Despite the mellowing effect of the weed and the toe-tingling satisfaction of the orgasms, Regina doesn't sleep much on Monday night.
She'd stayed at Robin's for a little while longer, had let him coddle and stroke and kiss. And then let him slip his fingers back down and rub her to another gasping peak – "one more for the road," he'd called it – before she'd finally given in to her more responsible inner voice, slipped his shirt off and back into his hands, and left for home.
The bubble of marijuana-induced tranquility had popped as soon as his door had shut behind her, said inner voice muttering the whole way home how insane she'd been to do any of that.
Going over there in the first place, maybe, sure. She'd been in the clutches of an anxiety attack she wasn't likely to easily shake on her own, and he'd helped her settle and calm without having to endure the embarrassment of calling her therapist yet again.
But she should probably have left after that.
Logically, she knows this. Or thinks she does. She's not sure anymore?
What she is sure of is that Mother is even more of a monster than she'd previously thought, and has absolutely no sense of decency or conscience when it comes to her pride. Which means that if she remembers Robin, he's in for a world of hurt.
"If" being the operative word.
She doesn't know, has no way of knowing, and the possibilities plague her. She lies in bed, tossing and turning, sleeping fitfully and never for very long, her dreams a lurid kaleidoscope of her mother's horrors.
Fifteen year old Regina trapped – literally trapped – locked in a room with no windows and no doors, and no food or water, just a massive screen where her mother shines down on her, ordering her into one more sit-up, one more, another, another, until her abs ache and tremble, her cheeks wet with sweat and tears. She wakes with her torso clenched tight, her fists and her jaw, too. Wakes sore and miserable, and rakes her fingers through her hair as she turns to look at the clock.
She groans – hours of torture had only taken up twenty minutes of rest.
More tossing, more turning, more staring at the ceiling.
She's not sure when she slips under again, but she dreams of Robin in jail. She's unable to see him, visitors are family only, they tell her. It's days, weeks, months, she doesn't know. She tries again, and they tell her he doesn't want to see her, but he has a message for her: This is all your fault.
And then she's in a small room with a big wide window, Robin on the other side of it, strapped to a table. He stares hard through the glass at her, and she realizes what this is, her stomach swooping into her shoes.
This is his execution.
She's ruined him, cost him everything. His freedom, his life, everything.
In a sick turn of fate, it's Mother who wields the fatal syringe, and it's Mother's voice that speaks to her from Robin's lips: "You stupid girl. How did you think this would end?"
Regina sits bolt upright when she wakes this time, gasping and sweaty, her heart pounding, the urge to run next door and press her hand to his beating heart overwhelming.
But it's the middle of the night, and it's just a dream. She knows that. It's just a dream, and he's… he's fine. Probably sprawled peacefully over that unmade bed.
Regina gives up on sleep after that – doesn't even bother to stay in her bed.
She doesn't want to sleep, if that's how sleep is going to go.
Instead, she showers. Soaps up her loofah, and scrubs her skin half-raw, then stands under the hot spray and lets the water run down along her shoulders, her back, her hips and her legs, until her skin is pink and pruning. She tells herself it's pampering when she slathers on a generous layer of shea butter lotion, but really it's just something to do. Something to pass the time between 3:12 AM and breakfast.
After she's lotioned, and done a quick face mask, and swished coconut oil for ten minutes to whiten her teeth (and hopefully purge her mouth of the vaguely lingering aftertaste of pot), she trades her robe for soft pajama pants and Robin's sweatshirt, and takes a book down to the living room.
Somewhere around four AM, she remembers that part of her homework from Dr. Hopper had been to journal her anxiety, so she drags herself back upstairs to the guest room (her limbs feel tired now, heavy, her head a bit cottony) and pulls out a fresh journal from the small collection of pretty volumes she buys but rarely fills.
She chooses one with flowers on it this time. Real, pressed flowers embedded in the rough parchment of the cover, the pages inside thick and pulpy, the kind a pen just sinks down into and rolls over, their edges rough and rustic.
A pretty place to write down all her messy thoughts.
Regina sits at the desk in the guest room and writes until six.
Writes about Mother, writes about Daddy, writes about the sickly awful way she feels right now. Writes about the nightmares.
