Chapter Text
Kendall presses his head harder into his knees. The air conditioning in the car is white noise in his ears, not quite muffling the sound of the driver shifting uncertainly in his seat. Kendall wishes he’d stay still. It’s not hard.
Color bursts behind his eyelids, tiny pops of green and blue as he applies pressure to the jelly of his eyes. He wants a drink. He wants a smoke. He wants to be back in New York, striding along in Frank’s wake and listening to the lower-floor staffers whisper as he passes. And he wants his father to –
Someone raps on the window next to his head, sharp and perfunctory. Kendall startles to attention, blinking away black spots. His mother is frowning through the tint at him, lips pursed, apparently having emerged from her summer afternoon white wine haze long enough to wonder about the car idling in the driveway.
Delaying the inevitable, Kendall rolls the window down halfway with a numb finger. Heat pours through the gap, and his scalp prickles with sweat instantly.
“Kendall,” says Caroline, “Armand tells me that you’ve been out here for twenty minutes.”
“Uh,” says Kendall, unable to summon a reasonable explanation, “yeah.”
Caroline’s eyebrows tighten in dry incredulity. “Well, come on, then,” she says expectantly, stepping back from the car.
Armand, crisp in his summer uniform, opens the door. Kendall unfolds himself begrudgingly.
When his sneakers hit the pale pavement, a death knell sounds in his head. This is the end of his summer: shuffled off to the fucking Summer Palace with his mother and his kid siblings. No more scotch filched from his father’s office and no more reports reviewed with Frank’s approval and no more flying in on the weekends to gloat at Shiv and Roman.
Caroline embraces him briefly, bony and cool. Sometimes, on parent weekends, Kendall sees the other boys at school trying to peel their mothers off for a bit of breathing space. They get ribbed for it, for their mothers hanging on them like bad dates. Kendall has thankfully never encountered this problem, mostly because his mother does not come to parent weekends.
He follows Caroline inside as she promises to have Lina fix him something light. He doesn’t want to eat, hasn’t wanted to eat since yesterday, and he’s been up all night, so it’s basically the same day. The point is, he’s not hungry, but Caroline will doubtless drift away before following through, so he doesn’t bother to dissuade her of the notion.
None of the lights are on. Kendall can hear Shiv laughing several rooms away, a lone ghost in the world’s fanciest haunted house. She falls silent in an instant, leaving Kendall alone with their mother in the foyer. He watches Armand cart his bags away to avoid eye contact.
“I’m so sorry about the internship,” Caroline says. She sounds like she means it, which is a true testament to the quality of her finishing school. Kendall grimaces. “No, really. It was wretched of your father to toss you out on your ear.”
It’s been like this for a couple of years now, always “your father” and never “Logan,” neither of them staying at the same house long. Words like “wretched” and “beastly” from Caroline, words like “cunt” and “frigid” from Logan. Shiv and Roman are too young to notice. Kendall isn’t.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” he manages dully.
“Of course not,” says Caroline, and that ought to put the matter fully out of discussion. His mother loves an easy out. She turns to meander off into the depths of the house again, saying, “Your siblings are in the dayroom. Siobhan’s in a foul mood.”
This means that Shiv is in a normal mood. Kendall decides to take his chances.
When he reaches the dayroom, it’s only Shiv, strewn across an armchair and obviously waiting for him. She’s in white cotton, a dainty little dress with tiny rosebuds on it. Kendall supposes it’s the envy of little girls across America, which means that Shiv hates it passionately and already has grass stains all over it. She probably went outside specifically to grab handfuls of foliage to rub into it.
“Hi, Kendall,” she drawls. She’s spent the summer banishing every trace of their mother’s accent. Her new empty-headed East Coast shrillness is grating. “I heard Daddy fired you.”
“No, he didn’t,” Kendall says sharply before he can stop himself. Fuck this. Twenty hours ago he was basically C-suite. Now he’s arguing with a ten-year-old.
