Chapter Text
“So do you get up here very often? To Toronto, I mean?” The tall hockey player—tall enough for basketball, really; why did he play hockey, anyway?—seemed almost shy as he asked, and Myka smiled at him. He’d really been so nice and helpful during the whole ridiculous retrieval scenario, and she quite frankly was enjoying being the one who had to tilt her head up to look someone in the eye. She wouldn’t ever have wanted to be short, but there was something to be said for not towering over everybody in every room. Just for a little while.
“Well, sometimes. It’s a weird business. We never know where we’re going to be, really.”
“That’s gotta be difficult. For… for, I mean, relationships. I was just wondering, because maybe if you find yourself around here again, you and I could… have dinner. Or coffee, we could start with coffee.”
And just like that, Myka found herself back in high school, stunned that someone, anyone, would find her attractive enough to even notice, much less actually ask out. “That’s incredibly nice of you,” she said, and meant it.
His face lit up. “Yeah? That would be awesome, if you would. Hey, are you going back right away? Because I’m free tonight—we don’t have a game, so if you feel like it, I know some great places.”
Myka winced. In fact, Pete had already suggested that instead of trying to get a flight out tonight, they should wait till morning, because they hadn’t slept in a really long time, and reasons reasons reasons, most of them generated just to get Artie to spring for hotel rooms. Myka had tried to say that she really wanted to go home instead, but Pete kept shushing her and wouldn’t let her have the Farnsworth. She could have knocked him down and taken it, but she was too tired. So maybe he was right? Still, she’d been pretty sure she’d feel better at home than she would in a Toronto hotel room.
“I’m sure that you do,” Myka began, and his smile drooped a bit when he registered her tone, “but the thing is…”
He held up a hand. “Say no more. I get it. You’re not interested in some big lug of a hockey player. I get that a lot.”
“You do?” Myka was genuinely flabbergasted. “But you’re a professional hockey player. In Canada.”
“I’m no superstar on the line, so in Toronto, that makes me small potatoes. Now, if we were in Winnipeg, that’s maybe a different story,” he told her. “So it’s okay. I’m some guy from—you’ve probably never heard of where I’m from. It’s basically Gas Station, Canada. You want somebody more cosmopolitan. It’s okay,” he repeated.
“That’s not it,” Myka said. Then she stopped and tilted her head. “Although weirdly, that’s sort of it.” He drooped some more, and she hurried to say, “No, the thing is, I actually… I’m sort of…”
“You’re seeing somebody? Oh, well, that’s different. You should have said. I mean, it would have been a surprise to find that someone as… well, someone like you, wasn’t seeing somebody.” He nodded, as if this settled things. He actually seemed reasonably happy.
Why Myka felt she had to go on, she had no idea. And yet there she went, and, fascinated, she watched herself go. “It’s really really complicated,” she said. “I can’t even describe to you the extent to which it’s complicated.”
“Are we talking Facebook-status ‘it’s complicated’ or real-world ‘it’s complicated’?”
“If Facebook had any way at all of understanding this, I’d be amazed. The thing is, we aren’t technically supposed to be seeing each other, because of what our jobs are right now, but we both—I mean, this person and I—we’ve been through a lot together. Apart, but also together. And we had some miscommunication about the whole thing, but then… this person basically said that life’s too short, and I agreed with them, and that was sort of that. But it’s still really difficult. We kind of have to sneak around. It’s like being teenagers, but you feel even more stupid, because it’s supposed to be different when you’re an adult, right? At least this is what I keep telling this person, who honestly is pretty unfamiliar with how this all works these days, which is another huge part of the complicated.”
He seemed relatively impassive as her words petered out. “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and ask a question,” he said. “Don’t get offended, okay?”
“Um… okay?”
“This person… is a she, right?”
Myka kept herself from gasping, but only just. And then she got angry at herself for not wanting him to have said it, and for wanting to hide it in the first place, and for not being at all clear on anything anymore. She took a long time trying to formulate her answer, and when she looked up to deliver it, he was smiling, almost chuckling. “What’s so funny?” she asked.
“This is almost the exact same conversation I had with my sister two years ago. Except for the part where I asked you out. I didn’t ask my sister out; that would be weird.”
“Wait, your sister?”
“Is gay. And she did the pronoun dance for years, with everything about how we did this and that, they said this and that, this person and I. And I finally just had to say, Gertrude, honey, I’m pretty sure I’ve cracked your code. You can say ‘she.’”
“Your sister’s name is Gertrude?”
“Our parents, who are, and I say this with love, the worst amateur actors in the world, met on a production of Hamlet. Everybody, and I mean everybody, in our family gets Hamlet names. Gertrude would’ve been Ophelia, of course, but that was their first dog.”
“My middle name’s Ophelia,” Myka admitted.
“Yeah? Sorry about the dog thing, but it wasn’t my fault. Happened before I was born. If it helps any, she was a great dog.”