She writes until she hears her alarm beeping in her bedroom, and then she straightens her hair and does her makeup, pulls on a comfortable-but-classy dress and brews the biggest pot of coffee she can manage.
.::.
When she gets to work there are goddamn fucking flowers on her desk, and Regina loses it.
She checks the card, hoping against hope that Robin had made a late night call to 1-800-Flowers, or that Daddy had called the florist after dropping that bomb on her yesterday.
But no.
No, they're from Sidney. Of course they're from fucking Sidney.
And she doesn't have the patience for this anymore. Not today, not after the last several days, she just… She just doesn't.
She picks up the vase, her blood pumping hotly in her veins as she stalks to Sidney's office. He's frowning at his computer screen, barely has time to look up and tell her how beautiful she looks this morning before she is cracking the vase down onto his desk and demanding to know, "What are these?"
He frowns at her and says, "They're roses."
"Yes, they are," she hisses. "And I have asked you, more than once—so many times now—to stop giving me things like this. And yet here I am, again, in your office to return another unwanted gift."
So much for avoiding the blunt approach.
Sidney straightens a little in his chair, clears his throat slightly and says carefully, "I overheard you telling Kathryn on Friday that you were having brunch with your parents yesterday. I know how they can be. I thought some flowers might cheer you up."
"Not your place," she tells him, cursing herself for the little bit of guilt she feels that he'd been trying to do something nice and she's bawling him out for it.
But this isn't a nice gesture, she reminds herself. This is him blatantly ignoring what she has asked of him.
"Well, pardon me for trying to do something kind for someone I care about," Sidney says, dropping his gaze slightly, and making this face, this sort of trying-to-hide-my-hurt expression that she wants to believe is real, but my God, she has seen this from her mother so many times. The fake penitence and the fake hurt and the guilt tripping, and she has had it.
"Sidney, if you really cared about me, you wouldn't ignore everything I say to you."
"I don't ignore everything you say," Sidney shoots back, his gaze slapping up to hers. "I listen to everything you say, I pay more attention to you than anyone else in your life."
Ain't that the truth, she thinks with a scoff. An actual out-loud scoff that makes his jaw clench and his eyes go flinty for half a second.
She pushes past it, saying, "Well, I want you to stop. I have tried to be nice about it, but I can't anymore. I want you to stop this. You and I are not going to—" She shakes her head, and tells him, "This would never have worked out anyway."
He scowls, and asks her, "Why on earth would you think that?"
Regina has a very simple answer for him: "Henry is eleven."
"What does Henry have to do with—"
"Everything," she insists, because doesn't he get it? "He's everything to me. And he's eleven."
Sidney's brow furrows, confusion written all over his face as he says, "I don't understand how Henry's age is a problem."
Of course he doesn't. Because he doesn't even remember what he doesn't know, does he?
Regina crosses her arms, straightens her back, and looks down on him as she asks, "What's my birthstone?"
Sidney answers without missing a beat: "Amethyst."
"Favorite color?"
"Royal purple."
"Coffee of choice?"
"Americano with a splash of cream," he says with a pleased little smirk, and an addition of, "Or a cappuccino if you're feeling indulgent."
That's wrong – a cappuccino is his coffee of choice, not hers. Too much milk; she's more likely to go for a cortado. But he clearly thinks he's winning, and she's more than happy to let him dig his hole a little deeper before she points out where the flaw is in all of this.
So she challenges, "Favorite sports team?"
"The Red Sox, for some reason," he chuckles, and her jaw tightens.
They were Daniel's favorite, and she never gave a damn about baseball before him. But color her unsurprised that something about a man who isn't him would not blip onto Sidney's radar. God, how could she have been stupid enough to date him?
She shakes off the little bit of self loathing, and asks, "Go-to lunch order?"
"Eat-in or take-out?" Sidney asks smugly, and God, she can't wait to drop the hammer on him in a minute.
"Chinese take-out."
"Steamed chicken and vegetables with garlic sauce on the side and brown rice."
"Sushi?"
"A sashimi lunch special with miso soup, and an avocado salad."
"Eat-in?"
"Kale salad with chicken or salmon, and a seltzer with lime."
"What food do I hate?"
"Raw onions."
"The lotion I keep in my desk—"
"L'Occitane en Provence shea butter hand cream."
Regina nods slightly. Waits a moment to let it all sink in, to let him bolster up his pride in his little victory in the Regina Mills Trivia Game.
