring a woman home to family dinner whom his mother calls too skinny and who his father nods at in a way he doesn’t nod at Kendall’s new wife. Shiv asks him what he’s paying her, of course, but that’s just par for the course.
The best part is that Grace doesn’t seem to be fully aware of the symbiotic nature of their relationship. “You can’t just keep giving us money like this, Roman. You don’t get anything in return,”, is her reply to every tuition check he writes, and he answers, “I get your looove, though, don’t I?”, drawling out the word mockingly, meaning the opposite. She rolls her eyes at that, saying you can’t buy love, you idiot, and Roman smiles back, saying yes, I very much can.
After a couple of months, he sets the reminder to biweekly. That’s a normal thing to do, right? Once the honeymoon phase is over, couples have less sex, he is sure about that. And Roman and Grace’s honeymoon phase, whoa nelly, that shit was crazy, is what he tells everybody who listens (and some more people who don’t), just, fucking like rabbits, man, you know what I mean. I’m talking like kitchen islands and windows, yeah. But not anymore, now, you know how it is. Just regular sex now. Consider him tamed, or whatever.
Things fall apart when he goes back to New York. Grace is annoyed at having to up and leave all of her shit in LA, rarely getting to see Isla, who comes to visit on weekends, and Roman works for the company again. He’s COO now, and when Grace’s hands start trailing down his chest after he falls into bed at 2am, he can’t stop himself from pushing them away with a barely contained rage and snapping at her, “All day, people want shit from me and I get home and I can’t get left alone for one fucking minute?”, and her hands pull back to turn out the light.
Trying to do any sort of work at Waystar RoyCo without enraging his father is a juggling act on his best days, and while he has resigned himself to his role as the circus clown, nay, carved that role out for himself with incisor-shaped knives, he’d prefer being in on the joke to dropping his clubs and balls and sabers all over the arena like a guy in a black-and-white infomercial. And with Grace in the picture, he can’t concentrate on keeping things in the air. Bottom line of this whole fucking spiel is to convince Dad that he is more than the fast-mouthed hopeless brat he has seen in him for the last thirty odd years, and Grace just doesn’t work with that anymore. She is standing in the fucking way.
The decision to break up with her is easy. Finding a normal-people reason to break up, though, now that’s tough. The few minus points she has that would explain a sudden split, like having a kid or not giving two flying fucks about Waystar Royco, were clear to him from the beginning and never bothered anyone who mattered. In the end, he decides to blame it on the fucking turkey movie. Killing two birds with one stone, that is. He gets to relieve some of the frustration of that disappointment of a career move, and he can delete the fucking calendar reminder. Clean break from LA, fresh start in New York. As far as something like that is possible for Roman Roy.
– Tabitha
He is officially abstaining from relationships when he meets Tabitha. What’s the phrase again? You find love when you stop looking for it, barf. Write that above his mantle, see what reactions that will bring. And it’s not love, anyway, it’s for a joke.
The question of his plus one for Shiv’s wedding has been pinging around his head ever since he last saw his sister. Just because his ego got a little booboo over a fucking turkey movie doesn’t mean there will be empty seats at their wedding were her exact words. And maybe he’s feeling a little vindictive about his little sister’s shotgun wedding (who the fuck gets married after so short a time? He would (and does) imply that Shiv got herself knocked up, but to be fair, the baby could walk out of the womb by now. Whatever, he’s not a biologist). He wasn’t planning on it, swear, just like he wasn’t planning to forget the fiancé’s bachelor party, but it is hilarious that the fiancé’s lay of the night has stunningly recognizable hair which would be hard to miss at a wedding reception.
Doesn’t hurt that she’s funny, and really into the idea of making Tom squirm at his own betrothal.
There’s no pretence with Tabitha. He doesn’t ask her out. He doesn’t ask her to be his girlfriend, or whatever grown-up equivalent of that. He just asks her to come to the wedding with him. But then they keep talking, and it’s really nice to hang out with her. He makes her laugh, because that’s what he does, but, surprisingly, she makes him laugh, too. At the sight of her cheeks twitching from the strain of smiling at him he feels a rush of affection in his belly. So when he gets home from the botched bachelor party, childhood cages on his mind, he looks at the number she typed into his phone with fingers freshly washed of Wambsgans precum and presses Call.
“Yeah?” Her voice soft through the receiver, a little bit hoarse. She sounds like she’s in bed already, maybe not lights out, but with a glass of wine and a copy of some classic work of literature spread open on her chest, face wiped clean of make-up, hair combed and braided. Or maybe not. He doesn’t really know what girls do after parties. Maybe she’s lying on her kitchen floor sipping vodka straight out of a bottle. He suddenly feels self-conscious.
