Work Text:
Meet me at 205 East 45th. Suite 1101
Midtown?
I thought we could wander the Duane Reade after the meeting. Or go to that diner where they have meatloaf.
Every diner has meatloaf. Be there in fifteen.
It’s not unusual to get cryptic addresses from Roman, to end up in meetings she has to bluff her way through because he’s all bluster and excitement about any potential deal that makes his dick slightly hard. They’ve talked about it - or at least she’s lectured him about it, when it’s late and he’s panting for it, when her hand squeezes around his cock in an attempt to make him hear the words she’s whispering in his ear.
And then he presses a kiss to her lips, shaky and unsure - she wonders if he’ll ever be sure - and he tastes like sweat and whisky, and lets her lead him to bed, where they fall asleep, most of the mattress between them.
It’s nice, to wake up with him. To have him standing over her with a mug of coffee waiting for her, on the nights when he can’t actually sleep because his nerves keep jangling throughout his body, because he can’t settle. Or to gently brush hair from his face and deciding to let him sleep an extra fifteen minutes, because it comes so rarely for him.
He reads the newspaper on his phone and laughs at her for keeping up a paper subscription. She has toast and a bite of his eggs, he has eggs and a bite of her toast.
They take separate cars to the office, and he always stops for coffee on the way. If the drivers have any thoughts on the arrangements, they stay silent. And that, Gerri supposes, is what they pay them through the nose for.
Just take the elevator up.
There are tourists taking photos on the street corner when Gerri gets out of her car. She gets a few glances from curious eyes, wondering if she’s anybody important, to be driven around in a big black town car. It’s one of the few buildings that doesn’t have a storefront or a restaurant on the ground level.
Gerri pushes the button for the elevator, reading through emails on her phone, scrolling fast, triaging, filing away, deleting an email from Connor asking her for advice on some ridiculous project. She’s already managing one Roy fuck-up, the other three will have to find their own version of her. The doors close as she pushes the eleventh floor and she adjusts her glasses on her nose, flicks her hair behind her ear.
She’s not sure what this meeting will be, who Roman’s met that is going to be the next big thing. There’s enough paper in her briefcase to be intimidating to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, she can set an alarm to fake a phone call ten minutes in if it looks like a shitshow.
The doors open onto a lobby-like area, fake ferns in the corners, cushioned chairs. And Roman, his legs all folded up, shoulders hunched, like he’s nervous. Gerri’s guard flies up - if he’s nervous about this meeting, that he set up, then she has no clue what she’s about to walk into. She’s already spooling scenarios to get them both out, considers just pulling him back onto the elevator with her, leaving before anyone sees them.
But a door opens at the far end of the waiting room and a reedy man in glasses catches sight of her. “Roman? Ms. Kellman? I’m ready for you.” Roman unfolds himself and looks at her with big eyes. And she knows that there’s nothing for her to do but follow him into the office of this mystery man.
“What’s the game, Rome?” she hisses, and he just shakes his head tightly. His nerves send her reeling, and she doesn’t know when their emotions became so intertwined.
The office they’re led into is nicely furnished. A leather couch right in the middle of the room, two high-backed chairs facing it, like they’re in someone’s living room. Gerri can see the whole of Midtown through the large windows, the East River just visible through gaps between buildings.
Roman settles onto one end of the couch, like he’s been here before, like he’s comfortable in the space. She can see how his shoulders relax, just a little, like it’s a relief to be here in the room with her. Or in the room with this man, whoever he is. Maybe it’s both.
“Have a seat.” It’s not really a question, and she doesn’t like being in the dark about what’s happening. It’s rare that she knows so little about the lay of the land before sitting down. But she perches gingerly on the far end of the couch from Roman, doesn’t miss the way he watches her.
“I’m Dr. Richards,” he says, settling into the chair facing them both, a pen and pad in hand. “I’m glad you were able to come, Ms. Kellman. Roman talks about you a fair amount.” Gerri slants her eyes at Roman, who is suddenly looking anywhere but at her, out the windows, at the back wall, not meeting her eyes.