And then she reminds him, "You thought my son was nine."
Sidney's face falls, and it's Regina's turn to feel a smug ripple of satisfaction.
"You know everything about me, remember every little piece of trivia," she tells him. "And you thought my son was nine. Anyone who's going to be with me has to understand that to love me, you have to love my son. And you may care about me, but you don't care about Henry. It would never have worked. I'm a package deal, Sidney."
He flounders for a moment, clearly caught off guard by his lapse in knowledge. And then he stammers, "I could – I could change that. I could be better."
"I shouldn't have to ask," she tells him simply. "If I have to ask you to make my son a priority, it's not going to work."
"I bought him a birthday gift," Sidney argues. "I did make him a priority."
And oh, that's rich. A maybe fifteen dollar trinket with the bare minimum of thought put into it.
"You did buy him a gift," she nods. And then she points out, "And one for me. And since you've spent the last five years learning every detail of me and very little of Henry, I have to wonder if his gift wasn't just an excuse to drop off mine."
"It wasn't. I do care about Henry," he says, and it might be convincing if he wasn't so insistent. Wasn't trying so hard. "He's important to you, so I care about him."
"But you didn't," Regina tells him. "You haven't. It's too little, too late, Sidney."
He opens his mouth to protest again, but she forges ahead, deciding enough is enough and it's time to stop dancing around this.
"And it's not just about workplace fraternization," she tells him. "You are not the one for me. I don't want to date you."
It's harsh, maybe, but it's true. She forces herself to ignore the way his expression has gone wounded, ignores that part of her that was raised to be polite even when being unkind.
She's tried to be polite, and it's gotten her nowhere, so now she's going to be brutally honest: "I was not in a good place when I said yes, and I shouldn't have. You were a bad rebound decision, and I am sorry that I did that to you. I know it was unfair. But this"—she gestures back and forth between them—"This isn't going to happen again. So please stop showing up uninvited, or showing up in places you know you'll run into me, and please stop leaving me gifts, or doing me little favors. Please stop telling me how beautiful I am. Because you're making me uncomfortable – very uncomfortable. And none of those things will make this work."
He's the uncomfortable one now, shifting slightly in his chair, avoiding her gaze as he adjusts things on his desk needlessly, going from kicked-puppy to a tense-jawed mask of control.
Regina keeps talking, making her feelings very, very clear: "We're not going to date, Sidney, and not because of Leo, or the clients, or our coworkers, or anyone else. Because of us. Because it's not what I want. You're a nice guy, but you're not going to be my guy. So please, back off."
There. It's done. There's no possible way he can misread that dismissal.
Sidney clears his throat, scratches at the side of his nose, and says, "Well… that's just not true, is it?"
"Excuse me?" Regina asks, baffled. He has to be joking. He can't just… He can't just disregard everything she's just said.
But he's not dismissing it, she realizes, as he looks up to meet her gaze again finally, and she finds his expression hard and tinted with anger. He's heard her loud and clear.
"Maybe it's not because of Leo, or the clients, or our coworkers," he says to her, "but it's not about 'no one else,' is it? It's because I'm not a deadbeat bartender, and apparently that's what you're into these days."
"Excuse me?" Regina demands, her brows rising to her hairline as heat flares up the back of her neck.
"You heard me," Sidney tells her simply, quietly, coldly.
"You have no right," she tells him darkly. "I've told you before, Robin and I are just friends, and none of your business."
Most of my friends don't give me orgasms pops into her head, and she hopes the flush of her anger disguises the extra heat she feels in her cheeks.
"'Just friends' don't stare you down while you're only talking to other men the way he did last weekend," Sidney argues. "He was glowering at you. He's possessive; he has the makings of a jealous man, Regina, and jealous men are dangero—"
"Sidney, he was looking at you," she interrupts.
This is getting ridiculous. She has not had enough sleep to deal with this.
"Because I was talking to you and he was jealous," Sidney says to her, all confidence.
She has no problem popping that little bubble: "Because you were there, and you weren't invited."
"How would he have known that? I'm a work friend, we dated, I could easily have been—"
"Because it was a children's party, Sidney. For children, and their parents. You don't have a child, you were not there with a child," she reiterates. "And he knew that I was…"
She shouldn't say that. She shouldn't tell Sidney that she's been talking to Robin about him, that won't make any of this any easier.
