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Gerri doesn’t go to Roman on the yacht.
She knows better than that. But she’s horrified, for a moment, when she finds herself considering it. Knock on his door and, what, insult him until he can’t taste the muzzle of a gun, anymore?
Fuck.
So she doesn’t.
Instead he finds her, orbiting around her, sitting near and dipping into her space. Their knees nearly bump, and his shoulders hover just inches from hers. They never touch. She doesn’t mind. Every damned person on that boat is watching each other, and she can see them all not-watch them, glance toward and glance away. Reading an alliance in Roman’s ease, Gerri’s posture.
She lets Frank and Karl see. It might save her skin, today. She’ll deal with tomorrow later. There’s no long game in the clusterfuck that is the Roy family drama. There’s Logan’s whimsy, and Logan’s violence, and Logan’s hate. Even with all the maneuvering in the world, she’s found, and some days you just hope you can keep your head down long enough that his mood doesn’t swing at you too hard at the wrong time.
Roman’s right about one thing—a lot of things, actually, but especially this one: Gerri survives by making herself just important enough to keep and just unimportant enough to mostly ignore. It’s worked for thirty years, and it better keep working.
Gerri’s not going to jail for this family.
When evening comes, she makes herself scarce as early as she can, in the hopes of avoiding any turns Logan’s cruelty might take.
And—Roman’s there. Asleep. At least, if the slow rise and fall of his chest indicates anything.
She knows she’s playing a game with him, one with little margin for error. He even seems to understand the rules. This is how it goes: he offers himself with pokes and prods and insults. When she says go he goes, and when she says come he comes.
And that’s all literal, to her. Plausibly deniable. She hasn't seen any of it. She hasn't touched him. He hasn't touched her. Nothing that's passed between them, in a script, would sound any different from his many other bizarre and provocative conversations.
“That’s just how Roman talks,” anyone would say. Under oath, even.
It’s important that they keep it that way.
And yet—and yet.
Roman Roy is in her bed.
Maybe he doesn’t understand the rules as well as she’s thought.
“Hey!” she whispers.
He doesn’t budge. Just digs his face down into his forearm, forehead crinkled. There are bags under his eyes. He looks awful. He looks peaceful. He looks like he’s getting the best night of sleep he’s had in months. In her bed.
It infuriates her.
“Hey!” It snaps, this time.
This time he just snuffles, a bit. The tips of his ears are pink, from the sun.
For a moment, she sees herself sitting beside him, rousing him with a gentle shake. Would he be the sort to smile unconsciously in those spaces between waking and sleeping? And would he brighten when he sees her? Or shutter and close? On second thought, he’d probably recoil and say something characteristically disgusting. He must understand that he can’t trust her. He must.
And yet, again, here he is.
She shakes her head at herself. He’s an idiot, and she’s an even bigger one for entertaining this, even in theory. Gerri’s not going to touch him. It seems very, very important that she never, ever touch him. Even more so here, with no one to observe them.
Gerri claps her hands, this time. He still doesn’t budge.
Is she going to need to jab him with an elbow? Throw fucking water over his fucking face? It’s tempting to slap a hand over his mouth, because there’s no guarantee he doesn’t just spew shit everywhere the instant he wakes up. But smothering him with a pillow is probably a safer bet, anyway.
He’s going to kill them both.
Half-heartedly, Gerri wishes she were the sort to leave things scattered around her room. Then she’d have a convenient scarf to waggle in his face, or a makeup brush to poke him with. But everything’s sparse and tidy, packed away in its proper place.
(She expected Roman to stray his things carelessly about, unlike her. But his spaces seem to be just as barren as hers. She hasn’t thought about whether it’s because he’s hiding parts of himself away, like she is, or because there’s just nothing there.)
Finally, she manages to kick the bedframe a few times, hard enough that the force of it resonates with a quiet metallic hum.
Roman goes from drowsy to sharp disturbingly quickly. His entire body stiffens then rearranges itself into a mimicry of relaxation. It’s clear that he’s awake and surveying the room through the cracks of his eyelids, but he remains carefully limp, as if trying to avoid notice.
