Chapter Text
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring that damn MCP to this party!” Walter says, slamming his glass back down on the table. “I don’t like the direction you’re taking that program one bit, Ed.”
“Well, Walter, there’s always next year,” Dillinger quips, smile not reaching his eyes as he looks over Walter’s shoulder at the clock hanging on the kitchen wall. The hour finally seems appropriate for him to make his exit. “It’s almost ten, so I think I’ll be heading out now, thank you.”
“Fine, fine,” says Walter, and there’s a note of beleaguered frustration in it. “I’ll go get you your coat.”
Dillinger watches his retreating form with something like relief. Even now, he still feels slightly out of his depth talking to Walter Gibbs. He’s just some old git , he tells himself again, you’ve surpassed him. But, though Walter may be slightly kooky—talk of “spirits” within the computer notwithstanding, he insists on calling this get-together, by any other name the Encom Christmas Party, their “Festivus Celebration”—there’s something about him that’s also undeniably sharp. Something that makes Dillinger feel that he isn’t measuring up, like he’s a boy being scolded back in primary school.
He takes another sip of his drink. The barest amount of amber still clings to the sides of the ice cubes.
“Here you go,” Walter rounds the corner from the hallway into the kitchen, holding his scarf and wool overcoat. “Would you believe it, it’s actually started snowing out there.”
“Just like back home,” Dillinger says, and immediately regrets it. Where did that come from?
The embarrassment of that particular half-voiced yearning hangs in the air for a moment before Walter nods and looks at him seriously.
“Thank you for coming, Ed.”
“Yes, thanks,” Dillinger grits out, turning to put an arm through his coat sleeve.
“Aw, leaving so soon, boss?” another voice cuts in: Kevin Flynn, just the wrong side of drunk and lying languidly across much of the living room sofa. “Alex will be disappointed. She hasn’t even had time to confess her undying love to you yet.”
What?
“Kevin!” says Lora, sitting directly to his left on the couch. “What–”
“W–what?” Another voice, quieter and tinged with panic, this time from a brown-haired woman sitting in the corner of the living room. Dillinger faintly recognizes her as Alex herself, one of the newer hires in the laser lab.
“She thinks you’re dreamy, Dillinger,” Flynn continues. “Why don’t you step up to that mistletoe and give her what she wants?”
The rest of the guests are split in their reaction: there are some giggles here and there, but others, like Alan Bradley, look mortified.
“No, no, no…how…” Alex says softly, pressing her palms to her eyes. Then, her head snaps up and her tone changes entirely. “Kevin Flynn…did you read my private emails ?”
“You shouldnt’a put something so private in emails being sent from the company server,” Flynn shrugs. “It wasn’t like I went looking for your deepest secrets specifically.”
“What is wrong with you?” Alex says, standing up. Her eyes glisten. “All that so-called programming genius for–for what! To go snooping through employee data? What is wrong with you! ”
She turns to Walter. “I–I think I’m gonna leave now. Sorry for ruining your party,”—her eyes dart to Dillinger for the briefest of moments—“Sorry.”
And then she’s gone, down the hall and out the door.
Lora is the first to break the stunned silence.
“Kevin, are you serious? What the fuck?”
“I just happened to come across it, man, I wasn’t looking for–”
“Okay, well, sure , I guess,” Lora sputters. “Even if we’re to put that aside, for some reason, still, why would you…”
Dillinger turns to Walter. “Do you know anything about this?”
“No, no,” Walter shakes his head. “Nothing, why would I?” he pauses. “Actually, a couple months back she did ask me about your birthday. I didn’t really think anything of it, just that maybe she was into astrology. I don’t personally bother with that, but I didn’t see any harm in humoring her, you know, maybe there is something to it, stars and all, so I told her–”
“Thank you, Walter,” Dillinger stops him. He pulls his scarf around his neck. A picture is developing in his mind. “I’ll go try to figure this out.”
He catches Flynn’s eye as he leaves.
“We’ll be talking about this on Monday,” he says. “In my office. Try to have your story straight by then.”
It really is snowing when he steps outside. He descends the few steps from Walter’s porch and then stops. The pale flakes falling silently in the darkness make everything seem a bit surreal. Surreal, just like Flynn claiming that someone was in love with him. Him, Ed Dillinger. For all the power and prestige he’s accumulated in the last few years, romantic interest was never something that came by him easily or frequently. Newly forty-one, he still isn’t married. He’s got a big house now, filled with all the latest and greatest, and…nobody to greet him when he comes home after a long day, nobody to share those fancy 800 thread count sheets with. Work comes first, he tells himself. You’ve been too busy to focus on other things. He tries not to think about it too much.
Tries not to.
Crying in her car on Christmas Eve. This is the worst, the worst, the worst . She always hated him, that cocky bastard, and now this. And he’s right , too. She shouldn’t have ever mentioned Dillinger when sending messages from her official Encom email. Stupid, stupid! But he shouldn’t have been looking, either, so what the fuck! Why the fuck?
She tries to remember exactly what she said. They had just gotten extra-network connections set up last month, so messages could be sent beyond the in-house Encom system. Ilene had an email account through the university where she was doing her Ph.D. program, and they’d thought they’d test the whole thing out. In retrospect, she’d treated it too much like a regular letter to her best friend. But she could have sworn she didn’t say anything that weird. It was something like Mr. Dillinger always looks so well put-together, I don’t know if anyone else cares much but I always admire his suits. I wonder if he’s married? I’m too much of a peon to really talk to him, but he is strangely…well. You know how I am. Nothing about “dreamy,” nothing about kissing, nothing about sucking his dick, nothing –
There’s a knock on her window. She looks up.