"He knew that I wasn't expecting any more guests. He's not a jealous man, and—" It's on the tip of her tongue, and she shouldn't, but she does: "And he didn't have anything to be jealous of. He knew that you and I had gone on a couple of dates, and he knew that I wasn't planning on going on any more."
"And how exactly would he know—"
"Because he's my friend, and we talk about things that are upsetting me – like men who won't hear no for an answer no matter how many times I try to politely tell them."
Sidney sobers a little at that, dropping his gaze and adjusting the things on his desk again, shifting them all half a centimeter back to where they'd been to start with.
As he does it, he tells her tensely, "I'm sorry. I didn't realize I was upsetting you. If I had, I wouldn't have— I'm sorry. Thank you for your honesty; I need to get back to work."
Well, alright then.
It's an abrupt end to their conversation, and it's certainly not handling things with the grace Leo had demanded, but… it's done.
And she would really much rather be anywhere but here, so she says, "Of course. And I'm sorry – for saying yes when I shouldn't have, knowing how you felt about me. I could have spared us all of… this."
He's turned his attention back to his computer already, and offers her only an affirming, "Mm," in reply.
It's childish, and petulant, and unprofessional, and Regina has to fight not to roll her eyes.
Instead, she sighs and tells him, "I'll see you at the four o'clock," and then she turns and walks out.
.::.
The rest of her morning doesn't go much better.
She seems to have a mountain of emails to wade through for a simple two-day weekend, and a client upset about their latest campaign that she has to call and talk down before he runs it up the chain to Leo and she gets her ass fried for it. (And he would, this client, he absolutely would go straight over her head if he didn't get his little temper tantrum sorted in a timely and sufficient manner.)
By quarter past eleven, she's hungry, over-caffeinated and exhausted.
She has plans to swivel out of her chair and head for the break room to pour even more caffeine on her already frazzled nerves, but she just needs a minute to sit here. And breathe. In silence.
Regina plants her elbows on her desk and drops her head into her palms, the heels of her hands pressing against her eyes until colors dance on the insides of her lids.
She could sleep right here, she thinks. Just like this. She could take a five minute nap – or she could, if she had slept at all last night. But she didn't, so the probability of waking up at noon with a puddle of drool on her desk and a keyboard imprint on the side of her face is far too high to risk it.
So she'll just sit here for a minute and make a mental list of everything in her top two dresser drawers, from left to right. She'd count, it would be more mindless, but it might also help her nod off. So recitation it is.
Top left is bras. Cream with ivory lace, nude underwire, fire engine red, black lace, black silk, black unlined. Royal purple lace crossback—
The knock on her office door startles her so hard she jumps, sucking in a breath as her head snaps up.
It's Sidney. Standing there with a stack of folders in the crook of his arm and a look of haughty amusement.
He asks, "Are you ready?" and Regina frowns.
"Ready for what?"
"The meeting with Heller and his guys."
Regina's frown deepens, her brow wrinkling as she glances at the clock with a moment of panicked fear that she actually had fallen asleep while cataloging her bras and somehow slept for five hours.
But no, no, it's 11:25 in the morning.
"Sidney, that meeting isn't until four," she reminds, but he just smirks some more.
"It was at four," he tells her. "Now it's at eleven-thirty."
"It's—what?" Regina questions, panic spiking hard in her gut. "Since when?"
"Since that email they sent last night," Sidney tells her, and shit. Shit, shit, shit.
Regina clicks into her inbox and scrolls back through the messages she hadn't gotten to yet, muttering miserably, "I must have missed it – I didn't know."
Sure enough, there it is. Half past seven last night, and with a priority flag and everything, the subject reading "UPDATED MEETING TIME." How could she have missed this?
"I haven't done the prep yet," she groans, frantically clicking into the necessary documents – God, she hasn't even pulled up the latest metrics. It's going to take her a minute to run them, and then she needs to compile, and print, and collate, and it's eleven twenty-fucking-seven.
She mutters a ripe, "Shit," just as Sidney drops one of the folders he'd been holding, letting it fall to the corner of her desk with a little slap.
"Metrics, progress reports, and estimates for another twelve-week campaign," he tells her.