“But… your name’s Larry.”
“Just wait for it, it’ll come to you. In about three… two…”
“Laertes? Really?”
“Boom. I could show you my birth certificate. I’m just glad it isn’t Fortinbras. Can you imagine how my life at hockey camp would have gone? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are their current pets, in case you were wondering. Rosie’s a chihuahua, and Gilly’s an enormous cat who outweighs her by at least ten pounds. Inseparable.”
“What’s going to happen when they run out of characters?”
“Honestly? I’m afraid to ask. They’ve still got a few to go, and I’m hoping anyway that Rosie and Gilly live a good long time.”
“You’re right, by the way,” Myka said. “She’s a she.”
“Is that the complicated part?”
“There are not enough words in this language or any other to explain how much I wish to god that that were the complicated part.”
“Do you want to talk about it? You actually sort of sound like you might want to talk about it.”
Myka smiled up at him. She actually sort of did want to talk about it, but she was having trouble imagining a way to do so that didn’t boil down to something like, “So that author, H.G. Wells? Was not a man, is not dead, tried to end the world, then saved it.” The part where they were making out in the backseats of cars like teenagers these days, and sneaking up to her room at the B&B, was really such a minor aspect of the story, but… that was one of the few parts she could talk about. So she thought that maybe she could start with that. “Have you ever fallen for somebody you weren’t supposed to?”
He laughed. “All the time! Started with my teachers in school and just escalated. The less available they are, the more I want them.” He quirked an eyebrow at her, exactly as Helena might have. “You should probably be careful, there, Agent Bering. Now that I know the full extent to which you aren’t interested, I might have to start stalking you and declaring my undying love. I once gave the full Say Anything treatment to a girl, with the boombox and all. I honestly thought she’d fall right from her bedroom window into my arms, but instead, she was just mortified. We were fifteen. In retrospect, I should have seen that response coming, but fifteen is a pretty idiotic age.”
“Isn’t it? Like I said, the part where this makes me feel like a teenager is maybe the most horrible. I hated being a teenager. It was the worst.” Myka hadn’t fully formulated this thought before, but now that she was really thinking it, she realized that she was going to have to take some kind of step in the direction of making it all a little less high school. Because she profoundly did not want to relive those years; the joy of being with Helena was how different it made Myka feel about intimacy, about her body, about every neurosis that had plagued her back then and seemed to delight in finding new inflections with which to continue to torment grown-up Myka. She sighed. “And so I hate having to act like one now.”
“Is that because of the gay thing? Even if it isn’t complicated for you personally, it can still be plenty complicated when you start getting the rest of the world involved.”
This startled Myka, who hadn’t thought much about “the gay thing” at all, really, because… well, if she were being honest with herself, because it hadn’t come up. Larry was the first person who’d asked her out since it started, and she hadn’t even been intending to mention it to him. She realized that she hadn’t been intending to mention it to anyone, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have mentioned it like that. She didn’t know what it meant that she wanted Helena; she just wanted her. And she’d wanted her since the very beginning. (This amused Helena greatly, because as she said, it made her feel like she really hadn’t needed to try as hard as she had done. To which Myka had responded acidly, “People can fall out of love at first sight, too.” Which just made Helena laugh and kiss her, which in turn made Myka conclude that people couldn’t really fall out of love at first sight after all.)
“You’re taking a long time to answer that, too,” Larry said.
“Sorry. Just thinking. It’s weird, but the gay thing isn’t even… I don’t think that’s even an aspect of the problem. I mean, I might have a little bit of a problem with it, I don’t know yet, but I think the problem would be exactly the same if one of us were a guy. Well, not exactly the same, but enough the same. It’s this huge work thing; the protocol, and it’s been around a long time, is that people who have her job can’t have that kind of relationship with people who have my job. All these ideas about influence and bias. And then part of it is who she is, too; she’s kind of… unique. In the… organization. She’s done some things that people don’t normally do, and she’s got a level of… experience, I guess, that other people don’t have, and so they don’t want… it’s sort of, they don’t want either of us to be distracted.”
“I can see how you’d be fairly distracting,” he said.
This reminded her of Pete. “Quit it,” she said, as if he were Pete, and she was pleased to see him absorb the teasing blow as it was intended. Well, he did have a sister.
“But seriously,” he went on, “I bet sneaking around is even more distracting, for the both of you, than not having to sneak around would be. Isn’t it?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. Not having ever not sneaked around with her, I can’t say. Maybe even more distracting for the first little while, because of the newness? But then we could start figuring out what normal is? Whereas right now I don’t feel like we’re ever going to get a chance to do that.”
“Well, the good part and the bad part is that nothing goes on forever. Something always changes.”
“That sounds a little pat.”
