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@ron_r0cksston3: Go fuck yourslef
@lavenderhayes: how about you stop defending white supremacists, fascists, antisemites, transphobes and homophobes online, you piece of shit? go kill yourself, you’re a disgrace. i’m asking you to leave this space KINDLY
Roman tries to think of a reply. He did, technically, drag a guy who checks all these boxes into the Oval, and defended him, too — vehemently — but there’s no way user @lavenderhayes could possibly know anything about that. It’s either a high school student or a fifty year old woman with an office job, he can’t quite tell by the writing style.
The reason Roman is — or was, he’s probably blocked now — following her is... pretty ridiculous. Tabitha has the weirdest Twitter account: it has about two thousand followers and it’s private. Nobody gets in this little clique, nobody gets out, and the rats leak her priceless 3 AM thoughts to pages like “tabitha hayes every day”, “tabitha pierce truther” and, well, miss @lavenderhayes.
She can dress, she's kinda funny, she can play up the socialité angle when she needs to, she smokes weed. Of course she's widely popular in narrow circles.
Roman was still following Tabs from his main account — @roman, blue check, 500k followers. That is until he got hammered this one time and tried to send her a dick pic: he got really nervous, so his finger slipped, so he pressed the wrong button, so he accidentally unsubscribed and lost access to her for all eternity.
He could have just asked Tabs to let him back in, she wouldn’t mind. For whatever reason, this was not the option.
The reason was that he ghosted her. She was the one to triple text him:
1. A meme with an ugly weeping cat (they were going strong back then);
2. “Havent seen you in a while! You alright, dear?” (a gentle nudge with a disregard for apostrophes);
3. “Did we break up? No worries if not ;-)” (which sounded like Tabitha would be really bummed out if they were still in a relationship, so Roman backed out).
Roman just had a lot of shit on his platter. Plus he convinced himself he was in love with Gerri (he was) and then with Mencken (he was, too) because they both took the lead in their own way, gave him clear instructions and sprinkled some praise on top of that. Roman was going fucking feral over performing a task correctly.
But then he fired Gerri on a whim and she found herself a geriatric boyfriend, and Mencken — whom Roman didn’t fuck, no matter what Reddit said — started posting vlog-style videos with his Ellie on the GoJo app. Apparently, this seasoned politician was not going to leave his white, blonde, conventionally attractive and age appropriate wife of of twenty five years. Didn't matter if he swore on the Bible that he would.
The only reason they didn’t have sex was that Roman had a panic attack at the worst possible time. Mencken was first excited but quickly got weirded out; he called his wife in the middle of it all, asked her for directions, put a phone to Roman's ear and made him listen to Ellie count from one to ten and from ten to one. Mrs “Not Really a Nazi: Just Socially Liberal and Fiscally Conservative!” was pretty great at pinkwashing her husband, and her attempt at bootleg therapy left a pleasant impression on Roman. Which wasn't saying much: he liked most older women who showed him any amount of compassion.
On the whole, though, it was a weird scenario to find himself in.
Infidelity was part of the appeal. Having any kind of relationship with Mencken was wrong. Roman thought he was making his WASP lady cry herself to sleep and overdose on diet pills, which was horrible enough to make him at least half-hard. Turns out Roman wasn't significant enough to be kept secret. At some point Mencken pressed two fingers to his neck, found the heart rate satisfactory, took the phone away and started talking to Ellie over Roman's head. Something about stacking the Congress, helping Ed Inglewood secure that Speaker nomination, and then about why "the dress was ugly" — this one seemed to rattle Mencken more than his semi-legal machiavellian hijinks.
From what Roman could gather, they were talking about Ellie's dress for the inaugural ball. It was supposed to somewhat resemble her wedding dress — probably to remind everyone that those two fossils have been married since slavery was abolished. Mencken loved it, Ellie didn't, the stakes were literally life or death, and Roman wasn't a part of the conversation. He sat on the queen sized hotel bed with his dress pants around his ankles and felt more and more itchy every passing second. The Menckens let him jump on the bed, it was a mistake, and Roman knew it before any of them did.
The worst part was waiting for them both to realize it, then blame him for all the drool, hair and stench.
Anyways, that’s where Roman was in terms of romance. Grace was in the past. He fumbled Gerri. President Jeryd Mencken wasn’t soulmate material and fucked off the second he moved to the White House from his #Menckave in DC. Tabitha — well, Roman left her on read and was too embarrassed to try and come back.