“What are we doing here?” she asks finally, bluntly.
Dr. Richards looks slightly perplexed, like he’s never had to answer that question before. “This is counseling, Ms. Kellman.” She wishes she had something to throw, something to squeeze. She wishes she could throttle Roman, slap him in the face. And she’s cognizant that any move she makes will be written down on that notepad and analyzed, so she stays still.
“You didn’t know you were coming to therapy?” The eyebrow raised, the pen poised above the notepad. It brings back flashbacks of the few times she and Baird tried therapy together, before she decided it wasn’t worth the time. She told the doctor that marriage wasn’t high on either of their priorities, and it was more productive to spend time together in a boardroom than in a therapist’s office. Never a wife, always a lawyer.
“Mr. Roy -” Eyes narrow at her, she can feel Roman tense, even though he’s three couch cushions away. “Roman asked me to meet him here. It’s not the first time he’s sent a random address, and it definitely won’t be the last.”
“So you trust him implicitly to not put you in danger then, Ms. Kellman?” She wonders if he’s using her last name to bait her into a reaction. She’s had a lifetime of questioning motives and just because there’s a wall full of diplomas behind the doctor doesn’t mean she’s going to stop now.
“I think it’s more that he trusts me implicitly to get him out of danger he might find himself in,” she says delicately, resting a hand on the arm of the couch, resisting the urge to tap her fingers, to stare at the clock on the wall and will time to move faster. “You can call me Gerri. If the aim is to “get personal,”” her fingers making quotation marks in the air, “then it seems only fitting you call me by my first name.”
“So, Gerri, you didn’t know where you were coming today.” The therapist smiles indulgently at her, like he thinks they’ve reached some new level of intimacy. “Roman sent an address and you showed up.”
“If I’d asked for details, I would’ve probably gotten something along the lines of ‘we’re going to talk to a guy about some stuff’ and I would’ve been no less informed than if I didn’t ask anything at all.” She looks at Roman, who is still studiously looking away from her. It’s tempting to throw a pillow at him. She would do it, if they were alone, bean him right in the head.
And then he’d make a joke about having a pillow fight with her, about her sorority girl days rearing their head. Phi Beta Bimbo, which would earn him another pillow to the face. She trains her eyes back to Dr. Richards, rearranges her features to neutral, the bland expression that gets her through board meetings and mass firings, leaving her valuable and forgotten in the corner.
“So this normal, then?”
She twists her lips. “You’ve spent however long with Roman - a few years at least. Do you know him to be particularly normal?” Roman shifts on the couch, his trousers sliding against the cushion fabric.
“I am, like, sitting right here?” It’s the first thing he’s said, really, and she wills him to meet her eyes. It takes a minute, but he turns to look at her. He always does, eventually. Something she’s learned about him. She smiles, minutely, a quirk of her lips she knows he’ll see. He always picks up on her subtlety - even when subtlety seems so far beyond his ken.
Dr. Richards shifts again, crossing his legs, resting his pad on his knees. “Okay. Why don’t we talk about why you’re here today. Both of you, together.”
“Isn’t it obvious? He tricked me into couples therapy.” The words have a little more bite than she means, but it’s so strange to be in this room, where the whole point is to talk, to be open and honest. They don’t do this, not really.
“Tricked feels...fuck, Gerri, it wasn’t a trick. You just said that I’m, like, shitty with words or whatever. So why can’t this schmuck just say it all for me? Why can’t we do that?” He’s leaning towards her now, facing her more than the therapist in the room with them.
“We need a liaison for our liaison?” She understands what he means, sort of, his desire to have a conduit for what he’s feeling. She just assumed eventually he’d start leaving post-it notes around with his thoughts and concerns until he could say them out loud to her.
“A liaison? So this isn’t merely a professional relationship?”
