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Gregory Hirsch, apparently, cannot leave well fucking enough alone, which isn’t exactly a surprise but sure is annoying. His face, wide-eyed with faux innocence, is on Tom’s phone so often he might as well make it his wallpaper. He spills his awkward guts about everything remotely questionable Logan’s ever done in his vicinity—Boar on the Floor, hitting Iverson, the yacht meeting from hell, a handful of miscellaneous death threats and temper tantrums—each interview paced perfectly apart so that just after the public’s collective outrage at Waystar dies down, there he is again, gargantuan boy wonder with Bambi eyes and the world’s most inconvenient moral compass.
Kendall must be behind the timing; there’s no way Greg knows that much about content engagement metrics and all that strategic bullshit. He’s put some thought into Greg’s image, too, apparently, because Greg lets his hair grow out again, little uneven wisps framing his face and refusing to stay behind his ears even though he insists on continuing to try to tuck them there. That plus the eyes, the dimples, the way he rubs the back of his neck and ducks his head at any compliments—he’s Logan Roy’s worst nightmare and perfect opposite, stuttering his way through all of PGM’s morning talk shows in an ill-fitting suit worth a hundredth of ones Tom knows he has in his closet, looking every inch the hapless, exploited everyman. Jesus.
Tom is, well, not loving the ATN situation, to be honest, and watching them heap hot shit on Greg’s head in an effort to preserve Logan Roy’s ability to cover up his colleagues’ abuses of power with impunity isn’t exactly helping, no matter how furious he is with the traitor. When he tries to broach the idea of a department shift with Shiv, she says she doesn’t want to keep him from being happy, and a whirlwind of high-paced and painful months later, he finds himself out of a job and a marriage.
Well. Goddamn that, then, the metropolitan happy ending, the American Dream his high school lit teacher could’ve told him was a mirage if he’d been paying closer attention. There’s a saying, right, something about a siren song and a car crash, or maybe he thought that up when he was half-asleep and 23, living on food the Roys have never tasted. Oh, they could get a burger airlifted up Mount Olympus when they have a craving, sure, slumming it without any of the safety hazards, but Tom wonders, just once, if he maybe should’ve married someone who’d ever had to run a hand through their hair and hide a sigh after opening a bill. That thought doesn’t have the chance to work up much momentum before he’s looking into Greg’s disproportionate pupils on his phone screen again, except this time, it’s ringing.
Ton couldn’t say, really, why he answers, even if he could maybe manage to think it if he got really drunk first. Something about an empty AirBnB and making twice as much coffee out of habit and the unexpected frustration of hearing a voice you used to tune out every day talking to a gaggle of PGM hosts and not you.
Anyway. “Why, hello, Judas,” Tom says, and on the other end of the line, Greg coughs.
“I, uh, I think I’d remember? If I kissed you?” Greg says, and Tom rolls his eyes, because that is obviously not the point of the expression.
(If I asked you to? If I told you to?)
Tom pointedly does not screw his eyes shut.
“Fine, then, Peter.” He paid attention in Sunday school. Greg, with his guiltless who-knows-man agnosticism, clearly didn’t; he gives a breath of confusion before Tom takes—not pity on him, okay, he’s fucking pissed, thank you very much, he just doesn’t have time to listen to Greg’s ten-minute buildup to admitting he didn’t understand a reference, so he keeps talking. “Long time no stab, huh? What, did you run out of talk show material and want to shake me down for something else incriminating?”
“N–no, dude, I just, like, I missed you? I wanted to see how you were doing?”
“I’m divorced, Greg, and plummeting towards upper middle class, so, you know, I’m just great.”
“That’s, uh. Um. That sucks, man.”
Tom rolls his eyes, but his heart isn’t in it. Every square inch of him feels exhausted, like he’s being depleted on a cellular level. “How about you? Turncoating pay well these days?”
Tom listens to Greg’s roundabout small talk for a while, prods him in one direction or another every so often, and then it’s late and he’s maybe been drinking for the last, like, at least forty-five minutes of this conversation, so he means to say something thorny about Greg’s wardrobe and instead says, “Hey, why don’t you like Shiv?”
Greg pauses, which is strangely weighty, like a painter calling attention to an object through their use of negative space. Or something; Tom’s only ever known as much about art as the person beside him was likely to.
Greg clears his throat. “You mean other than the fact she broke your heart?”
Tom scoffs, because what kind of answer is that. “She—she didn’t break my heart, Greg, what the fuck. It, uh, it was a mutually advantageous move for us to go our separate ways.”
“Right, right,” Greg says in that way of his, doubtful but not sarcastic. Fucking annoying as all hell. “Well, uh, no, it’s just—I mean, I love her, she’s my cousin.”
