A/N: Sorry, I know not everyone likes trigger warnings, but I'd rather warn than risk ruining someone's day. Rough break-up, that's all I'm saying. I've been there, and I found this chapter difficult to write, so I reckoned there might be some folks who found it difficult to read.
Chapter 36
She asks him to move out three weeks before Christmas, which is two weeks later than Kirk expected, but, he guesses, when it comes to calling time on their marriage, Lori is no better at letting go than he is. It's not that it's a surprise — far from it, in fact — it's just that he thought he knew how he'd feel when it finally happened. And it turns out he was completely wrong.
He comes home to find her in a chair by the window, an overnight case on the floor by her feet. A bottle of Laphroaig sits on the table in front of her and she's cradling a half-empty glass against her chest, curled in on herself and staring out over the lamplit city below. It has been a long, unsettled day: crisp and clear, but buffeted by a strong west wind that has swept in from the sea and shaken the bare branches of the trees that scatter the Presidio, and, Kirk thinks, as he pulls to a halt in the doorway in this last, fragile moment before everything changes, there's something fitting about that. His marriage is bookended by storms.
He watches her from the threshold for a long moment, leaning against the doorframe as he works out how to start a conversation that he doesn't want to have. "Are you going somewhere?" he asks at last.
Lori doesn't startle at the sound of his voice, simply turns her head towards him. If her husband's arrival takes her unawares, there's no sign of it in her manner; no sign, in fact, that it's any kind of a surprise to her to find that she's not alone. Always she's ready for whatever comes next; always she's one move ahead. In another world, Kirk thinks, he could have fallen in love with this woman.
"Jim," she says. "You're… are you late? I'm sorry; I've lost track of time."
He is, of course, late: the frostier things have gotten at home, the more effort he has put into avoiding it, and, though he hardly sees enough of her to know for certain, he's fairly sure that his wife has adopted a similar strategy. There came a point, not so long ago, when he realised that it took more work for them not to argue with each other than it did to just go ahead and let it happen, and that was the first night he spent on the couch at his office. Kirk doesn't want to be that guy, but, so far, the only way he's found to stop it happening is to make sure he's somewhere else.
"I had a conference call with Margolis and Biedermeier," he says, and he doesn't know why he's lying. It would be the work of thirty seconds for his wife to discover that the meeting ended three hours ago, though he knows she won't check. "Where are you going, Lori?"
"Ah, Jim," she says, and closes her eyes. "Let's not… let's just make this easy, all right?"
"Easy?" His coat is damp from the fine mist of rain that soaked into it as he moved from the aircar to the door of their apartment block, and he shrugs it from his shoulders as he crosses into the room, low-lit from a lamp in a distant corner. She doesn't turn to follow him as he moves; he doesn't expect her to. "How would you like to make it easier than it already is? We stopped being married November 24th, dear, and neither one of us has made any move to do anything about that. I'd call that pretty damned easy."
"Fine." She drains her glass, sets it on the table. "I was going to try and do this like a reasonable adult, Jim, but I guess your way's good too. I'm booked into the Fairmont until Sunday. I'd like you to be gone when I get back."
Kirk grabs a glass from the cabinet and stalks to the table, helping himself to a generous measure of whisky from her bottle. "Just like that?" he says, and he can't strip the bitterness from his voice.
But they've gotten good at this, these past months: segueing effortlessly from civility to antagonism in the time it takes to draw breath. Kirk can do it without thinking now; it's like a kind of armor: strike first and catch the other off their guard, maybe win a couple of those oratorical points that always seem like they matter in the heat of the moment. He sees it flash across her face — the same spark of animosity that's massing a storm-surge of ugly words in his chest — and, without missing a beat, Lori answers in kind.
"Oh, please," she spits. "Like you ever actually moved in. Show me one thing in this room, in this goddamned apartment, that tells me you live here, Jim. This isn't your home. This is just some place you stayed while you worked out how to tell the landlady you were already gone."
