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Kate Wyler was as close to breaking point as she had ever realistically been. What she wouldn’t give to be back in a badly cooled, rat (and other) infested, hole in the ground office somewhere in a war zone… well, it was a short, very short list.
While she’d had a few weeks of respite in the State Department weighing in on some foreign policy discussions and actually feeling like she was being a useful, functioning member of the Foreign Service again, those meetings had come to an end early the previous week and she had been shunted back to the more inconsequential side of things – budget meetings and expense justifications, awareness training, and any other pitiful task they could rope her in on.
Meanwhile, in the background, nothing seemed to be happening around diplomatic posts. At this point, she would take anything. She would take a demotion if it meant getting out of a rickety office with a heater that squealed like a pig when you turned it on, and a broken desk chair that, try as she might, she could not get clearance for a replacement.
Maybe the Wylers had used up all their good will to replace Hal’s smashed laptop.
The thought made her smirk. She had warned him not to do it but once Hal had his mind set on something…
She sighed as she opened the fridge in their apartment and withdrew a bottle of white wine, half empty, a fitting metaphor for her mood.
Hal was travelling, foisted upon some junior delegation on assignment in Florida, of all places, and he would be away until Friday evening. At least she didn’t have to navigate time zones this time.
“Actually, Florida is 30 years behind,” Hal had joked as he had left the previous morning.
It was actually nice to have the apartment to herself, particularly when she wasn’t in turmoil after a blazing row with him. The last time, when Hal had been in Europe, the apartment had felt like a prison cell, such was the extent of her internal strife over everything. It had felt cramped and cold and unknown for that particular week.
Tonight, it took on a different hue. The light had a warmer glow, the room felt welcoming, and she had the feeling of someone existing in a space shared by two, rather than laying claim to it in a kind of spoils of war fashion.
Sighing, she took her glass of wine and walked through to their main bathroom where a deep, freestanding bathtub was beckoning her like an oasis in a desert. Pressing down the stopper, she twisted the lever by the tap and pulled it up.
As the water poured, she added a small gloop of bubble bath and a large sprinkling of magnesium salts, something Hal had bought to help with his recurring back pain, despite not being able to sit still for long enough to actually enjoy a bath.
Unless she was in it with him, in which case it inevitably became an exercise in making his back worse.
But Kate enjoyed baths. They felt like a reward at the end of a hard day. At the moment, they felt well and truly deserved.
Keeping watch on the water level, she undressed, tossing her clothes across a small corner table that held various supplies. She looked in the mirror as she removed her bra and underwear. She leaned into the mirror to inspect the bags under her eyes.
She was sleeping ok but she was still tired. It was a tiredness of the soul rather than of the body. She was beginning to break under the mediocrity of her day-to-day existence.
Turning back to the bath, she flipped down the lever and the water stopped. Testing the temperature with her hand, she stepped into the bath, hovering on the edge of the tub to ensure that it wasn’t too hot or cold. Then she slowly lowered herself in, moaning in delight as it felt like the stress simply seeped out of her pores to mix and dilute in the water.
She let her head fall back against the edge of the tub and closed her eyes. Remembering her glass of wine, she reached down to where she had left it by the corner table and picked it up, taking a long slug before replacing it on a recess within the wall.
She could feel herself drifting away from the responsibilities of her life, the hot water soothing joints that she didn’t realise had been aching. She was almost entirely tuned out when her phone rang somewhere behind her.
Groaning, she turned and reached for her pants, shrugging when the action pulled all of her clothes down onto the damp tiles. When she withdrew her phone, she saw Hal’s name on the screen. She contemplated not answering but knew that he would just keep calling. Instead, she pressed the green button and settled herself back into the bath.
“Hey Hal,” she said as she shuffled her shoulders back in and under the hot water.
In what seemed like a show of solidarity, Hal was boiling like a frog in a pot in the Florida climate.
“I swear to God, Kate, I don’t know how anyone lives in this. The humidity is about 200%...”
Kate smirked, “Pretty sure that’s not how percentages work, Hal.”
He chuckled, “Spoken like someone who hasn’t been witness to the fruits of the Florida education system all day…”
She smiled and then sighed, tilting her head back against the edge of the tub, moving her legs slightly and creating a ripple effect in the water.
“Where are you?” Hal asked suddenly, and she knew he had heard that movement. Honestly, the man could ignore a brass band playing on his head, but he could hear the tiniest ripple of water from thousands of miles away. It was like he had a sixth sense that could tell when she was naked.
She took a deep, cleansing breath and said, “I’m in the bath.”
