Work Text:
These are the things she said: I have worked hard at my career. You will not dictate the course of my life. I am not going anywhere.
Declarative sentences, starting with You, I, She (but never We) and ending with periods. At the time she meant every word, but trying to maintain that kind of resolution is draining, especially when it feels like you're talking to a brick wall. So when she gets home that night to her still barely furnished apartment and Ryan's name pops up on her caller ID, she reasons there are far worse things in this world than picking up the phone.
"I hear you're back on the market," he says as an opener, and she thinks him asking her out this soon is either incredibly tacky or ballsy or both, and it still doesn't seem like the worst thing ever.
Propriety wins out, in the end. She puts on her most wearied voice, which isn't all that hard to muster up. "It's only been a day, Howard."
"Never too soon to think about the future."
"What?"
"I wouldn't imagine you'd want to stay in Scranton after everything that's happened."
"No," she says with a sigh. "You wouldn't imagine."
"Look, I'm sure you've heard by now that the manager position over at Utica has opened up, and not to make light of a shitty situation, but maybe the timing has worked out for the best."
"What?" She's repeating herself. She hates sounding stupid.
"I talked it over with David Wallace and I want to offer you the Utica branch."
She smiles tightly to herself; maybe this is some kind of joke she's just not getting. "That's some big talk for a salesman who's never made a sale."
"Former salesman," he corrects, to her surprise. "And I'm pretty sure this is appropriate-sized talk for the new corporate manager."
Things start falling into place in her head. "You asshole," she says, but there's no venom in her voice and he even laughs a little. Ambition is the one thing they've always had in common; she's not going to begrudge him that.
"So?" he asks.
"Utica is far?"
"Very far."
She closes her eyes. "Yes," she says, and feels something close to relief. "Yes."
--
Ryan gives her an entire week to get to Utica but real estate up there isn't exactly cutthroat, so she finds herself set up a lot faster than she predicted. She rents out a U-Haul and spends her first Tuesday afternoon since college in tank top and jeans, and basically moves everything by herself because the movers are useless. But it feels good to be doing something on her own. Her last two moves, she'd always had a boyfriend to help carry stuff, and in the end that had been all they were good for. "You fall in love too easily, Karen," her mother would say, which was just her way of making it Karen's fault.
She spends her last weekend of unemployment driving around town with the windows rolled down and her sunglasses on, learning where all the neighborhood stores and cheap eats are. The air feels like change, like summer moving into fall, and low-hanging suns and bad '80s ballads on the radio make her unusually metaphorical like that.
She comes to a rolling stop at a light, making note of the Starbucks to her left. A woman walks her dog down the street, a couple strolls hand-in-hand past store windows. Karen's gaze lands on one of those green and white signs that list nearby cities, arrows helpfully pointing the way. Convenient, that. Ithaca to the south, she reads, Rome to the north. And here, at the center of it all, the beating heart: Utica.
She can't help but think Utica is an unfortunate name for a city, especially when it's this close to Rome. They probably wouldn't have named it that if they had known its history; Utica is a place of retreat, of defeat. It's where – centuries ago, on a different continent – Caesar drove back Cato and the last gasp of resistance to his overwhelming power, a stupid fact she learned years ago on one of those historical tours of Italy with her family. She remembers the people there went as far as giving Cato their city's name, for his efforts against Caesar, but that hadn't lasted very long. He killed himself in the end.
Ultimately, this is a story about failure.
Karen has to come to a full stop when the couple to her right starts to cross the street. She watches them as they pass, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, her free hand gesticulating while she talks about whatever couples in Utica talk about. Laundry, probably. At this angle, the sun setting behind them renders them silhouettes – their features blur, are drowned by light – and in this moment, they could be anybody. She's in a new city with a new job and a new life, and they could be anybody. The inane normalcy of it all makes it hard for her to breathe.
The light changes. Karen makes an abrupt U-turn and starts to head back to her apartment. She realizes she's come too far.
--
Work is mercifully easy. Painfully easy. She thought the monotony would leave her once she got promoted, but that's not true – boredom follows you everywhere.
The people who work for her are adequately efficient. And adequately nice. She even has lunch with them once in a while, although it's still kind of awkward. It's obvious they don't know how to act around her yet, how far they're allowed to go with her. Karen likes it that way. She likes that line between here and there, you and me. It makes her life simpler.
But most of her lunches are spent in the office, on the phone with Ryan.
"Just wanted to see how you were adjusting," he says, even though it's been a month already. She picks through her salad, avoiding the celery. Every time she asks Rolando not to get her celery, and every time he does. She wonders if this is some kind of weird power play.