So he was stalking miss @lavenderhayes instead. Was she a cunt? Yes! Total bitch! Was she dedicated to the cause and serial killer level of meticulous? Also yes. Roman did appreciate that.
There really wasn’t a better way to keep the tabs on his Tabs.
The only issue were all those heavy lesbian undertones and vicious hatred towards him. They never went public — Grace, for example, really wanted that sweet sweet exposure and Roman didn’t mind, but with Tabitha neither of them gave a fuck — so their relationship was, so to say, plausibly deniable. There were some paparazzi pictures, and Roman only found out that they looked cozy when he saw how furious @lavenderhayes was about those shots.
It was all pretty chaste. They held hands. Tabs rubbed his back. She leaned in so that he could get on his tippy toes to plant a kiss at the crown of her hair. He never just opened a car door for her — instead he got out, took a few steps back, jumped and slid over the hood of the car, made a faggy little knicksen, and then opened it.
@Lavenderhayes hated all these pictures, but there was this one photo, grainy and blurry, that made lose her fucking marbles. It looked like Tabitha pushed Roman up against the wall and kissed him right behind the ear, and he had the stupidest fucking grin on his face. User @lavenderhayes claimed that hilarious queen Tabitha was simply telling this ugly nazi moron a joke — maybe as an act of kindness and charity for the depraved.
Really they were both leaving some gala, drunk on champagne (Roman being the nearly-sober one, for a change) and high on the feeling of superiority after an hour of shit talking.
It was the best. No one could come close to Tabs in this department — except for his siblings, maybe, but that was different. Tabitha didn’t have that extra layer of Shakespearean tragedy to her and no insatiable void where her heart was supposed to be either — she was whole, she was fun, she was cool, she was free. Hard to stay in the cage and love it when you're like that.
Roman’s driver was supposed to pick them up, but something came up and they had to wait for a while.
The air was cold, it was after two in the morning, the lights were yellow, Tabs had this insane emerald floor-length dress with a halter neckline and wore her hair down. Roman wore a tux and clutched what used to be a bowtie in his fist. Tabitha was hobbling down the stairs, (which Roman took as an invitation to put one hand above her waist and the other on her stomach) hissing and swearing.
"Nope. Fuck that," she mumbled eventually.
"Five more steps. We can do it."
Tabitha grabbed his arm for balance and took her suede pumps off. Shit, maybe the feminazis were right and heels were a torture device, who knows.
"You're embarrassing yourself, you know?"
She was, she really was, so Roman had no choice but to death-stare anyone who gave them too much attention and take his shoes off too. The stairs were ice cold and the pavement was probably full of AIDS, and he couldn’t let himself endanger his girlfriend like that. He squatted in front of her, by some miracle got Tabs in his shoes — manhandling a deer would have been easier — and stayed in his socks. He lost feeling in his feet pretty much immediately and decided that all this "good boyfriend" schtick was the worst.
Roman really couldn't see the appeal.
They nearly claimed victory over the stairs, but his shoes were a size too big for Tabs and the dress was too long without the inches that the heels gave her, so she lost her footing and tripped. Roman refused to let go of her, which made them both struggle for balance — long story short, they fought like lions but couldn’t find it after all.
He took most of the impact and hit the back of his head when they bumped into the wall. Tabs was alright, though. The Astounding Worm from the newest “Waystar Studios” knock-off could only dream of catching his girl like that.
And then Tabs started laughing.
Dad would’ve called that a hyena laugh (maybe not from that piece of tail, but he wouldn’t have let Roman off the hook that easily) so he just chuckled with his lips pressed together. But then she looked down at her fucking clown shoes clashing with her dress, and, apparently, it seemed so ridiculous to her that she just lost it.
Tabitha was crouching, one hand on Roman’s shoulder and the other on her stomach, screeching.
“Pfffhat the hell. You moron,” Roman grinned. He almost hated how soft his voice sounded.
He asked for Gerri's hand in marriage and came up with the most elaborate plan for Mencken to divorce Ellie Callahan soon after. Naturally, he was ready to marry Tabs back then too. One more giggle and he was sure he’d pop the question for the third time that week — because there she was, hammered, bursting with laughter, gasping for air, pointing at his shoes and hers, mumbling something, then biting her lower lip and giggling again. “Yeah, yeah, hilarious. Get your drunk butt over there, Steve’s gonna be here in-”
So she did.
