lyss-writes
writer? i barely know her.
writing sideblog for wambsgangs. find me on AO3.
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found this alt to the final chapter of “unlearning what ain’t right” (aka the rate my professor tomgreg fic) in the drafts.
Tom blinks out of a dreamless sleep to bright, harsh sunlight streaming through the curtains. He lifts a hand to rub the sleep out of his eyes. Weird, he must have slept through his alarm and well into the morning. He’d normally drag himself out of bed at six to go for a run around the neighborhood with Mondale, but if the weight on his chest is any indication, they’ve both overslept.
But it’s not Mondale—it’s Greg. Passed out on top of him, his face pressed into his chest. The early morning grogginess clears, and Tom flushes at the snatches of memories from the night before that come rushing back.
Well. That happened.
He gingerly peels Greg’s arm off his waist, slips out from under him so that he can pull on clothes—a light tee and a pair of faded sweatpants that he wears to clean the house, the first things he can grab—and sneaks out of the bedroom.
Mondale is waiting for him when he pads into the kitchen, sitting sentinel by the breakfast table. Tom stoops to scratch behind his ears, to beg forgiveness.
“I know,” he croons. Mondale huffs, pointed in his show of displeasure. “I know, buddy. I’m sorry for kicking you out last night.”
It is strange, the ease with which Tom came to accept that his life would be one of solitude. Just a middle-aged divorcé with his dog, living in a suburb where nobody could find him. He’d figured that the odds of finding someone to settle down with—after the public split from Shiv, the humiliation at the Brightstar Senate hearings—were slim to none. That he could be content, if not a little disappointed by the path that led him here, with sharing his bed with a seventy-pound dog.
And it’s not that he is particularly attached to this life. Coming home from work, where everybody hates him, to an empty house, an empty bed. It isn’t so different from the life he had with Shiv, really. Just quieter, with more opportunity for self-reflection—a dreaded pastime.
But that doesn’t mean that he isn’t scared of change. Even when it's indisputably for the better.
He puts a pot of coffee on, sips idly from a chipped mug while he sits with his back to the hallway and stares out the kitchen window through to the backyard. As Tom strokes Mondale’s head, he thinks of the way he brushed a hand over Greg’s forehead last night, sweeping his sweaty hair out of his eyes, as they were falling into a doze.
“Tom,” Greg had mumbled, lips moving against Tom’s chest.
“Mm.”
“Maybe this is, um. A bit forward,” he’d said, voice heavy with drowsiness. “But are we, like, a thing now? Is this something?”
Tom’s hand stilled. “Ah.” He shifted under Greg’s weight. “I don’t usually put out on the first date, so. Is this, ah, is this your idea of pillow talk, Greg?”
“Tom.” Greg sighed. “Can we be serious for, like, a minute?”
He closed his eyes. “We’re not seriously having the what-are-we talk right now, Greg.”
“No, sure,” Greg said through a yawn, and pressed his face into Tom’s neck. “But, um. You’re not gonna, like, act all weird when we do?”
It had never failed to unnerve Tom, these moments where Greg could be oddly perceptive. How he could understand Tom better than anyone, even after months of distance and silence.
“Tomorrow,” he’d said finally, ghosting his lips over Greg’s forehead. He couldn’t promise much more than that. “Just go to sleep, Greg.”
But sleep took a long time to claim Tom.
At the sound of heavy footsteps on the kitchen tile, Tom glances over his shoulder. Greg shuffles in with bare feet, with one of Tom’s shawl cardigans drawn tight over his bare chest, and a pair of borrowed flannel pajama pants. His ankles jut out a few inches below the hemline.
“It was cold in your room,” he says, at Tom’s raised eyebrow. “But, um. Hi.” Greg stoops to press a kiss to the corner of Tom’s mouth, sleepy-eyed and reticent.
Tom offers a wry smile, curling a hand into the soft wool before releasing his hold on Greg. “So, ah. Are you usually this comfortable stealing from the guys you fuck, Gregory?”
“Um, no.” Greg scratches behind Mondale’s ears, and shoots Tom a look before he crosses to the row of kitchen cabinets in search of a mug. “I don’t usually, like, stay the night?”
“Didn’t leave you much choice, did I—oh, top row, above the sink.” Tom watches Greg pouring coffee from the pot into a blue ceramic mug. He settles at the table next to Tom, and Mondale tentatively slinks away from his station at Tom’s knee to rest his head on Greg’s lap. Traitor. “Your pile of scrap's halfway across town.”
Greg shrugs. “Honestly, like. I would have stayed over anyway.” He blows gently over the mug before taking a careful sip.
“Don’t say shit like that,” Tom frowns. “I might start to take you seriously.”
“I’m being serious.” Greg sets his mug down and folds his hands in front of him. Maybe it was the months in an executive role at Waystar, but Tom is surprised that the gesture actually reads as authoritative. “Like, come on, Tom. You really think I moved upstate because of, like, the views? Or the business program?”
“Well.” Tom runs a thumbnail along a groove in the table surface, pointedly avoiding Greg’s knowing look. “You were never one for doing research. When you worked for me.”
Greg heaves a sigh, blowing an exasperated breath out through his nose. “Dude.”
Look—Tom can read between the lines. He’s not as obtuse as people seem to think he is. But he just can’t wrap his head around the idea that he might be worth a sacrifice. That someone might want to make sacrifices for him, instead of making him into one.
“Maybe,” he says, even though he knows he's being petulant. “Maybe you did, Greg. I don’t pretend to know what you’re thinking.”
Greg props his chin on his hand. He studies Tom with those penetrating eyes, scanning for any signs of weakness. One of those latent Roy family traits, he supposes.
“Is this about the thing?”
Tom flushes. He doesn't want to talk about the press conference, or that last, awful conversation in Greg's apartment. “No. Fuck. Not everything's about something, Greg.”
“But—if it is." Greg's eyebrows settle low on his forehead in a long, unbroken line. "Like, I know I already told you, but seriously, dude. It wasn’t personal.”
“See, the more you say that, the less I’m inclined to believe it,” Tom says, taking a long sip from his mug to punctuate his point.
Greg grimaces, but he doesn't comment. They drink their coffee in a silence that is only broken by the sound of Mondale’s tail thumping against the table leg by Tom’s foot.
“I’m sorry,” Greg says finally. “I'm really fucking sorry, dude. For hurting you like that.”
There are no words to respond. Tom doesn’t have a canned answer at the ready for this sort of thing. He isn’t sure that he’s ever heard someone say these words to him before. At least not with this apparent sincerity.
“But, Tom,” he says, laying a hand flat on the table between them, fingers stretching out near enough to brush against Tom’s wrist. “You know that I came here to be with you. Right?”
Tom’s throat constricts, tight with an emotion that he thought he'd left behind in the backseat of a chauffeured town car all the months ago. “I told you to fuck off,” he manages in a reedy voice.
“I know,” Greg says. His smile is delicate. “But, to be fair, like. You’ve told me that a lot? But you never seemed to mind when I came back the next day.”
His fingers tighten around his mug. The coffee is going cold, but it's something to do with his hands, anyway. “You're serious,” Tom says, squinting at Greg. “You want me. After the fucking bullshit I put you through.”
Greg traces his thumb along the length of Tom’s wrist, a light touch that makes him shiver. He gives Tom a look like he’s being stupid. “Well, yeah.”
“You fucking idiot.”
“You don’t mean that,” Greg smiles.
“No, I do,” Tom insists. His voice rises in pitch, cracking with emotion. “I mean, fuck, do we have to commit right this fucking second? Can’t we just take this one day at a time? What if you get tired of this place, or—or me? What about that, Greg?”
He’d wondered, while lying in bed with Greg asleep on his chest, if he was just a novelty. If Greg had thought about what it might be like to fuck his cousin’s husband, who happened to be his boss, who ended up being his teacher. If it was just about tasting the forbidden fruit. If the morning would come, and Tom would turn back into a pariah. An unfuckable sad sack with enough baggage to fill the cargo hold on the Waystar Royco private jet.
“Tom.”
“It’s just that, you know. Statistically speaking, I don’t have a great track record with relationships.” Tom lowers his gaze to the table again, just so he doesn’t have to look into Greg’s fucking dairy cow eyes when he speaks. “I mean. I can be really goddamn needy, Greg. Possessive, maybe.”
“I know.” Greg strokes gently at his wrist, certainly trying to be sympathetic, but Tom can still hear a hint of a teasing smile in his voice.
“Fuck off,” Tom mutters, half-hearted. “Point is? I’m a fucking mess, most of the time. And you might get bored of dealing with my shit, and—and you’re in the fucking prime of your life, you know? You don’t need to—” His voice catches, and he swallows hard to keep the rising lump in his throat at bay. “You don’t need to stick around because you feel sorry for me.”
He has come to understand Shiv in the months after their divorce. Her restlessness, her mounting dread at being tied down forever. There’s nobody in this world who Tom hates more than himself. It was only natural that his wife would feel the same way.
“I don’t, um.” Greg clears his throat. “I don’t feel sorry for you.”
Tom looks up. At Greg’s solemn expression, he pulls a skeptical face. “Don’t bullshit me, Greg.”
“But I don’t,” he says, firmer. His hand tightens around Tom’s wrist. “Like, I know you think that you’re pathetic or whatever for leaving, but, dude. You were fucking miserable.”
Tom frowns. He wants to argue that point, because his life was—objectively—materially better than it is now. Gorgeous wife, high-powered job with opportunity for advancement, a sense of belonging in elite circles like he’d always dreamed he would one day.
But he was also good at denial, self-deception. Still is.
“Look, dude. I’m not—I’m not Shiv,” Greg says. “I’m not gonna, like, get bored of you. Okay? I’m pretty sure I know what I’m in for with you.”
“Well, that makes me feel better,” Tom sighs, dropping his forehead into his hands. “If that’s not a fucking sunken cost fallacy. What, I’m just a safe option for you? Is that it?”
“I don’t know about safe, per se, ” Greg says with a breathy laugh. “But, like. You were my best friend. Maybe the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Tom digs the heel of his palm into his eye socket. “That’s fucking depressing.”
“Still.” Greg pauses, long enough to sip from his mug. It lends Tom enough time to blink back the tears stinging at the corners of his eyes before he looks up again.
“When you left? I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t deal.” Greg gives an insouciant shrug, like he hasn’t just said something impossibly kind. “I know how I feel about you, Tom. Pretty sure I’ve known for a long time. I just, like. I don’t think I could lose you all over again, you know?”
Tom pinches the bridge of his nose. He won’t fucking cry over Greg again, even if it’s not a goodbye this time.
(How stupid he was, to think that he could cut Greg clean out of his life, and never look back.)
He reaches for Greg across the table, pulling him in by the sleeve of his sweater, and kisses him full on the mouth. He feels Greg’s lips curl into a subtle smile against his. When he pulls away, he runs a thumb over Greg’s bottom lip. “I know.”
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draft version of a few scenes in “love is the last fridge magnet left” which i’m revisiting anew on this auspicious succession season premiere eve.
“What can I get you, sir?”
Tom has his pounding forehead cradled in his hands, elbows stacked on the bar. He peers at the bartender through slotted fingers with a grimace.
“Scotch neat,” he tells the barkeep as he leans forward on his stool. It’s an effort to be heard over the raucous laughter of the other patrons, the clink of ice cubes in highball glasses, in this crowded corridor. “I don’t care which brand, whatever you’ve got is fine.”
He should have known better than to take a dinner meeting in Greenwich Village. There’s a reason that he avoids these sorts of places, the same reason that he frequented them at the height of his chimeric glory days.
Tom had always wanted to be seen. Back then, it had seemed so important to flaunt his unearned wealth, his tenuous connections. He had flown too close to the sun and crashed back down to earth. A mere mortal condemned to crawl on all fours for the rest of his days.
But Icarus wasn’t so easily forgotten after his literal fall from grace, and neither was Tom Wambsgans.
He keeps his head bent low over the bar. It’s his sincerest hope that none of the twenty-something junior investment bankers and model girlfriends packed into the entrance and hemming him in are New York magazine readers, cable subscribers or—God forbid—fastidious Twitter users. He hopes that he is unremarkable, bland and inoffensive as any other white guy in his forties.
“Thanks,” he mutters when the bartender slides a lowball glass in front of him. He doesn’t dare to lift his eyes out of fear that he might make eye contact with himself in the back bar mirror, even through the neat rows of liquor bottles and fluorescent gleam.
He had reconnected with an old friend—well, an acquaintance, at least—from his brief stint in journalism school in the late nineties, and when Rob had mentioned that he was working for an offshoot of the Times, Tom figured it was worth an overpriced dinner at the Waverly to pick his brain a bit.
It wasn’t like he was busy. The abrupt shift from the feverish pace of life on the executive floor to slouching around his Lower East Side two-bedroom and scrolling aimlessly through LinkedIn gave him vertigo. He needed a fucking reason to exist, if not as a prodigal son-in-law or global broadcast chairman.
“Might there be room for someone… like me?” Tom had asked at an opportune moment, when their plates had been cleared away and digestifs set before them—Armagnac for Rob, a splash of single-malt Macallan for Tom. “I mean, is that an insane thing to ask?”
Rob paused with his snifter raised to his lips. “Well.” He shrugged, took a sip. “That’s a complicated question.”
“Is it, though?” Tom smiled. “I do have a journalism background. And I have connections.”
“Right, but,” Rob said uneasily, setting his glass down. “It’s a bit of a conflict of interest, isn’t it? We covered the Brightstar hearings.”
“Well, I’m not—look, I’m not a journalist,” Tom said. His cheeks felt flush, and certainly not from the whiskey. “It’s not as if I’m putting myself at the center of a story. I know the business end of these operations.”
Rob scratched at his neck. The mood had shifted from a casual meeting of like minds to something akin to a Roy family dinner. Tense, awkward. “It’s just—the cruise thing, ATN. As far as a culture fit goes, I don’t know. It might not be for you.”
Tom resisted the urge to scoff. What did this self-righteous prick know about what suited him? “You know I didn’t believe the right-wing horseshit that the network churned out,” he said, incredulous. “Right? Nobody actually believes it. It’s all advertising dollars. Ratings. None of it’s real.”
“Tom,” Rob said, his mouth set in a tight line. “You’re a nice guy, okay? And you’re definitely qualified. But it’s just about the optics. That’s all it is.” He grimaced and lifted his glass again, took another sip while Tom tried to recover what remained of his dignity.
“And anyway, between us? This actually isn’t a great time to be onboarding topline staff. With the buyout and everything.”
Tom frowned. “The buyout?”
“Yeah. The new guys at Waystar, actually. They just swooped in and bought us out from under fucking Dean Baquet,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know how the fuck they did it. Must have gotten a massive capital infusion or something. But anyway. Heads are gonna roll.”
Tom drained the rest of his drink in one gulp to hide his scowl while Rob signaled for the check.
He probably could have slunk off back to his apartment and drank himself into oblivion in peace, but the place is too quiet but for the distant sound of passing cars and wailing sirens on the streets below, the hum of the refrigerator. He doesn’t feel up to quiet introspection in his half-furnished living room with only his dog for company.