Kirk snorts a humorless laugh as he paces to the side of the room, out of the circle of acrimony and into neutral territory. There's a pattern to follow, like the steps of a dance, and they've both learned their moves well enough by now that it's easier just to let the familiar take over, to see them through one more struggle, one last time.
"'Landlady'," he says. "I like that. That's exactly what this is, Lori — your home. Not mine."
A single, fluid movement carries his wife to her feet, and she spins to face him, her face a dark cloud of hostility.
"Don't pretend — don't you dare pretend," she snaps, "that that's what this is about. Jesus Christ, Jim, can we have one, just one, single, honest conversation in this marriage? It's over now; it's done — we don't have to keep on pretending that we both don't know what's going on here. So don't you dare try and play this like it's because I hoarded all the closet space or you didn't like the color of the bathroom tiles. I deserve more than that. We both do."
Kirk purses his lips, tilts his glass towards him. A fine tremor in his hand has set up a trembling in the surface of the liquid, almost imperceptible in the half-light, and he can't tell if it's caused by anger or by the implication buried in her words. Quietly, he says, "I'll speak to Estates tomorrow morning about a temporary billet. I'll be out of here by Friday evening."
Lori shakes her head, and a hand rises to pinch the bridge of her nose. "You can't even give me that, huh?" she says. "After all this time — after everything, Jim? You can't even tell me it wasn't me? That this" — a vague flick of her hand, designed to encompass the entirety of their life together — "this thing of ours never even had a chance?"
An eyebrow arches, and Kirk can feel a wave of something vicious, something ungovernable trying to force its way out past barriers that are starting to show the strain.
"You seem very certain that our marriage was never likely to work," he says. "I wonder why you agreed to it in the first place."
Lori laughs: a dry, cynical gesture laced with something that might be resentment, might be regret. "Yeah," she says sourly. "You and me both, Jim."
She reaches for the bottle on the table, unstoppers it one-handed and pours a generous measure that brushes up against the edges of the glass. For the first time, it occurs to Kirk to wonder just how long she's been sitting here, bag packed, waiting for her husband to make an appearance so that she can have this one last battle with him that finishes something neither one of them had the strength to fight for. "Goddamn it," she says now, and it's almost a whisper. "How stupid do you have to be to marry a man who's in love with somebody else?"
The angry ache twists viciously, spiking poison beneath Kirk's ribs, and, to cover it, he raises his glass to his lips, swallowing the contents in two gulps that scald his throat and bring tears to his eyes. He pivots on one heel, but there's nowhere to go — he's already at the edge of the room — so, instead, he spins back to face her, though he knows his face tells a story he'd rather she didn't read.
"There is nothing…" he starts to say, and his tone is like ice, but she cuts him off with a shake of the head.
"Don't," she says. "Just… don't. I'm sick of hearing you deny it, Jim. I know what I saw. I know you."
"Is that so?" He can feel the anger massing at the back of his throat, a dangerous momentum clamoring to be set free. He can hear it in his voice. "You know me well enough to tell me what I feel, but you were quite content to bury your misgivings twelve months ago when it suited you. So tell me, Lori — which one of us is denying anything? Or perhaps it was politically convenient to…"
"Don't you dare!" she yells. Whisky splashes up and over the edges of her over-filled glass, darkening the carpet beneath her hand in a Rorschach scatter. "Political? Political? Jesus, Jim — just when I think you can't sink any lower…"
"You've always been Nogura's woman, Lori," says Kirk coldly. "Starfleet first and Ciana second, isn't that it? I believe it's served you very well, though maybe not so much those around you…"
"Oh, don't give me the 'wounded innocent' routine, Jim!" she shouts, and her voice is trembling on the edge of control. "Like you've never played the game? Like your motives are always so goddamn pure! You don't think I read your files? You don't think I knew exactly who I was getting when the Enterprise hit Spacedock? I could name a half dozen women right now, women you sweet-talked, women you charmed, women you had eating out of your hand because they were useful to you. You know how many days of the week I'd put myself right at the top of that list?"
