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It doesn’t play out like he thought.
Mostly because he hasn’t actually imagined it very much in the first place. Yeah, he’s soft hearted about her, but they’re still friends. It would feel disloyal, somehow, fantasising about something that would make her miserable. Instead they’ve just tended to avoid the subject of Ruth and Russell, like their lives here in Vegas occupy some parallel reality.
But he knows, nonetheless, when it happens. She doesn’t say anything to him, but she’s puffy eyed and subdued, and the other girls cluck round her with weirdly ferocious sympathy. When he comes over to talk to her during a break in rehearsal – about lighting grids and an upcoming soiree at the Flamingo, and other practical, functional things – Jenny and Melrose glare daggers until he backs off. He’s not an idiot. He gets it. Right now, he’s in the enemy camp. Just one of those things, and maybe there’s a part of him that’s even grateful she has friends that will fuss and make all the right noises, because Christ knows he can’t.
But most of him, if he’s honest, is annoyed. It reminds him of the days between finding Carolyn in flagrante delicto with Chuck the Steadicam operator and their divorce. When, somehow, he still managed to end up the bad guy. Yes, she was the one who cheated; but would she have felt the need to cheat if he was a better listener; a better communicator; a better fuck?
Alright, so her therapist didn’t actually say that last one; but it’s always been there, the truth unspoken as far as Sam’s concerned. It’s not like Chuck was listening to her, when he found them together after hours in her trailer, was it? Idiot found it difficult enough to string a sentence together at the best of times. Chuck the dumb fuck. Goddamit, they’d even used to joke—
Enough, he tells himself, lighting up a cigarette. It’s water under the bridge at this point. Ancient history. Dead and fucking buried.
He drags on his cigarette; aware he has all the cool calm collectedness of a scalded cat right now; trying to settle his raised hackles. None of it matters a damn anyway—
“Did Sandy tell you about the party?”
Debbie interrupts his oscillation between filthy anger and thwarted pity. “Yeah,” he says shortly. “You want one of the slots?”
She shakes her beautiful head, watching Ruth rather than him. “Uh, no. Randy will be here.”
And he sees, for a second, Ruth’s baleful gaze catch. He sees colour that blushes in her cheeks, as she looks at her shoes, still unable to bear Debbie’s stare. He’s knows the bantam vitriol of Jenny and Melrose and Carmen, well meant as it is, is no balm to Ruth’s misfit soul. She misses her friend; misses the kind of pitiless dissection Debbie could offer; the setting of Russell in his context of other former lovers.
Next time, maybe, he thinks. Debbie is close to forgiveness now. Snapping Ruth’s ankle, bizarrely, has put things between them on more of an even keel. But as Debbie had to weather the storm of divorce alone, so Ruth must now mourn the close of what he thinks might be the world’s mildest romance.
He pinches out the remains of his cigarette, shaking his head.
Maybe there’s something to be said for dying alone after all.
He finds her on the periphery of the Flamingo mingle.
“Hey.”
“Hey, hi. Yes.” She supresses a hiccough. Not wasted; not yet. But one drink outside her comfort zone already, with the second in hand.
And she’s wearing that fucking dress, the one he made the mistake of describing as a Ferrero Rocher wrapper. She took umbrage at that. Still, her wrath is better than her knowing she took his breath away when he first saw her.
It makes no fucking sense, he’s told himself a thousand times. She wears less on a day-to-day basis in the ring, and he can keep a lid on his feelings around her there well enough… But there’s a difference, he knows in his bones, between her looking beautiful in character and her being so beautiful as Ruth.
“Having fun?”
“Sure! I mean, I—” She opens her mouth to lie further and catches his eye. “No. Not really.”
“Me neither.” This earns him an eye-roll. “Wanna talk about it?”
“Do you?”
“Nope.” She actually laughs at that, somewhere between appalled and amused. “But I’d be a pretty shitty friend if I didn’t at least ask. Right?”
“Right,” she agrees. Something like a smile is tugging at the corners of her mouth now.
“So…”
“So?”
“Go.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not—I don’t think I want to…” She sighs. “It was a mutual thing, really. Sometimes… things just reach a natural conclusion. And—and that’s okay…”
It takes every last vestige of his self-control not to roll his own eyes. “Uh-huh,” he manages, draining the last of his champagne. She’s looking at him strangely. “What?”
“…the clean and sober thing is going well, I take it?”
“Who said anything about fucking sober?”
“But you’re not—you haven’t—?”
He sniffs. “Forty-two days.” It might not last. He’s done longer stints before, and still fallen back into the powder habit. But it’s something.
“Woah.”
“Yeah, I astonish myself sometimes, too.”