So he settles for nursing a scotch, alone, at a bar that has long since gone out of fashion, surrounded by pleasantly drunk twenty-six year-olds who have probably never known a single disappointment in their lives. Did they have to quit their high-profile media jobs in disgrace? Did they have to relinquish all claims to joint assets in their divorce settlements?
These fucking millennials.
Tom takes a rough swig of his drink, flinches at the burn that trails down his throat. He is aware that he is the textbook definition of a man experiencing a midlife crisis. It’s a bit too on the nose, right down to the loosely knotted tie around his neck and the sheen of flop sweat on his upper lip. Just what he always wanted—to be a fucking cliché.
“Tom?”
His shoulders tense. Against his better judgment, Tom looks up and finds Greg peering down at him as if from a great height (which, he supposes, it is).
“Oh, would you look at that,” he says in a flat affect. “Gregory Hirsch. As I live and breathe.”
Greg drops onto the stool next to him.
“It’s, like, really good to see you, man,” he says with an easy grin, and if Tom wasn’t so deeply suspicious of Greg’s motives, he might think it sounded genuine. “Um, how are things? How’s the, uh—the job search?”
“Fantastic,” Tom drawls. “What’s with the pleasantries, huh?”
Greg gives him an odd look. “I’m being polite?”
“Jesus. If you’re gonna be a backstabbing piece of shit, Greg, you’re gonna have to ditch the manners,” Tom says, swirling his drink in a tight circle on the bar. “Good to see you, too, et cetera. Feel free to fuck off and talk to someone else.”
Greg folds his hands in front of him, the picture of contrition. “Dude.”
“No, no dude. None of that,” Tom says with a frown. “We’re not fucking friends, Greg.” He shifts in his seat and tries to get a good look at Greg. On the surface, he looks good. Brash confidence rolls off him in waves, paired well with rolled-up sleeves and coiffed hair that is tousled just so. Where he learned to pull off that disaffected cool, Tom doesn’t know.
But Tom does know this motherfucker, this earthworm trying to pass for a viper. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but something is definitely off with Greg. His eyes are a touch too bright, color high in his cheeks, not a trace of that twitchy anxiety that underpins his every stuttered word. “Are you on something right now?”
“No,” Greg tells him, a little too quickly to be credible. He prims his mouth into a tight smile. “I’m just, like. Having a good night.”
“Uh-huh,” Tom says dubiously, eyeing him. “You’re here alone?”
Greg frowns. “No, uh. Ken’s here somewhere, I think.” He twists around in his seat and cranes his neck to look behind him into the throng of nobodies squeezed between the bar and the brownstone entryway. “Or maybe not. Kinda lost track of him at some point,” he says with a rueful laugh.
Tom chews on the inside of his cheek. That’s… not promising. “Okay, well. I don’t know if I trust you wandering off on your own.”
“Dude, I’m fine,” Greg insists. “I swear. Can’t I just be happy to see you?”
“See, now I really don’t believe you,” Tom sighs, signaling to the bartender. He hadn’t set out with the intention of being Greg’s babysitter all night long, but it beats sitting alone and steeping in sadness. “Can I get some water for him?”
“And, uh, two more of these,” Greg says, nodding to Tom’s half-finished scotch. “Thanks, man.”
Tom watches the bartender snatch the Glenfiddich off the shelf and pour two draughts out, and shakes his head. “Pace yourself, buddy.”
“I’m fine.”
“You know, as much as I’d love to believe that, I’d rather not see you choke on your own vomit,” Tom says, pressing the water glass into Greg’s hands when the bartender sets it down before him. “Drink up.”
And there it is, that glimmer of affection that he still hasn’t figured out how to quash after all these months. Because when he thinks about it, he doesn’t hate Greg as much as he wants to for the betrayal, the slick double agent bullshit he pulled. He is a difficult person to hate. His wide-eyed innocent act is endearing, to the point that Tom often catches himself starting to believe it.
If he’s honest (and he almost never is, even with himself), he’d thought that there might be something there with Greg. Before it all went to shit, of course. He didn’t have any other logical explanation for the intimacy he shared with his wife’s idiot cousin aside from—a twisted sense of family loyalty? To someone who barely qualified as an in-law? Or maybe it was all part of his knee-jerk instinct to protect him? But all of that pretense is gone now, and he should want to toss his drink in Greg’s stupid face or gouge out those wet calf eyes, but he doesn’t.
He misses the traitorous bastard, damn it.
. . .
The scotch does him some good. By the time they stumble out onto the corner of Waverly and Bank, Tom is loose-limbed, pleasantly drunk in a way he hasn’t been since—well.
“You remember that time I took you to that pop-up in Columbus Circle?” Tom asks, bracing himself with a firm grip on Greg’s flimsy bicep. “With the ortolan?”
Greg groans. His broad hands come up around Tom’s waist, fumbling for purchase. He’s a little unsteady on his feet, too. The fucking lightweight.
“Oh, fuck. You’re not—you’re not taking me for deep fried songbird again, dude? Because, like, I’ll definitely puke it up this time.”
Tom snorts, fond. “I was thinking more about a handful of aspirin, actually,” he says, drawing his phone out of his pocket. He needs to text his driver, get himself home in one piece instead of wandering around in a drunken stupor like a Columbia undergrad.
He glances up from his phone to ask Greg if he needs anything—a lift, maybe; some water. But before he can even get the words out, Greg dips his head and presses a soft kiss to the corner of Tom’s mouth, light enough that Tom could almost convince himself that it was an accident. His eyes are black, heavy-lidded.
Greg swallows hard.
“Sorry, um. I—”
“Don’t apologize,” Tom breathes, tightening his grip on Greg’s arm. And then suddenly they’re kissing, tangled up in each other on a dim street corner in Greenwich Village as if nobody can see them.
Tom isn’t sure who leans in first. He thinks that Greg is the one who crowds him against the side of the building and kisses him, slots his tongue into Tom’s mouth, tastes him like he is a thousand-dollar vintage or a rare songbird. Or maybe Tom is the one who pulls Greg flush against his hips, cards his fingers through that Ivy League cut.
Even with single-malt scotch sloshing around in his bloodstream and blurring his conscious mind at the edges, he knows that this is more real than any of his old feverish fantasies. Fucking Greg slowly on the stiff-backed couch in his corner office with a hand clamped over that supple mouth. Or, when things started to heat up with the Brightstar investigation, he’d let himself go all wistful and imagine the two of them just picking up and leaving it all behind, holing up in some cabin upstate, or maybe the French Riviera. Somewhere distant and safe, just out of Logan Roy’s reach.
“Come back to mine?” Tom pants against Greg’s neck when they pull apart on a breath.
Greg shivers in his arms, nodding into another kiss. “Yeah, like. Obviously.”
It’s only about a thirteen-minute drive to the East Side, a little longer with traffic, but Tom has every intention of making those paltry minutes count. It feels kind of sleazy to pile into the back of a private car and immediately draw up the privacy divider with little more than a curt nod to his driver, almost like he is afraid of being caught in a sordid affair, but Tom isn’t married anymore. He doesn’t work with Greg. (The fringe benefits of getting a divorce and quitting his job, huh?) It’s as much of a clean slate as he’s ever going to get, so he shrugs off any residual guilt before it can settle heavily around his shoulders and lays Greg flat across the backseat.
“Fuck,” Tom sighs into Greg’s ear. He traces the lobe with the tip of his tongue, tugs it between his teeth. “Greg. Are we actually fucking doing this?”
“Looks like it,” Greg says in a tight voice, sliding a shaky hand up the length of Tom’s back and settling right at the nape of his neck. His eyes are squeezed shut, neck drawn taut for the open-mouthed kisses that Tom presses to his throat, his jaw. “Unless—like, unless you don’t want to?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Do you even know how long I’ve wanted this?” Tom asks, shifting onto an elbow to get a better look at him. Fuck, he’s so pretty like this, rumpled hair and slick lips and all. Pretty. What kind of word is that to describe a fucking Muppet in a human suit?
“I mean, I feel like I had a pretty good indication?” Greg cracks one heavy eyelid open, returns Tom’s scowl with a lazy grin. “You weren’t, like, subtle about it.”
Tom narrows his eyes at Greg. “Thanks. That’s not embarrassing at all.”
“I didn’t say I minded.”
He kisses Greg quiet, swallowing his moans when Tom rubs him through his trousers with the heel of his hand. The privacy divider is almost definitely soundproofed, but. Necessary precautions.
“I’ll show you fucking subtle,” Tom hisses, stilling his hand when the car rolls up in front of his building. “Hm? Straighten yourself out, you look fucking wrecked.”
But he’s pretty wrecked, too. He’s sure that the doorman can detect the sharp mingled scent of scotch and sin rolling off him in waves, if the knowing smile that he tosses in Tom’s direction is any indication.
Tom grimaces and tugs a dazed Greg along behind him into the elevator.
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Excelsior (Part 11)
Thanksgiving was a quieter affair than in years past. For as long as Tom could remember, it had always been a pretty big gathering at the house on Lake Superior that belonged to his dad’s side of the family: aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. The whole Wambs-gang, ha.
Not this year, though. Which was fine, honestly. (All right, fine, it kind of sucked: his grandma was getting on in years, and he hadn’t seen most of his cousins in ages. Sure, they were all Facebook friends, and he’d liked posts announcing engagements and weddings and new babies for years now, but still. It wasn’t the same.) Tom had a little bit of trouble imagining a Thanksgiving dinner with his entire family that didn’t end up revolving around him and his (extremely public, thanks to those bastards at Page Six!) marital woes. Forgive him if he didn’t really feel up to hearing his aunt Ellen deliver unsolicited advice on the subject while he passed the gravy boat to the right. Yeah, no fucking thanks.
It really was better like this, though. Keeping it all sort of low-key, just him and his parents and Greg, and Jonas, who came begging for asylum at the Wambsganses after his own nightmarish dinner with Hannah’s entire extended family, laden down with an armful of leftovers in Tupperware containers.
There was something to be said for intimate gatherings, Tom thought to himself, as the five of them sat down to eat in the dining room, a simple meal of turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and roasted Brussels sprouts and canned cranberry sauce. He didn’t even mind that his mom got all embarrassingly choked up over dinner when a glass too many of red wine got her talking about how grateful she was to have him home, in spite of the awful circumstances that brought him back out to St. Paul in the first place. Even the little twinge of longing for Shiv and the life he’d left behind in New York wasn’t enough to overtake him and turn him into a weepy, maudlin mess at the dinner table. Huh. Maybe he was made of stronger stuff than he thought. Or else the mandated therapy was actually doing him some good. Would that Logan Roy could see him now.
“Uh, like. I’d actually like to say a few words now, if that’s okay?” Greg said, and tapped the side of his wine glass with his index finger.
Tom snorted, draping an arm over the back of Greg’s chair. He felt a little carried away with a sudden burst of fondness for him, the big gangly dweeb. “What the hell is this, a Toastmasters meeting?”
[read more on AO3]
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Excelsior (Part 10)
[10/12]
The problem with living at home with your folks when you were in your forties was that you couldn’t expect to have a social life without your parents eagerly inserting themselves into it.
Which was why, after giving his parents the runaround for two solid weeks, Tom finally had to call it and invite Greg over for dinner at their house on Sunday night.
“Sorry,” Tom said grimly, when he extended the invitation after they finished up rehearsal on Saturday afternoon. “I couldn’t get them to lay off. They’re unreasonably involved in my life these days, you know, now that I’m not allowed to actually have one.”
“No, no. That’s cool,” Greg shrugged. “I like parents. And, uh, I never say no to free food, like, on principle.”
Tom snorted. “Quite a code you live by there, Greg. Who said that, Tacitus?”
————————
“So! This is the famous Greg,” Tom’s mother said, beaming.
The four of them were standing around in the kitchen. Tom’s parents had been cooking all day long in preparation for this dinner, hard at work on a convoluted recipe from the New York Times that his dad had been dying to try his hand at for weeks. It was weird. They were acting like Tom was some kind of misanthropic neckbeard loser living in their basement and running up a hefty tab with pay-per-view porn and cheap beer, and he was finally venturing out into the real world to make friends. Which was a little insulting. He had plenty of friends! Friends he hadn’t seen or heard from in a couple of years, but friends all the same. He had Jonas. He had… his therapist. (Fine, maybe they had a point.)
Greg grinned. “Really? I’m famous?”
“Not especially.” Tom shot his mom a warning look. “You’re a curiosity, maybe.”
“Oh, don’t listen to him, Greg,” his dad said, swatting Tom with a dishtowel. “Tom’s a comedian.”
They ate at the dining room table. His mom had made a point of breaking out the ‘good china’ for the occasion, had even set down a silk-blend tablecloth. There was red wine and braised short rib stew and, miraculously, free-flowing conversation that didn’t center on the veritable grab bag of verboten topics: dead husbands, estranged wives, restraining order violations.
Instead, his mom and dad peppered Greg with questions about his childhood (apparently Greg had grown up in Canada, splitting time between his grandpa’s ranch in Quebec and his father’s one-bedroom apartment in Toronto) and his Thanksgiving plans (“Oh, no, we don’t really celebrate, me and my mom,” Greg said, which earned him an immediate invitation from his parents to their house for the holiday) which led, inevitably, to talking about the dance competition that would be held that same weekend.
“How are the rehearsals going?” his mom asked.
“Good,” Greg said. “Uh, like, they’ve been going really good, actually. Tom’s been like, super helpful, with the uh, the song choices and putting the whole thing together.”
“Oh, please. You’re just flattering me,” Tom said, slightly abashed.
“I’m not,” Greg insisted.
“You boys think you actually have a shot at winning this thing?” Tom’s dad asked, his eyes lighting up with a gleam of interest.
“Mm. It’s not really about that,” Greg said, chewing thoughtfully. “I mean, it is for the, like, real, uh, the real professional dancers? I guess? But I’m not, like, interested in winning, per se.”
Tom held back a wry smile. “Also, no. There’s literally not a chance in hell.”
“Fair enough,” his dad said. “So, Greg, if you don’t mind me asking—”
“—like, why do I do it?” Greg lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. It’s fun. It’s… a good reason for me to get out of bed in the morning.” He twisted his wedding band around his finger as he spoke, almost unconsciously.
For a moment, the room was quiet. Greg didn’t have to mention Andrew to make it plain what he was talking about. His name was unspoken, but Tom still heard it loud and clear.
————————
Tom led Greg out onto the porch after dinner. They sat close on the front steps, shoulders pressed together, and watched as all of the streetlamps flickered to life down the block.
“Did anyone ever tell you how Andrew died?” Greg asked, tracing the rim of his coffee cup with his thumb. “Jonas? Or Hannah?”
Tom shook his head.