Regina glances at him, and then the folder, reaches out for it and then thumbs through the pages. They're all here, all the prep she'd needed to do is done and ready to go.
"Individual copies for each attendee, marked with their initials in the corner, just the way you like it. All I need are your signature red pens to hold them all together."
Regina relaxes with a heavy breath, nodding and raking a hand through her hair. "When did you – How did you know that I wouldn't have—"
"You didn't respond to confirm," he tells her. "You always confirm schedule changes as soon as you see them. When you never responded to this one, I knew you must have missed it."
"I did," she sighs, closing out the documents again and admitting, "I'm frazzled today; thank you so much for taking care of this. I'm sorry I dropped the ball."
"Of course," he says, and then with an undercurrent of resentment, he adds, "See? I do know you."
Regina scowls, but by the time she looks up to say something, she's staring at Sidney's back.
She speed-reads the packet in front of her and tries to commit all the figures to memory, but her brain is mush, and nothing sticks.
She stumbles over them in the meeting, has to refer back to her notes several times in a way that makes her feel like she's making an idiot of herself. It's probably not as bad as it feels, she tells herself. Isaac Heller always has that condescending look on his face, she reminds.
Sidney steps seamlessly to her aid more than once – of course he does, because he's had plenty of time to run over the paperwork and probably got a full night's rest on top of it.
It hits her then like a ton of bricks: He had known.
That morning, when she'd left his office and told him she'd see him at four, he had known the meeting was moved. And he hadn't bothered to say a word.
The revelation irks her, distracts her, has her staring at the side of his head so hard she's surprised he can't feel her gaze boring in through his skull.
But for once, he seems oblivious to her. Probably for the best, considering she's the only woman at this table full of particularly obtuse and rude men. Usually she can keep up with them just fine, rather enjoys putting them in their place with a bit of sass and competence, but she's off her game today.
Even Heller notices, making a crack at her expense (his "Maybe if you weren't so busy admiring Sidney's profile, you'd be able to pay better attention to the conversation at hand, Regina," has her clenching her jaw and struggling to find a scathing retort – but not too scathing, he is a client, after all), and she is immensely relieved when the meeting comes to an end.
A satisfying, productive end, with an agreement to extend their campaign and promises that all the requisite paperwork will be drawn up and on its way over by end of day.
Sidney doesn't wait for her to leave the conference room – a rarity for him, but, well, they're clearly having a day, aren't they? So much for her assurances to Leo that she could handle this without screwing up their working relationship.
Regina follows after him, takes a few extra-long strides so she can grab his wrist and stop him.
Sidney turns to face her, asking, "Something you need?"
God, what an ass. What a childish, petulant ass.
Regina cocks her head slightly and asks him, "Why didn't you say anything?"
"What?"
"Earlier." She shakes her head a little and continues, "You knew. You knew I had missed the email, and you didn't say a word until five minutes before the start of the meeting. Why?"
Sidney looks her up and down once, and tells her, "You asked me not to do you any more favors, Regina. I was just trying to listen to your wishes."
There's ice in his words, and bitterness, and as Regina watches him walk away she wonders if finally shutting him down has just made everything even more awkward.
.::.
By lunchtime, her roses are in the break room.
She has no appetite, between exhaustion and anxiety, so she's just there to fill up her coffee again, but the roses are parked on the center of the table. Mocking her.
Regina avoids looking at them, beelines for the coffee pot and finds it still brewing.
"It was empty when I got here," Kathryn says from the doorway, making Regina jump slightly. "But it should be done soon. I was just coming back to fill up."
"Perfect timing," Regina says with a forced little smile. Just her fucking luck, it's Kathryn and her watered down brew on a day when she needs Sidney and his jet fuel. Still, it's better than nothing.
So she'll wait a minute, and take a chance to catch up, watching as Kathryn glances at the fridge and asks, "Want to know a secret?"
What she wants is a decent cup of coffee, but since she's not getting that, sure, why not?
"I'm all ears," Regina offers, taking her empty mug to the table and sitting down.
Kathryn gets a mischievous look on her face, makes a furtive glance toward the door, and then opens the freezer, pulling out the box of fish sticks that has lived in the back of that thing for God only knows how long, and God only knows what reason.
She brings it to the table, opens the end of it, and unearths a tube of… no…
"Are those Thin Mints?" Regina asks, as Kathryn untwists the end of the sleeve of little chocolate cookies.