She got her drunk ass over here, then placed her hands on the sides of Roman’s neck — zero pressure, just the contrast between the warmth of her fingers and the scalding, exhilarating cold of the many many statement rings that knocked the air out of Roman’s lungs — and then planted a kiss behind his ear.
It was soft and dry, so Roman pat her back (closer to the shoulderblades than to the waist) and kept calling her names. Affectionately.
Then it got wet and insistent, and Roman wasn't good with anything like that: those things were icky. He was dry-humping things instead of jerking off with lube until his late twenties.
There was a bit of tongue — warm, wet, sloppy, finding a pulsing vein and pressing against it — then she grazed her teeth along that spot, and it wasn’t painful or scary or unwelcome or anything like that. There was no danger. It's just that his drunk girlfriend was getting horny, is all. Then she pressed her lips against the glistening wet patch on his neck, opened them, (maybe yawned, Roman thinks she did) took a bit and shut them back, pinching the skin.
Lightly, as usual. She wasn’t some six foot two asshole grabbing him by the neck, or some miserable menopausal cunt refusing to leave his room before she taught him a little trick. So it was not impossible to enjoy it. Whatever. Roman could even say, with some confidence, that he didn't mind the kiss.
His heart was pounding, lungs ceased to work and the hands were shaking so hard he thought he caught Parkinson’s instead of Foot AIDS. Roman couldn’t bring himself move them further south, though. He wanted to. Tabs had this great fucking dress on, he spent the entire evening eyeing her waist and he wanted to touch it. He could see himself power through the thing.
But he didn’t.
“Hey,” it was barely audible. “I'm an irresistible sex beast, can't really blame you, but you can can you stop now. Like for r-”
Roman really didn’t need to blabber like that. He wasn’t planning to, it just happened, and he was still pleading (crotch on fire, throat closing from guilt and regret) when Tabitha took a step back, rummaged with the fabric on her hips to lift up the skirt a bit and scratched her ankle with the heel. It was like nothing happened. She was drunk, her eyes were all droopy, and both her ego and body count were big enough to handle Roman. It probably wasn't anything out of the ordinary for Tabitha. She wouldn't get mad at him or give him the silent treatment — she never did. It probably didn't even occur to her, Ms Healthy & Well-Adjusted.
Roman knew that, technically, he was a virtue signaling teasing cunt leading a nice girl on. Nothing happened, but if anything did — later, with a different person — it would have been his fault. He still pulled her back in, hid his face in the crook of her neck and grabbed a handful of hair at the back of her head.
Maybe not even grabbed. Just closed his fist around a mass of silky curls, held them, then relaxed his hand and felt them bounce back.
It’s not that Roman hated whatever just happened. He didn’t, he fucking loved it — more so, he wanted to love it. The picture that @lavenderhayes wanted to scrub from the internet like that one Beyoncé photo said as much: Roman Roy was happy during sexy times for exactly one second, and then immediately made shit weird. But he had this one Normie Foreplay second (no power-trips, no degrading, no uncertainty) and he hung on to it for dear life.
Later Roman sticked to what he did best. He spread his fingers, scratched the back of Tabitha's head again and kept going at it until Steve finally drove by.
Roman opened the car door for Tabs. Got in after. Examined her heels for scratches or bloody spots from the blisters — there were some — because he just had to do something with his hands. Then Tabitha finally passed out on his shoulder, which was very graceful of her: Roman didn't think he could handle any sort of eye contact right now.
At some point Roman threatened Steve to fucking sew his feet to the pedals if he kept ramming the dicktires to the pussholes on the road and disturbing his girlfriend.
He was fully sober by then.
User @lavenderhayes blocked @ron_r0cksston3, but not @timothylipton. What a fool she was, thinking she could escape Roman Roy's innumerous accounts... She was no match for him: he had a whole stash of SIM-cards from his past life when he was hanging out with Still-Congressman-Mencken. He was very particular about leaks and provided Roman with a bunch of burners at no cost. It didn't mean shit, Mencken was keeping himself, his wife and his two adult children safe, but when Roman had the slightest chance to percieve something as care and generosity, he did.
So @timothylipton was checking out his ex-girlfriend's insights instead of writing an award-winning novel about the anxieties of modern life and love in the age of social media. Honestly, Roman thought that "Electric Circus" had one hell of a plot, but then he met Joy Mencken, a freshman at Barnard, at the Noguchi Museum. She proceeded to cheerfully describe exactly 7 novels that had the same premise, as well as one "the 1975" album. Her daddy wasn't there to make sure that no Roy dirt rubbed off on the baby, but Joy spoke of him fondly.