"Useful?" says Kirk. "Please tell me, Lori, how useful I found it on Cochrane Day last year when I got a promotion I didn't want that cost me my ship!"
"Damn it, Jim!" She slams her glass on the table, whisky pooling on the lacquered wooden surface. "Your ship? You want to make this about your ship? You think we'd be having this conversation if you didn't lose a whole hell of a lot more than the Enterprise that day?"
Unbidden, unplanned, Kirk's hand stabs the air in front of him: a sharp, violent gesture.
"Don't," he says, quietly, fiercely, and there's a weight of menace behind that one syllable that unsettles even him.
"And still we can't talk about it!" He knows she saw the fury in his eyes; he saw her momentary recoil. But her own anger has made her reckless: she wants, he thinks, to see him break. "God forbid one of us should speak his name!" she snaps. "God forbid we should acknowledge it! No, we're going to just pretend that nothing happened, because that's the way we do things in this marriage. Goddamn it, Jim, everything fell apart for you; everything you had just came apart at the seams in the space of two weeks…"
"Don't," he says again, but carefully, more evenly. He will not lose control.
"Why, Jim?" Two small words, but there's a note of desolation creeping in now, frosting the anger with a sorrow so deep he can only wonder how long it's been eating out the heart of her. Kirk glances up, meets her eyes, and finds them liquid with a sadness he can't quite read. "Why can't we just say it?" she demands. "He left you. You loved him and he left anyway, and you can't get past that."
"For God's sake, Lori…" says Kirk, but his voice is hoarse. It sounds like someone else's voice, and she acts like she doesn't hear him.
"He left you," she says, softer now. "And you — you just kind of… stopped. Maybe if you'd fallen apart, maybe if you'd stopped functioning, I don't know — if you'd disappeared for two weeks, if you went off the radar, and then you show up in jail in some godforsaken backwater on the other side of the galaxy looking for someone to bail you out… That might've made some kind of sense. You can see that, you know? You can quantify it. I don't know, maybe you can start to fix it. But you?" A soft laugh, and she sinks bonelessly into the chair beside her. She looks, suddenly, exhausted, and another time, another day, he might find himself crossing the floor to her, lowering himself onto the seat beside her and wrapping his arms around her. But they're a long way past that now. "You just kept right on going, one foot in front of the other, with your meetings and your decisions and your command distance, and, damn it, you were so good at it. You know? I never expected you to break down, Jim. That's not your style. But I damn well should've known when you never even broke stride."
Silence settles on the room, like dust. Kirk peers into his empty glass, looks towards the table where Lori's sits in a spreading pool of whisky, and, without a word, he crosses to the the bottle, lifts it and pours two fingers for his wife, another two for himself. He passes her the beaker, damp-bottomed and dripping a disregarded trail of liquid onto the carpet, onto her knee, and lowers himself into the chair beside hers.
"He was my friend," he says quietly. It's the first time in more than eighteen months that Kirk has acknowledged even this much, and the angry ache flares so sharply that, for a moment, he's not sure he can catch his breath. "He was my friend and he left. Is that what you want me to say? I wish he hadn't. But he was not the only one."
Her eyes are a gentle heat on his skin. Kirk doesn't meet them. "He might as well have been," says Lori softly.
Kirk shakes his head. "No."
"Just say it, Jim," she says, and her words are heavy, weary. "It meant more than Bones. It meant more than the Enterprise or command or deep space or any of it. Damn it, it took me all of four weeks to figure it out; why is it so hard for you to see this? You won't ever get past it until you stop burying it."
"I'm fine, Lori," he says.