Gerri’s head moves so quickly that she’s just thankful she doesn’t give herself whiplash. She doesn’t know whether to stare at Roman, for keeping them a secret even from his therapist, or to stare at Dr. Richards, for not understanding what seems, to her, to be a large part of Roman’s life.
They haven’t told anyone what they are, what they do, beyond oblique references over family breakfasts that everyone takes as Roman being ridiculous. They haven’t told anyone, and Roman has respected that, to the nth degree. She can feel a warmth, in the pit of her stomach, at the thought. They keep lots of secrets, together. She can enjoy the luxury of being isolated in the knowledge of their togetherness, a blanket wrapped around just them.
“No,” is what Roman says, answering the question, his voice small and soft, and she can imagine him as a child, getting stared down by Caroline when he broke a vase. And then his spine stiffens and she can see the man that he’s become take over. “We’re fucking. Sort of. It’s a whole thing. I don’t know. She gives me breakfast in the morning and I sploosh onto her carpet at least once a week and there’s all this fucking shit in between.” He’s flailing, Gerri can see that too.
“He’s got a whole Oedipal thing - you didn’t figure that out on your own?” Now she feels irritated not only at the fact of being in this office, but that she’s in an office with an apparent moron and her...paramour. Whatever he is. They haven’t put anything into words. Which is maybe the point of this whole exercise. “How much do you pay him, Rome?”
She smiles around her words, but Roman just crosses his arms. “I’m not going to pluck out my mom’s eyes or anything.”
“Yes, that’s the part of the story I was talking about.” Now the distance between them worries her, to far too reach out and touch him, calm him, comfort him. This is the furthest apart they’ve sat in weeks. Months, maybe. His bouncing leg makes her feel antsy, a jittering around her heart.
Dr. Richards looks back and forth between them, writes something down on his notepad. His handwriting looks terrible, even upside down. “Let’s start at the beginning of your story, then,” he says and it’s so trite sounding, so ridiculous. Their story, like they’re a romantic comedy. She can see Roman staring at her out of the corner of her eyes, that pleading expression, and she can’t keep the smile off her face, the smile that means she almost has to laugh about how ridiculous this all is, how ridiculous they both are.
Roman looks away again, out the window. A bird flies by, maybe a seagull. “Shiv’s wedding. The magic and fantasy of being in a whole fucking different country. Go to Hogwarts, think about fucking your dad’s lawyer. Whatever.”
“In what world is that a beginning?” She leans toward him again, the distance between them lessening. It always does, two magnets pulled together.
“I don’t know! You had on that perfume and I didn’t kill anyone, but if I had, I knew you’d fix it, because you always fucking fix it. And then I jerked off about you later that night.” He’s defensive, hackles up, the prowling alley cat watching warily.
“Huh.” She rolls it around in her head. Roman looks fed up, stands suddenly, starts pacing, stares out the window, back at her. She feels like she’s on display, like she’s a piece of art in a museum, stared at by tourists. Dr. Richards writes something else down and she just wants to crane her head, to steal the notepad. “What?”
“Huh? That’s all that - fuck, Gerri. You don’t have to be the fucking vault right now.” He throws his hands in the air, looks back out at the city, tracks another bird with his eyes.
She’s not used to talking, and he talks all the time. He’s pacing again, and she just wants him to sit down, wants to put her hand on his knee and remind him it will be all right, just with her touch, the way she can in meetings, the way she does on the plane rides around the world when he’s too much energy in a small space. “She’s like this Magic 8 Ball that is always saying ‘ask again later’ and the answer never changes even when I’m asking a different question.”
A vault, a filing cabinet, a Magic 8 Ball. Anything but a person. If they were in a different room, if it were just the two of them, and not a silent audience taking notes, she’d say something, she’d throw it back. But instead, she feels poleaxed, surprised by his frustration, surprised by this anger. She’s used to it directed at Kendall, at his father, at Shiv, even at Connor. But never at her. She hates how it makes her feel.