"They are," Kathryn smirks, fishing one out and handing it over to Regina. "Mal keeps a stash of them, has for years. She thinks nobody knows."
"But you do," Regina points out, taking the offered treat.
She feels a little lance of guilt at pilfering cookies from Mal – a curious sensation, considering her office loyalties have always been more to the woman in front of her. But it's been a busy summer, a stressful summer – for all of them – and there's a distance here now that wasn't there before.
She's been a bad friend, she realizes. Too caught up in her own drama to help Kathryn through hers, and the guilt just piles on, piece by piece. She should try to do better, be better...
"I discovered them last year," Kathryn confesses. "I sneak one every now and then, but I never told anyone. I figured if everyone knew, she'd catch on. But now I bequeath this secret unto you."
Kathryn munches happily on a cookie of her own, and Regina's brows rise slightly. She takes her own bite, the minty, chocolatey sweetness a delightful change from the bitterness of the coffee she's been drinking all day.
"To what do I owe the honor?" she asks once she's chewed and swallowed.
Kathryn gives the door another glance, then lowers her voice and says, "I got the job."
"The one in D.C.," Regina says; so much for trying to do better. Kathryn nods, and Regina smiles, sadness washing down another bite of Thin Mint.
It's only D.C., she reminds herself. It's a day-trip – not even. But it means no more of these midday coffee breaks, and that's… That makes something in her chest ache.
"I start after Labor Day; I'm telling Leo at the end of the day," Kathryn explains.
"I'm happy for you," Regina tells her, and she means it. She really does. It's just… "But I'm going to miss you. And I'm sorry I haven't… been the greatest friend lately."
"You've been fine," Kathryn assures, shaking her head and telling her, "There's nothing you could have done to fix what David broke. And besides, it seems like you've had your own stuff going on lately."
Regina scoffs, and tells her, "Understatement." And then, "But that's a conversation for another day, and"—She glances around at this little break room, and its oversized bouquet, and contraband cookies, and overused mugs—"another place. Maybe we can find some time before you leave to go out, relax, have dinner?"
"I'd like that," Kathryn agrees, and then she adds, "And I'm only going to D.C. It's not like I'll be so far away that we can't see each other. We'll just have to plan it a little better, that's all."
"Get a place with a spare room," Regina smirks. "Henry loves D.C., maybe we'll come down and spend a weekend every now and then."
"I'm house hunting this weekend; I'll add 'Regina's guest room' to the list of necessities."
They both chuckle a little, and then Kathryn is slipping two more cookies from the sleeve, sliding one across the table to Regina and twisting it closed again, tucking it away in its secret hiding place.
"You don't think she'll notice that four cookies are missing?" Regina questions, popping the last bite of her first cookie into her mouth.
Kathryn goes to check the coffee pot with a shrug, and says, "I'm out of here in two weeks; I don't really care what that bitch notices."
Regina rolls her eyes slightly – she'll be sad to see Kathryn go, but she won't miss that particular office rivalry.
Still, she finds her already sour mood considerably dampened by Kathryn's news – even if she had known it was almost certainly coming. Maybe it's the exhaustion that has it hitting harder than usual. Maybe it's just the edge of loneliness she can't seem to shake lately.
Either way, it's selfish. Kathryn needs a new start, deserves a new start after everything she's been through this summer.
Regina tells herself she should be glad things are going right for someone, even if it doesn't feel particularly like they're going right for her.
And then she takes a bite of that second cookie.
.::.
By two, she has a building sense of dread.
The light of her computer monitor is making her eyes ache, and there's an ominous little spot shimmering at the edge of her vision.
Aura.
The last thing she needs today is a migraine, but she doesn't have anything stronger than an Advil on hand, so it looks like she'll probably be getting one.
She reduces the brightness on her monitor, turns off her fluorescent overhead light, shuts her door to close out some of the usual noise of the office. Anything she can do to keep from exacerbating her impending headache further before the end of the day.
The buzz of her phone on her desk sounds overly loud in the quiet of her office, and she scoops it up quickly to find Robin's name on her screen. Her stomach swoops nervously, a little flush of embarrassment over last night heating her skin, but she swipes her thumb across the screen anyway, answering the call with a quiet, "Hi…"
"Hello, love," he greets cheerily. So he clearly doesn't have any regrets. "Is this a good time?"