"I'm fine," she answers absent-mindedly. It's hard to see Ryan as her boss, when for so long he was the kid salesman who people still referred to as the temp. Or Fire Guy. He seems too young to be her superior, although she suspects he's older than he looks. She finds herself wondering how old he really is.
They talk about work, mostly. They talk in numbers. Sales figures and budgetary concerns and expense reports. The inanity of it gives her a headache. She can almost see why Michael was driven to such antics all the time. Almost.
"And I'll be coming out to Utica for a visit next week," Ryan says, breaking the routine of their conversation.
"Oh?" Despite herself, she looks around her office. There are still some boxes in the far corner that she hasn't gotten around to unpacking. Those will have to go before he gets here.
"Right after I visit Michael." She can almost hear the smile in his voice. "At least I'll have some stories for you."
They share a small laugh over that – over Michael, over a life escaped together. Strangely, she feels herself relaxing. She didn't even realize she was tense.
"See ya, Filippelli," he says casually. It catches her off-guard.
"See ya, Howard."
So it's like that between them. That's where their line is.
--
On Friday, Ryan walks into the office, talking into his Bluetooth and thumb-typing at his BlackBerry. He barely looks up, although manages to navigate his way to her office just fine. She wonders, had she gotten the job, if she would have looked as much like a douche as him.
He settles into the chair across her desk, turns off his various electronics, and smiles at her. He looks haggard – bloodshot eyes, day-old stubble. On conference calls with the higher-ups, he always sounds so frenetic, using words like "synergy" and "dynamism" and being unbearably enthusiastic. Trying to save a dying company all on your own must take its toll.
"So, how do you like it here?" he asks with a knowing smirk.
She smiles back. "I think I can finally cross 'manage small time paper company' off my list of lifelong dreams."
"Yeah? What's left?"
"Oh, you know, the usual. Climb Mount Everest, ride unicorn."
They talk about New York, about the upcoming football season, about Michael's latest antics. It's strangely comfortable, even though they never really talked like this back in Scranton. She had other concerns there, and Ryan was the least of them. But being in a new place can change things like that. It's as if they've survived a war together, and what's left between them is the memory of something horrific and absurd and singular.
The conversation turns slowly to work. Ryan pulls out some documents and leans over her shoulder to point something out, and suddenly she feels very aware of the closing space between them. This is the first time in a while a man has stood this close to her. This is the first time she's let one. It feels bearable.
The next natural step, of course, is to invite him back to her place.
--
They drink beer and play Call of Duty 3. Ryan is horrible, of course, but then when she comes back from the kitchen with two more bottles, he's doing much better than his natural abilities should rightly allow.
"Oh my god, are you in God mode?" she says with mock disgust. She sits down next to him again on the bare floor.
"I looked up the cheats on my BlackBerry. I couldn't get past the goddamn snipers."
"That's pathetic, Howard. Truly pathetic. I think I have to revoke your dude card now."
"Shut up and beer me."
This goes on well into the night. Eventually they end up next to each other on the couch, their feet propped up on her coffee table and the game amelodically waiting to be unpaused for the past hour. The beers in their hands are lukewarm by now.
"I heard you broke up with Kelly," she says, slurring a little. "How?"
"You're asking me?" She can tell he's just as drunk by the way his head keeps lolling over to her side of the couch.
"No, I'm not asking how I heard about you breaking up with Kelly. I know how I heard about it. Rolando. Ro knows all, Ro speaks all. What I'm asking is how did you break up with Kelly." This is very important to her, all of a sudden.
"On camera."
He looks at her with his wide blue eyes, dead serious, and that's when she starts laughing uncontrollably. Drunk laughing, which – like drunk crying – is highly contagious to other drunk people. Ryan joins in, and soon they're leaning up against each other for support. This is the second time today his mouth has been this close to hers.
"At least you're man enough to own up to it," she says, once they've calmed down again.
"I don't think you can really call it that."
No, she thinks, probably not. "Do you miss her?"
"I miss..." He looks around Karen's living room, at her blank walls and sparse furniture. "I miss her place. It was nicer than mine."
She thinks she knows what that feels like. Missing a place more than a person. Missing a home more than anything. It wasn't until she moved to Utica that she realized she didn't own any towels of her own. Small, inconsequential things like that get lost along the way. You leave them behind. You let them go missing.
She kisses him then. She puts her hand to his cheek, feeling the stubble there, and brings her mouth to his. Her legs wrap so easily around his slight body and suddenly he's everywhere, inside and around her. The beer bottle drops from her fingers, rolls across the bare floor. His hand slips beneath her underwear. All in one breath.
What was this leading to anyway, if not this.