She makes an irritated squeak. “I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Playing at weary outrage, to cover the fact this might already be the highlight of his week. “Anyway… You were telling me how it was all very mutual and inevitable…?”
“And that was another thing, actually, he used to… I mean, it wasn’t exactly snoring? But it was this noise that just—”
“Ruth.”
“—and then I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep and—”
“Ruth.”
She stops. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Every time I think I’m done, there’s just another thing that… sort of erupts out of me.”
“I know. I’ve been here the whole fucking time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s boring. And you’ve been very patient. And we… should talk about something else.”
He shrugs. “Like the clowns?”
They’ve followed the party away from the Strip, to the elegant house of another director. Well, it’s an elegant house aside from the clowns. There are several of them, mostly done in oil paint; one particularly disturbing variant in stained glass.
“What are they about, do you think?”
He gives her a look. “Francis directed Circus Circus.”
“I know, I know, but, is there something meaningful about the clown as the element of circus in this particular—?”
“Jesus Christ. Don’t overthink it. You want another drink?”
“Yes, actually.”
“But then I think, maybe I was always just fooling myself? You know? I mean, did she ever see me as more than a fucking… meal ticket?”
“You don’t really think that.”
“I don’t know what I think. I know what I thought. And then the reality…? Fuck.”
“People are complicated.”
“Tell me about it.”
She sighs, letting her head loll back against the sofa cushion, wrapped in a convenient tartan blanket. He thinks, when they first sat down in here, there were probably some other people around. Now it’s just the two of them in the studio space; empty glasses and paper plates the only trace of the evening behind them.
“Should we… do we need to leave?”
She shakes her head. “Francis said it’s fine to sleep here on the couch.”
“Really? When?”
“I think you were in the middle of the Vegas leg of your tale of woe...”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“No, no.”
“Uh…” He investigates the arm of their sofa. “I think this maybe—” The leg-rest springs out with a humorous sploing sort of noise, rocking them both backwards. “…Yep.”
It should be awkward, really. The two of them side by side on the now extended sofa-bed. Instead, her head rests companionably against his shoulder. He slips his glasses off, onto the arms of the sofa.
“There’s, um, some spare blanket, if you need?”
“I’m fine.”
“Really?”
No, but he’s got some pride. “Really.”
“Well, if you change your mind… It’ll be too late because I’ll be asleep.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Silence falls, or the closest thing to it this part of town can manage. There’s still traffic noise, a muffled siren on the very edge of hearing. The buzz of the light in the corridor, the creak of an unfamiliar house.
And Ruth’s breathing, soft and slow. He thinks maybe she is asleep, and his own eyelids are drooping…
She makes a sighing sound, stretching out slightly under her blanket, at his side. Her head presses harder against his arm, seeking something.
“You alright?”
“Mmm.” Still shifting as if she’s uncomfortable.
“C’mere.” He puts his arm around her, letting her head come to rest on his chest. “Comfy?”
“Yes.”
And he’s a pathetic old man, he knows, but to lie here holding her like this makes his heart swell in his chest. Like taking her hand at Justine’s stupid fucking dance. Only this time he knows better than to push his luck. If this is all they have, all they’ll ever have, it will have to be enough—
Her fingers, ghosting across his stomach, make his breath hitch. They curl around his side, holding onto him, too. An embrace by inches, tentative at first; both of them expecting the other to pull away. Neither of them does, until eventually they’re holding each other so tightly they’re practically white knuckled.
Like they’re holding on to each other, afraid to fall.
She presses her face into his neck; just pressure at first. Then a kiss; two; three against his collarbone. He finds he is doing the same against the top of her head. It’s almost chaste. And if she told him goodnight now, and settled back against his chest—
“Sam?”
He glances down as she looks up, bringing them almost nose to nose. He is suddenly very dry-mouthed. “Mm?”
“If I kiss you right now… I won’t be able to stop.”
He’s pretty sure his heart skips a beat. “You think?” he manages, as his nose bumps against hers.
“I know.”
“Huh.” His lips brush hers. “Would that be… so bad?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, the words spoken almost against his mouth. “It scares me.”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He presses a kiss, butterfly soft, to her lips. “Ruth, whatever you want—”
She does the same in return, cutting him off. A delicate thing at the start, a kind of kiss that’s frankly alien to him. Like his whole life so far has been a rush; the fear of missing out, of losing something before he’s even held it in his hands. Kissing Ruth feels instead like an inevitability.
She was right though, he realises. Minutes later; maybe hours; as she deepens the kiss and his body responds in kind to hers. She was absolutely fucking right.
There’s no way he’s able to stop.