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Redford is stunningly handsome. It’s the sort of handsome you can’t look at directly for too long at a stretch lest it blind you, like staring at the sun during an eclipse. Blindness would be a fitting punishment, too, for the hubristic belief that one even has the right to behold such a beauty straight on.
See, Carl, Bob might say, I can use metaphors and ten-cent words too.
Being around Redford tends to steal all those words from him, though. It’s just so hard to think with that man’s focus trained on you. Bob sometimes feels that having Redford’s eyes on him is just as close to playing with fire as looking is.
The disparity in their appearances is greater than that between Hoffman and Carl - how could it not be, when next to Redford’s Hollywood good-looks even the handsomest ordinary person looks dull and lifeless - but Redford seems determined to portray Bob accurately on screen anyway. He’s as dogged about it as any reporter, and Bob would have started to feel a little harried by now if Redford’s rapt attention didn’t warm his chest and cheeks like sunlight. There’s no world in which Bob would tell him to back off.
So they get coffee, and they get drinks, and they get dinner. Redford visits Bob’s apartment. They get breakfast. Bob doesn’t tell Carl.
“I’m boring,” he tells Redford, over cappuccinos in a cafe of the sort Redford must frequent all the time in LA. The weak sun filtering through the thick, grimy windows lights on Redford’s signature strawberry hair and turns it to spun gold. Bob, in his shadow and possessing no features worth highlighting anyway, feels small and dull and useless. “Carl’s the interesting one. I’m just… I’m boring.”
Redford’s brow furrows in earnest concern. Bob tries to find a trace of himself in that perfectly sincere expression, but it’s no use. The idea that Redford could ever embody plain, boring Bob Woodward has always been nothing more than a flight of fancy.
Redford frowns harder. “Don’t sell yourself short. Boring people don’t lead lives as interesting as yours.”
“My life’s interesting, sure,” Bob says with a shrug, fighting down the familiar flush of warmth at even the most indirect praise from Redford. He’s grown good at ignoring it. “Interesting things have happened to me. But that’s not who I am. Watergate didn’t gift me a new personality. I’m the same person I’ve always been.”
Redford hums in agreement. Bob sits and tries not to tap his feet or fidget with his tiny porcelain cup, long since drunk. It’s embarrassing, having been so self-deprecating in front of someone as confident and self-possessed as Redford. But it was true.
“I never thought it had fundamentally changed you.” Redford seems unconcerned, tracing the rim of his cup with his pointer finger as he holds Bob’s gaze captive with that penetrating blue stare. “I imagine you were always like this. Just as stubborn, just as principled, just as determined, just as courageous.”
Bob laughs. It sounds hollow and uneasy. “Robert, come on.”
“Does it make you uncomfortable?”
It does, sort of, in the way a sunny day starts to burn your skin after too long. Bob doesn’t want to go back to the shade.
“You don’t have to be nice,” he says. “I know I’m not you.”
Redford’s grin is whiter and straighter than Bob’s, the amused glint in his eyes so unlike Bob’s usual sleep-deprived glaze. Bob wants to be him. He wants… he just wants.
“Good,” Redford says. “I’m just a guy with a face that sells movies. You saved the country. Who wouldn’t be interested in someone like that?”
It is the kind of smile that sells movies, the twinkling eyes that women fall for on the big screen and off. But it’s also the kind of smile Carl flashes at pretty waitresses - and, sometimes, when he thinks Bob isn’t looking, pretty waiters too. It’s an interested sort of smile.
Tentatively, Bob allows himself to bask in it properly, rolling his shoulders in the tiniest of stretches like a cat in a sunbeam. Redford’s gaze drops briefly to follow the stretch.
“I’m not as handsome as you,” Bob tries, just to see what Redford might say to that.
Redford waves him off. “Eye of the beholder.”
“I don’t have depths. There isn’t more to me than this.”
“I don’t believe that. Or at least I haven’t fully figured you out yet.”
There’s a new look in Redford’s eyes - darker, intent. Interested.
Bob takes a steadying breath. “What’s left to know?”
“I don’t think I saw all of your apartment, for one.” Redford’s gaze burns where it lands on Bob’s face, his shoulders, his hands where they grip the delicate porcelain too tight. Bob feels himself catching fire in response. “We didn’t make it to your bedroom last time. I’d like to see it, if you’re not busy.”
The heat in Bob’s cheeks and coiling low in his gut is going to burn him alive. It would be worth it, he thinks.
“I’m not busy. I don’t have much of a social life these days beyond… well, beyond work and you. Like I said, boring.”
Redford looks delighted. His chair scrapes along the floor as he stands, blotting out the light from the window for a moment before he extends a hand to pull Bob from his seat and put them on a level again. His grip lingers.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” he says. Their hands part with a reluctance Bob could almost tell himself is mutual. Redford grins. “We’ll open your windows when we get there; it’s too nice out to leave them closed.”
Bob smiles back. His bedroom does get a decent amount of afternoon sunlight. Redford will look good there.