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Noise outside the room woke Lizzie with a sense of déjà vu. For one moment she allowed herself to fantasize that it had all been a dream. That she had not woken in the night to find Tommy having a seizure in their bathroom. That Ruby had not fallen sick. That she had not…
It only lasted a moment before reality reasserted herself. She was not in their bedroom in Arrow House, she was in a hotel room. She’d always known she was—the unfamiliar scent of the sheets didn’t allow for confusion about this being the big house—but it had been nice to allow herself to imagine for once.
She opened her eyes and looked around. The room was still bright—they’d fallen asleep without turning out any of the lights. She was lying tucked under the covers where she’d retreated after climbing back onto the bed to shout at Tommy. Tommy himself was asleep with his back to her, curled in on himself like a wounded animal. Neither of them had said a word since she’d finished her tirade.
The sound came again. It was from the hallway which meant it was no concern of hers—Tommy in all his fastidious paranoia would not have neglected to lock the door when they’d first come in here. Still, she didn’t think she could just lie here waiting for reality to crash down on her even more than it already had. She pushed aside the blankets, climbed out of bed and padded across the room. Tommy had both locked the door and slid the chain through it’s loop. She undid the locks and pulled the door open.
The sounds turned out to be a couple out in the hall. The man was laughing and drunkenly trying to unlock the door to a room further down the hall. The woman was smiling a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes. When the man got the door open and they went inside Lizzie caught a flash of chalk on the bottom of the woman’s shoe.
Lizzie closed the door quickly. She had plenty of experience with nights like the one that woman was having. She’d fucked Mosley on a night much like the one that woman was having. She leaned her forehead against the door and tried to hold back a sigh. The woman was unfamiliar to her. There had been a time when she’d at least seen all the working girls in Birmingham, but that had been years ago. She’d never thought to feel guilty about that before but now she did. As if she didn’t already have enough to feel guilty about.
“Did you lock the door again?” Tommy asked, his voice thick with sleep.
She jumped even though she knew Tommy was incapable of sleeping when there was someone else awake and moving in the room and therefore would have woken the instant she got out of bed.
“Yes,” she said, even though she hadn’t. She turned the lock and replaced the chain. She padded across the room and pulled on a robe, tying it tightly around her waist.
Tommy rolled onto his back and massaged his temples, one hand shading his eyes from the light of the lamps. “What time is it?” he groaned.
She checked the clock. “About one thirty,” she said. “Someone was having trouble getting into their room. That’s what woke me.”
Tommy hummed vaguely, obviously disinterested.
“Have you eaten today?” she asked instead of pushing it, fumbling through the papers from the hotel sitting on a dressing table.
“Lizzie…” Tommy groaned.
“I haven’t eaten either,” she said. “I think we can still order room service as long as we don’t mind something small.”
Tommy just sighed. His arm was draped over his eyes now. He was huffy with annoyance, which was a change from how silent he’d been before they’d fallen asleep. She smiled vaguely as she dialed room service. Maybe he was annoyed that she obviously planned to stay up which meant he couldn’t go back to sleep either.
Her smile vanished quickly as she gave their order to room service. As humorous as the idea of Tommy Shelby actually wanting to sleep was, he obviously had a headache coming on. It was too early to tell where on the spectrum from “tense-jawed and snappish with discomfort” to “immobilized with agony” this one was going to fall, though the fact he was already sensitive to light didn’t bode well. Lizzie hadn’t realized just how much Tommy had been using booze to treat his headaches until he’d gone sober and how common they actually were often worried her.
More broadly, Tommy had been making her nervous for days. He was grieving but so was she so that didn’t make her nervous. What made her nervous was that he had also giving off “Tommy Shelby with a secret.” When he’d introduced Duke during the family meeting, she’d thought that was the secret for a few minutes and almost been relieved under her incandescent rage. However, the air of a secret kept on.
She wanted to kick something. She knew all Tommy’s mannerisms and so many other things about him. She could tell when he was anxious or wary or in pain. She knew how to tell when he hadn’t slept, or when he hadn’t eaten, or when he’d been so involved in his plots he’d half-forgotten he even existed. But she could only see the shapes of his emotions not the actual thoughts behind them. She had the feeling she could figure out what was going on if given enough time, but she didn’t want to work it out for herself. She wanted him to fucking tell her what was going on himself.
She’d fantasized about throwing Tommy down and screaming at him until his ice mask broke and he finally showed emotion for years. She’d done that tonight, but it had not been at all like she’d thought it would be. She’d screamed in his face and his expression hadn’t even changed. She knew that he felt guilty but she didn’t want to know he felt guilty, she wanted to see that he felt guilty. She wanted him to trust her enough to tell her what the secret was or just to fucking breakdown and cry. She wanted proof she was married to a real person not a fucking stone statue.
She pushed a breath out between her clenched teeth. There was no point in being angry. She’d already been angry once tonight and there was no point in trying to scream Tommy Shelby into acting like a normal human being. She knew he definitely had emotions even if he didn’t express them normally; she should be able to just be okay with that.
There was a knock at the door and Lizzie went to answer it. This late at night, all she’d been able order were small things like finger sandwiches. They’d also sent up another bottle of champagne, though Lizzie hadn’t asked for it. It was obvious the hotel staff’s impression of what exactly she and Tommy were doing tonight which had led to them ordering food this late only partially aligned with reality. She shook her head.
