Chapter Text
Bzz. Bzz.
-
Bzz. Bzz.
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Bzz. Bzz.
Bzz. Bzz.
“Seriously?” you grumble, peeling your face from the pillow and squinting at the nightstand. Your phone is face-down, but the screen still illuminates the surface below it as it buzzes again. Even that feels too bright right now.
Bzz. Bzz.
The “fuuuuuck” you utter is more of a long, drawn-out sigh as you stretch an arm out from under the sheet and unplug your iPhone before pulling it swiftly to your chest to smother the light. Instinctively, you know that could only be one of three people at this time of night, and quite frankly, you don’t really feel like acknowledging any of them right now. Too late. Or early. Or whatever.
Bzz. Bzz.
The vibration against your chest startles you from dozing off, and you tentatively pull the phone away from your bare skin, just far enough to glance at the name on the screen before slamming it back against yourself. It’s partly because of how the brightness instantly makes your eyes water and squeeze shut, but also because you have just confirmed that it’s the one person you feel like speaking with the absolute least in this moment.
Bzz. Bzz.
Bzz. Bzz.
He clearly wants to talk to you , though. And if you don’t text back soon, he’s gonna try calling, and that is really not something you want to deal with right now.
Peering through the tiniest crack you can manage between your scrunched eyelids, you pull down the settings menu for your phone and crank the brightness all the way down, which doesn’t really do much. Your thumb hovers over the iMessage button, the red circle indicating 9 messages awaiting your attention.
“Christ,” you mutter. Bullet bitten, you tap into your messages with 🐜🐜🐜
Did jodi call u
I think we should talk
For real this time
Get ahead of things
Can I call
Nvm
Youre sleeping
Probably
Maybe
The temptation to lob your phone across the room grows stronger with each message. He’s texting like he’s drunk. Three ellipses hover and disappear in the bottom left corner of the screen as he types, then stops, then types, then stops … thank god you guys don’t have read receipts on right now because you are really not ready for this. Not after today.
And then your phone starts buzzing anew and his stupid fucking face pops up on your screen with his stupid mussed-up hair and his stupid shit-eating grin and you once again consider launching your phone into the stratosphere. But you answer instead, skipping the pleasantries.
“No, I haven’t talked to Jodi, and yes we should talk, but -” you can’t stifle the yawn that turns into a languid stretch, and your body makes an inadvertent ‘hnnngh’ kind of sound “- it’s late and I was sleeping because I am currently three entire hours ahead of you.”
“So why’d you pick up,” he says, smarmily. It isn’t a question.
“And how was Mother’s Day?” you counter. It’s more biting than you intend, but it’s 3 in the morning and you’re slowly remembering where you are, and why.
“Was fine. We did brunch, the kids took her mini-golfing.” He hesitates briefly. “I opted out because it was just all kind of … weird,” he admits. You can hear him rubbing his hand over his beard, and then the telltale clink of ice against a glass.
“Fair enough,” you reply slowly, beginning to put things together. “So now you’re home drinking at midnight?” You don’t ask if he’s alone; you wouldn’t be speaking right now if he wasn’t.
There’s a heavy silence that extends longer than it should.
“Drinking, yes. Home, no.”
It hangs in the air for a moment. Okay. You let out the breath you didn’t realize you were holding.
“Oh,” is all you say.
“Yeah.”
You can hear your heartbeat in your ears as you worry at the edge of the sheet with a manicured nail. He hadn’t really said much during the FYC event, though how could he have; he showed up minutes before you went onstage, the two of you barely having a moment to breathlessly acknowledge each other before a panicking Patricia practically dragged you onstage.
But you had been very conscious of your own left hand all evening, keeping it deep in your pocket all night, even though your own ring was sitting firmly around your finger. “I’ll glue it to your hand if I have to,” Jodi had called over her shoulder as she’d left for the venue. It was tinted like a joke, but you knew it really, really wasn’t.
He breathes out through his nose. “It was just really awkward. I dunno.” You hear him scrub his beard again, picturing him itching at his chin the way he does when he’s thinking. Picturing how your thumb fits into the divot just below and to the left of his mouth, how it would feel to press your digit there now that he has a full beard. Allowing it for just a moment. “Ben and Christine had the whole quarantine thing when they separated, you know? Kind of … forced them to all hang out and get along. And we just - we just aren’t? Doing that, I guess?”
You exhale what you hope is a non-committal noise and sit up in bed, shuffling the bedspread around yourself. It’s his turn to make a sound, something between a sigh and a grunt. The air shifts again. The sheets are suddenly too scratchy and your mouth is so dry, and you realize with a quiet groan that you didn’t bring any water to bed. You crawl to the edge of the bed and balance the phone between your shoulder and cheek so you can pull on the fluffy grey socks you’d dropped there earlier.
“So … when do you fly back?” you ask as you grab the worn, oversized green sweater from where you’d tossed it over the back of the chair earlier.
“I was supposed to stay tomorrow too. But - yeah, no. Might as well get back and settle in, gonna be an intense week on set.”
“Just a sec,” you mutter, tossing the phone onto the bed so you can quickly pull the sweater over your head. It’s so worn that it’s stretched long enough that it covers what needs to be covered, the sleeves hanging well past your hands. You bunch them up your arms and grab the phone again. “You flying into JFK?” you ask.
“Yeah, first thing. I don’t think I’ll sleep, to be honest. I have to be at the airport in like -” he makes a funny old man noise and you can so clearly picture him trying to awkwardly maneuver his jacket sleeve up and over his watch using the hand that’s holding the phone. “- two hours. Jesus.”
You step into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind you. Your socks muffle your footsteps on the carpet completely. “You can just sleep on the plane,” you say quietly. “Finish off the bottle of whatever you’ve gotten into tonight and just … pass the fuck out.”