It’s Dillinger. He’s leaning over at an awkward angle, too tall to look through the window of her shitty econobox otherwise.
The panic and the longing well up in her throat again, a physical thing that burns, and it isn’t fair, she’s a complete mess–
“Alex, he says, voice muffled by the glass, “can I talk to you?”
She pulls a tissue from a pack in the center console, wipes her eyes, and then rolls down the window.
“I’m sorry,” she says, as soon as the cold air hits her face. “I didn’t want anything like this to happen, I was just stupid, I didn’t think.”
“This is certainly Flynn’s fault,” says Dillinger. “I’m going to have some words with him about that.”
“I hate him,” Alex says, then slaps the tissue over her mouth. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
Dillinger lets out something between a sigh and a laugh. “I don’t like him too much either, honestly.”
She laughs too, nervous but grateful for the branch he has extended.
“Like I said, I’ll deal with him,” he continues. “But Alex…I’d like to talk to you about something else.”
Oh god. Oh god, oh no.
“A week ago, on my birthday, a bouquet of flowers arrived in my office. There was a note attached,” he stops for a moment, looking uncharacteristically sheepish. “It said, ‘happy birthday, from your secret admirer.’ The florist wouldn’t tell me who sent it.”
Fuck . Stupid, so stupid! This wasn’t some high school Valentine’s Day, what was supposed to happen?
“Sorry,” she says thickly, grabbing another tissue.
“Alex,” he says, “don’t cry, please.”
It’s too much, too much, all too much. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, he wasn’t supposed to know. Which also goes against the whole point, because she knows, deep down, that she did want him to, eventually, somehow, but not like this .
“I don’t….” she blinks, and tears are hot on her cheeks. “I don’t know what came over me to make me act so…so childish . I don’t know what I expected to come of it, and then I had to go include the ‘secret admirer’ part, like I’m, I’m–passing notes in class! I wanted…I wanted to make you happy, you always seem so alone, why did I say that, sorry, fuck–”
There’s a hand on her shoulder.
“If I may,” he says, and his touch is gentle, tentative, “I really liked the flowers.”
“Really?” she says, looking up at him and trying to will the water back into her tear ducts.
“Yes,” he says. “It’s been a while since I got a proper birthday present. The date falls so close to Christmas, and, well–”
He shivers. There’s a faint brushing of translucent flakes on the shoulders of his coat and in his hair and on his eyelashes. He looks beautiful, and her heart clenches–
“You’re cold,” she says. “Would you like to, uh, get in?”
Dillinger looks her car over, gaze settling on the empty passenger seat.
“It’s a bit chilly,” he admits. “I’ll go around the other side.”
“Sorry it’s so cramped,” Alex says when he climbs into the opposite seat. It’s surreal, seeing him sitting in her tiny car—he’s both elegant and awkward, his long legs leaning at an odd angle to fit into the limited space between the seat and the dashboard. “You can adjust the seat backwards, there’s a lever,” she reaches out and then stops, because that would mean putting her arm between his legs . “It’s underneath. In the middle, there’s a bar, lift it up and–yeah, like that.”
He slides the seat back and stretches out. Alex catches her breath. It’s the closest they’ve ever been to one another.
“I’ll be a white Christmas,” she says, babbling to fill the awkward silence. “Have you ever seen one before?”
“Once,” he says, “back in England.”
“I’m from Texas,” she says, like that explains anything. “It, uh, doesn’t really snow there.”
“Right.”
“Yeah.”
She’s suddenly acutely aware of all the clutter in her car: receipts stuffed into the cup holder next to a half-empty water bottle, a container of Tic Tacs rattling around by the gearshift, random pens, quarters.
“So,” says Dillinger, “you’re my secret admirer.”
“Yeah,” Alex says, finally breathing out, the admission heavy in the air.
“Why?”
“What?”
“Well, what do you admire?”
Alex swallows. She didn’t consider— you don’t think ! —that she’d ever have to explain the ball of half-formed feelings taking up space in her chest to him. But he had asked. He’d asked, which meant…he was willing to hear her out? A kind of giddy hope spikes through her.
“I don’t know you very well, I’ll admit,” she starts. “But I want to. I’ve always noticed your suits. My aunt was a seamstress so I know what good tailoring looks like. You look very…elegant, like, not many guys would put in that much effort. It shows you’re interested in something. It made me wonder, I guess, why you were doing it and what you were like outside of just work, work, work. I would, ummm, think about you carefully picking out your shirts and suits and ties every morning, and I wanted someone to give that same kind of care to you. I wanted to know what you wore on weekends and what your favorite pizza toppings are and about the town you grew up in and I want to go to the beach with you and run my hands through your hair. I…I want to know what it would be like to love you, Mr. Dillinger.”
Alex breathes out as the last words tumble from her mouth, and then, silence. At some point in the middle of it all, she had started to feel like she was floating, watching the both of them from above like characters in an arcade game. Somehow it was easier to spill it all to him that way.
“I–” says Dillinger after a few seconds, then stops. Back in her seat, Alex scrunches her eyes closed and braces, too afraid to look at him. She can hear him shift. In her mind’s eye, his hand is hovering above the door handle.
“I’m very flattered,” he finally says.
“But?” she chokes.
“But, if you want to know what it would be like to love me, first you’ll need to stop calling me Mr. Dillinger,” he says, “and start calling me Ed.”