It’s fucking weird.
Gerri freezes, waiting for him to snap out of it.
When has this prodigal boy ever needed to wake on a dime at the sound of metal, then play dead? Not traits common to a life of luxury. She wonders, for a moment, whether getting taken hostage in Turkey might inspire behavior like this. But this looks like a long-held habit, more instinct than anything.
That’s when she remembers that he went to military school. Her brain starts to connect a few dots and ask a few more questions. None of the answers are pretty. So she folds all that up as small as she can make it, then files it away into her growing mental repository of things I’d rather not know or think about in regards to R. Roy.
“You need to leave,” she says after a few excruciating seconds, once it becomes clear that he’s decided to just keep playing dead.
“Jeez, Prince Phillip, have a little compassion for this sleeping beauty,” Roman mumbles without opening his eyes, voice fuzzier than normal. In another context, the tone might feel intimate. “Talk about a rude awakening.”
“Sleep all you want.” She sharpens the edge on her tone: “In your own bed.”
“Oh, this isn’t mine? And here I thought everything under the sun belonged to daddy dearest. Su casa es mi casa, and so on.” He stretches, a sanguine, petulant motion that’s mostly in his spine. When he’s done, he looks thoroughly planted in place in the dead center of her bed.
Against her will, annoyance is making her eyes slip closed. She almost regrets waking him up.
“Don’t make me roll you out,” she says.
His eyes light up. He hasn’t even opened his mouth when she realizes that threat was possibly the worst thing she could’ve said.
“Feel free to try.” He throws his arms out, crucifixion-style, and settles in.
Fuck.
“What do you want, Roman?”
“If that isn’t the billion dollar question,” he muses. “Or—twenty-billion? How’re the markets doing? How much am I worth, after all this week’s colossal fuckups? Do you think the whole hostage situation increases or decreases my market value?”
“Decreases.”
“Ah.”
Managing to silence him is something, at least. But now he’s holding out a hand. She doesn’t look at it, doesn’t acknowledge it. She tilts her head, eyebrows and all, at the door. Meaningfully.
“Sit next to me?” he asks with an exaggerated pout. “Hold my hand? Pet my hair?”
She folds her arms. Tries to radiate stern disapproval, in the way that he tends to correctly identify as “stop fucking around” instead of the way that he (also, unfortunately, correctly) identifies as sexual.
And there it is—the slight fold of his shoulders. The quiet retreat. The recognition that he’s pushed too far. He’s good at that, at reading between her lines. Any second now, he’s going to get out of her bed.
But instead, he just slaps his hands to his face and screws his eyes shut.
“Look,” he says, “I know you don’t want me here.”
“You’re right. I don’t,” she cuts in.
“Is there something that would make it okay for me to stay? I could… go sit in the bathroom again? Hang out where I belong, like the excrement I am?” It’s boyish, hopeful.
“We’re not doing that tonight.”
“I know, I know. Fuck.” He’s muttering under his breath, now. “Couldn’t get it up if I wanted to, anyway. Scared half to shit—” And he’s raising his voice again, enough that she gestures at him to quiet it down. He does. “Thought they were gonna fucking, I don’t know, take me out back and—do whatever they do in Turkey behind their woodsheds. Er, behind their luxury hotels in the middle of a coup.” He makes a whistling noise and a hand motion that seem to indicate beheading, maybe with an axe.
She refolds her arms. She hadn’t even realized she’d relaxed them. “No funny business.”
“None.” He’s out of the bed and walking backwards toward the bathroom. He puts his hands up, as if to say, look, no dick!
Bewilderment has begun to eclipse Gerri’s annoyance.
It’s a yacht, an expensive one, but it’s still a bathroom on a boat. Just a gross, cramped little thing. More toilet than vanity. It can’t be nice in there, or comfortable.
A thunk trembles through the door. Roman’s head hitting the back? She can picture it: him in his sweats and t-shirt, still wearing a watch that costs more than most of his employees make in a year. Does he have his head in his hands, again? What’s he looking at? Is he just jerking off anyway?