“It was, uh. Earlier this year,” Greg said after a pause. “February 12th. Three days after our second anniversary, um.” His mouth twisted into a grim, humorless smile. “Yeah, so, we were married for two years and three days, and I loved him. So much. But we’d been going through, like, a dry spell, for a couple of months and we weren’t really having sex anymore, and it just felt like we were so… uh. Disconnected. And I was depressed, and maybe some of it was my fault, like, that’s always been a part of me, and some of it was him wanting us to have kids, like, get serious and start thinking about finding a surrogate or something, but I have a hard enough time taking care of myself, so I don’t know, I wasn’t ready.” Greg cleared his throat. “Anyway. Uh. One night after dinner, he took the car to Minneapolis and bought some—stuff, you know, condoms and lube and shit to get something going between us again, and this—” He shuddered out a breath. “—this dude comes barreling down the Intercity Bridge, drunk as fuck, in the wrong lane, and Andrew, he swerves so that he doesn’t hit the guy head on, but he loses control and the car goes off the side of the bridge and into the river.”
Tom stared at him in horrified silence.
“Yeah,” Greg said. His eyes were glossy with tears, shining under the dim porchlight. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
Tom had no clue what to say to that. It felt like it might be better to say nothing at all.
He felt for Greg’s hand in the dark and gripped it tight, and Greg squeezed right back.
————————
Andrew’s death haunted Tom for days. He worried, maybe a little selfishly, that it would change his dynamic with Greg. They had a good thing going, witty banter that, even if Greg couldn’t exactly match Tom beat for beat, he took it all in stride. And the dancing was fun in a way Tom really hadn’t expected it to be. It had started out as an obligation, a begrudging favor to a vaguely irritating acquaintance, but somewhere along the way, Tom found himself looking forward to their rehearsals. Found himself kind of eager to see Greg and fall into step with him.
But his worries were unfounded. Greg was back to his usual irrepressibly cheerful self at their next practice session on Wednesday afternoon. They even managed to work out a tricky section of their routine that had been tripping them up for a few weeks now. Weird, how figuring out a step in a ballroom number could put Tom in a good mood.
“Oh, hey, I almost forgot,” Greg said afterwards. “Shiv replied to your letter.”
“What?! When?”
“Uh, like, it came in the mail the other day, I think?”
“And you forgot to tell me?!”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Greg said, shrugging.
Tom gaped at him. “Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Give it to me!”
Greg sighed and trudged upstairs to the second floor of the garage apartment—his bedroom, ostensibly—and returned a minute later with a nondescript white envelope in hand. “Here,” he said. “I just hope you can, like, handle it.”
“Why would you say something like that?” Tom asked as he tore into the envelope.
“I mean, like, I just don’t want you to get your hopes up?”
“Thanks, Greg.” Tom held the folded sheet of paper in his hands and stared at it. Shiv had written him back. He almost couldn’t believe it, but here it was. Six months of no contact, and now he had this tangible proof that Shiv was thinking about him. His heart pounded wildly in his chest.
Greg was watching him closely when he looked up. “Are you… like, you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. He swallowed. “Uh, I think I’m just gonna read it out loud? You know, if she says anything that’s, ah. Is that too much to ask?”
Greg nodded. “No, ‘course not.”
“Okay. Here goes.” Tom took a deep breath and unfolded the letter.
Dear Tom—
I was so happy to get your letter. I’m sure—
“I thought you were gonna read it out loud,” Greg said.
Tom blinked. “Right. Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “‘Dear Tom, I was so happy to get your letter. I’m sure you know that you were taking a huge risk by writing to me, but you did the right thing by sending it discreetly through Greg. This is a good way for us to communicate while I keep the restraining order in place for the time being.’” He looked up at Greg, who nodded for him to keep going. “‘You sounded like your old self in your letter. It sounds like you’re working hard on yourself these days, becoming a much happier and healthier person, like I always knew you were. And you’re doing an amazing thing by doing this dance competition with Greg. It’s very selfless of you, and I’m sure it means the world to him. I just wish that I could be there to see it.
“‘Obviously these are some extremely positive developments, Tom, but if I’m being honest with you, I need to see something to prove that you’re ready to come home and work on our marriage. Otherwise, I think we might be better off apart. Please take some time to think about this before you write to me again. You can give your letter to Greg and he’ll take care of getting it to me. I’m really glad that you’re doing well. Love, Shiv.’”
He folded the letter back up into a tight square and tucked it into his pocket. It wasn’t until he lifted his eyes to look at Greg that Tom realized he was crying.
“She said that you need to show her something,” Greg said, stepping in close. His eyes were dark and serious. “Like, this dance could be that something.”
Tom sniffled, wiping his eyes roughly with the back of his hand. “Yeah,” he said in a broken voice. “Maybe.”
“Don’t think of it as, like, a favor to me,” Greg told him. He touched a soft hand to Tom’s shoulder, the weight and warmth of his giant palm serving as a real comfort. “It’s for Shiv.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” Tom said. He looked up into Greg’s face and resisted the sudden, powerful urge to hug him. “Thanks for the, ah, the letter.”
“Anytime,” Greg said, his expression blank as slate.
“See you tomorrow, Greg.”
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Excelsior (Part 9)
[9/12]
Looking back on that moment later in the privacy of his therapist’s office, Tom might have said any number of things. He might have said, Are you fucking nuts? (Pejorative, and potentially a trigger.) Or, Suppose you’ll want to be the one in heels, Ginger Rogers. (Passive-aggressive, with a subtle hint of good old-fashioned homophobia baked in, for flavor.) A simple No, thanks might have sufficed here, but.
The thing was, Greg used to do this competition with Andrew every Thanksgiving weekend. Greg, whose family was a grouchy Quebeçois hermit and a conniving New York news magnate and a handful of cousins who had never once mentioned him. Andrew, whose family was English and distant in every sense of the word. And now Andrew was dead, and Tom was going to—what, he was gonna tell him No, uh-uh, absolutely fucking not, Greg like some kind of homophobic monster, like some horrible beast who would sooner piss all over a dead guy’s memory than shimmy around a hotel ballroom in Spandex pants like some low-rent Midwestern Baryshnikov with his wife’s cousin?
Shiv. Now there was an angle. Oh, to think of Shiv discovering that Tom had taken pity on her poor widowed cousin! Oh, oh, oh, how she’d fall longingly at his feet when she heard all about his selfless act of kindness. How gallant he was! How dashing!
So he agreed, but—because Tom was smart and blessed with real business acumen when it came to cutting deals and closing tricky loopholes—Greg had to find a way to deliver the note to Shiv first. Send it first-class, via carrier pigeon, in a fucking stripper-gram, for all he cared. Just get it done, nice and discreet, and then they could talk about this… ballroom dance thing.
“This is a wonderful thing you’re doing, Tom,” Dr. Parfit said, smiling at him. “A wonderful, wonderful thing.”
Oh, it was wonderful. God, he was good. In awe of his own brilliance. He could be back home with Shiv by Christmas, if he kept playing his cards right.
“Gosh, is it? I don’t know,” Tom said, simpering. “I like to think I’m just… being a friend.”
“Of course,” Dr. Parfit said, hand to his chest. “Of course you are.”
But his therapist didn’t know about the letter. He didn’t know about the sneaky little (possibly illegal) side deal he’d struck with Greg.
Logan Roy had once said in a fit of passion that Tom was fathoms beneath his daughter. He liked to think that this bit of duplicitousness would do his father-in-law proud.
————————
His parents were thrilled, predictably. Less thrilled, when they realized who his new dance partner was. It seemed like everyone knew Greg somehow: as the twenty-nine year old widower, as the resident office nympho. His mom mentioned that Greg had shopped his wrongful termination suit around to the white-shoe law firms in the Twin Cities a couple months back, including hers, but he’d decided in the end that it wasn’t worth the time and money to pursue legal action. But gee, wasn’t that a terrible tragedy to happen, to lose his husband when he was ever so young, and so in love! And wasn’t Tom such a sweetheart for taking him under his wing. And did Greg know that he was welcome to come for dinner anytime—really, anytime at all, anything for Tommy’s new friend!
“Sure,” Tom said, just to get his mom off his case. “I’ll tell him.”
But first: the letter. He disappeared into his bedroom and settled at his old desk and wrote. And damn, it was good. Really moving stuff, just super romantic. Would Nate do this for her? Would he write a bunch of purple prose and wax poetic about how lucky he was to be married to someone so extraordinary, so breathtakingly beautiful? Would he break some smug bastard’s nose for daring to touch her? And, well. Would someone like him, so concerned with the plight of the working class, blah blah blah, do what Tom was doing for Greg? What was he doing right now? Was he making a difference in Shiv’s cousin’s pathetic life? Ha! As if!
He scrawled it all out on a bit of his mom’s stationery—proof of life, etc.—and sealed it up in an envelope to give to Greg at rehearsal.
————————
“Holy shit,” Tom said. “You’re telling me that this was a garage?”
He stood in the middle of what could have been a professional dance studio, which just so happened to be in a converted four-car garage behind an old derelicted Craftsman. It was gorgeously designed. Oak floors, an entire wall of paneled mirrors, a top-grade sound system with wall-mounted subwoofers.
“Yeah,” Greg said. “I know. It was a total mess before I moved in with my mom, but she let me, like, trick the place out. Cool, right?”
“Jesus,” Tom said, running a hand along a light switch panel on the wall: turn a dial, and the lights dimmed so that a single spotlight burned overhead; flip a switch, and there was a strobe effect that rivaled the display at a West Berlin discotheque. “How opulent. This must have cost a fucking fortune.”
Greg smiled, a little sheepish. “Roy money.”
“Ah.” Tom thought privately that it was probably a bit of a waste, throwing several hundred thousand dollars at a bachelor pad slash elite dance studio in your mother’s garage, but then again, if he had his hands on even a fraction of Shiv’s inheritance, God knew what he’d do with it. He probably wouldn’t be channeling his millions into funding the cure for cancer, either. Maybe that was why she’d been so insistent on signing a prenup. “I thought you said you weren’t much of a dancer?”
“I’m not,” Greg shrugged. “But it’s therapy, and it’s fun! And the walls in here are good because they’re soundproofed, so I can play music really loud and my mom doesn’t hear it.”
“Oh. That’s… useful.”
Greg plugged his iPhone into a speaker setup and started tapping at the screen, scrolling through a Spotify playlist. “Uh-huh.”
“So when are you gonna give it to her?” Tom asked.
“What?”
He pulled the sealed envelope out of his back pocket and held it up. “The note, Greg.”
“Huh?” Greg kept looking at his phone. “Uh, I don’t know. Soon. I thought I’d, like, email it to her? Do people even use the post office anymore?”
“You’re not gonna read it,” Tom said, eyebrows cinching in the middle of his forehead. “Greg. Tell me you’re not gonna read the note. It’s private. It’s romantic.”
“Fine, like, type it up for me if you don’t want me reading it,” Greg said, his eyes still glued to the phone screen.
“Greg, you know I can’t do that. I can’t use a phone, I can’t touch a computer.”
“Yeah, yeah. Right. I forgot, the restraining order.” Greg lifted a shoulder. “I’ll scan it, or something.”
“Good, good.” Tom hummed to himself, a little unsettled by Greg’s nonchalance. There was a lot riding on the successful delivery of this note. “It’s a good letter, though. I think.”
“Mm. I bet.”
“Yeah, Shiv’s not really much of a romantic, you know. Or, uh, she’s not really, uh, comfortable showing affection. Always hated PDA. She keeps her cards pretty close to the chest.” Tom cleared his throat. “But I think she’ll see where I’m coming from.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And I mentioned in there, I talked about what I’m doing for you, the dance thing, how generous it is—”
“Very.”
“—and how I’m, ah, how I’m being of service to you—”
“No, like, yeah. Absolutely.”
“—to your need.”
“Right.” Greg took the envelope from Tom with a tight smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Uh, should we start?”
“Oh, ah, sure,” Tom said. Somehow he’d managed to forget that dancing was part of the deal. Apparently too much to hope that Greg would forget about it too, huh. “Show me what you’ve got, Stringbean.”
They warmed up for a bit in front of the mirrors, not so much dancing as they were swaying side-by-side to the beat of whatever treacly pop song Greg had pulled up on his phone.
I remember when,
I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
It was… fine, but not really danceable. Not in the way Tom knew how to dance, anyway. (Yes, he’d dabbled a bit in theatre, back in college. And yes, he’d taken lessons with Shiv before the wedding, a simple waltz, nothing too extravagant.) If they were gonna do this, then they needed some damn wedding music. Whitney Houston! The Spinners! Earth, Wind & Fire, for fuck’s sake. Real music.
So he cajoled Greg into switching up the playlist a little, and then they were, uh. Kind of dancing, the two of them, Tom leading with a firm hand on Greg’s hip. It was weird, dancing with someone taller than him, who also happened to be male, and gangly, and redolent of Old Spice deodorant, but he was also surprisingly… coordinated? And he didn’t seem to mind that Tom had taken the reins and was pushing him around the dancefloor like a housecleaner with a Hoover.
The level of automatic trust was unexpected. Which was nice, Tom had to admit. Weird, but nice.
“Hey, you’re, like, pretty good at this!” Greg said at one point. They were dancing to an oldie, a Sinatra song with a slower tempo, while they caught their breath.
“Don’t sound so surprised, Greg.”
“I didn’t know you knew how to dance, is all.”
Tom raised an eyebrow and spun Greg in a loose circle under his arm, and went in for a dip.
“Of course I know how to dance, Greg. Jesus,” Tom said, expertly tipping Greg. Yeah, he still had it in him. “I’m not a philistine.”
“I–I know,” Greg stammered, blushing, on his way back up.
Dancing was more of a workout than Tom remembered. They were flush and out of breath after an hour. Greg’s hair was damp, stringy with sweat, and his cheeks were pink.
He looked good, all worked up like that.
“See you tomorrow?” Greg asked when Tom went to leave.
“Yeah, sure, tomorrow,” Tom confirmed. “And, uh. Don’t forget about the letter.”
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Excelsior (Part 8)
[8/?]
When Tom strolled up to Greg’s house that night, he debated going up to the front door and ringing the doorbell. He checked the impulse before his feet could lead him up the porch steps. See, that was dangerous. That crossed the fine line between friendship and flirtation, and Tom already had enough of a problem toeing that line as it was. Blame his Minnesotan upbringing for that irrepressible charm.
The garage door opened, and Greg stepped out. He looked… good. Really good, actually. It looked like he had managed to tame his wild mop of thick black hair with a comb, and he’d ditched the band t-shirts and flannels for a crewneck sweater and jeans.
“Don’t you clean up nice,” Tom said when Greg made it to the end of the driveway. “Almost didn’t recognize you out of your pajamas.”
Greg smiled; a real one, with dimples. “Uh, thanks. I think.” His eyes flickered up and down in an appraising sort of way. “You look nice.”
“Thanks.”
“So, um. No suit this time, huh?”
Tom pressed his lips together in a thin smile. “Very funny. I might ask you where your suit is this evening.”
“Oh, you mean my Versace suit? It’s at the dry cleaners.” Greg smirked.
“It’s Armani,” Tom said, and immediately regretted saying so. “You know what, never mind. Let’s just go.”