He hummed in approval, “As if I wasn’t feeling hot under the collar already…”
She chuckled, tensing her body under the water and then releasing, feeling the soothing heat on her skin. She let out an uneasy sigh, knowing that he would pick up on it right away.
“Tough day?” he asked in a soft voice. She cleared her throat and nodded, directing that wordless answer to herself more than to him.
“Yeah,” she rasped, “Yeah, it's…it's getting tougher, Hal. Harder to see the…gap in the trees.”
There was silence between them; there was plenty one or the other of them could say but… it was a torrid topic of conversation, equally likely to erupt in anger as it was to brandish solutions. Hal cleared his throat and Kate let her head lay back against the rim of the tub.
“I’m really, really starting to wonder if we’re just done, Hal.”
“Kate?” his voice had a hint of panic, as if he’d just been told he’d left his gas on.
“I mean, what are we really doing at this point?” she sighed, bringing one hand up to rub over her face.
“Kate, I thought…”
“So did I, Hal. I thought this would be a temporary thing, a smack on the wrists and then they’d reassign me, us, but they seem really determined to just, I don’t know, force us out…”
She could hear him take a deep, shaky breath on the line and frowned.
“Hal, are you alright?” she asked in a louder tone, sitting up slightly in the bath and waiting for him to respond. He’d complained about the heat; she wondered if he was drinking enough water. Dehydration was no joke, particularly in those sweaty armpit states.
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, biting back a laugh, “Kate, you really know how to get my heart racing…”
She frowned, wondering what the hell he was talking about and voicing much the same confusion to him.
“Kate, you just asked if we were done and what we were really doing at this point…” he prompted and she tried to play the conversation back in her head. At first, it didn’t register. Then, at the second time of asking, she realised what she had said.
“Oh, fuck. Sorry, Hal,” she chuckled, before saying she had thought it clear that she was referring to work woes.
“Maybe, but hearing the words “we’re done” tends to strike fear in the heart, no matter what the context,” he said with a smile that she could hear.
She smiled and apologised again. The thought crossed her mind that this would be much harder if she didn’t have Hal in her corner, even if he was largely responsible for putting her in that corner in the first place.
But she was trying, with all of her might, to move past that recrimination, for both of their sakes. She sighed, shifting one leg over the other and causing the water to ripple again, echoing loudly around the tiled room and, apparently, down the line to Hal.
“Listening to you moving around in that bath is not helping my body temperature, Katie…” he murmured in that low, sensual tone that he had so well perfected. She sighed again.
“Hal, do not take that tone of voice with me when you’re a thousand miles away…”
He chuckled and the line was silent for a moment, letting the moment breathe. Finally, Kate sighed again, her mind not capable of staying neutral for long.
“I don’t know what to do, Hal,” she said, shifting again in the water, feeling the stinging heat ebbing out of it.
“You want me to talk you through it?” Hal said, still in that low, dangerous tone and she scoffed, laughing at his one-track mind, though not entirely opposed to the idea.
“As delightful as that sounds, I meant about work. I’m starting to wonder if I should just say ‘fuck it’ and go do something else. There are any number of non-profits where I could walk into a job and actually, possibly, affect some kind of change. It might be nice to work with people who actually want that…”
Hal cleared his throat, “Would you really be happy if it came to that?”
She pursed her lips, pulling her legs up toward her until her knees were visible above the water line.
“I don’t know, Hal. Maybe? If it was going to give me some purpose again, then, yes? Obviously, the ideal would be a diplomatic posting, I don’t want to give up on those ambitions but… I can’t keep fucking around in the little leagues either, if that’s all I’m ever going to get. I can be more useful somewhere else.”
It was her first time voicing any such suggestion, but she believed every word she had said. She wasn’t ready to walk away but it might be the best thing under the circumstances, she just needed to get her head around that reality. She needed to make her peace with that reality, and everything that had led to it.
She was so deep in her own thoughts that it took her a moment to realise that Hal hadn’t responded. She said his name, asked if he was still there.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. I don’t… I didn’t realise you’d been considering something like this…”
Kate smiled.
“I wasn’t. Not really. I mean, the thought has occurred every now and then and I’ve usually pushed it aside and tried to stay positive about the whole situation, tried to convince myself that when something comes along it will come to me because, aside from you, I’m the best person for that post. But… nothing’s coming along. Things should be, but they’re getting pushed back further and further, and a nagging part of my brain says it’s because they don’t want to give it to me. They want me, both of us, out.”
She exhaled loudly. Again, Hal was silent and she suddenly became suspicious.