No—his breaths are slow, steady. As if he’s halfway back to sleep, already. He isn’t saying anything. Gerri’s starting to think she’ll be here for a long time. She considers dragging him out by the ear, throwing him into the hallway.
But then she thinks, what the hell. What if he gives her something she can use, tonight? Her position’s as precarious as anyone’s. Never hurts to have more knives under her skirt.
She pulls up a chair outside the bathroom.
She taps gently.
“Rome? You okay?”
“No.”
His voice is weirdly clipped. Is he crying? He better not be crying in her bathroom.
Nothing else is forthcoming.
A year ago, she would’ve said she always knew what was on Roman Roy’s mind. The wise cracks, the sarcasm—it isn’t subtle. Just a layer of jokes-that-aren’t-funny over a layer of nastiness that looks exactly like the jokes on the tin. The Roy special, with maybe a bit more facade.
But the more she talks to him, the more she’s pretty sure there’s something even smaller, and darker, and nastier underneath it all. She thought she’d had it. Oedipal issues, a dash of shame, some garden-variety impotence, a few tablespoons of actual self-hatred mixed with some genuine-but-buried yearning for better things. He nourishes an appreciation for someone who’s willing to cut open his soft underbelly and stoic enough to ignore the sticky, cancerous mess that pours out.
Sugar and spice and everything nice.
But none of this really fits with that, does it? That person, that picture—he has a short list of things he wants. And he knows he’s not getting any of them alone in her bathroom tonight.
So what the fuck?
For someone who’s so easy to read, it’s been disturbingly difficult to figure out what he’s really thinking, lately.
“Any reason you can’t have a mental breakdown in your own bathroom?”
“Fuck, can we not do the whole ice-queen top bitch thing right now?”
Gerri blinks. Chooses her words carefully. “I wasn’t aware that it bothers you.”
“Yeah, well, it does, Gerri. It fucking bothers me. That you think I’m—that it’s just—” There’s rustling, and another thunk against the door.
Her silence seems to give him fuel to continue. “I asked Kendall and Shiv to like, you know, talk. About. shit. Everything that’s going down—it’s just. I almost died on a fucking business trip for fake money. And for, fucking, what? Fuck. And they just fucking, did these—baby voices? Like Goofy. Fuckin Disney, Goofy. Hyuk hyuk, you wanna talk about feelings?”
The voice is too weird. “That’s appalling, Roman, please stop.”
“You’re telling me.”
His voice pulls her in. Gerri makes careful, deliberate choices. She chooses her words with precision. This instinct to get off her chair and put her back against the door—it’s a bad one. She knows it.
This isn’t anything she can use against Roman. Not in business, anyway. Not in anything that matters.
He just wants comfort. No poison, no barbs.
And that isn’t something she’s prepared to give him. Her head’s on the chopping block, just like everyone else’s. But her back is already against the door, against his, and that’s something. They could probably touch pinkies under the crack.
The whole… Pyramus and Thisbe, Shakespearean vibe of it probably doesn’t bode well. Lovers whispering to each other through a wall, because they can’t be seen together during the day. How does that one end? With the two families, all dead? The couple, torn apart?
Gerri closes her eyes.
It’s fine. This is still to her advantage. And it’s not like she’ll ever have this good of an in with any of the other Roys.
She offers him an olive branch. “So you… want to talk about your feelings?”
“No. Fuck, no. I don’t. Who the fuck am I kidding, anyway? You’re fucking—you’ve been wiping Roy asses for thirty years. You don’t want to hear this.”
“It’s not about whether I want to hear it, Roman.” She’s slipping into the voice she uses when she’s counseling him, playing the mentor to his boy genius. Soothing. Reassuring. Pushing just enough. “Is it smart for you to tell me?”
“No.”
“Well, then,” she says, “keep it to yourself.”
“Right.”
She can’t squash the urge to offer him something. “Look. Your family’s…”
“Insane?”
“Difficult.”
“Right.”