There was a twenty-four hour diner a couple of blocks west of their neighborhood, so they walked there. The weather was pretty mild for mid-October in St. Paul; chilly, but not cold; brisk, but not bitter. Still, Tom was going to have to bite the bullet and buy a winter coat soon enough. It had been so long since he’d needed one; in New York, his complete reliance on door-to-door car service had basically supplanted an entire category of his wardrobe.
They sat in a booth by the window. The vinyl seats were sticky to the touch, just like the plastic menus that their waitress handed to them.
“What can I get for you boys?”
“Tapioca,” Tom said, sliding the menu away from him.
Greg frowned at him, visibly confused. “Uh, just a Diet Coke, thanks.”
“You got it.”
The waitress disappeared, and Greg cleared his throat. “I thought you wanted to grab dinner.”
“I did,” Tom said, scratching his neck. “I just wanted to make it clear that this isn’t a date.”
“Okay, like. I know it’s not a date,” Greg said. His cheeks went a little pink in spite of his insistence otherwise. “You do know that ordering, like, actual food doesn’t automatically make this a date? Or are you actually that insecure in your own heterosexuality?”
Tom scowled at him. “Right. Changing the subject.”
“Consider it changed.”
“How’s the dance thing going?” Tom asked.
“Good,” Greg said. “How’s the restraining order?”
Tom reared back in surprise. “Jesus. I think I just got whiplash.”
“Just making conversation,” Greg said innocently. “I heard that, like, the cops showed up at your parents’ house the other night.”
“One cop,” Tom corrected him. “And it was all big a misunderstanding. But the thing is that because of my, ah, my record, he still had to file a report, and Shiv’s lawyers are probably gonna see it and show it to her, and all of the work I’ve been doing, the therapy and the meds and the running?” Tom sighed. “It just feels like it’s all for nothing.”
Greg made a sympathetic sound. “Hm.”
“Like, I’m just the nutcase who went postal on her co-worker, and now there’s this new black mark on my record. It fucking blows.”
“That sucks, man.”
“Yeah, well.” Tom sighed again. It wasn’t helping all that much to talk about it; he felt weighted down by the confession. “Anyway.”
The waitress returned, setting a Diet Coke down in front of Greg, and a bowl of suspicious-looking tapioca in front of Tom. He forced a polite smile at her.
“Seriously, man, why did you order that?” Greg asked after she left.
“I don’t know, I panicked.”
Greg wrinkled his nose. “Looks gross.”
“Thanks, Greg.” Tom spooned a bite into his mouth. “Ugh.”
“Anyway,” Greg prompted. “You were saying.”
“Oh, right. I mean, if it wasn’t for the restraining order, I’d have my phone, I’d have my iPad, I could just call Shiv and explain myself, you know, tell her all about the progress I’ve made in the last six months, but apparently that’s, uh, a violation of the restraining order.” Tom ate another spoonful of pudding and grimaced, pushing the bowl away. “I just wish I could, I don’t know. Write her a letter? God. That’s so pathetic.”
“It’s not,” Greg said. “Like, I think it’s nice.”
“‘Nice,’” Tom snorted. “Isn’t that the kiss of death. Especially with her family.”
Greg looked down at the table. “Huh.”
“I can’t believe I’m asking you this, but.” Tom looked helplessly at Greg. “What would you do, if you were me?”
“Oh.” Greg chuckled, fiddling with his plastic straw. “Uh, you definitely don’t want my advice.”
“Yeah? And why’s that, Greg.”
Greg’s eyes flickered to his. There was something dark, implacable there. “Like, I’m guessing Hannah didn’t tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“We don’t work together anymore,” he said. “I, uh. I kind of got fired.”
Tom tilted his head to the side. “Okay? What for?”
“I had sex with everyone in the office.”
Tom blinked. Blinked again. Greg stared back at him, face unreadable. “You’re joking.”
“Nope.”
“Everyone?” Tom leaned in eagerly across the table, drawn in completely in spite of himself. “Like, at the same time? Like an orgy?”
“No, no,” Greg said, laughing. “No, it was, like, just a lot of random hookups. I don’t know. It was stupid. But it was right after Andrew died, and I was really fucked up, and, uh. There were a lot of people.”
“Men?” Tom asked. He raised an eyebrow. “Women?”
“Yeah, no, like, it was just, like a smorgasbord,” Greg said. “A smattering, as it were.”
“Holy shit.” Then, horrified: “Hannah?”
“Oh, God, no.” Greg made a face. “No, she’s, like, a sister.”
“Fuck. And they fired you for that? They can do that? That doesn’t sound terribly legal.”
“Like, it’s kind of not? I mean, like, technically they said it was performance-based, and I failed a drug test, but I think it was the sex stuff.”
“Fuck,” Tom breathed. He felt an odd twist of desire low in his gut. “Sorry, I’ll stop talking about it. I sound like a perv.”
Greg shrugged. “That’s okay. I don't mind.”
“How many people?” Tom blurted out before he could stop himself.
“Uh, let’s see.” Greg screwed up his face in concentration, counting on his fingers. “Nine?”
Tom’s mouth fell open. “Gregory. You total fucking slut.”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus.” Tom was fully aware that he was acting like a sleaze, but there was something oddly fascinating about Greg. Hidden depths, he guessed. You really couldn’t judge a book by its cover. He shook his head. “So, what do I do?”
“Huh?”
“What do I do, how do I get a message to Shiv?”
A flicker of irritation registered on Greg’s face. “I don’t know. Don’t you have a therapist to talk to about this stuff?”
“I can’t,” Tom sighed. “He’ll probably report it to the police.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you, dude.”
“Well, great. Thanks for your help, I guess.”
The look on Greg’s face hardened at that, and he sat back in the booth, folding his arms over his chest. Tom frowned. “What? What just happened?”
“Why did you even ask me to dinner?”
“God, I don’t know,” Tom said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Did I need a reason? It was an olive branch.”
“Yeah? Because honestly, it just kind of feels like you dragged me out here to dump on me and that’s, like, not a great feeling,” Greg said.
“What the fuck? You asked me about the restraining order!” Tom exclaimed. “How the hell is that me dumping on you? Don’t fucking ask next time!”
“You realize that we’ve only talked about you, like, every single time we see each other?”
Tom bristled. “Fuck you, Greg. I’m going through something.”
“So am I,” Greg said, eyes flashing with anger. “You know? My fucking husband just died, not that you actually give a fuck about that, you’re just wrapped up in your own bullshit, obsessing over your wife, who, by the way, probably had the right idea asking for a restraining order against you, because the shit that you did to that guy was really fucked up. And like, maybe you need a reality check. Like, it’s been how many months and you’re still a fucking mess.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah,” Greg said coldly. “You need to figure out a better way to deal with your shit instead of just dumping all over me.”
Tom felt himself getting upset. His breath started coming fast and shallow. “That’s awfully rich coming from you, Greg.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Fucking your entire office, spreading STDs all over town, you’re right. Much healthier approach,” Tom scoffed. “I’ll have to give that one a try.”
Something darkened in Greg’s eyes. “Wow,” he said. “You really are a dick.”
He got up from the booth and stormed out of the diner, which had gone quiet at some point in the conversation. People at nearby tables were openly staring at Tom when he looked up. An older woman sitting in the booth in front of him pursed her lips with obvious disapproval. Tom glared right back at her.
“Kindly fuck off,” he said. “Thanks.”
Tom ripped a twenty out of his wallet and left it on the table in plain view, and hurried out of the diner after Greg.
He was walking quickly down the sidewalk, shoulders hunched against the cool breeze that had picked up since they’d made their way over to the diner. Tom jogged a little to catch up to him. “Greg? Greg. Greg! Gregory! Greg, buddy, come on, I’m fucking sorry!”
“You say that a lot,” Greg tossed back over his shoulder. “Like, do you ever get tired of apologizing?”
“All the time,” Tom said. He curled a hand around Greg’s wrist, tugged him to a stop. Greg clenched his jaw tight and looked past Tom at some distant point over his shoulder. “Look, I know. I know I’m a prick. Trust me when I tell you that it’s kind of an open secret back in New York.”
Greg rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything.
“But for some reason, in spite of the fact that I’m a fucking piece of shit, you’re just determined to be my friend.” Tom raised his eyebrows. “Bullshit and all. Why?”
Greg blew out a harsh breath. He looked at Tom. “Uh, okay. I didn’t wanna say anything before, but like, I can get a message to your wife.”
“What?”
“Shiv’s my cousin.”
Tom stared at him. “No, she’s not.”
“I’m serious.”
“And I’m married to her, dipshit,” Tom said, frowning. “I think I’d know if you were related to my wife, yeah? You weren’t at the wedding.”
Greg gave him a knowing look. “Ewan Roy is my grandpa.”
Oh.
Tom had met Ewan exactly once. It was his first Thanksgiving with Shiv as his fiancée, the first holiday in years that he hadn’t gone home to St. Paul to celebrate, and the first, at least in recent memory, that Logan’s brother Ewan would be attending. Before that, Tom hadn’t known that Logan Roy had a brother. By the time the table had been cleared and the group adjoined to the parlor for drinks, it became abundantly clear why Ewan didn’t make a habit of dropping in. The sparring match that ensued between the brothers had been spectacular: mostly terrifying, but fascinating, a car wreck in slow motion.
They didn’t invite Ewan to the wedding for good reason.
“Yeah,” Greg said, at Tom’s look. “I know. I mean, I haven’t really spoken to her in years? But I can definitely, like, get a note to her. Tell her that you’re doing better.”
“Oh, my God.” Tom was momentarily overcome. His lips parted. “Greg, I—”
“But, um.” Greg held up a hand. “There’s just, there’s one thing I’d like you to do for me. In exchange. Like, a quid pro quo.”
Tom blinked. “You want me to fuck you?”
“No,” Greg said. Suddenly he looked shy, uncertain. “Uh. The ballroom dance competition, the one I was telling you about? In Chicago? It’s in about a month.”
“What?” Tom frowned. “What, you want me to come watch?”
“I want you to do it,” Greg said. “With me.”
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Excelsior (Part 7)
[7/?]
Tom walked home in a terrible mood. His cheek was smarting from the slap, his pride was wounded, and all he could think about was Shiv. Shiv, and her big, beautiful eyes; Shiv, crinkling her nose at him when he proposed, laughing when he scooped her up in his arms and spun her around; Shiv, with tears shimmering in her eyes, telling him that she couldn’t commit to a monogamous relationship on their fucking wedding night; Shiv, head thrown back in the throes of pleasure while Nate fucked into her, in their shower, in their condo.
He slammed the front door behind him on his way in. It rattled loudly in the frame.
“Tommy?” his mother called to him from the living room. The television was blaring at top volume. It sounded like a Vikings game. “Honey, are you all right? Jonas called and said you left early.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re sure? Jonas sounded worr—” His mom stepped out into the hallway and caught Tom shrugging off his suit jacket. She gasped. “Oh my God! What happened to your face?!”
“Huh?” Tom reached up to touch his cheek; the skin was hot to the touch, flaming with a blood blush. “I don’t know. It’s fine.”
“Tommy, what happened?”
“What the hell is going on?” his dad demanded, following his wife’s voice out into the foyer. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at Tom. “Jesus. What happened at dinner?”
“Nothing,” Tom said through gritted teeth. “I’m fine. God.”
“That doesn’t look like nothing, son.”
“Would you just leave me alone, for Christ’s sake?!” Tom snapped. “I said I’m fine!”
His parents stared at him, wide-eyed.
And then, as if someone had flipped a switch, Tom burst into tears.
It was uncontrollable. One minute he was fine, and the next minute he was sobbing his fucking eyes out, crying harder than he’d ever cried in his life. It was kind of like standing in the middle of the ocean when the surf was rough, and wave after wave kept coming in, taking him out at the knees, the waves crashing down on him hard enough to send him toppling, and just when he would find the strength to stagger to his feet, another wave would roll in and suck him right back under.
He felt his mom sink down next to him, felt her hand warm and comforting between the planes of his shoulders, and he tried to choke out an apology for cracking up like this but he couldn’t, he was crying too hard, snot was running in thick, slow rivulets down his chin, and distantly he heard his dad asking for Dr. Parfit’s number, but it sounded like his voice was coming from the end of a tunnel, and then the song, the fucking song, came roaring into his ears.
I said I love you, and that’s forever
And this I promise from the heart
Tom squeezed his eyes shut, straining against it, but it only managed to make the song louder in his head, and he saw, with perfect, searing clarity, Nate crashing backwards into the shower wall, a smear of blood on the tiles, his fist connecting with that celestial nose over and over and over, black blood on his knuckles, Shiv’s mouth opening in a terrible scream, and the scream rang out in his ears, mixing fluidly into the wail of the saxophone line.
I couldn’t love you
Any better
I love you just the way you are
His mom was sobbing, too; his dad was practically shouting on the phone, and then someone was pounding at the front door.
A neighbor must have heard the commotion and called the cops, because an officer was standing at their door. He seemed to know all about Tom’s case: the stint at Touchstone, the restraining order Shiv’s lawyers had filed against him in a city outside of this jurisdiction, the incident at Dr. Parfit’s office.
“I gotta write up a report,” the officer told him, after Tom had pulled himself together, and they all gathered in the kitchen to talk calmly about the situation. “I’m sorry about that, I really am, but given the facts here…” He sucked his teeth. “You understand.”
“My son didn’t do anything wrong, Officer,” his dad said, throwing a protective arm around Tom’s shoulders.
“He has a criminal background,” the officer said, not unapologetically.
Tom’s dad rolled his eyes. “You’re pulling my leg. It was a noise complaint.”
“I know, but my hands are tied here.”
“Will Shiv find out about this?” Tom asked. “Because this isn’t a reflection of where I’m at, sir. I’m working on myself, I’m not—”
“Your ex-wife can see the report, yes,” the officer said. “By law, she’s able to see any police report pertaining to the existing restraining order.”
“She’s not my ex-wife,” Tom said. “She’s my wife.”
“I’m sorry.” The officer stood up from his chair at the kitchen table and nodded to Tom’s parents. “Just try to keep the noise down, all right?”
————————
The next morning, Tom woke up feeling horrible. He laid in bed for a while, staring blankly at the ceiling, and rode out the worst of his shame hangover. God, what a mess. It had taken a couple of hours after the officer’s visit for his mom to finally calm down, and then he’d had an argument with his parents (quieter, this time) about his staunch refusal to take his medications, and there were threats, and more tears, until finally, finally, he got up from the kitchen table and poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher and shook his pills into his hand—150 milligrams of lithium; 150 milligrams of Clozaril—and swallowed them in front of his mother and father.
“Happy now?” he’d hissed, and went upstairs to bed.
After about an hour of laying there and feeling sorry for himself, Tom got up and pulled on his running gear, laced up his sneakers and grabbed his Walkman. He wasn’t allowed to have his iPhone or an iPod, or any device with a hardwired Internet connection, but the good thing about old-school music players was that you didn’t need much more than a pair of headphones and an eight-track tape to use them. He popped the lid open and slid in a cassette, clicked it shut. The Eagles, One of These Nights. Not what he’d usually go to for a run, but the moodiness suited him this morning.