“Did too,” she sings. “I asked him.”
Kendall goes hot. Logan calls the kids sometimes in the evening, maybe once every two weeks. Usually, Kendall is in the next room over in the apartment, listening to his father dote on Shiv and spare a few words for Roman. Now – well.
“He said you gargled major balls,” Shiv says, still prim as anything.
Kendall is never not going straight to his room again. He’s sweating now, palms slick despite the climate control. “I did not – I did not gargle major balls, Shiv. I messed up and he overreacted.”
Shiv’s nonexistent eyebrows shoot up, and she crosses her arms in front of her skinny chest.
That’s when Kendall sees the bite marks.
His sister’s forearms are dappled with purple and red, tiny divots in her pale skin in the exact shape of teeth with the left canine missing. They weren’t there two weeks ago. He reaches out to grab her wrist, but she slips out of his grasp, tumbling over the side of the chair to stand behind it and scowl up at him, eyes nuclear blue against colorless lashes.
“Hey,” Kendall says, trying to sound commanding. “What are you and Roman doing to each other?”
“Ooo,” says Shiv with a mocking lilt, “someone’s playing Connor. Quit trying to change the subject. What, did you and Frank get caught sucking each other off?”
“Shivvy, don’t say that,” he snaps.
She just barely ducks her head, red flaring in her cheeks. “Your hands are wet,” she says flatly after a moment, scrubbing her wrist off performatively on her dress.
They pull faces at each other. Then, Shiv draws herself up artfully and says, “It’s a game. It’s called Bitey, and you can’t tell.”
Kendall thinks about his options for telling. They’re not great. At least this way he has an in on the situation. “Sure, sure.”
Shiv eyes him, all juvenile suspicion. “Prove it.”
“What?”
“Play it with me. Now.”
Kendall glances at the dim doorframe. Shiv steps out from behind the chair, staring expectantly.
“Right. Uh, okay. What are the rules?”
Shiv beams, gap-toothed. She’s missing her right canine, Roman’s mirror image. “You bite me. I bite you. Until one of us can’t take it.”
Kendall blinks. He doesn’t know what he expected.
“Come on, Kendall,” Shiv says. “Afraid I’ll win?”
He’s not. She’s ten. She probably has the jaw strength of a blobfish.
He’ll humor her. If he doesn’t, she’ll be up his ass for the rest of the summer. Roman, too, no doubt.
Fuck it.
He rolls up his sleeve.
Shiv clambers up on the chair to match his height and sticks her arm in his face.
“Don’t bite where there’s already a bite. That’s cheating,” she commands.
This is easier said than done – Roman has gnawed on her like a chew toy. It's a given that his arms look similar. Eventually, Kendall finds an unmarred patch of skin near her elbow.
Shiv, impatient, grabs his arm, hauls it up to her mouth, and sinks her teeth in.
Kendall makes a strangled yelping noise. Shiv bugs her eyes out at him and jerks her head at her own arm. The movement makes her teeth twist in his flesh, and Kendall muffles another sound of pain by taking Shiv’s forearm between his teeth.
It’s horribly small. She tastes like sweat and grass, and he can’t bring himself to bite down fully. She can tell, too: her grip on his arm is so painful that he's seeing stars, and she’s making low, frustrated noises as she tries to shove her arm up against his teeth.
“Bite, coward,” she says around his arm. “Daddy’s right. You don’t have any fucking follow-through – ”
She breaks off with a screech, falling away from him and down into the chair, clutching her arm close to her chest.
Kendall is breathing hard, heart pounding. There’s blood on Shiv’s fingers.
“Shit, Shivvy, I’m sorry, I’m – ”
Shiv is looking at him with pure shock. “I’ve never lost before,” she says, something like delight twisting her mouth up into a smile. “You have got to do that to Roman.”
She’s out of the room like a shot.
Kendall sits down on the Turkish carpet and thinks about crying.