She’s losing him. There’s that vicious boredom in his voice, the tone that always comes before some small cruelty.
What can she tell him that he doesn’t already know?
“Your father’s going to die.”
The pause—she’s piqued his interest. “I’m… not so sure about that.”
“No,” Gerri says, voice getting stronger. “He will. And you and Shiv and Kendall—you won’t.”
“Not so sure about that one either.”
“Just… hang in there. I know it doesn’t feel like it now. I know he has us all trapped here, while he’s tying his noose and deciding which one of us the rest will hang out to try. And I know that you’ve never really… had the chance to live outside of his influence. You don’t know who you are, what you want, outside of him. And that’s… that will end. If you play your cards right, you’ll come out at the top.”
The silence on the other side of the door is petrified.
She knows how he’s going to hear it: CEO for him, his siblings under him, the family company at his beck and call.
That’s fine. It suits her, if he doesn’t ever see the world beyond Waystar.
“Right,” he says eventually. “Thanks. And General Council Ms. Gerri Kellman, Esquire, is going to propel me to the top, yes?”
“Yes,” she says. “If you listen to me.”
Gerri doesn’t think it’s a lie. At least, she doesn’t mean it to be.
She says, “My bones are going to hurt if we stay down there much longer.”
“Oh, alright, old lady. What are you doing down there? Go sleep in your bed, hog it all to yourself. Leave me down here on the floor.”
“You can’t stay there all night.”
“It’s nice knowing that no one can get in. Fearsome dragon Gerri’s guarding the door.”
“I’m not guarding you. I’m going to bed.” Last night’s sleep before facing the firing squad tomorrow, Gerri thinks glumly. “And you should leave.”
“Oh, come on. No one’s paying attention.”
“Someone’s always looking.”
“Okay, Foucault.” But he’s rising. She begins the slow process of getting up herself—shakes out the half-asleep foot, glances at herself in the mirror on the wall.
She holds the door open for him. He brushes past, just a little closer than he needed to be. His eyes fix on the floor.
“Thanks,” he says.
Hold my hand, he had asked, at the beginning of this. Pet my hair.
She takes his hand in hers. It’s dry. Then reaches for him. He flinches away. His hair is lank, greasy, and when she pushes it behind his ear, it falls back out of place almost immediately. She squeezes his captive hand, then lets it drop. He’s still not looking at her. Looking away from her with more fervent intensity, if anything.
“Out,” she says.
“Yeah, yeah, okay.”
In bed at last, she runs his words through her mind, trying to pick up the things he’s not saying. She turns them over, looking for the threads that drive his logic. He always wants something. He’s just a bottomless pit of wanting, like any other billionaire. So what does all this get him?
Nothing. Not on the parameters she’s been using.
The dread builds the next morning at breakfast, as he defends her. It’s too earnest; there’s not an obvious angle. Everyone is running calculations, putting together conclusions that will damn them both. She can’t look at him.
She always thought that she’d be the one to get hurt, in this. Or that they’d both get torn down in some scandal.
But, fuck, he’s going to hang himself before Logan gets to him.
He’s her chosen proxy in the corporate wars. And, well, if a little bit of degradation and mutual masturbation keeps the lights on, that’s been fine by her.
There’s maybe one way they win, take the Waystar-Royco crown for themselves. In that world, she stands behind him, puppeteer regent to the boy king. But in hundreds of others, she’s always figured he’d save his skin, she’d save hers. One big game.
But he might not be as smart as she thought. Maybe Roman is, for once in his stupid little life, serious. About her.
And he’s going to let her use that.
At the end of it, Kendall’s head rolls. Gerri doesn’t feel any safer.
Between the speedboats and the family cars, everyone splits up to go home. They find themselves in the same car to the office. Roman’s doing, but she doesn’t mind. It’s her driver, not on Waystar payroll. Still, they don’t say anything. He falls asleep ever-so-slightly leaning against her. Roman’s breath is warm against her cheek. The driver won’t mention it. Neither will Gerri.
The whole ride, she keeps her eyes wide open.