He ran, pushing through the discomfort of a stitch in his side, and focused on evening out his pace. The tightness in his chest eased; he kept running, and Don Henley crooned about girls with lying eyes and lovers on the other side of town, and he was so distracted that he didn’t realize that he’d turned a corner onto Greg’s street.
The old Craftsman slid into view. In the daylight, Tom thought it looked a little derelict; there were loose shutters, and the siding needed a good power wash to clear off several decades’ worth of mildew stains. He frowned, slowing his pace as he passed to get a better look. It was still pretty, but damn. Greg couldn’t get up on a ladder and fix those shutters for his mom? Come to think of it, did he even need a ladder?
And then someone darted out in front of him.
Greg.
Tom almost tripped over his own feet but he caught himself in time. He ripped off his headphones. “What the hell?”
“Hey,” Greg said, jogging backwards. He looked ridiculous running in a pair of ratty flannel pajama pants and a White Stripes t-shirt. “Did I scare you?”
“Did you scare me? You almost gave me a fucking heart attack!”
“I called your name,” Greg said. “You didn’t hear me, I guess.”
“What are you doing.”
Greg gave him a stupid look. “Uh. Running?”
“In your fucking pajamas??”
“So what?”
“You’re ridiculous,” Tom huffed, picking up the pace. “You’re a fucking rodeo clown.”
“What happened to your face?” Greg asked, easily falling into step beside him. Those goddamn Roadrunner legs. He didn’t even look winded. Asshole.
Tom shot him a look. “Are you serious?”
“Like, I didn’t slap you that hard.”
“I bruise like a peach,” Tom snapped. “So thanks for that. Why the fuck are you following me?”
“I’m not following you,” Greg said. He was frustratingly cool-headed. “This is my street. I’m allowed to run on my street.”
“Well, this is my route. And I like to run alone, so fuck off.”
“So do I.”
Tom skidded to a stop, and Greg mirrored him. He glared at him, hands on his hips. “Would you stop?”
“What?”
“Stop following me!”
“I’m not following you!”
“Oh, sure,” Tom said, gesturing vaguely with his hand, “so I’m just supposed to believe that you were out for a run in your Converse.”
Greg jutted out his chin, defiant. “Yeah. Like, maybe I was.”
“Pick another fucking road!”
“I like this road,” Greg insisted. “I live here.”
Tom gritted his teeth and set off at a sprint, leaving Greg in the dust. His headphones jostled around his neck; Don Henley’s voice blared tinnily out of the earpieces, barely audible over the sound of his heavy footfalls on the asphalt. He swore under his breath, rounding a corner, and then Greg burst out of a side street and barreled straight towards him.
“What the FUCK.”
Greg caught up to him a little too easily, his hair flopping wildly in the breeze.
“Jesus! Leave me the fuck alone! I’m married!”
“So am I!” Greg shouted back.
“Your husband’s dead!”
Greg sneered. “Where’s your wife?”
“Oh, my God.” Tom barked out an incredulous laugh, slowing to a stop. He braced his hands on his knees and panted for breath. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy? Listen to yourself, dude,” Greg said, glaring at him. “I’m not the one who ended up in the mental hospital. All right?”
“At least I’m not a fucking creep who propositions married men.”
Greg’s eyes narrowed.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said, pinching the bridge of his nose. Clearly he hadn’t learned his lesson last night. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Greg said, nodding. “I’m a creep. I’m disgusting and sloppy and dirty, but I like that, I like who I am. Can you say the same about yourself, dude?”
He shot one last withering look over his shoulder and ran around the corner, and disappeared.
————————
“You had quite an eventful evening last night, I hear,” Dr. Parfit said, frowning at Tom over his notepad.
Tom peeked at him through his latticed fingers.
“Do you remember our discussion the other day?” he said. “Do you remember when I said, ‘Tom, you need a strategy for dealing with these feelings, because I don’t want you falling apart?’”
“I remember,” Tom told him tersely. “You think you could give me a strategy, maybe? What am I even paying you for?”
“Actually, you’re not paying me at all,” Dr. Parfit said. “The state of Minnesota is. I’m your court-appointed therapist.”
“Semantics.”
“You still have to do it, Tom.”
“Easier said than done, Alon.”
“I see what you’re doing,” Dr. Parfit said. “Deflecting. You use sarcasm as a defense mechanism when you’re uncomfortable.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “What are you, my junior high guidance counselor?”
“Why don’t you tell me about that shiner you’ve got there,” Dr. Parfit said, nimbly sidestepping.
Tom sobered. “Oh. Uh, well. That one was kind of my fault,” he admitted. “Jonas’s wife invited her work friend over for dinner, and we got into it a little bit, this guy Greg and me, and after the dinner blew up I walked him home and he asked me if I wanted to fuck him in his garage, and when I said no he asked if I wanted him to fuck me. The guy just lost his husband and he still wears his fucking wedding band and he wants to fuck me in his garage. He’s nuts.”
“You still wear your wedding band,” Dr. Parfit pointed out.
Tom pulled a face. “Well, yeah, but I’m still married.”
“Do you think that this Greg just needs a friend?” Dr. Parfit asked. “Maybe he thinks that by offering you sex, it’ll be easier for the two of you to get to know each other.”
“That’s fucking insane.”
Dr. Parfit tilted his head. “Is it?”
“I mean, it tracks,” Tom said. “He literally said to me that he likes that he’s easy, that he likes all of the messy parts of himself, and can I say the same about myself?”
“Can you?”
Tom frowned. “You’re really asking me that question?”
“I am.”
“You’re asking me if I like myself?”
There was a silence. His therapist watched him expectantly.
“I don’t always like who I am,” Tom said finally, looking at his hands. “For good reason. I mean, I’m impulsive, I’m needy, I desperately need people to like me but I always find a way to piss them off.”
“Don’t you think that you could channel some of that neediness into a real friendship?” Dr. Parfit asked.
“Oh, fuck off,” Tom muttered, dragging a hand over his eyes. “I’m forty-fucking-two years old, guy. I don’t need new friends. I’m not in the second grade.”
“Okay, well, think of it this way.” Dr. Parfit leaned forward in his seat, raising his eyebrows meaningfully. “What if it got back to Shiv that you took someone who was really struggling under your wing? What if that proved to her that you were basically thriving? That you’ve changed in the course of your time apart? Wouldn’t that lead her straight back to you?”
Tom considered.
“Huh.”
“Think about it,” Dr. Parfit advised him.
————————
The next time he went out for a run a few days later, Tom made a point of jogging past Greg’s house.
Sure enough, Greg appeared at his side, materializing out of thin air like magic. Apparently he’d imprinted on Tom like a lost duckling separated from its mother. It really didn’t make any sense, especially not after the way Tom had behaved at dinner, or on their run the other morning, but if Tom was honest, it was a personality quirk that they had in common. The Roys treated him like shit and they still couldn’t shake him off; it was a toxic dynamic, but a tiny part of him was desperate to win them over with his impeccable wit, his small-town charm. Four years in and he hadn’t quite managed it yet, but after this whole mess blew over and he was back with Shiv, he’d do it.
Maybe Greg liked a challenge, too.
“Hey,” Greg said, glancing at him out of the corner of his eye as he adjusted to Tom’s pace. He looked wary, like Tom might snap at him.
“Hey, buddy,” Tom said, and smiled genially.
They ran for a couple of blocks in relative silence, and when Tom paused to tie his shoe, he looked up at Greg. “I’m sorry about the things I said,” Tom said. “About your husband.”
“Andrew,” Greg said, panting a little.
“Andrew.” Tom stood up and looked Greg square in the eye. “Why don’t I take you to dinner tonight?”
Greg blinked at him. His face went blank with surprise.
“Me?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “No?”
“No, yeah,” Greg said, flushing. “I mean, yes. Uh. Like, yeah, I’d like that.”
“Great,” Tom said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”
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Excelsior (Part 6)
[6/?]
“Jesus Christ,” Tom said, staring at the imposing stranger in his friend’s foyer. “You’re fucking tall.”
Tall didn’t even begin to describe it. Tom was six-three, and this guy towered over him. He was massive. He was like a skinnier version of Andre the Giant. He looked like a starving peasant who had survived an overlong session on the rack after the gendarme arrested him for stealing a baguette. He was exactly what you’d get if you crossed a borzoi with a Sasquatch.
To his credit, the guy didn’t even blink. Must get that a lot, being the approximate height of an air traffic control tower.
“Greg!” Jonas said, beaming. “Greg, this is Tom, my best friend since high school. Tom, this is Greg, Hannah’s friend.”
“Hey, man.” Greg lifted a huge hand roughly the size of a serving platter in greeting. A glint of gold from his wedding band caught the light from a chandelier overhead.
“Hey,” Tom said, nodding to him. “You still, uh, wear your ring?”
“What the fuck,” Hannah said.
Jonas groaned. “Tom. Come on, man.”
“Um,” Greg said. The polite smile slid right off his face. “What?”
“The ring. Your wedding ring,” Tom said. “You still wear it? I mean, I haven’t taken mine off since I came out here. But then again, I’m still married. My wife’s waiting for me. I’m just taking a beat to get my shit together.” Oh, God, what was he saying. He couldn’t seem to make himself shut up. The words just kept tumbling out of his mouth, unimpeded. “How’d your husband die?”
An uncomfortable silence descended on the foyer.
“No offense, man, but that’s, like, incredibly fucking rude of you to say that to me,” Greg said, when he’d finally recovered from the shock. “Like, holy shit. That’s so fucked up.”
“I apologize for my husband’s friend’s behavior,” Hannah told Greg, touching a hand to his forearm. She shot Tom a poisonous glare.
“Sorry,” Tom said automatically. “That was out of line. I’m on this new medication, I literally don’t even know what I’m saying half the time.”
Greg looked at him sideways, clearly skeptical, but seemed to decide that the apology was genuine. He pressed his lips together in a tight smile. “‘S’all right.”
“How about a tour?” Jonas suggested in a voice that was bright with forced good cheer. Hannah rolled her eyes.
“Cool,” Greg said.
Tom sighed.
————————
Dinner was uncomfortable. Hannah had prepared a tater tot hotdish, which tasted about as good as it looked (read: not very), and kept up a steady stream of inane chatter throughout the entire meal so there wasn’t an opportunity for an awkward silence to settle.
“You know, Tom, Greg here is quite a dancer,” Hannah said at one point. Tom almost choked on a bite of hotdish.
“No, I’m not,” Greg mumbled.
“I’m sorry. You’re a dancer?” Tom asked, trying his damndest not to crack a smile. “What, uh, what kind of dance are we talking about here?” He had a sudden, intrusive mental image of Greg as Michael Flatley in Riverdance, his gangly legs flailing out wildly in all directions, and he had to bite down on the inside of his cheek, hard, to stop himself from laughing out loud.
“Ballroom,” Hannah answered for him. The tips of Greg’s ears flamed bright red. He glowered at his plate. “And you know something, he’s real good at it. Really. He’s even competing at the Drake in a couple of months.”
“No kidding,” Tom said mildly, spearing a tater tot on the end of his fork.
“Please stop talking about this,” Greg whined.
“What? I think it’s a wonderful thing,” Hannah said. “You’re being too modest, Greg.”
Greg was turning crimson. There wasn’t an inch of skin above his shirt collar that wasn’t mottled with a painful blush. “Seriously, Hannah, I’m, like, begging you? To stop.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said, her face looking pinched.
“It’s fine, like, whatever.”
“It’s cool that you do that,” Tom said, meeting Greg’s eye across the table. He felt kind of bad about blurting out a question about Greg’s dead husband; it was tasteless, and for all he knew, the guy might have died a couple of weeks ago. Maybe the wound was still fresh. He wasn’t a dick, much as he acted like one sometimes. “The dance thing, the competition. And the Drake is gorgeous, it’s a real classic hotel. A nice piece of mid-century Americana. I haven’t been there in years. My wife and I spent a weekend there a couple of years ago, actually.”
“Huh,” Greg said, squinting at him. “So, like. What meds are you on? You said you were on medication.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Hannah said, throwing her hands up.
“More wine?” Jonas piped up from the head of the table.
“What meds am I on?” Tom repeated, ignoring them. “Uh, none. Well, technically I’m meant to be taking lithium and Clozaril, but I don’t take them anymore. I’m foggy when I’m on them. Not to mention that they make me look all bloated. I’m still trying to get rid of the depression weight.”
“Yeah, like, I was on Xanax and Effexor,” Greg said, nodding effusively. “Two hundred twenty-five milligrams. Like, I was zonked.”
“You ever take Klonopin?” Tom asked.
“Klonopin?” Greg gave a dark chuckle. “Oh, yeah.”
“Right?!”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It’s like, ‘What day is it?’”
“Oh, God, yeah.”
“What about Trazodone?”
“Trazodone,” Greg said, and he started laughing. It was a warm, pleasant sound. “Holy shit, dude.”
“Now there’s a real heavy hitter,” Tom said, grinning. “I mean, shit. You get on Trazodone and it just knocks you the fuck out. It flattens you out. Takes the light right out of your eyes.”
“God, that sounds awful.”
“Yeah, that shit literally turned me into the Walking Dead.”
Jonas cleared his throat. Suddenly Tom remembered where he was, how inappropriate this conversation was. He was shooting the shit with his best friend’s wife’s work friend, a perfect stranger, bonding with the guy over some high-octane psychotropics. And Jonas and Hannah could not have looked more uncomfortable than if Tom had whipped his dick out at the dining room table.
“Oh!” Greg exclaimed suddenly, and Hannah jumped about a foot out of her seat. “Wait, I know who you are now. You’re that guy!”
Tom paused. “What?”
“You’re Tom Wambsgans.” His eyes gleamed. “See, like, I knew you looked familiar, I just couldn’t place you, but I see it now. You’re Shiv Roy’s husband? You went, like, fucking apeshit on her boyfriend.”
Jonas dragged a hand over his face.
“I saw it in the papers,” Greg said. “Well, like. The online edition, anyway. Twitter. I saw it on Twitter.”
Tom shrugged.
“I heard you broke his nose,” Greg said.
In spite of the macabre turn that the evening had taken, Tom smiled. He felt smug. “Yeah.”
“Whoa.” Greg looked oddly impressed. “Dude, like, you’re fucking crazy.”
“Okay, well. Excuse you, guy,” Tom said, bristling a little at that. “I’m not fucking crazy.”
“I mean, you broke a dude’s nose, so.”
“Jesus Christ. You have terrible social skills. You have a problem.”
“Oh, do I? Do I have a problem? Because, it’s like, check the transcript, dude. You’re the one who says inappropriate things.”
“Fuck you. I tell the truth,” Tom said stiffly. “You’re just fucking rude.”
“You want the truth? Here’s the truth,” Greg said, and his eyes—which had vaguely reminded Tom of a dairy cow when he first walked into Jonas’s foyer, warm and docile and framed by impossibly thick black lashes—flashed with a burst of real anger. “You’re a dick. That’s the truth.” He pushed his chair back with a loud scrape, and looked at Hannah. “I’m done. I think I’m gonna go.”
“Should I... drive you home, or… ?” Jonas asked, glancing back and forth between his wife and his guests, uncertain.