“Yeah, okay, you love her, right. But you don’t like her.”
Tom can’t actually hear Greg running a hand through his hair, tucking it fruitlessly behind an ear, but he doesn’t need to. “Well, she—okay, you know when Uncle Logan had the stroke? Like, right after I came to town?”
“Yeah, Greg, that’s kind of hard to forget,” Tom says, but, well. It hasn’t exactly been a priority of his lately, okay.
“Okay,” Greg says, “well, Shiv was, like, getting some drinks or something from the vending machine, but she didn’t have any cash, and I—I gave her my last twenty, or like, she took it, or something, and didn’t give me the change. So, uh, thus the dog poop bags at the break station, because I, you know, didn’t have any food. So yeah, I guess I just, uh, I mean—I'm not holding a grudge,” he rushes to add, ever the gentleman, Tom thinks sardonically. “I just think we don’t have a lot in common?”
Tom gave up on being a gentleman the day he was issued his divorce papers, so he can be furious. And he is—at Shiv, more than he’s ever been before and probably more than he ever will be again, once he’s slept on this news enough to rationalize it, and at himself, because that sad fuck probably would’ve done the same thing, too, if she’d wanted him to, if he’d thought it’d impress her. He wonders if he’d have done anything differently, if he’d seen Shiv take Greg’s last twenty like it was less than nothing, a means to an unimportant end, the change not worth the effort of reaching for it. And yeah, he thinks it was fucking stupid of him to do it, but Greg—well, how can you know somebody did a thing like that and not love them, really?
Only if it doesn’t mean anything to you, apparently. For people who care so much about money, the Roys don’t give a shit about it when it really matters.
“If this plane goes down,” he remembers telling Shiv at Thanksgiving, “I don’t even want a parachute. I’d wanna perish on impact, I really would.” Easy enough to say when it’s all blue skies and heart-shaped clouds. Now that they’re in freefall, he’ll pull the cord, thank you very much.
That doesn’t mean he’s enjoying falling on his ass.
*
“You said you’d look after me,” Greg wants to say, “Remember? So maybe it’s my turn to look after you, just, like, with less workplace harassment.”
Even as he thinks it, though, he’s doubting it would work. He’s a stoner who got lucky, sort of, and still listens to the same grunge albums as he did in high school, and Tom is experiencing a hubris-induced fall from grace set to some kind of sonata. Repression in D major. Who’s he kidding—what, did he think he could, like, take Tom to a gay bar and show him the ropes? “Sorry, the vodka won’t make you piss gold, but it does have a rainbow-tinted bottle from a company preying on a vulnerable demographic under the guise of progressiveness, figured you could appreciate that.” Did Gregory Hirsch effectively utilize queer power when he committed white collar crimes to save his own skin at the job he acquired via nepotism?
He can’t teach Tom how to be okay with himself the way Tom had shown him how to, like, be okay with stepping on people as a way of life. It’s a totally different mechanism. Tearing your internalized oppression up by the roots uses different a muscle group than biting off the head of a songbird—but maybe both have something to say about shame and pleasure being two sides of the same coin, landing on its ass in one scenario and spinning like a top in the other. Maybe that’s why working for Waystar made Greg so damn dizzy.
“Yes,” Greg says instead, because that’s all he’s got when it comes to Tom. Yes and yes and yes. God help him.
“What?” Tom asks, glancing over, a level of neutral that makes Greg disturbingly proud. It’s been a while since he last looked like he didn’t think a comment was trying to find him out.
“You asked if I would kiss you,” Greg explains, “when we first met. I’m saying yes.”
Tom blinks. His eyebrows raise. “What the fuck, Greg, you can’t just say yes without context and expect me to have any fucking clue what you’re talking about. Besides, I was joking, anyway.”
“You were?” Greg asks, unconcerned.
“Yes, Greg, I was,” Tom says, but it’s rendered pretty pointless by the way he clutches Greg’s shoulders to pull him to himself and kisses him. Or maybe he needed to say that in order to be able to do it. Greg can live with that.
“How the fuck did you think that was going to work?” Tom asks much later, when they’re both significantly more rumpled. Greg shrugs.
“I figured, you know, you’d ask me to elaborate, and if you didn’t, I’d just forget it.”
Tom snorts. “Oh, so that was your great confession plan? Relying on my curiosity and prepared to abandon all hope otherwise.”
Greg shrugs again, which he knows Tom is getting really annoyed with because he’s laying with his arms and legs all folded up and his head pillowed on Tom’s chest, so his shoulder sort of jabs Tom in the collarbone when he moves. He’s not changing anything until Tom tells him to, and even then it’s a stretch. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tom sighs, “I guess it did.”