Roman moves back into her orbit, back to her gravitational pull, sits down again, next to her this time, not so far away. “I mean it’s fine when we’re at work and it’s business. I mean, sort of, not really, but, like, I get it. She’s - you’re - trying to do something with me. Better than leaving me out in the cold with my pants down. But when it’s you and me? When it’s us? Shit, Gerri, it’s hard.”
She touches him, gently, firmly, fingers on his knee. “I thought being cryptic was one of my charms.” He mumbles something about how she has other charms and looks at Dr. Richards, a pleading expression on his face, but he’s not twitchy, not moving. She hath charms to soothe a savage Roman.
“Perhaps we should return to the original question - what was the beginning for you, Gerri? When did you know there was -” He waves his hand in the air, “something?”
“Well, I knew there was something when you grunted into a pillow while I insulted you,” she says cautiously, trying to humor him, to tease out a smile, doesn’t look at the therapist, doesn’t want to know what he thinks about that. “But that’s just. Anyone can have that. I could have that with Frank if I didn’t think he’d cry.” She can see the hurt in Roman’s eyes, like he’s been telling himself she thinks he’s special and now she’s telling him he isn’t.
She feels a bit of desperation, unfamiliar and itchy, squeezing around her ribcage, presses her hand more firmly against his leg, willing him to not look away, willing him to meet her gaze. He does. He always does. “The kind of thing that gets me here in this room? It wasn’t until the yacht. That was - that was the real beginning, for me, anyway.”
Her hand retracts and she settles back into the couch, relaxing for a moment, for the first time since arriving in Dr. Richards’ office. Roman’s foot taps against hers, once, twice, three times. A Morse code of taps to let her know he’s there.
“What happened on the yacht?” Dr. Richards leans forward, like he thinks he’s uncovered something juicy, and Gerri gets the sense of being watched, like a contestant on a TV show, or something.
“There was going to be a culling and Roman made sure I was safe.” It’s easy, to winnow it down to such few words, to say them without conveying the way her heart pounded, the way she was almost afraid to look up, to meet his eyes, the way her breath caught in her throat until discussion turned to the next victim.
“Was that a role reversal for you?” Dr. Richards taps his pen against his notepad and Gerri wonders if he even knows he’s doing it. Roman scoffs and she snaps her head to look at him. “What’s that, Roman?”
“Yeah, it’s a fucking role reversal,” he says. “Like Commandant Kellman would ever trust me to run things.” It’s meaner than he usually is, at least to her, like it’s been sitting in his stomach, stewing, boiling, pickling, turning from peppermint to poison. It hits like a punch to her gut, a slap to her face, like nails digging into her skin.
“Like you actually want to run them,” she parries, walls creeping up once more, easier to fight back than to just take it, because he’d be just as happy to recline on chaise with bunches of grapes, an emperor fiddling while the city burns.
“Whatever,” he says, and he leans forward, elbows on his knees, hair falling into his face. Her finger twitches, she wants to brush it away. “You steer the ship like ninety fucking percent of the time and the ten percent I take the wheel, you get all weird.”
“No, the five percent of the time I let you take control, it’s fine because we both know it’s happening. The five percent where you go rogue and turn into Crown Prince Asshole, leaving me blindsided to fix your shit, that’s what ‘makes me weird.’” Her hands come up to frame her face in air quotes again and she sees how Roman shifts in his seat, like an ant under a magnifying glass on a blistering hot day.
“I mean, fuck, Rome,” the nickname softens him, she can see it, the anger deflating from him, the hurt. He cares too much about her to stay upset, and it wrenches at her heart in a way that’s new and different and not entirely comfortable. “Blindsiding me into therapy? Bringing me into this room for something that’s so completely fucked up because you’ve had time to think about it and what you’ll say and you know this man?”
Roman opens his mouth like he wants to say something, but she holds her hand up. “It’s not about the therapy, it’s really not. It’s about Waystar and it’s about us and it’s all connected. We’re the knot in the middle of a giant game of tug-of-war, and when shit like this,” she gestures to the room around them, “comes up, suddenly we’re fighting on both fronts. We know I steer the ship and you listen to me, but jesus, Roman, you could fucking hindenburg me any time you want and when you just give in to your fucking whims, it makes me think that someday you’ll just go rogue and everything will bottom out.”