“Greg, don’t go,” Hannah pleaded. “Stay, please. We haven’t even finished dinner. I haven’t even brought out the chocolate turtle cake.”
“No, I should get out of here.”
“He should go. Not you. It’s his fault.” Hannah fixed Tom with an icy glare. “He’s been an awful prick all night.”
“Hey,” Jonas said sharply. “Too far, Hannah.”
“I’ll go,” Tom said, acquiescing to the room. He’d endured enough Roy family dinners that culminated in a Comedy Central-style roast that rivaled the brisket.
“Tom,” Jonas said, frowning at him.
“Seriously, I don’t mind.”
“I just wanted a nice dinner!” Hannah exploded, and promptly burst into tears.
Upstairs, the baby started to wail at the top of her lungs.
“Let’s just go,” Tom said to Greg. He looked a little shell-shocked. “I’ll walk with you.”
Greg nodded dumbly.
————————
As it turned out, Greg only lived about a block away from Tom’s parents. It was about a five minute walk from Jonas’s house, and the evening air was downright pleasant, a hint of an autumn chill in the breeze that went a long way towards clearing his head, but it felt like the longest walk of Tom’s life. Greg didn’t say a word; he just loped alongside Tom in complete silence, hands shoved roughly into his pockets. Tom didn’t know how to ease the tension. It seemed kind of pointless to bother clearing the air after the scene at the dinner table. Oh, well. With any luck, he’d never see this guy again. He was pretty sure that Hannah would slap him with a lifetime ban on Sunday night dinner at their house from here on out.
“This is me,” Greg said finally, slowing to a stop on the sidewalk.
Tom looked up at the house. It was an old Craftsman with a low-pitched gable roof, a huge wraparound porch with a set of Adirondack chairs. It was nice. Quaint, actually. They really didn’t make houses like that anymore.
“Ah. Okay. Well, uh.”
“Uh, so, uh, listen,” Greg said, and took a halting step forward so that the toes of his sneakers touched Tom’s brogues. “Like, I haven’t dated since before my marriage, so I don’t really remember how this works.”
“How what works?”
“Come on, Tom,” Greg said softly. His eyes were huge and dark and glossy in the soft light from the streetlamp overhead. “I saw the way you looked at me, at dinner. Like, you felt it, I felt it. Don’t lie.”
Tom stared up at him, stunned into speechlessness.
“Technically? I live with my mom, but she converted the garage for me to stay in while I, like, figure my shit out, so like.” Greg bit his bottom lip. “If you wanted to fuck me, she wouldn’t hear us.”
What the fuck. What the fuck. Tom could feel himself starting to panic, his heart beating wildly in his throat. Was he seriously being propositioned right now? After one of the weirdest dinner parties of his adult life? It had to be a joke, like, a really off-color joke, a gotcha moment. It weirdly reminded him of something that his brother-in-law Roman might pull.
Greg was staring at him, apparently waiting for a response. Fuck, all right. He could be tactful. He could.
“Um.” Tom shook his head to clear it. “I don’t wanna fuck you.”
“Oh, okay. You wanted me to fuck you, then.”
“Jesus Christ, no,” Tom said, pulling a face. “I’m—like, I’m married? To Shiv? Shiv Roy?”
Greg’s face went very still, almost placid. “Yeah,” he said frostily. “I know.”
“I… wow.” Tom stuttered out an incredulous laugh. “God, this is fucked up.”
“Yeah, I’m not really seeing how this is, like, funny, but thanks for that,” Greg said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m not laughing at you. I’m not a fucking homophobe, it’s not—it’s just.” Tom huffed out a sigh, closing his eyes while he gathered his composure. “Look. I had a nice time tonight, weirdly enough, and you’re,” and he opened his eyes to look Greg square in the eye, “not… unattractive, but I’m married, okay? That’s it.”
“Like, I’m married, too,” Greg said, frowning.
“Oh, you’re not married,” Tom said. “That’s confusing. He’s dead.”
Greg recoiled like he’d been punched in the gut.
“Shit. I’m sorry,” Tom said, immediately regretting it when Greg’s eyes registered real hurt. “I didn’t mean—”
Greg slapped Tom across the face, hard, and stalked off towards the garage.
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Excelsior (Part 5)
[5/?]
The waiting room was blissfully quiet. Tom sat and flicked through an abused issue of Psychology Today while he waited, listening to the low hum of the air conditioning unit and the receptionist softly typing. She pointedly avoided eye contact.
Tom smiled to himself and kept reading.
“No music this time,” Tom observed cheerfully on his way into Dr. Parfit’s office.
Dr. Parfit chuckled. “No music.”
“Good,” Tom said. He settled into a low chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Much better without it.”
“Glad to hear it,” Dr. Parfit said. “So, tell me, Tom. Have you been taking your clozapine like we discussed last time?”
Tom frowned. “We’re just jumping right in, huh.”
“Tom.”
He huffed out a sigh. “Uh, no. No, I haven’t.”
Dr. Parfit looked at him for a beat. He took off his glasses and folded them up, pocketing them in his shirt. “Tell me one thing,” he said. “Do you want to be a guy who goes back to the hospital? Or back to jail? Hm?”
Tom squirmed under the scrutiny. “No, but—”
“So then take your medication, and if you do fine, then we’ll reduce the dosage.”
“I don’t see the correlation there,” Tom said.
“You don’t.”
“No, I don’t.” Tom leaned forward in his seat. “Because honestly, Alon? Shiv’s waiting for me.”
Dr. Parfit’s face flickered with a bunch of fleeting emotions. “Okay.”
“She is. She’s waiting for me to get back in shape and get my life in order, and when I go back to New York, she’s gonna be with me again.” Tom looked down at his knotted fingers. “And that’s better than any medication.”
His therapist sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Tom, I want you to be prepared for the possibility that Shiv might not take you back.”
Tom made a face. “That’s ridiculous. I’m her husband.”
“I know.”
“She loves me,” he said.
“I know,” Dr. Parfit repeated. He struck a patient tone, not unlike one that a parent might use to reason with a particularly obstinate toddler. “But love—real, true love, Tom—is about letting her go and seeing if she returns.”
Tom scowled. He twisted his wedding band around on his finger. He wondered if Shiv still wore her ring. She’d always complained that it was too loose, but whenever Tom offered to have it resized, she would brush him off. Maybe she couldn’t bear to be without it. Wishful thinking, probably.
“In the meantime, Tom? You need a strategy,” Dr. Parfit said. “If you hear that song, I don’t want you falling apart. And I don’t want you obsessing over things that you can’t change.”
“Can I say something?”
“Go ahead.”
“The thing I learned, uh, in the hospital,” Tom said. “And Waystar, I guess, to some extent. You have to work hard, and grit your teeth and get through the worst of it, and if you do, if you stay positive, then there’s a shot at a silver lining.”
“That’s… true.”
“I have to believe it. I don’t know what else to believe in right now.”
Dr. Parfit nodded. “That’s a start,” he conceded. “But think about a strategy, Tom. I’m serious.”
————————
Sunday night rolled around. At 6 pm sharp, Tom Wambsgans strode up the porch steps at Jonas and Hannah’s house with a bottle of red wine in one hand, a bouquet of hideous supermarket flowers in the other, and knocked on the door.
He looked down at himself while he waited. In the chaos that immediately followed the Shower Incident, there wasn’t much time for Tom to gather up his belongings at the Lenox Hill condo, so his wardrobe at his parents’ house was sparse. For the most part these days, he dressed in simple, loose-fitting clothes: old sweatpants patchworked with the faint outlines of bleach stains; t-shirts from his frat house days; a stretched and faded rugby polo; his running gear. He had managed to snag one of his old Armani suits, though, stowed away in a leather weekender bag with some of his other valuables, and that was what he wore tonight. For dinner at his childhood best friend’s house. God, he was such a prick.
Tom turned to leave.
The front door opened behind him.
“Hey!” Jonas said. “Tom, hang on, where are you going?”
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Tom admitted. “Wearing this.”
“What? Dude, you look great. Super sharp.”
“It’s too much.”
“Are you kidding? Come on,” Jonas said. He was wearing a cranberry thermal shirt and a pair of well-worn jeans. “Seriously, you look good.”
Tom grimaced. “Aah, Hannah’s gonna hate it. I should go, I don’t know, change into something less…”
“Absolutely not,” Jonas said, and he opened the front door wider. “Come in, come in.”
Tom swallowed his protests and followed Jonas inside the house. It looked a lot like it had thirty years ago when Jonas’s parents had owned it, minus the awful shag carpeting that had been a calling card of interior decorators in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and the walls had been painted over in a nice, inoffensive shade of eggshell white instead of avocado green.
“Honey,” Jonas called up the staircase. “You’ll never guess who’s here.”
“Who?”
“James Bond!”
Tom cringed.
Hannah stepped out onto the second-floor landing with a baby balanced on her hip. “James Bond?” She looked down into the foyer, saw Tom standing there like an asshole in his three-thousand dollar suit. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hi,” Tom said lamely. “Uh, thanks for having me, Hannah. It’s good to see you, you know, after all this time.”
“Yeah,” Hannah said, narrowing her eyes. “Great.”
“Doesn’t he look sharp, Han?”
“Mm. It’s a little formal.”
“So what?”
“Nothing,” Hannah said, and frowned at Tom. “You know this isn’t the Ritz, right?”
Tom bit back a scowl. God, she’d always been insufferable, even back in high school, but ever since Tom moved halfway across the country to go to Columbia and stayed after graduation for a job at Goldman Sachs, Hannah had taken this tone with him like she thought that he thought that he was better than the rest of them. Which was bullshit. For fuck’s sake, the Fly Guys had been in the wedding party. He hadn’t lost touch with his roots, whatever she seemed to think. Fucking bitch. “Must have forgotten.”
“Right.”
“Tom brought wine,” Jonas said, making an obvious attempt to cut through the tension. “And flowers. Isn’t that nice, sweetie?”
“Very nice,” Hannah said. “Lovely. Thank you, Tom.”
He smiled back tightly.
Jonas looked between them, his wife and his best friend, and clapped his hands together. “A tour!” He grinned at Tom. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve done with the place.”
Tom trailed around behind Jonas through the first floor while his friend chattered in bright, enthusiastic tones about the remodel, pointing out the brick wall between the kitchen and the den that they’d knocked down to open the space up, the exposed beams, the new crown molding in the study. “We’re thinking of updating the dining room,” Jonas told him. “Ripping out the old buffet. It gets in the way, and anyway, we’re hosting Thanksgiving this year, could really use all the extra square footage.”
“It looks good already, though,” Tom said, frowning. “You’ve gotta be making some serious dough to make that happen.”
“We’re doing all right, I can’t really complain.”
“Isn’t the market down, though?”
“Well, yeah,” Jonas said, smiling a sheepish smile, “it is, but you know, Hannah wants more, so I’m giving her more, man. You know how it is.”
Tom smiled, but the truth was, he didn’t. The money at Waystar was good. More than good, it was a little obscene, but it didn’t matter how much he made, or how hard he worked, or how much abuse he had to take from Logan or Cyd Peach, or how hard it was to bear the brunt of the psychological strain that came with covering up the shit that happened in Cruises in the early ‘90s (which, apparently, was nothing more than a delusion brought on by extreme stress), because Shiv was always going to be the breadwinner. She was always going to be able to provide for herself, and that was endearing, and sexy, and Tom loved that about her, but a tiny part of him did wish that he could take care of her.
“...and you start snapping up commercial real estate on the cheap, and you flip it, flip it over, and that’s when you really make the money,” Jonas was saying when Tom tuned back in. “But the pressure, man, it’s like…” He trailed off and looked over his shoulder. Hannah was in the kitchen with the baby, spooning creamed corn into her daughter’s mouth; he looked nervous, pale.
“You okay?” Tom said, frowning.
Jonas bit his lip. “Tell you the truth, I’m not okay,” he whispered. “Don’t tell Hannah. Listen. I feel like I’m getting crushed, dude.”
Tom leaned in. “Crushed by what?”
“Oh, where do I even start,” Jonas sighed. “Family stuff, the baby, the house, the job, the assholes at work, and it’s like, you know, like I’m trying to keep my head above water, but, I don’t know, man, I’m like, I’m fucking drowning.”
“Holy shit.”
“Well,” Jonas said, and he gave a humorless chuckle. “You can’t be happy all the time.”
“No, sure. Of course not. But you’ve got a good thing going here,” Tom insisted. “I mean, fuck. I’d kill for this. I’d kill to have this with Shiv, you know?”
Jonas stared at him for a beat, mouth falling slack. Tom could tell that he didn’t know what to say to that, that he was wracking his brain for a harmless platitude, but he was coming up empty. He wet his lips and looked like he was about to say something when the doorbell rang.
“Jonas!” Hannah called from the kitchen. “Get the door!”
“Just a sec!” he shouted back, and looked at Tom. “Uh, listen, hope you don’t mind, but Hannah invited her friend from work. You’re okay with that?”
Tom blinked. “Who?”
“Her friend,” Jonas said. “Greg.”
“Oh,” Tom said. He tugged anxiously at his shirt cuffs. He really wished he hadn’t worn the fucking suit after all. “Yeah, fine.”
“He’s been going through a little bit of a rough patch,” Jonas explained, the corners of his mouth turning down sympathetically. “His husband just died, and—”
“Jesus,” Hannah grumbled, brushing roughly past Tom in the hall, “I’ll get it.”
“He died?” Tom repeated.
“Please, don’t bring it up,” Jonas said.
“No, how did he die?”
“How did who die?” a male voice said from the foyer, and Tom looked up (and up, and up) to see a very tall and thin and pale man standing at Hannah’s shoulder.
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Excelsior (Part 4)
[4/?]
Tom jogged past houses in his old neighborhood. It was perfect running weather. The air was crisp, and late afternoon sun was slanting through the trees. Everything was awash in shades of crimson and amber. Really gorgeous. October was just around the corner. There were already squat pumpkins on some of their neighbors’ front porches, dry leaves swept into tidy piles on the curb and crunching under his sneakers as he went running past.
He hadn’t gone on a run in a while. Used to, before he met Shiv and it didn’t make sense to go for a run across town when he could just use the gym at Waystar. And then the Shower Incident happened and for months, every waking moment of his day was heavily monitored, which meant no jogs around the property at Touchstone, especially not unsupervised. The cocktail of antidepressants they had him on, and the clozapine, in particular, made him gain some weight and generally had him feeling sluggish and murky, which wasn’t necessarily unusual for a guy in his early forties but Tom Wambsgans had always been something of an athlete because there wasn’t much else for a kid in Minnesota to do other than play ice hockey in the winter, and run cross-country during the rare months when it wasn’t cold enough outside to freeze your balls off.
But all of that was about to change. The months in the facility had been grueling, and he’d emerged from it as a shell of his old self with a few extra pounds around the waist, but none of that was an insurmountable hurdle to clear. He would get in shape, wean himself off the drugs, go to his counseling sessions, and before he knew it he’d be the guy who had once managed to sweep Shiv Roy off her feet. Better, even. Tom Wambsgans 2.0. A new and improved look with the same great taste you already know and love!