"Yeah, sure. You're fine," she says. "Goddamn it, Jim, I love you, you stupid son-of-a-bitch…" Her voice cracks, but his wife has never cried in front of him before, and he can't imagine she's going to start now. "I love you," she says again, "but I'm done watching you break your heart over someone that's not me."
Kirk lifts his glass to his lips, sips, swallows. "If I've hurt you," he says at last, "then I'm sorry. It wasn't my intention."
"What do you want me to say — it's all right, Jim?" Anger flares, but listlessly, as though she doesn't have the energy for it. "It's not. It's not all right. It's a long way from all right." A sigh, and the fire leaves her voice as quickly as it came. "Maybe I shouldn't have married you," says Lori quietly. "But you damn sure shouldn't have married me."
Kirk says nothing. He drinks his whisky and stares straight ahead, through the dark windows and into the moonless sky, where the stars and the orbital traffic are veiled behind a thick blanket of cloud. The silence rings in his ears and burns at the back of his throat, but it's easier than trying to find the right words. He doesn't think the right words exist.
"You remember our first argument?" says Lori presently; soft words against the stillness of the quiet room. "The day after the wedding; how the hell did I not see this coming?" A gentle, rueful laugh, but there's no bitterness in it anymore. "I told you, everyone thinks we're crazy, Jim; are we crazy? Did we rush into this? And you said — you remember?"
"It's a one-year contract," says Kirk quietly. He remembers very well.
"It's a one-year contract," she agrees. "Good answer, Jim. Wow, just — yeah. Great answer. Are we crazy? Well, yes, Lori, maybe we are, but that's okay because we already put an expiration date on this thing, so why worry?" Her head drops back to rest against the chair and she closes her eyes. "You shouldn't have asked me," she says. "That's on you. You knew how I felt and you knew how you felt and you shouldn't have asked me. But I knew. I knew, and I did it anyway. So that's on me." A beat. "I saw the way you looked at him. I knew."
"Lori…" says Kirk, but he doesn't know what comes next and so, when she flashes him a hooded glance, he allows it to silence him.
"It doesn't…" she says, and shakes her head. "It doesn't matter anymore. Let's just get out while we can, Jim, okay?"
She drains her glass and sets it on the table, leaning her head forward to rest against her hands. For a moment, she sits quietly, elbows braced against her knees, hair hanging loose in a curtain of yellow around her face, and then she exhales deeply, and, slowly, listlessly, gets to her feet. She doesn't raise her eyes to his.
"I'm going to go now," she says. "I think we both could use some sleep."
"I'll carry your bag down to the car," says Kirk, but his wife shakes her head.
"I'll manage," she says. Her coat is slung over the back of the chair, and she lifts it, slings it over one arm, but she doesn't shrug it on. Kirk has to resist the urge to remind her that it's cold outside, and threatening rain again; the time for that kind of care has passed. So, instead, he stands with her, follows her as she moves across the room to her case, and he wants to reach for her, to pull her towards him and keep her here, the way he should have done a thousand times these past months, back when it still mattered. He was a fool to think he knew how he'd feel when this was finally over.
Lori turns to face him, and, for a long moment, she stands in front of him, not speaking, not moving. Then she takes a step back, meets his gaze, makes herself smile.
"Take care of yourself, okay?" she says. One hand rises halfway up his body, hesitating by his lower arm before it closes on his flesh in a cursory, fleeting grip. "I'll see you around."
Her fingers fall away, and the skin beneath them registers their absence with a faint chill of remembered touch. Kirk stoops, lifts her bag, passes it to her without a word, and she slings the strap over her shoulder with a nod of thanks. He watches her leave, hands folded behind his back, and, as the door slides shut behind her, he clears his throat, turns back towards the window, and reaches for his glass.
And for all the times Kirk has sat in this lounge, staring out across the city and wishing like hell he was alone with nobody to consider but himself and the service, it turns out that, when the apartment is as still and silent as the black skies above the Bay, it's far too big and cold and empty for just one man and his memories.