It’s the most she’s said in one go, words spilling out of her in a way they normally don’t. Roman’s shoulders are hunched, up near his ears, and his face is sad, worried, and she wishes they were miles away in another room and she could just show him it’ll all be okay.
She wonders, too, if this turns him on, if hearing the worst things about himself here in this office makes the blood rush to his dick, if he, too, wishes they were miles away so he could thrust his hands down his pants and groan into her thigh.
“Every day I decide to trust that you won’t blow this all up, Roman,” she says after a minute of silence, a minute that felt like an anvil on her shoulders. “I trust you.” Three simple words that mean more than any other words she’s said to anyone else. He can trick her into therapy and he can text her eggplant emojis at two in the morning, and it doesn’t matter, because she trusts him. Because of the yacht, because of the hotel, because of who he’s becoming, a psychological growth spurt in his thirties.
Dr. Richards clears his throat, brings their attention back to him, and Gerri flicks her eyes to the clock, trying to gauge how much time they have left. “Trust has come up a lot today. Gerri just said a lot there, so Roman, your turn. What is it about Gerri that makes you trust her? Why do you want to work with her?” He clears his throat again, “As well as all of the other things.”
It’s funny that they’ve been sitting in a room with him for this long without really addressing the sex thing. The sex thing that sometimes seems like it’s the whole thing, and other times feels like it’s barely a blip.
“Well, she’s a total smokeshow, obviously. Much hotter than Frank.” Maybe it’s because she’s been in this room for too long, maybe it’s because she’s feeling too raw, but she wants to clench, to curl up, to hide from that remark. Is it a joke? Is it real? What does he think about her, really? He always goes for the joke and she’s just never really sure what he means, what’s there at the root of it all.
“So that explains the sex, but what about work?” Dr. Richards is one of the few people on the planet who doesn’t let Roman get away with his tangents and asides and smart remarks, and Gerri has to respect that, at least a little. Roman fidgets again, and she wants to hit him for being so cagey when she just laid everything all out on the floor in front of them.
“She’s smart. And she believes in me. Fuck, I don’t know. You could tell me she hung the whole fucking moon up in the sky and I’d believe you.” He collapses against the back of the couch, face pointed towards the ceiling, arms falling to his side. She thinks they could both use a drink, doesn’t know the policy of imbibing during therapy. “It’s like. You know when people always talk about the first time they put on glasses? And suddenly trees have leaves or whatever? Gerri has leaves.”
It’s probably the nicest thing he’s ever said to her and it’s wrapped in a thousand layers of bullshit, but that’s probably the best he can do. A fuck-up trying his best, doing it the only way he knows how. She taps her foot against his, a slight press to the top of his shoes, and she knows Dr. Richards sees. The uncomfortable feeling of being watched settles back down on her shoulders and she crosses her legs, folds herself back up, like snapping a briefcase shut, closing a laptop. He makes another note on his little pad, crosses something else off, shakes his hand a little, his sleeve falling back so he can look at his watch. “Okay. Well. There’s not a lot of time left, but before you go, I want to talk about the privacy of this relationship. It’s been just the two of you for so long - how does it feel to expand the circle of knowledge, even by just one person?”
Gerri doesn’t know how to put it in words. Not words she wants to say out loud, anyway. It feels freer in some ways but also more constricting, because now someone else’s impressions of them - of them together, as a unit - exists in the world. “Well, you’re sworn to patient confidentiality, so it doesn’t mean that much, in the end,” she says, but with her arms crossed, with her face shuttered, she thinks Dr. Richards sees right through her.
“You get driven everywhere, correct? Presumably they know something is afoot. And your doorman, Gerri, knows to let Roman up at any hour of the day. My guess is he doesn’t think Roman’s there for a late night meeting. Three people already exist in that circle, so what’s one more? Is it different with me?”