“Tom? Tom Wambsgans?”
He turned; across the street, his old high school friend Jonas stood in his driveway with a car trunk loaded up with grocery bags, shielding his eyes against the sun’s harsh glare.
Tom grinned big and wide and jogged over, slowing his pace considerably. “Hey, hey, man!”
“Thought that was you,” Jonas said, walking down the length of his driveway. “You’re the only guy I know who wears compression leggings to go for a jog around the block.”
“Fuck off,” Tom said amiably. “Good to see you, buddy. How long have you been back out here? My mom mentioned something a while ago.”
“A year,” Jonas said. “My folks were getting tired of the winters up here, so they’re down in Key West full time these days. It just made sense to take the house off their hands.”
“Aah,” Tom said. He felt a twinge of guilt that he, alone, was responsible for keeping his parents from a fully realized retirement, early bird specials and a group of friends who played bridge, that sort of thing. “Good investment, in this market. Smart.”
“But, hey. Welcome home, bro.”
“Thanks,” Tom said. “I’m out.”
“You’re out? Out out?”
“Yep.”
“Well, that’s great.” Jonas took a deep breath. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t visit you in the hospital, man.”
“Oh,” Tom said, feeling awkward. He rubbed his neck. “No, ah, that’s—”
“—work was out of control, and Hannah had just had the baby, the place was a mess, but I’m, uh, I’m really glad you’re back. Even after all these years, you know. I missed you.” Jonas smiled. “Listen, Tom, you gotta come see the baby. She’s beautiful. And Hannah wants to make dinner for you.”
“Oh,” Tom said again. He didn’t know what to say to that. The last few times he’d seen Jonas and his wife, there had been… friction. “Oh, well, hey, congratulations on the baby and the—the house, but I don’t know if I should, uh, take you up on that.”
Jonas frowned. “You think Hannah still hates you?”
“No, I know Hannah still hates me,” Tom said.
“Man, that was years ago,” Jonas said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “High school. Jesus, that’s practically ancient history.”
Tom scrunched his nose up, quietly dubious. Just then a window on the second floor slid open and a woman poked her head out—Hannah, who Tom hadn’t seen since the wedding maybe eight years ago. She scowled when she saw Tom. That tracked.
“Okay, maybe it’s a little true,” Jonas conceded. “But come on, man. Help me out here. She still wants you to come.”
“Jonas!”
“What?” he called back.
“Did you invite him yet?”
“Yup!”
“Well, can he make it?”
“I don’t know yet!” Jonas shouted, and turned back to Tom, looking oddly hopeful. “Can you make it next Sunday?”
Tom shifted his weight, a little uncomfortable. “Uh. Sure.”
“Great. That’s great, man,” Jonas said, breathing out a sigh of relief. He looked over his shoulder and shot Hannah a thumbs up. “Seriously, it’s gonna be so good to catch up. You have no idea how great it is to have you back in town. Really.”
“Yeah.”
Jonas grabbed a bag of diapers out of the trunk and slung it over the crook of his elbow. “I’ll see you Sunday,” he said, pointing at Tom.
“Sunday,” Tom confirmed.
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Excelsior (Part 3)
[3/?]
Tom laced up his running shoes in the mudroom, pulling the laces tight. He needed a breather. A good run to really clear his head.
The fact that he was forty-two and living at home with his elderly parents was only a mild humiliation, in the grand scheme of things. The part that really stung was the fact that he couldn’t be trusted to live on his own anymore in the wake of The Shower Incident. The part that truly made him want to crawl headfirst into a hole and die was the fact that all of this was well-documented in Page Six and remained a perennial topic of conversation on the Internet. Well-meaning relatives (his mom’s sister, Ellen, in particular) kept forwarding along emails that linked out to tabloid hit pieces, and his mom, God bless her, really did try to hide it from him, but Tom had set up a Google Alert to pull in all of the media hits that mentioned him even in passing since he and Shiv hooked up four years ago, so that was pretty much a futile effort.
His mom poked her head out from the kitchen. “Tommy? Is that you?”
“Yeah, I was just heading out for a run.”
“Good, good. I just wanted to hear how the session went?”
“Aaah,” Tom said, grimacing. As soon as he came home after his appointment with Dr. Parfit, he’d gone straight upstairs to his old bedroom (which still looked, incredibly, just as it had in 1992. Not a single thing out of place. His Walkman was still there, and so was his stack of Billy Joel and Air Supply cassettes, his Boy Scout badges pinned to a corkboard over his old desk. Even the Kathy Ireland Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover was still safely tucked underneath his mattress, the torn page faded and a little wrinkled around the edges after almost thirty years of imperfect preservation, but it was still there, and more importantly, Kathy still looked good) under the pretense of needing a nap. Wasn’t it enough that he’d gone and done the therapy in the first place? Did he really need to rehash it right after? “Fine? It went fine.”
“Really?”
He looked at his mother. The concern she held in her eyes wasn’t new; in the months since The Incident, and the restraining order, and the day she drove out to Bloomington to discharge him from the facility, there had been a deep sadness there, a fear. A disappointment. “Really, Mommy. It was all right. Can I go for a run now?”
“Tommy,” she said. A hard look came across her face. “What happened in the waiting room?”
Oh, fuck. She knew. He didn’t know how she knew, but she knew, and he got the very uneasy feeling that he was on trial here and his own mother, Ann Marie Wambsgans, one of the most respected attorneys in the Twin Cities, wasn’t even handling his defense. “What do you mean, what happened?” Tom asked, frowning up at his mother. “It’s a waiting room, I waited.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” Tom lied.
“You flipped a magazine rack and knocked a ficus over.”
Tom winced. “Well….”
“And then I hear you’re not even taking your medication,” she said, and her eyes filled with sudden tears. “Are you trying to hurt us? Are you doing this on purpose?”
“Mommy....” He stood up from the mudroom bench, walked over and pulled his mother into his arms, pretending not to notice when she flinched at his touch.
“Because if you don’t, Tommy, I’ll have to call the facility, and they’ll come for you. And I can’t stop them.”
He pulled back from the hug, his arms falling away from her shoulders. “You wouldn’t do that,” Tom said, suspicious. But his mom just bit her lip, looked down at her feet. “Mommy. Why would you do that?”
“It’s not my decision,” she told him, “it’s up to the court. You know that. You know the conditions.”
He did know the conditions. It was all part of the plea deal that he’d struck with the team of lawyers in New York (only after his mother had taken a closer look at the terms, of course). If he pled guilty to the aggravated assault charge, and agreed to comply with the restraining order that Shiv’s lawyers slapped on him, then he could be eligible for psychiatric treatment and anger management training at an in-patient facility of his choosing (closer to home, which suddenly meant St. Paul, Minnesota, and not the Upper East Side) and commit to six months, minimum, of CBT with a court-appointed therapist, and full compliance with his doctors’ recommendations, then maybe—a long shot, but not totally out of the realm of possibility—he could ask Logan Roy for his job back at Waystar, and Shiv could let him come back home, and everything would be all right again. Those were the conditions. And they were easy conditions to agree to, when he was under duress and slightly hysterical, and, quote, “a danger to himself and others,” end quote, but now he was looking at the facts with a bit more clarity, and he saw himself medicated to the point of zombification and living in his parents’ house well into his fifties, bagging groceries at the Aldi in Highland Park, and suddenly the conditions didn’t make sense to him anymore, and he wanted out.
“Yeah, I know,” Tom said, and he could feel his blood pressure rising again, just like it had in Dr. Parfit’s waiting room. He tried to breathe nice and even through his nose with that bullshit box breathing technique he’d learned in the facility: breathe in four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds. “But you have to understand, Mommy, I don’t like the way the drugs make me feel, all right? I’m so much clearer without them.”
“You flipped a magazine rack,” she repeated.
Tom huffed out a frustrated sigh. “Mom.”
“Hey, hey. What’s going on in here, huh?” Tom’s dad shuffled into the hallway from the living room, reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead. “The Vikings are on, for God’s sake.”
“He’s not taking his medication, Bill,” Tom’s mom informed her husband, still not looking at Tom.
“What do you mean, he’s not taking his medication? He knows the deal.”
“I’m going for a run,” Tom announced, backing up into the hall and out of the kitchen, away from the mess he’d just created. “Bye.”
“No, no, come on, you can’t just leave,” his dad called after him. “Didn’t you just hear me, Tommy? The Vikings are on, son. We’re looking at the playoffs!”
Tom let the screen door slam shut behind him and jogged down the porch steps, taking two at a time.
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Excelsior (Part 2)
[2/?]
“You sly bastard,” Tom said. “That was a messed up thing you did back there, Doc. Really fucking messed up.”
“Please,” Dr. Parfit said, steepling his fingers. “Call me Alon.”
“Yeah, well,” Tom said. “Maybe you’re not from around here, Alon, but in St. Paul, that’s not how we go around meeting people. You know? It’s a terrible first impression.”
“I’m sorry about the song,” Dr. Parfit said. He didn’t look all that sorry, to be honest. “I just wanted to see if it was still a trigger for you.”
Tom snorted. “Ha. Well, ah, there you go. Bingo. You got me. It’s still a trigger.”
“I see that.” Dr. Parfit flicked through a folder on the low table between them—a Noguchi, Tom noted approvingly—glasses low on the bridge of his nose. “You’re still taking the Clozaril as directed?”
“No,” Tom said. “No, I’m not taking that shit anymore.”
Dr. Parfit set down the folder. “You have to take your medication, Tom.”
“Look,” Tom said. “I know what the game is here, all right? We had guys back at Waystar who cracked up from the pressure, they’d take their leave of absence, they’d come back after a couple of months pumped full of crazy pills, they were fucking zombies. Okay? I’m not doing that. I need a clear head, if I’m going back out there.”
“Well—”
“I’m not that guy,” Tom said, frowning. “I’m not, ah. The—the explosion guy. I had one—one—teensy little incident, all right, I take full responsibility for that, I’m ready to admit fault here. Wouldn’t be sitting here with you right now if I didn’t think that I had something to do with it. But she just needs to own up to her side of it.”
Dr. Parfit blinked. He pushed his glasses further up on his nose. It was a real beak of a nose; he looked an awful lot like a parrot. “Her side. What’s her side?”
Tom stared. “Are you fucking serious?”
“Let’s just go back to the incident,” Dr. Parfit said, leaning back in his seat. “Walk me through it.”
Tom swallowed. “Okay.”
The last time he had walked through the incident was in a statement to an officer at the 19th Precinct. The months since then had been a blur of psychiatric treatments, in-patient facilities, little yellow pills in Dixie cups, orderlies and nurses and therapists who spoke with cool detachment, refused to tell him when he might be discharged, refused to let him call Manhattan, refused to let him fucking apologize for something he didn’t mean to do, didn’t think he was capable of, he wasn’t this person, after all, he wasn’t fucking crazy.
“So, the incident.” Tom closed his eyes. “I leave the office around five, after a… ah, a disagreement with Cyd Peach, she’s the chair at ATN. I come home, it’s maybe a quarter of six? And I’m supposed to be alone for the weekend, Shiv’s in DC for a campaign fundraiser, but I come home, and what’s playing but the song from our wedding.” He opened his eyes to glare at Dr. Parfit. “The song that you so charmingly played for us out here today.”
Dr. Parfit nodded, his face studiously blank, betraying nothing.
“So that’s playing, and honestly I don’t think anything of it, which is weird, because I should have. I mean, Shiv’s in DC, she’s not supposed to be home, she didn’t text, she didn’t call, she didn’t update her iCal, I have no way of knowing that the trip’s off, but hey, maybe it’s just her trying to rekindle things. You know? Because we’d been going through a bit of a rough patch, me and Shiv, she’d, ah.” Tom swallowed hard. “She’d asked me, uh, if—on our wedding night, actually, she’d asked me if I would be into opening up our marriage. Because she wasn’t so sure that she was cut out for monogamy. And I mean, she’s—the most, the absolute most incredible woman I’ve ever been with in my entire life, I’m just this little boy from St. Paul and she’s a fucking Roy, so of course I say yes, and of course that’s a terrible idea, and at this point we’re basically roommates, we have separate bedrooms and everything.” He took a shuddering breath. “But I come home, and I hear our wedding song, ‘Just the Way You Are’ by Billy Joel, and I come up the stairs and I see her underwear on the floor outside the master bath, and I think, I think, Oh, that’s kind of sweet, she wanted to surprise me, and I look up and she’s naked in the shower, and I think, She wants a shower bang, is that it? and I think, Well, this is perfect, we haven’t fucked in a while, I’ll just hop in, and I go to pull the curtain back, and—I see—” Tom braced his elbows on his knees, leaning forward in his chair, started to feel a little short of breath. “I see her co-strategist, this guy Nate, and he’s fucking her from behind, and he looks at me, balls deep in my wife, and he says, you know what he says to me? ‘You should probably go.’”
“Hm.”
“That’s what this prick says to me,” Tom said, breathing hard and shallow now, “and yeah, I snapped. Because I’m supposed to take shit from her dad and her brothers, and I’m supposed to be the shitbag bogeyman at the office and answer for all kinds of bullshit that wasn’t even my fucking fault in the first place, and I’m supposed to let my wife fuck the odd peasant if she wants to, but this is her fucking colleague, Alon. I mean, this guy was at our wedding. And he’s fucking her in my condo in my shower with my wedding song playing in the background, and I’m not supposed to get a little upset about that?”
Dr. Parfit was quiet for a few moments. He picked up the folder again and pulled out another file. “And can you tell me what happened directly leading up to this incident?”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Fine. Fine, about a month or so before all of this, I—I was planning to, uh, set up a press conference. Because my father-in-law had been covering up this massive criminal conspiracy in our Cruises division, but apparently that, uh. None of that was true because we found out from the psych ward at New York-Presbyterian that I, uh, that I had, uh.”
“Undiagnosed bipolar disorder,” Dr. Parfit supplied for him.
“Yeah. With the delusions, the mood swings, all that stuff. But only if I’m under severe stress, which doesn’t happen all that much, thank God.”
“Mm.”
“So, yeah.” Tom shuddered out a breath. “So apparently I’ve been living with this my entire life, and I’m forty-two years old and I just, I never knew. And I’ve been, uh, it’s like I’ve been skydiving without a parachute, no medication, no supervision, nothing.”
“That had to have been difficult,” Dr. Parfit said quietly.
“Yeah,” Tom said. His voice sounded a little strangled. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, especially when you don’t know what the fuck is happening to you. Which I do, now. Sort of.”
“Well,” Dr. Parfit said. “The good news is, we’re here, and we’re going to work through these complicated emotions, and you’re going to take your lithium and your Cloz—”
“—I already told you, I’m not taking that shit.”
“—your Clozaril, because what we need to do is we need to get to the root of your trauma.”
Tom scoffed. “Actually, all due respect, Doc? What we need to do is shut that fucking music off before my brain explodes.”
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Excelsior (Part 1)
[1/?]