Maybe Mencken didn't get high on his own redpilled supply: Joy was in her element surrounded by things Mencken would classify as degenerate art. She didn't look like a girl who was paranoid about her father coming out of nowhere and berating her for crying over a hairy blob of slime on a pedestal. Mencken would probably grit his teeth, smile and nod.
The thing about humans is that they tolerate (to some extent, at least) each other's peculiar behaviors. With dogs any anomaly is a ticket straight to the vet or the shelter.
Joy was almost twenty years younger than Tabitha, but nonchalance and modern art brought them together, even if only briefly. Roman barely managed to save that one selfie she and Tabs took together (Joy deleted it, for whatever reason): 0,5 lens, both blonde and blue-eyed. Joy had her father's brows, nose and facial expressions, so it all felt a bit like a Roman-Roy-ex-simposium.
@Lavenderhayes wasn't too pleased about this picture, so she rolled out a whole thread dedicated to the fact that the sins of the father were not the sins of the daughter (one), and that Tabitha didn't even know who the girl was (two, self-contradictory), plus it was virtually impossible to background check every single member of HayesHouse for nazi allegations.
Roman tries to think of an ice-breaker. HayesHouse? Poor man's Beyhive?
Doesn't send it.
He doesn't know what the fuck is wrong with him, why he won't just reach out — maybe he's a masochist and a moron who likes being stuck in a cage. Maybe there's an unspoken understanding that cages are fit for dogs, but a bird will soon get bored there. There's no space for her to spread the wings, and even though its's a 6,4 thousand square foot cage with floor to ceiling windows, it's still stiffling. The dog is fun, yes, but when he barks it's loud and annoying, and when he tries to join in on a warble he just wails now. He's a huge embarassment and she can't even hold a leash in her beak — this last one's on her, though. Stupid fucking bird.
Tabitha doesn't post much these days, which makes Roman feel uneasy — she doesn't appear in any of their shared friends' posts or stories either, and by the end of the third week of the incommunicado Roman has half a mind to ask Mencken to ask his daughter to reach out. It's improbable that they kept in touch, and, on top of that, it's highly unlikely Mencken will dignify him with a reply. He's the fucking President, and Roman is not even fucking the President.
The drought gets so severe that @lavenderhayes starts posting throwbacks.
First that jewel-toned green dress Tabitha wore to the gala, then the same dress on the model. Roman's neck feels strange, and massaging the tension out doesn't help much.
Then a link to the dupe of that opalescent little hairclip that left Tabitha's neck exposed back at the Pierces' funny little house. The neck was there, open, weirdly smooth-looking in dim yellow lights, and Roman didn't do anything about it except stare and drool. He had a step-by-step guide, didn't do shit.
One of user @lavernderhayes's most notable fails was a resurfaced rumor from Deuxmois that Tabs used such and such perfumes. The guesses were all off, though — fucking amateurs! — and Roman knows it because he has a nose for these things. The feeling doesn't last long, but for a few minutes he's beaming with pride. He knows something that all those other cunts don't. If someone asked him, he'd give the right answer.
What Tabitha really does is go with the flow and mix shit together like Walter White: high-end, Lush, something she stole from her dad. She has a relationship with her dad: everyone fucking does, apparently. First baby Joy, then his ex — maybe that's why they're relatively well-adjusted and he's cruising through Dante's Inferno.
Roman knows that if she wears the same thing but smells a bit different, it means that she finally managed to fuck someone. Like Naomi back in Tern Haven.
It was fair. Roman knew he scared her back there, in bed, and then bored her when he refused to let her figure him out. Tabitha wanted to sort some blocks by size and color and put them into holes of different shapes, and Roman had no fucking clue how to play that game. Maybe things would've gone better if Tabs suddenly decided to play catch.
But they were both cool and nonchalant and grown up about this shit. No, he didn't eat for forty eight hours after that. Yes, that perfume combo is, to this day, his favorite, because when Tabitha came down for breakfast she was still riding the endorphin wave. Someone made her happy and content, which authomatically made him happy and content — on some deeper primal level. A bit closer to the surface he was, well, starving himself.