--
They see each other on the occasional weekend. It's not something they talk about, and it's definitely not something they tell HR about. They each have one disastrous office romance on record already. She wonders what the official wording for that is. Relationship: terminated. Something ridiculous like that.
He comes to Utica, most of the time, even though he's the one with the busy schedule.
"I don't mind," he says one night, only half under the covers. It's an unusually hot night for this late into the fall. "I kind of like the train."
"Nobody likes the train," she says as she settles her head onto a part of his arm where she knows she'll cut off circulation, giving him a dead limb in the morning. Sometimes she's twelve like that. "The train is miserable."
"That's sort of why I like it. It reminds me that everyone hates their life."
"You hate your life?"
He looks down at her and smiles. "Not when I'm coming to see you."
It makes her feel girlish and stupid, but she can't help smiling back. She thinks this is what it's supposed to be like. She can't ever remember a time when someone smiled at her like that.
This is the closest he's ever come to admitting his feelings for her.
--
Her employees start to complain about the broken copier, even though it's only been two days. She shuts the door to her office when Ryan calls, and strangely, he wants to know about the copier too.
"So accounting called me," he says instead of a hello. He does that, when he wants to talk about work or something uncomfortable. He skips the greetings. "They had questions about the new copier you ordered."
"I thought such things were beneath your concern."
"They are, usually. But when Scranton is charged for something Utica ordered, accounting gets a little confused." He sounds officious. But then again, she sounds defensive.
"I can explain it to them."
"No need. I already talked to Michael and he told me what happened." It doesn't escape her notice that he called Michael for the full story, and not her. "Is this something we need to talk about?"
"No."
"You sure?"
"Why would this be something we need to talk about?"
"I don't know, I thought–" A sigh. "Never mind."
--
A different weekend, a few weeks later. The copier is long-forgotten, or at least she hopes. For a while there, he kept accusing her of not being able to move on, grabbing his bag and slamming the door behind him (he always seems to be leaving). "I have, I have moved on," she kept insisting to him. "I mean, I moved, for fuck's sake." It's not the same, she knows, but she didn't know what else to say at the time. Eventually, they stopped talking about it. Things went back to normal, or as normal as secretly sleeping with your boss can be.
"I won't be able to make it up here next Friday," he says, zipping up his overnight bag. She watches him from the bed, adhering to her very strict rule of never getting up before eleven on a Sunday. "Feel like coming into the city, seeing my very depressing apartment?"
She smiles lazily at him. "The compromises we make for the ones we love," she says without thinking – it's just something her mother used to say. She catches herself, looks up at him, but he's only grinning at her.
He reaches over to kiss the top of her head. "See ya, Filippelli."
And this is the closest she's ever come.
--
Despite everything, Utica starts to feel like home. The barista at Starbucks makes her usual drink as soon as she walks in. She knows which red lights will make her late to work in the morning. Rolando gets her celery every single day. Maybe that's all a home is, something that keeps working to keep your life the same. She starts to hang up pictures and fill the empty spaces in her apartment.
Ryan suggests that they finally go to HR about their relationship.
"Relationship?" she says with a raised eyebrow. They're watching a rerun of one of the Law & Orders, she's not sure which.
He rolls his eyes at her. "It just kind of sucks that we can't go out anywhere because someone might see us."
"All right," she says simply.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She turns back to the television to hide the stupid grin on her face.
That's all they say about it. It's strange, finding herself in a relationship when she wasn't even looking for one, but all that's really changed from the past few months is a piece of paper filed away in an office somewhere in corporate. If she and Ryan were to fall apart, there'd be a record of that too – a paper trail of her romantic failures – but she doesn't like to think like that.
Ryan proposes for their big debut as a couple, they go public at the Superbowl.
She laughs. "If you actually manage to score us tickets, I'll totally flash the JumboTron."
"Deal."
--
The next natural step, of course, is to move to the city. For him. For them. The train ride to Utica is ridiculously long, and they don't get to see each other as often as they'd like. Ryan keeps talking about positions at corporate that might be opening up soon, but she's doubtful of how that would work out. She might not have read the relationship waiver as carefully as she should have, but she's still pretty sure that as her boyfriend-slash-boss, he's not allowed to offer her anything.
She does want to move, to the city, to a bigger and better job. But Utica is just starting to feel like a place where she actually wants to be, instead of a place she ran away to. She has to stop moving to and from places because of a guy, she tries to explain to Ryan. He says he understands, but she knows that can't last very long. She'll have to make a decision soon, but for now, today, she can just go into work and do her job.
She likes the openness of her life, the choices she has. Utica or New York. Ryan or someone else, or no one at all. Happiness is not a place, she knows. Or a person.
She wants to make the right decision. She wants a lot of things.