“What is it?” Tommy asked. A pause. “Is that another bottle of champagne? Can you bring it over here?”
Hearing him ask for booze was disconcerting and the fact it was disconcerting was disconcerting. Every time Tommy had refused a drink in the last four years it had been like looking at some kind of foreign creature who had crawled into his body and taken up residence, but now that he was behaving like himself again, it seemed just as foreign. She wanted to scream.
Far be it from her to try to talk him out of drinking. “Fine,” she said. “But use a fucking glass, at least.”
Tommy did use a glass, but he also turned the light on his side of the bed out when he got up to get said glass and to find his shorts. She tried not to let that worry her, but Tommy would be a lot easier to be angry with if he wasn’t so much of a mess all the time.
Tommy returned to the bed and looked up at her. “What?” he asked.
She realized she was just standing in the middle of the room with the tray watching him. “Nothing,” she said and carried the tray over to the bed.
She and Tommy didn’t ever eat in bed. It was the sort of luxury that she figured people as filthy rich as they were engaged in, but it had never been something either of them had indulged in. Of course, that made sense for Tommy since things like breakfast in bed required some baseline of relaxation which he was likely incapable of achieving, but Lizzie had never done it either because it just felt opulent and unnecessary. She’d gotten used to many things she would have never expected to get used to since marrying Tommy, but she found she’d prefer this wasn’t one of them.
Still, there was a first time for everything, she supposed.
Tommy had brought two glasses and he poured one for her. She took it without comment and selected a sandwich off the tray. She was not hungry and hadn’t been since they’d taken Ruby to the hospital, but she knew she had to eat anyway. The sandwich tasted like paste, but she forced herself to chew and swallow.
After a moment Tommy took a sandwich as well and nibbled experimentally on the corner. She was briefly confused as to why he’d decided to eat without her pushing him about it, but then she realized he was feeling guilty and this was him extending an olive branch, just not the olive branch she wanted from him. She focused on her sandwich and ruthlessly suppressed the urge to tell him that he knew what she wanted from him and if he wanted her forgiveness all he had to do what give it to her.
So, they didn’t speak. The silence stretched on. It was uncomfortable, but still not as bad as it had once been, back when they’d have screaming fights and then not speak to each other for weeks. She was ashamed of those fights now. Ruby and Charlie had heard some of them and those arguments hadn’t contained anything children should have to hear from their parents.
She squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to ward off the memories. Back then she’d told Tommy that Ruby was scared of him, but she hadn’t mentioned there had been times in the aftermaths of those fights when Ruby had been scared of her too. The memory brought tears to her eyes. Some of her earliest memories had also been of her parents screaming at each other when she was supposed to be asleep. Lizzie had so badly wanted Ruby to have a better life—she’d agreed to marry Tommy primarily for that purpose, after all—she wasn’t sure she’d ever recover from just how completely she’d failed.
When she opened her eyes again, Tommy was watching her. “What are you—” he began then his voice cut off.
She could actually see the moment the migraine hit. Tommy swayed like he’d been punched and swallowed hard, face gone green and waxy with nausea. He downed the rest of his champagne as a shot and promptly choked on the carbonation. She pounded him on the back a few times until he stopped coughing and was almost relieved by the distraction from her ruminations.
“Fuck,” Tommy muttered when he could breathe again, running a hand down his face. He kept his head turned away from her. She knew he was avoiding looking directly at the lit lamp on her side of the bed, but so soon after everything else that had happened tonight, it felt like he was avoiding looking at her. She ruthlessly squashed the renewed desire to break something.
Tommy reached for the champagne bottle and poured another glass. He drank this one a bit more slowly, wincing. “I fucking hate champagne.” He grumbled.
“Yes, well if you want something else you’re going to have to order it yourself,” she said. She could hear the concern in her voice and evidently Tommy could too because he gave her a glare which was half a squint of pain.
“I’m fine,” he insisted even though he obviously wasn’t. Even in this, she wasn’t allowed in.
Perhaps she would have called him on that, if she hadn’t already done it once tonight and had no success. Instead she just got up, put aside the tray of sandwiches and turned off the rest of the lights in the room. She checked the door one last time—if she was entirely honest with herself, the doors always being locked was one of the few places where she was as paranoid as Tommy was—and then climbed back into bed.
Tommy had already sunk back down onto the bed, his back to her and the blankets pulled up around his head. At least he didn’t appear to be planning to finish off the bottle of champagne. She allowed herself a brief hope that maybe she wouldn’t have to be the one to drive them both home in the morning—she was not a very good driver, but over Tommy’s years of sobriety she’d learned there was a point at which her couple-driving-lessons-years-ago-and-never-had-enough-practice-since driving was safer than Tommy’s Tommy-Shelby-with-a-migraine driving. Still, she knew better than to get her hopes up about anything. Or at least she kept telling herself that and then being proven wrong.
She folded herself back into bed and lay with her back to Tommy staring out into the dark room.
After a stretching silence, Tommy shifted. “Lizzie?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“I really am sorry,” he paused. “For everything.”
She waited, but he didn’t go on, didn’t let her in. She hadn’t really expected him to, but she was still disappointed anyway.