“Hal,” she probed, “What is it? You’re never this quiet about this stuff.”
She heard him sigh, before the sound on the line changed, an indication that he was moving or had gone to a different room or maybe outside.
“You remember at Guillermo’s party, I spoke to Billie for a few minutes?” he suddenly sounded far less sure of himself, meeker than she usually liked her Hal Wyler. She also remembered that night, looking across the room, seeing he and Billie speaking quietly and his slight drawback when she said something to him before walking away.
She had been trying, for weeks, to find out what Billie had said to him, to no avail. He was like a clam when it came to the topic, and he was skilled enough to wangle his way out of the discussion entirely.
“Yeah,” she said, giving him space to elaborate, although he had clearly expected her to say something more, given how he stumbled into his next sentence.
“Well… she couldn’t tell me exactly what or when but…” he took a breath and Kate sat up in the bath, recognising even without the benefit of sight, a nervous Hal Wyler. And a nervous Hal Wyler was usually a bad sign.
“Hal, what are you trying to say?” she prompted him, her tone more cutting than she had intended. But his nervousness had raised her heckles.
“I told her that you were… not enjoying what you were doing – she asked, I didn’t bring it up. She said… she said to hang in there, that something was afoot and that there might be something once whatever it was played out…”
Kate frowned, trying to follow and then retrace the words he had said. That party had been almost three weeks ago. He had been sitting on this for 19 days without telling her.
“Hal, what the fuck?” she said finally, her voice a mixture of disappointment and disdain.
“Kate, hear me out…” he tried but she cut him off. She fucking hated when he used that phrase; it usually translated to ‘let me tell you why you’re wrong’.
“No, Hal, I will not hear you out. For fuck’s sake! Just because your career is done, it does not mean you get to control mine, or my life!” she slapped a hand down in the water, causing a splash that sloshed over the edge and hit her in the face. Her anger was so palpable that she’d temporarily forgotten the water wasn’t something solid that she could slam.
Hal’s voice sounded booming through the phone, as if her outburst had ignited a similar argumentative spark in him.
“I wasn’t trying to do either of those things, Kate…”
She shook her head. She couldn’t believe he was trying to deny culpability on this. He had known about this for weeks and had left her stewing in her own remorse, railing against the unfairness of it all, bereft at the idea that her career was tanked.
“How could you not tell me about this, Hal? Are you that caught up in yourself that the very idea of me progressing while you’re stuck, is abhorrent to you?”
He coughed in surprise, possibly choking on a mouthful of water or, more likely, whiskey, before answering in a shocked tone, “What? Kate, no. It’s nothing like that…”
She leaned her head back on the edge of the bath-tub, clenching her eyes shut, unsure of which emotion was stronger – her hope that something might be in the pipeline for her, or her anger that he would keep something like that from her.
“Then what, Hal? What is the justification? Please help me to understand how, with everything we’ve gone through in the past few months, you would keep something like this from me? When I have been fucking drowning in despair over this…”
The words spilled out of her like the water from the tap earlier. It felt painful to say them out loud, probably because this was the first time she had done so, and in such an unguarded state. This wasn’t a glib comment about the mediocrity of everything; it was like the lament was being pulled out of her soul.
And he just didn’t fucking understand that. She ran a wet hand through her dry hair, she hadn’t even had the chance to submerge herself, to open her eyes underwater and see the world above in a different veneer of reality.
“Kate,” Hal said, in a softer tone, “I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
She found that that answer infuriated her even more.
“Hal,” she shook her head, “I’ve needed some glimmer of hope.”
She heard him take a breath, weighing his response.
“Not if it’s false, Kate.”
She sighed, biting her lip, wondering what she would have done if this scenario had been the other way around. She liked to think she would tell him, give him something to cling to. But she could see why someone might not. It infuriated her that she could see his point of view, even if she didn’t agree with it.
“Hal, you can’t just make decisions like that about things that affect me, and think that I’ll be ok with it. I’m not a child; I can handle some pretty fucking big responsibility.”
He sighed, “I never said you couldn’t, Kate. I just… I didn’t want to give you something that might turn out to be nothing. I don’t trust Billie or the State Department to do the right, not even just the right thing, the smart thing. I didn’t tell you because, at the moment, this mysterious ‘something’ is nothing, Kate. And I didn’t want you jumping at every phone call, every knock on the door, every ping of an elevator, wondering if this is it. Is this the moment? Because that’s just killing you ten times a day, every day, until the something either comes or you go.”
Kate felt numb, though she wasn’t sure if it was from his words or the fact that the water in the bath had lost most of its heat. And yet, she couldn’t bring herself to stand up, wasn’t entirely sure that her legs would hold her up.