Don’t go changin’
To try and please me
You never let me down before
“I’m sorry,” Tom Wambsgans said, his voice coming out a touch louder than he meant for it to be, “but, ah, is that song really playing?”
The woman in reception looked confused. “Excuse me?”
“I’m not hallucinating.” Tom dug his fingernails into the meat of his thighs, testing. The sting of pain confirmed that he was real. That he was, in fact, sitting in the waiting room at his court appointed therapist’s office. That the music wasn’t just in his own head but piping softly over the speaker system. “You can hear it, too. Right?”
“Well, yes. We have music sometimes,” she confirmed warily.
Don’t imagine
You’re too familiar
And I don’t see you anymore
“Okay, well, ma’am? That song is killing me. Could you please turn it off?”
“I-I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I don’t have the controls.”
“You don’t—” Tom blew out a frustrated breath, squeezed his eyes shut. The music was getting louder, if that was possible. I don’t have the controls, bullshit. “Did Dr. Parfit put you up to this?”
The receptionist looked at him, bewildered. He’d seen that look before and he didn’t like it.
I would not leave you
In times of trouble
We never could have come this far, mmm
“Sir,” she said, wheeling her chair back away from the desk, “I’m sorry, but—”
I took the good times
I’ll take the bad times
I’ll take you just the way you are
Tom pushed to his feet. Too much too much too much. “Is there a speaker here?” he demanded. “Huh? Is it here?” He started rifling through sheaves of magazines in a wooden stand next to his chair, knocking some of them loose and sending them tumbling to the floor. “In here?” He shoved a potted ficus out of the way. He could feel his blood pressure ticking up, up, up, approaching dangerous levels. He was reaching the point of no return, but Billy fucking Joel’s voice was hammering at the inside of his skull and he couldn’t fucking take it anymore. He had to stop it somehow. “Huh??”
Just then the door to Dr. Parfit’s office swung open.
The song stopped.
Tom was standing in the middle of a wreck of his own making. Crumpled magazines strewn all over the floor, dirt from the potted plant under his shoes, palms slick with sweat, a terrified looking receptionist cowering behind her desk.
“I’m sorry,” he said, automatic. “I’m sorry, I’ll fix it, I’ll clean it up.”
“Later,” Dr. Parfit said, and jerked his head towards his open office door. “Why don’t you come in for now and we’ll have a chat?”
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ao3feed-tomgreg: via AO3 works tagged ‘Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans’ She was beautiful, and she made him laugh, and she was ridiculously out of his league, but he found the chink in the armor when she stared up at him with glassy eyes. This one, she needs me. She needs me to save her. Only natural that he would run into Greg tonight, of all people, and repeat the fucking cycle.
via AO3 works tagged ‘Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans’
#title: love is the last fridge magnet left#tag: tomgreg fic#tag: tomshiv fic#status: on hiatus#type: multichap
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dirty work
tom’s awful bachelor party, but make it 1973.
Greg Hirsch is miserable.
He sits alone at the bar drinking tap water at an underground group sex party in Sunset Park, coming down from a high off the three fat lines of cocaine that he’d snorted even though he hadn’t wanted to but felt a—like, a filial duty to do it, a cousinly responsibility to save Kendall from himself. The idea had seemed pretty noble at the time but turned out to be a really fucking stupid decision because he’s pretty sure his heart is gonna burst and splatter all over the sticky bartop. This is why he doesn’t do white drugs. Or leave his apartment, if he can help it.
His passport (newly issued, unstamped) is tucked into his inside jacket pocket, but instead of jetting off to Prague, he is stuck here, watching his cousin’s fiancé pretend with a deranged sort of desperation that he’s having the absolute time of his life.
+
“Hang on,” Tom said, squinting at Roman. “This isn’t where we’re having my bachelor party, is it?”
“You don’t have a problem with that, do you, Wambsgans?”
Tom blanched. He tugged at the lapel on his overcoat, drew it a bit tighter across his shoulders. Burberry, Greg thought, by the checked tartan lining around the collar. Too ostentatious for... whatever this was. “No, I—I just, uh, wondered. Were all the, uh, all the squat houses on St. Marks Place taken this weekend?”
“Well, hey, you’re welcome to fuck off to the Plaza for crumpets and tea with your fucking norm-o friends.”
Roman raised an eyebrow, but when Tom just stood there, hands in his coat pockets and shoulders slumped in resigned defeat, he jerked his chin toward the tunnel entrance and the group trudged off into the shadows.
His cap toe oxfords were still fairly new, the soles still shiny and slick. (A gift from Tom that wasn’t so much a ‘gift’ as it was a mandated wardrobe upgrade, when it turned out that his Kalsos weren’t as versatile as advertised. Seems that they didn’t complement his suit—Italian, perfectly tailored to fit his body with its absurd proportions, which almost amazed Greg more than the price tag.)
He shouldn’t have had to break them in like this, here. Shoes as nice as these were for the executive suite, swank uptown restaurants with a ‘jacket required’ dress policy and unpronounceable French dishes on the tasting menu (even if it is, technically, his mother tongue, Quebeçois transplant that he is). They weren’t meant for a jaunt through the crack dens of Sunset Park.
Greg stumbled over the gravel path as he jogged, flat-footed, to catch up to Roman, panting a little. “So, like, uh, I take it that we’re, we’re not going to Prague?”
Roman snorted, a sharp sound that echoed off the tunnel walls. “Prague, schmog.”
+
They should have been boarding a private jet at Teterboro (eight-passenger plane; ceiling low enough to smack your forehead on) and popping open a bottle of Bollinger.
But instead, they’re in a slow-moving service elevator with these huge metal grates, and it kind of feels like they’re a herd of cattle being driven to the stockyard. There are no windows, just concrete and metal and a whisper of a chill in the air. It’s November, after all.
He shivers and hugs his arms around himself, tucks his hands under his armpits, but if it makes him smaller, the difference is marginal at best. God, he wishes he had worn a heavier coat.
+
“No, sure. ‘Prague, schmog,’ I get it, I’m sure this is like, way better, than, um. That.” Greg softened it with a tremulous laugh, and tucked a loose hank of hair behind his ear.
“But, but, I just. Uh. Does this not give you a bit of, like, a murder-y vibe?”
Roman snapped to attention at that, looked up at him with renewed interest. Well, fuck. Good going, Greg. ‘Here, Roman, here’s a bit of soft underbelly, and a knife.’
He really should have just hung back with Tom.
+
“Oh, well.” Tom heaves a weary sigh, after the attendant pulls the metal grate shut and the elevator starts its slow climb. “I’m sure it’s gonna be great. Thanks, Roman.”
“What did you expect? Why’d you even ask me, Tom?”
“Thought you’d rise to the occasion.”
“Well, clearly I haven’t risen to the occasion.”
“Where the hell are we?” Greg asks, and when nobody answers him, he can’t decide if it’s a small kindness or something else entirely.
+
“Scared of a little danger, Cousin Greg?” Roman taunted. His grin was wicked.
“Uhhh,” Greg said, brain stalling out. “‘Danger?’”
“Oh, my God, you’re such a fucking pussy. Just try not to look any crackheads in the eye, you’ll be fine.”
Kendall grunted from somewhere behind them, and Roman smirked. “Well. Present company excluded, anyway.”
“Very funny, Rome.”
+
When they step off the elevator and out into a sea of writhing bodies, it’s clear that they just do not belong here.
Or at least, Greg doesn’t.
He’s twenty-eight and unattached, but he is also hopelessly, desperately, head-over-heels in love with his cousin’s fiancé. And the sick thing is that he feels like Tom is a little bit in love with him, too.
(He thinks. But he’s always been a terrible romantic, hasn’t he?)
So imagine his dread when Roman tells them that tonight is whatever they want it to be, and Tom’s face splits with a huge, face-wide grin.
Tom pulls him aside by his shirtsleeve and pushes a glass of something amber into his hand, and he’s literally pulsating, giddy. But there’s a trepid undercurrent to it that Greg can feel humming under the surface. “We should talk to some girls.”
“Ask them where they were when Kennedy was shot,” Connor tells them, unbidden, from his place at the bar. “If they don’t know, they could be under twenty-one.”
Tom just laughs off the suggestion, and Greg plasters a cellophane smile on his face even though he can’t think of anything that he’d like to do less.
+
“Do me a favor.”
His uncle took an idle puff on his cigar and exhaled, slow and deliberate, and the cloud of smoke billowed around Greg’s head. He tried not to cough.
“Can you make sure that Kendall doesn’t come back in a box?”
“Okay.” Greg swallowed, puzzled by the abrupt turn in the conversation (but was it a conversation, is it ever, when Logan is sitting across the table?). He scratched his neck. “Yeah, I…”
“I don’t want him showing up dead at the bottom of some French fag’s pool.”
“Oh, no, absolutely,” Greg said, wincing. “None of us do.”
“Keep an eye on him for me.” Logan studied him with slate eyes. “Is this something you can do for me?”
+
Logan’s directive is clear. Do this for me, and we’ll talk. The idea of a lateral shift appeals, but only insofar as it puts a lot of distance between him and the mess of sensitive documents re: the Brightstar Cruises scandal. He just wants out. But he also wants to stop pining for his boss, and it’s easier to get a handle on his unfortunate crush if he can get some altitude on this.
But Tom is magnetic. He’s a force that Greg can’t resist. It’s honestly infuriating how easily he draws Greg in, even when he doesn’t want to be pulled.
He tries to resist. Greg trails Kendall around the warehouse instead of Tom, as if he is more intrinsically concerned with whatever his cousin’s getting himself into than he is with Tom, as if his thoughts aren’t just an endless churn of Tom, Tom, Tom.
Kendall evades him easily, slips into dark, secluded corners before Greg can catch him.
Tom, not so much.
He looms large in Greg’s peripheral vision, chatting up some girl with a shock of blonde hair, tilting his head back in a braying laugh.
Greg turns and goes after Kendall.
+
Someone touches his shoulder at the bar, and Greg is so profoundly miserable that he leans into the touch, and it is a genuine, pathetic comfort. He startles when he looks up into Stewy Hosseini’s face.
He remembers Stewy, of course. From the coffee shop on 5th Ave where Greg saw him with Kendall before they disappeared into the men’s room together. But Stewy won’t remember him.
+
“Jesus H. Christ, what took you so goddamn long?” Tom beckoned for the latte in Greg’s hand. “You didn’t get lost again, did you? It’s a grid system, Greg.”
“No, no, I just, um. I saw Kendall there, with this guy?”
Tom flicked through an open file on his desk, half-listening with apparent disinterest. “Guy, what guy?”
“Uh, I don’t know. He was, like. Tall?”
Tom looked up from his paperwork with a ghost of a smile at that. “Greg, you’re tall. You’re like if Gumby crossbred with the Jolly Green Giant.”
“Tall-ish, then.”
“Well, that’s helpful,” Tom snorted, and went back to his papers.
+
“Hey,” he says, and settles into the empty chair next to him. “It’s… Greg, right? You’re the Canadian cousin.”
Greg nods. His head feels heavy on his shoulders, his brain sluggish. “Uh, yeah.”
“Stewy,” he says, and extends a hand. Greg takes it after a beat. It’s warm. His palms are smooth, because of course they are, and he has a firm, solid grip.
“Yeah, I—I know who you are,” Greg says, stupidly, before he can stop himself.
Stewy laughs, revealing a flash of white teeth. “Kid, everyone knows who I am.”
+
Greg huffed. “I don’t know, man, I saw him for like, three seconds.” As if he hadn’t been thinking about the guy ever since he fumbled his change at the till and walked back to the office in a daze. He didn’t think he’d ever seen someone that attractive in real life. (Aside from, like. Tom, but that seemed to be a matter of opinion, depending on who you asked.) “He had dark curly hair, and, um. A beard, I think?”
“Oh, that’ll be Stewy,” Tom said. “One of Kendall’s old buddies from his Buckley days. Guy’s a prick. Buys companies for scraps and sells off the parts. Why you need a Harvard MBA for that, I have no idea.”
+
His dark eyes flicker over Greg’s face. “What’s with the long face? It’s your boy’s last hurrah, right? Before he drags Shiv kicking and screaming down the aisle?”
“I guess it’s just a little… much. For me? I don’t, uh, get out much.”
“Mm.” Stewy looks at him for a long moment and flags down the bartender, pointing to the old-fashioned in his hand. He waits until the bartender sets a fresh drink down in front of him, and pushes the glass towards Greg. “Go on.”
“Oh,” Greg says, and lifts the glass to his lips. He’s never been much of a drinker, but the liquor is smooth, and downright sapid on his tongue. “Thanks, uh.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure. So, what are you?”
+
Greg hummed a little, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Is he, um.”
“What?”
“You know.” Tom frowned, shook his head.
Tom’s office was empty, and the door was shut, but Greg lowered his voice anyway. “Like, is he of the, the male persuasion?”
+
“W-what?”
“What’s your deal?” Stewy takes a long pull on his drink. His eyes stay fixed on Greg’s face, his gaze dark and heavy. “Why haven’t I seen you around before? Guess you’re like, the black sheep Roy, right? Did Logan have you locked away in a sanatorium or something?”
Greg knows that Stewy can’t possibly be interested in the particulars of his life, but he’s too coked out to really connect with the thought. “No, actually, I…”
“Yeah, so, listen.” Stewy leans in. “Here’s the thing. I’m so fucking hard right now that I could literally rip through this jumpsuit.”
Greg blinks. The jumpsuit is… well. It’s black, and sleek, and expertly tailored so that the clean, sharp lines accentuate the breadth of Stewy’s shoulders, and the tapered collar reveals a swath of coarse chest hair. His mouth waters. “Uh.”
“Blame the coke, right? Shit’s potent.” He sniffs, rubs his nose. “Problem is, my girlfriend is, like, having a nervous breakdown or something, but I think you’ll do, in a pinch. You’ve got a nice mouth. Supple.”
+
“Wait, wait, hold on. Are you actually asking me if Stewy Hosseini’s a queer?”
Greg shrugged.
“How the hell should I know that?” Tom asked, and if Greg didn’t know any better, he’d think that Tom sounded a bit… defensive.
“Like, you know him, right?”
“Not like that,” Tom scoffed.
+
The forward flirt kind of knocks the wind out of him. Stewy just laughs. “It’s a fucking free-for-all, kid. Don’t tell me you’re a square.”
“N-no,” Greg stammers. “I’m not.”
Stewy nods, and drains the rest of his drink in one gulp. “Great, then come with.”
#title: dirty work#tag: tomgreg fic#au: the extended 1970s succession universe#status: abandoned draft#tag: gregstew
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He was twenty-eight, and Ewan had been nagging him about doing something with his life for long enough. So, fine. Greg took the hint.
He was pretty sure that Ewan didn’t mean for him to set out for Manhattan and try his luck at Waystar, but at this point, Greg didn’t care.
(1x01, "Celebration," but it's July 1973 and Greg is a draft dodger.)
via AO3 works tagged ‘Greg Hirsch/Tom Wambsgans’
#au: the extended 1970s succession universe#title: check out anytime you like (but you can never leave)#tag: tomgreg fic#status: complete#type: one-shot
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