“This is Roman. From the party? You know, devastatingly handsome, prettiest girl at the party, you blew his future brother-in-law?”
“Oh, yeah, the guy with the Napoleon complex,”, she replies, sounding like she’s sitting up.
He tells her to fuck off, and she laughs.
It becomes a kind of habit after that. He gets home from a colossal ass-fuck of a day, and without having so much as taken off his jacket, he calls Tabitha. She answers maybe six times out of ten, as much as I do love our little phone calls, I have life outside of them, you know, and they talk about anything and everything. She interrupts his fourth twenty-minute rant with a gentle, “I had a shitty day, too, you know”, and he sheepishly asks her what happened, staring holes in his blank TV screen. That becomes his reminder; if the TV’s out, ask her about her day. They happen to have a lot in common, like an appreciation for ‘The Real Housewives’ (he doesn’t watch that. Ask anyone.) and addicts in the family. Not that Roman ever talks about these things, but he listens to Tabitha’s diatribe about the time her father sold her horse for heroin and thinks that he might, at some point in a foggy future.
These casual conversations smooth over the damage his early marriage proposal does to their fragile situationship (blergh, what a fucking Facebook-using millennial pumpkin spice latte word). She looks pretty and tall and the yellow light in their room quiets the sounds from outside to an undercurrent of rumble. A quick, unexamined glint of last one left prompts him to ask her, and her soft oh, babe breaks his heart more thoroughly than the “Do you think this is the way to get people to stay?” that follows it.
Not that she holds it over him. In a way, he thinks that she’s glad about the confirmation of his interest in a relationship with her. Neither of them are entirely sure what they are doing, because friends don’t take each other to weddings and ask to get married, but people in relationships have sex, and, like, kiss, and they don’t really do that. Her toothbrush is in his cupholder, and his shirts are in her laundry, and that’s kind of enough for him. He thinks they’ve got a good thing going, and why upset it if everyone’s happy?
But then he fucks it, because he can’t get out of his skin no matter how hard he tries. He laughs too loud and Dad looks at him funny and he comes home agitated and flighty, his hands jumping from his waist to his hair to his forehead. She sticks her head out of the open-plan kitchen, a steaming cup of tea in her hand but still in her work outfit, and he crosses the apartment with big steps and kisses her hard on the mouth. She smiles against him and he wants to bite it off her lips.
He keeps the momentum going, ripping her dress off in a frantic motion that’s barely disguised as aroused – he’s just so horny that he can’t keep his hands from shaking, that’s it, he mouths against her neck with displaced licks and bites and feels a moan rumble in her throat, and then she’s naked and he’s in his boxers and all the fight drains out of him like a downpour vanishing into the sewer.
She raises a hand to smooth over the furrow in his brow, now the only point of contact between them, and asks him if everything is alright. He grunts in response, trying to will away the wave of repulsion that’s still washing over him.
“We don’t have to.” Easy for her to say. Yes, they do. “I like being your friend, too.” Great. A friend. What is he, five?
Examining the pattern of the wood-panelled ceiling, he says, “No, that’s not it. I want to, it’s just … I kind of have this thing.” “What thing?” “This thing that makes me think someone is disgusting while we’re doing it”, not exactly a lie.
“You think I’m disgusting?” “No. Yeah. No.”
She sighs, tries to catch his eye. “You really know how to make a girl feel special, Roman.”
“Yeah, thanks.” He sits on the edge of the bed, now that it’s evident that this is not happening tonight.
“We can work on that,”, a hand on his shoulder, “if that’s something you want.” She sits down next to him and he registers that she has pulled on her sleep shirt. Thank God.
“Is that something … that you want?” she prompts him after a few seconds of silence.
He thinks of her toothbrush on his sink. “Sure, okay.” He misses her already.
Because it doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t. It hadn’t worked with Grace, why would it work with Tabitha now? Because he was a tiny bit more honest with her? He is not actually an idiot, despite everyone and their mother telling him otherwise. This was hopeless from the get-go. Because with telling Tabitha a smidgen of the truth, she is more understanding than Grace, sure, she tries things that Grace would never have done, like pretending to be a corpse so Roman can imagine that he is dead and gone, too, and somewhere entirely different than one of the Pierce’s guest bedrooms, but it also gives her fucking leverage. Without really meaning to, he has given her the key to the little box in his brain and now she’s rooting through it, pulling out half-verbalised thoughts and fears and putting them into binders whose labels Roman can’t read. He thinks she has a bit of a savior complex, maybe. Why would she still be here, otherwise? Why would she suggest solving him, something neither he nor anyone else has ever been interested in, let alone attempted? Sometimes he wants to shake her and scream, “I’m not your fucking end of year fucking project” in her face until she gets it.