“Only because it is, Agent Bering. But it’s true. Now, seriously, where are we going for dinner? You can’t turn me down now, not when we’re just getting to the interesting part. What kind of food do you like? I’ve been going a lot to this tiny little Persian place that’s really blindingly good. You gotta like dates, though—the food, I mean, not going out on them—anyway, I swear they put those things in everything from the food to the… can you make placemats out of dates? Because I wouldn’t put that past them. I’ve never been to Iran, so I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing or just the folks who run the place.”
“Persian would be interesting,” Myka allowed. “I’m still not sure if it’s a great idea…”
“Really? She possessive, your girlfriend?”
“Not possessive, exactly. I’d say more… insecure. But,” she hurried to add, “under the circumstances, I don’t really blame her.” And then Myka realized that she’d accepted, without even blinking, his reference to Helena as her girlfriend. She hadn’t known it was possible for one’s heart to leap and clench at the same time. “I don’t always feel completely secure myself.”
“You should,” he said quickly. “Admittedly, I don’t know you incredibly well yet, but you seem like a pretty decent individual. And then there’s the fact that you’re hot as all get out. I feel like I can tell you that, given that I have no shot whatsoever.”
Myka laughed. “You really should be going to dinner with Pete. There are some similarities, which probably extend to sports and that kind of thing, so you’d probably have plenty to talk about. Though you’d lose him on things Hamlet-related.”
“How about your girlfriend? Would I lose her, too?”
“God no. Completely vice versa. She’s the one who’s hard to keep up with, literature-wise.”
“Snooty about it, huh?”
He was clearly teasing, but Myka answered honestly anyway: “Sometimes. Goes on, you know, about how she knows Oscar Wilde and Kipling and Conan Doyle.” Myka did, every now and then, enjoy the little private thrill of saying things that held meanings only she could hear. And the thrill made her wonder, every time, whether Helena had created something new in her or had simply revealed what was there all along.
The private thrill also always made her wish, however, that Helena could be there to share it with her. Because part of the delight of their relationship, she was discovering, was exactly that: what they shared. And the knowledge that no one—no couple in history—had ever shared a significant portion of those things before. Myka hadn’t ever thought she would be unique in terms of the person she ended up with; she’d imagined someone conventional, and herself as conventional too. She’d imagined someone like Larry, in fact: some tall, nice guy who knew about Hamlet and could carry on a conversation.
“I read some Kipling,” he offered now. “Not all of it, of course, because he wrote, what, like fifty things? A hundred? Some big number. Could never get through much of Wilde; he’s kind of snooty himself. And my sister had a Sherlock Holmes phase, so I refused to have one. On principle. I should probably sit down with those at some point, shouldn’t I?”
“I’ll tell you something,” Myka said. “If I weren’t in this… thing that I’m in, I would definitely go to dinner with you. For real. Because I like you a lot.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You see, though, how that doesn’t really get me anywhere.”
“I do see that. But still.”
“And I do appreciate it. But still.”
They smiled at each other. Myka thought that if Helena could see them, she probably would, in fact, get a bit possessive. Myka tried to imagine Helena sitting and talking like this with a guy… she couldn’t picture it. Helena would get bored too quickly. Myka was still amazed that Helena wasn’t bored with her, but maybe that was just what love did for you. If that was the case, then Myka would just have to hope that Helena never stopped loving her. But she was already hoping that, so… she did know, on a level that she didn’t want to acknowledge, that if she and Helena were going to have a real relationship, she was just going to have to accept everything, all of it at once, and stop questioning the why. If she kept worrying at the why, she would never believe any of it, because there would never be a sufficiently compelling why.
Well, all right, if she wanted to keep on being honest, she knew one compelling why, and it had turned out to be exactly as wonderful as she’d always tried very rigorously not to imagine it would be but had in reality always had great hopes about. And she was fairly certain she knew enough about these things to be interpreting correctly that it was pretty compelling for Helena too. (Who she hadn’t thought had been hoping in the same way she herself had, but Myka had turned out to be very wrong about that. A misunderstanding that had been spectacularly resolved.) But of course she worried that that would fade over time. And that fading would be made more likely with the removal of the prohibition, honestly, assuming that that actually happened at some point (because it had to, didn’t it?). Stealing time together made everything urgent; in the absence of that, would they still…
Which was just another clever way of herself trying to scare herself into giving up, she knew. Imagining every way it could go wrong… but not so she could anticipate and head off each of those ways, as she would if this were a plan for bagging some artifact. No, this kind of imagining was to show herself how wrong she had been to fall in love in the first place, how there was no way it could possibly end well and so it would clearly be better to get out while she still had some shred of her heart left.
And that was the only explanation she could think of for why, the next time she and Helena were in bed together… why it was that afterward, as Helena was mouthing kisses gently against her temple, her jaw, her chin, Myka said, “I went out to dinner with a hockey player in Toronto.”
It was as if she had no control at all over the words she uttered; she heard herself say them, and she physically cringed. She thought it was most likely the cringe even more than the words that made Helena freeze and say, with the worst counterfeit of a casual intonation that Myka had ever heard her use, “Oh?”
TBC