He laughs humorlessly, and you hear the clink of the ice again as he swirls his glass. “Art imitates life. Or I guess … life imitates art?” He scoffs. “Whatever. Either way, I’ve really been enjoying whiskey lately.”
You turn at the end of the hall and pause for a moment. “You really do sound like a man in peak mid-life crisis mode. You get that, right?” You keep your voice low, and there’s an unintentional edge to it.
He laughs again, but it’s tinged with something much darker. He doesn’t respond.
You would normally push things further, try to dig deeper under his skin than you know you already are currently. But it was a rough day for you, too, and things are starting to feel kinda … prickly. You step into the room at the end of the hallway and stand there for a moment, trying to center yourself.
Then his voice comes down the line as a sinister whisper. “And how was your Mother’s Day?”
Your heart thuds once, twice against your ribs. Hard. The question was inevitable, but you still feel the clench in your stomach as soon as he asks it. So this is the game tonight. Great.
“Well, it was fine until it wasn’t,” you finally respond vaguely, busying yourself with the task of getting some ice, which initially was just going to be for your water, but now you’re considering cracking into something much stronger and more expensive. You really don’t feel like talking about this tonight. Like, at all. And yet you can’t help but be vague, secretly hoping he prods for more.
He snorts. “The fuck does that mean?”
The grumble and clatter of ice falling into the bucket interrupts you both, and you suddenly realize that you just did a really, really stupid thing. You suck in a breath and close your eyes.
“Wait was that - was that an ice machine?”
Shit. Shit .
You slam the lid on top of your bucket and grab the phone from where you’d had it clenched to your ear with your shoulder. So much for keeping your cards to your chest.
Answers to unasked questions spill from your mouth. “Yes, it was an ice machine. And no, I’m not at home.” You let him sit with that as you stride back down the hall, jam the card into the reader on the door, and close the latch behind you before heading over to the small bar in the corner. You unceremoniously drop a few cubes into a rocks glass and grab two tiny, chilled bottles of Tanqueray and a can of soda water from the mini bar. “Gin soda,” you preemptively answer another unasked question as the hiss and snap of the can opening breaks the muted silence in your hotel room.
“Hmm,” he hums thoughtfully. God, he’s so fucking insufferable and you can picture him clear as fucking day; sitting up and then forward in whatever chair he’d been slouched in, at attention, eyebrow quirked. In. Sufferable.
You crack the lids of both mini gin bottles at once, pouring them in over the ice and following with a splash of soda. Normally you’d have a lime wedge with it, but the sting of it is what you’re really looking for right now, not a flavor experience. And you also have no idea where you’d get a lime right now. You down a deep swig and savor the burn. Everything feels really far away right now.
“I didn’t even go,” you admit slowly into the glass before taking another long sip. “Everyone was already at the park and I just … I just couldn’t .”
You can still feel yourself standing, rooted, in the front entryway, baseball cap in hand. Sun shining welcomingly through the door as he’d peered back into the darkness of the house at you, waiting. “I guess I just don’t want to keep being there if I’m not gonna … be there, you know?” you’d heard yourself saying in response to his unanswered question. He hadn’t replied. Simply tucked his chin, his face hidden behind the brim of his hat. There was no defeat in his shoulders as he’d walked away without you, though. Didn’t even trying to argue. You knew you couldn’t stand to be there when he got back. Not tonight.
“I love those kids, and his ex is genuinely so nice. But I guess I don’t want to - to drag things out if …” you trail off, not really knowing how to end that sentence. “So I got out of there for the night. I dunno. Just couldn’t do the whole big-happy-family, day-in-the-park thing.”
You should be sadder, you realize, because this is starting to feel like the end of something. An inevitable, slow march towards a finality. But knowing that he’s also sitting alone in a hotel room, on the other side of the country, and not at home in bed with his wife … it shifts something in your gut and fills you with a warmth that would make you feel guilty, if you let it.
You climb back into bed, pull the sheets and comforter up around your crossed legs, and lean back against the headboard, waiting.
The sound of a cheap Bic lighter flicks on the other end, and you smirk to yourself. If he’s smoking, he’s definitely going through it. You remember the first time you had seen him sneaking a puff. He’d been hunched over behind the farthest trailer in the lot, obviously trying (and failing) to be covert. It had been especially poignant because he was in full Mark Scout garb at the time, looking extra disheveled and just so unbelievably fucking shitty .
He had closed his eyes on each deep drag, letting his head loll back on his shoulders as he blew out a column of smoke. You’d watched from your spot on the little grassy hill behind the soundstage, tucked away and pretending to go through your sides. You’d found out later, through the PA grapevine, that he’d gotten word Naomi wouldn’t be joining the kids on their visit that weekend. And when you’d started shooting again for the afternoon, you could smell the faintest hint of cigarette smoke through the mintiness of the toothpaste he’d used as you ran lines together between takes. You didn’t dare ask him about it then.
He clears his throat. “Are you going home tomorrow?” His question is so loaded that it’s about to erupt.
You drain the last of your drink in one go, wincing and shaking your head unconsciously as it coils its way down your throat. “No,” you grit out, before sucking a breath in through your teeth. “Probably not.”
The sound of him taking a sharp drag on his cigarette is so loud in the dense quiet of the hotel room. His voice is even thicker now. You didn’t know that was even possible.
“Well, you know,” he murmurs.
You let out a small, inquisitive sound despite yourself. “Hmm. What do I know, Adam?”
He chuckles, low, and you swear you can fucking hear what he’s thinking about right now.
“Just that I’ll be around,” he says, each word coated in honey. “Sweet dreams, Britt.” And then the line goes dead.