She was angry with Hal, violently so. But fuck him if he wasn’t also entirely right in his reading of how she would have approached the situation. She ran a hand over her face, taking a deep gulping breath.
“Hal,” she said, shaking her head, but finding that the rest of the words wouldn’t come to her.
“Kate, I’m sorry, I promise I did not do this because I’m jealous of you, or because I want to control things… I just, I didn’t see it as a lifebuoy, just a bigger and more aggressive wave that would drag you under.”
Her breath hitched and she sucked her lips into her mouth, willing herself to regain her composure.
“Hal,” she said again, “Don’t ever keep something like this from me again. I swear, I will walk out the fucking door and we will be done. I understand and, on some level, I even appreciate your thinking on this, but don’t ever, ever take me out of the equation of my own life again.”
The silence that followed seemed to reverberate around the bathroom; it was a curious thing, she thought, to be able to “hear” the silence, the weight in it.
“Ok,” he said finally, “I promise.”
The silence again. Neither of them sure of what to say next. Nothing seemed appropriate to follow such a conversation. But there was something else that Kate wanted to know, and now was the best chance she would ever have of getting it out of him.
“Hal,” she said quietly.
“Yeah?”
Kate sat up straighter, as if preparing to spring to her feet. The thought amused her; she didn’t have the energy for that.
“Billie said something else to you that night. What was it?”
Hal let out a pained sigh, “It doesn’t matter.”
But she wasn’t letting it go this time. He would have to hang up on her to get away from this conversation and he knew how pissed off she would be if he did that.
“Hal…” she said in a warning tone.
“Kate, please. It doesn’t matter,” he sounded tired, tortured even by this reiterated request which he had batted away each and every time she had brought it up. He was not getting out of it this time.
“Hal,” she said in a firm tone, “What did she say?”
She heard him exhale, long and loud, a surrender at last. She almost felt bad about it. Almost.
“She said that your biggest liability… was me. And she wasn’t wrong.”
Kate felt an icy shiver through her body, again not sure what to attribute that reaction to. Either way, she really needed to get out of this bath before she inflicted a flu upon herself.
“Hal…” she whispered, but he cut her off.
“No, Kate. Don’t. She’s right and we both know it.”
She couldn’t argue with him. He wouldn’t appreciate that. He hated cheap platitudes, would prefer the brutal honesty.
“Maybe,” she said softly, “But…”
“What?” he asked in an almost whisper, and she understood now why he hadn’t wanted to tell her about this.
He hadn’t wanted to put this reality on the table between the two of them, as if it was something that hadn’t occurred to both of them already. But it wasn’t something that had been expressed because giving voice to something like this gave it agency, gave it power, and neither of them needed something so divisive to have any power in this discussion.
She felt herself soften as she replied, “That’s a truly fucking terrible thing to say to someone.”
She listened to his breathing, counted the beats until he replied almost 20 seconds later, a bullshit, bravado Hal Wyler answer.
“Yeah, well… I gave as good as I got.”
She raised an eyebrow, smiled sadly, “Really?” She could almost picture him shaking his head, that tiny, blink-and-you-miss-it twitch that she could recognise so readily where others wouldn’t even know that a decision had been made.
“No,” he said hoarsely, “No, not really.”
The call descended into silence again until Kate finally felt another shiver through her body. This time she was sure it was the water which was now, in fact, cold.
“I’m fucking freezing,” she said, just to say something that would break the aura of the conversation they had just had. She heard him chuckle.
“And I’m still sweltering; we balance each other out.”
She hummed and mumbled that that wasn’t much use when there was a thousand miles between them. Instead, she grasped the edge of the tub with one hand, ready to pull herself to her feet.
She stood up, knowing that he would hear the sound of the water gushing off her body and feeling a certain warmth at that fact. She heard his breath hitch and smirked as she stepped over the edge of the tub and onto the bath math, grabbing her towel as she did. She placed the phone down on the vanity and pressed the loudspeaker button on it, before towelling off and wrapping it around herself.
“Better?” Hal’s low voice echoed through the room and she smiled at the sound. As much as he infuriated her, he knew how to play her. He did it so well sometimes that she didn’t even realise he was doing it. The other times, when she knew what he was doing, he did it so well that she couldn’t find it in herself to care.
“Yeah,” she breathed, “Dry. Well, mostly…” she added in a sultry tone and waited.
“Kate…” he growled, and she smirked.
Then, picking up the phone, she flicked the towel to the floor and headed for their bedroom.
*