And because Tabitha is not an saint, she uses that leverage. Frequently. He doesn’t blame her, he knows she could do worse and he would do worse if he was in her place. But still, it stings. Whenever she’s had what she calls a colossal fuck-up of a day at work, he gets it. And he knows it’s his own fucking fault, because what she needs right now is someone to fuck her properly, or someone she can fuck properly. She told him so one of the first times they talked on the phone, complained that her libido was honestly through the roof and all she wants at the end of the day is a good fuck. He laughed, then, thinking she was jokingly exaggerating to flirt with him, or rather the sex-crazy front of a guy that he was still putting on for her. But now, he doubts that assessment with every needling comment. Still, most of them are pretty funny, he has to admit, and most of them are responses, anyway. It’s not like he deserves any better.
The only ones that do cross the line into I don’t think this is salvageable in the long term territory are with company. Because if she can’t help him keep up the charade, and she can’t fix him, what’s the use of her? Now that he has Gerri, he doesn’t really need Tabitha anymore. He wishes he could go back to before the wedding, when they were on the phone and she told him New Jersey was her favorite ‘Real Housewives’ installment. Before he asked her to marry him. Before he told her he thinks she’s disgusting. But the way they are now, it’s hard work and she thinks he’s solvable and he doesn’t.
– Gerri
Not that he really has Gerri. He thinks she might punch him in the gut if he told her that, and the thought makes him smile. No, Gerri and him, they just help each other out. It’s fucking stress relief is what it is. He gets orgasms that actually make him feel good, and she gets to tell him how much she resents him. Mutually beneficial, that. Anyway, this whole thing is perfectly healthy for a red-blooded American male. Milfs are in the, like, top five categories on PornHub. Might be top two, even. Nothing’s gonna beat the dykes.
And maybe it kind of turns him on that nobody knows it’s happening (even though he’s practically waving a picket sign with ‘ROMAN ROY HAD PHONE SEX WITH GERRI KELLMAN’ scrawled on it on the street corner). This is not happening for his father, or his mother, or anybody else he gives a shit about. Not that many people left there, anyway. This is happening purely for himself. This is sex without anybody else sitting in, no voice in his head telling him to be normal, for fuck’s sake, but a voice that tells him exactly how not normal he is, and that’s good. He is under no illusion that Gerri thinks this is, like, actually hot. How could she? She’s right, he’s fucking disgusting. But it has to feel good for her to let off some of the hatred that’s been building up against him since he was old enough to realise he could tell her what to do. As long as he gets off, fine by him.
It hits him while he’s jerking off on his couch, Gerri’s voice in his head but not his ear (geriatric bitch let him go to voicemail, as if a meeting’s more fun for her than counting down everything that’s wrong with him in a numbered list, starting with the fact that this is the seventeenth time he has called her in as many hours). He has never seen her face while he cums. And he is not picturing it now. He tries to, whispy blonde hair pulled to the back of her head, pointy nose, cunty glasses frame eyes that are … blue? Grey? God, are they brown? His hand slows down while he reconstructs her bit by bit and the image he comes up with looks like Gerri, but Gerri in a funhouse mirror, tits unproportional to shoulders, fingers hang too big from arms that are too short for her torso. Scrunching his eyebrows together, he shakes his head to make John Carpenter’s Gerri Kellman disappear. All right, keep it going, once more with feeling or whatever. This time he pulls up her contact picture, an unflattering snapshot taken while she’s reprimanding Kendall just out of frame, hands held in frustrated fists at her side. He closes his eyes, replacing Kendall with himself in the picture. She’s yelling at him and his dick responds immediately, springing to attention like a fucking cocker spaniel that hears the leash jingle. Slowly his hand starts to move again. Just when it finally starts to feel good, he realises that fantasy-Gerri doesn’t have a face. Fuck, what? His clammy fingers unlock his phone and he looks at the picture again. This is such a fucking drag. Who says you have to picture people while you jerk off, anyway? Some fucking people-loving liberal probably. Love is love or something. Not that he loves Gerri. Fuck. This is not working. But who the fuck jerks off without coming? It has to work. He manages to get a good rhythm going when he replays their last interaction word by word, repeating the highlights to the sound of his fist on his dick. Disappointment, yeah. A sick fuck, yes. Now that’s the ticket. This is what all this shit is supposed to feel like. And if he has to hang onto the thought of Gerri’s face and Gerri’s voice with claws and teeth as he approaches orgasm, if the voice itself does not nearly matter as much as what the voice is saying, well, that is for no one but him to know.