He’s not as idiotic as she might’ve thought at the beginning.
Roman opens his mouth before she can say anything. “Because they probably think we’re just having really kinky sex, like, I get tied to her bedposts while she featherdusts me. Or, like, I’ve ordered Gerri to give me a blowjob every night.”
Every night. She can’t remember the last night Roman didn’t come over. His proposal replays itself in her mind, the way it does every few weeks, when he does something surprisingly endearing, or particularly ridiculous. She remembers the way he twirled the rose between his fingers.
“We’re, like, choosing to talk about this with you.” Every broken clock is right twice a day, and even Roman Roy can find the pit in the middle of the peach.
“You’re giving it importance by being here,” Dr. Richards prompts, prodding Roman, looking at Gerri for confirmation.
“It is important,” Roman says, indignant, cocksure, barreling ahead and giving it all away when Gerri would’ve happily spent another five years dancing around that revelation because of what it means. But he’s said it, so she just nods. Lets him steer.
Dr. Richards looks at them both, at his watch again, and nods. “I think that’s as good a note to end on as any. Roman - next week? Alone, presumably?”
“Yes,” Gerri answers for him, because she’ll need at least two months to recover from this experience, and a stiff glass of whisky. She stands quickly, brushes the wrinkles from her skirt and adjusts her glasses, tries to remember how to be Gerri Kellman again, the person who walked into the room, the person who didn’t let her emotions splay out like a cat cleaning itself.
Roman’s behind her as she opens the door, she can feel his breath on her neck, and she wants blocks of space between them and she wants nothing in between them, and it’s an enormous amount of effort just to walk to the elevators and push the button.
“Nice to meet you,” Dr. Richards calls, and she manages a half-hearted wave and hopes it’ll be a long while before she sees him again.
“Do we have to work after that?” Roman asks, when they’re in the elevator and the doors are closed. His voice is plaintive and his shoulders are sagging, and he is the physical embodiment of everything she’s feeling. She rolls her head back, small circles to try to relieve some of the tension that’s crept up her spine during the last hour of talking and feeling and having everything hit her too hard. The first time she’s never felt prepared for the meeting about to take place, the first time she’s never just bluffed her way out of hard questions.
By the time the elevator doors open on the first floor, she’s made up her mind. They’re in charge, they can take a day. Her driver’s waiting, his is too. She hasn’t spoken in two minutes and Roman’s starting to look worried.
“We’ll take my car,” she says, and there’s a little relief, the wrinkles in his forehead shrinking, and he follows her into the backseat. “We’re going to my place,” she says, clipped and sure, and her driver just nods, puts his blinker on and pulls out into the street. She slides the partition shut, a little bit of privacy, after being so exposed, her underbelly pink and fleshy in the sunlight. “We had to come to fucking Midtown?” she asks, leaning against the headrest.
They have to stop at every light, pedestrians running through crosswalks, people stopping to take photos of the sun glinting off skyscrapers. It takes forever.
Roman’s hand is on the seat between them, a stark contrast to the black leather seats, and she doesn’t know if it’s there as a request, a plea, a hope, or if it’s just there because that’s where his hand is. She wonders if she’d be thinking this much about it even an hour earlier, before therapy, before they sat in a room together and made everything seem real.
She twists her lips, and lets her hand fall, her pinky just brushing his, the only concession she’s willing to make here, in the back of a car. It’s too much to find words, to keep things light, to go back to small talk. How exhausting, to be a person. Not something to do too often.
They stop at another light, and she looks at Roman, and he’s looking at her. His hair has fallen into his face and she brushes it away, fingers running through the strands. He has a strange look on his face.
“What?” she asks, almost afraid of the answer, afraid to talk anymore.
He’s quiet, for once, no words left to say. Just leans in, and kisses her. His lips feel like they’re sure, pressed right against hers. No room between them for any doubt to creep in.