He makes his personal shopper get those three bottles and gets halfway through them, never getting the scent quite right because of the semi-voluntary celibacy. Then @lavenderhayes finds herself in "a bit of a controversy".
The Mercury, one of Waystar's many tabloids, gets some pictures of Tabs and Naomi. Would have been better if they were just nudes, Roman fucking swears.
They're not.
First thing Roman notices is that Naomi swaps her bob for a pixie cut. She's wearing a black oversized blazer, black tee and has sunglasses on — huge and, yes, black. She keeps hitting her vape, too. Tabitha's wearing a black track jacket and has her hair in a bun (that hairclip is the hairclip, he remembers it). They both don't have any makeup on and Tabs looks like she's been crying, or maybe the vape has some ganja in it, that's not out of the realm of possibility either. But there's something about how pale she is, how sharp the "nasolabial folds" look (Roman has a very vague idea of where these are, he just knows Grace got rid of them with botox, but "lines" is a bad word, according to Mum) and how tired and glossy her eyes are that makes Roman want to peel every inch of his skin off with a swiss knife. Or give Tabs a hug. Probably both — first get rid of the skin and then lunge at her, red, hairless, naked and bleeding.
...Maybe it's not that surprising that Tabs left (she didn't, Roman self-sabotaged, folded in on himself, and locked himself in the penthouse).
Whatever. Doesn't matter. What matters is that the girls are in Italy, visiting Camilla Pierce's grave, and @lavenderhayes has a lot to say about that. She goes on and on, the body language expert that she is: the girls are communicating that they've been together for a long time, Tabitha's so distraught because she's such an empath who truly cares about Naomi, and, by the way, she never once visited Logan Roy's mausoleum, so it's time to stop straightwashing the poor woman. She wasn't in the church when Roman Roy fucked up the eulogy and made for a viral cringe clip that got edited and laid onto Skrillex-type-beat to oblivion.
@timothylipton: Oh you fucking CUNT
His hands are shaking and he can't think of anything better to say. There's a lump in his throat that he can't swallow or breathe away, too.
@timothylipton: Is this all a fucking joke to you? These are real people UNLIKE YOU YOU FUCKING LOCUST PARASITE. FEEDING OFF PEOPLE'S GRIEF. GO SIT ON A FUCKING SCREWDRIVER YOU WORTHLESS FUCKING HOLE. KILL YOURSELF
Then @roman reposts @timothylipton's rant. Just for shits and giggles, and maybe to solidify his position and send a message to his ex: he's chivalrous and savvy with the new ethics. Old ethics, the one that frowns upon the whole "You play dead, I play necrophile" thing? Not so much. But he knows when the tabloids and twitter users cross the line, that's for sure.
For about a week the entire app slams him for promoting suicide and sexual violence against minors, even though he's totally in the right, and then people move on. Roman's not sure Tabitha's even vaguely aware of it all: she told him once that Naomi doesn't read or watch the news — not any of it — and lives in somewhat of a bubble since the car crash. Nae-Nae reads the architectural and literary digests, but that's about it.
Roman fucking hates that woman. Truly. He thinks she ruined his nice surprise for dad sometime in his past life (bitch), stole his girlfriend (homewrecker), and kept Ken on coke when he could have gone clean and found bliss (enabler). This last one is a stretch, even Roman knows that, but blaming shit on Naomi is fun and easy.
He still hopes she stays off social media, though.
His outbursts go unpunished (hooray!) and unrewarded (oh, no). Roman sits, waits, slouches, occasionally humps shit, eats dry cereal straight from the box, waits, takes himself out for walks — Audi keys in his teeth — and waits again. Every day it's more of the same until @lavenderhayes finally posts again.
The girls are vacationing in some kind of Secondworldistan, but they're both rich and white, so it reads as exotic and even refined, not trashy. Tabitha's drunk off her shit on some local alcohol. She has a shot in her hand and likely can't feel her face or move the upper lip — Roman knows how she is when she's had a bit too much. She stumbles over nothing, crashes into Naomi — Secondworldistani men cheer — and now, to Naomi's dismay, there's vodka and green apple syrup dripping down her v-neck tee. She curses through laughter, then Tabitha pulls Naomi in and presses her tongue flat against her ribs, trailing up to the collarbone. Then the video cuts, thankfully.
Roman doesn't unsubscribe.
He's got his own Middle-East related memories, and when combined with jealousy, claustrophobia, loss and concern for Tabs queering out in the worst possible setting, they're just enough to make him hard enough.