Still, details. This is the best relationship he has ever had. There is no pretending. No calendar reminders. No puffing up his chest, neither literally nor metaphorically, because she knows exactly how scrawny he is. No unbearable make-out sessions. They don’t touch at all, in fact. Isn’t that nice for a change. She doesn’t even admit that they are in a relationship. When he proposes to her, he doesn’t get pity and introspection, he gets a scoff and a smile. She is uninterested in solving him. At last, a woman he can agree with. Gerri helps him because she gets something out of it, a shot at power, and isn’t it a fucking relief to know someone’s motive, and it has nothing to do with him? They could do this forever, as far as he’s concerned, he says rock star and mole woman and means Mata Hari and the chihuahua at her feet, until he’s 80 and she’s 160 and they share colostomy bags. And if they can do that, who gives a shit if he hasn’t seen her without so much as her shoes off?
He knows she doesn’t give a shit about him, truly, he is aware. She fucking told him that straight up. Her best interest. Gerri Kellman is in it for Gerri Kellman. As you should be. As he fucking should be. He knows all of that, and she still manages to catch him by fucking surprise. Mark that as 1:0. He shouldn’t have trusted her, but he did. He thought they had a good thing going. But if he had to choose between listening to a whining idiot rutting into his fist over a phone line or Logan Roy, he would have made the same decision.
Through the fog that’s rising up in his frontal lobe, he realises that this is the first time he has been broken up with.
+1 - Tabitha, again
He runs into her a few weeks after Italy. The silence in his apartment is too fucking loud and neither Kendall nor Shiv are answering their phones and he thinks his brain might implode if he doesn’t speak to someone in the next ten minutes, about anything at all, the fucking Super Bowl if that’s what it takes, and so he goes to a bar. That’s how fucking desperate he is. The first thing he sees after closing the ridiculously clean entrance door behind him is a cloud of blonde hair, and though his grip hasn’t left the handle and he could still make a quick exit, he sees Tabitha turn around and wave at him as if she was waiting for him all along and he feels the tension leaving his body.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”, she sing-songs as he slides into the booth opposite her, and laughs when he tells her to fuck off.
“Heard you got fucked, actually.”
“What, got a Google Alert on me? Stalker.” He meets her eyes, refuses to cross his arms in front of him.
“Well, what can a girl do when her boyfriend stops calling her?” She smiles at him and he thinks her teeth have never looked so sharp. “Anyway, no way to miss it. Was all over the news. In point of fact, I have your name blocked on Twitter, still got the message that your dad finally kicked you to the curb.” It stings. He deserves it.
“Yeah, he did.” He sucks his teeth and tries to think of anything else he could talk to her about. “What are you doing here, anyway?” The disparaging look in her eyes tells him she sees through his attempt to change the subject.
“Getting a drink.” She takes a sip through her soaked-through paper straw. When he keeps looking at her, she sighs, “Got stood up actually.”
“I’m sorry.” This time the words come easy to him.
“Nah, she was a bitch, anyway. Good riddance, I say.”
“Why? What’d she do?” He leans forward. Nothing is a better topic of conversation than badmouthing people who are not in the room.
She raises her face to the ceiling, takes a deep breath. He can see her nostrils flaring. When she looks at him again, she’s smiling.
“Told me she wanted to be more than friends when she didn’t.”
Oh, that’s how they’re playing it. “Yeah, sounds like a bitch. That’s not fair to you.”
She’s grinning now. “She’s not that bad.” He doesn’t know how to respond to that. Being forgiven is not really in his repertoire.
“I don’t think she’s had many friends before. Or any, really. I think she can’t tell the difference between love and love. She keeps mixing it up.”
He feels like he’s staring a hole in her forehead. This is the part of Tabitha he loathed while they were dating, the fucking armchair psychologist who acts like she knows him better than he knows himself.
But he doesn’t hate her, now. She’s holding up a mirror to him and for the first time in his life, he doesn’t hate what he sees in it.
“And this girl …”, he starts. Thinks of sprinting out of the bar, but his empty apartment is haunting him like his murdered first wife. “If this girl still wanted to be friends. Would you wanna be?”
She lays her hand on the table, palm up, an invitation he takes after hesitating for few seconds.
“I wouldn’t be uninterested.”