It's… not ideal, to be honest. She has plenty to get done before the end of the day, and the sooner she can clear the essentials off her desk, the sooner she can beg Leo's sympathy for the pressure starting to threaten at her temple and try to cut out early.
But she tells him, "I can carve out a minute to talk. What's up?"
"I just dropped Roland at daycare for the afternoon," he says; she can hear the edge of disappointment in his voice, no matter how much he tries to hide it. "And I have a bit of time to kill before I have to pick him up. So I thought maybe I could wander by, take you out for coffee…?"
Oh, wonderful. Just what she needs. Robin, in this office, while Sidney is in the mood he is, and just after she's told him there's nothing going on between herself and the neighbor.
"I… don't think that's such a good idea," she tells him reluctantly.
"Just as friends," he assures. "I know that last night was just last night; I wasn't meaning for it to be a—"
"It's not that," she tells him, although it should be that. It really should be. "I just have a lot to get done here, and I have a migraine brewing, and… I had a… disagreement... with Sidney this morning, and I don't think you showing up here would help at all with the little snit he's been in ever since."
"A disagreement I ought to be concerned about?" Robin asks her darkly, in that protective possessive tone he sometimes gets that she shouldn't find nearly as attractive as she does.
"Nothing I can't handle," she promises. "He's just in a mood. It'll blow over."
She hopes.
Robin lets out a little, "Mm," a dissatisfied little sound. But he drops the subject – imagine that, a man who can respect when she wants to let something die.
He switches topic, asking, "If you're feeling poorly, I can take Henry a little early, get dinner before his lesson tonight."
"Oh, no, it's fine," she assures. "I can handle dinner; I don't want to put you out."
"You're forgetting I called you because I have nothing to do," he says to her, and she feels her lips curving even as that little spot on the edge of her vision begins to spread and tremble.
She should probably take him up on it. If she can't kill this thing soon, it's only going to get worse, and she may feel up to making dinner now, but who knows how she'll feel in a few hours.
His voice is lower, softer, when he urges, "You've had a shit couple of days, yeah? Let me take him for the night, give you some time to yourself."
"You already did that on Saturday," she reminds him. She can't keep doing this – pawning her son off on the neighbor because she's too stressed to parent. She doesn't get to be too stressed to parent, that's not how it works.
"And I'm offering to do it again," he says to her, before amending, "Actually, no, I'm not. I'm not offering, I'm asking. Do you mind if I pick up your son for the evening, take him over to the music shop for a bit, then see he gets some dinner before his lesson? I'm really rather bored, and could use the company."
"Do I mind?"
"Mmhmm," he says, far too smugly. He's trying to reverse psychology her, and it would be cute if it didn't make her feel so guilty. She chews her lip, and sighs, shuts her eyes for a moment to let them rest (there's no good reason for her to be staring at the cursor on the document she's reviewing, after all).
"Would it bother you?" he asks pointedly, when she doesn't respond.
"Yes," she sighs, admitting, "It makes me feel… like a bad parent."
"Have you given your son any panic attacks lately?" he questions, and she scowls, well aware of the point he's trying to make there and not particularly enjoying having her tender spots poked at.
"No," she answers tersely. "But I have sent him to your place enough times that I'm a little worried he's going to develop abandonment issues."
Robin chuckles a little over the line, teasing her with, "You're worried he's going to get abandonment issues because you keep letting him hang out with the cool guy with the guitars?"
"Fair point," she mutters wryly. "Maybe I'm afraid he'll start to think you're cooler than me. I'll be old news."
"I'm definitely cooler than you," he grins – she can hear the spread of his smile in the tone of his voice. "That ship sailed around the time you ate a pot brownie and got worried about your exams."
Regina scoffs a laugh – she'd forgotten she'd told him about that last night.
"My son doesn't know about that – and never will," she warns.
"He won't if you let me take him for the evening. If you don't, well, who knows what will come out during his lesson," Robin threatens, but it's empty. He'd never tell Henry, she knows that, he knows that, they both know that.
And she's not sure why she's fighting this so hard when a night of quiet and rest would probably do her a world of good. She could nap. Could go straight home and lie down and rest for a little while, migraine or not – she needs sleep, desperately, and she's so beat that she probably won't even dream. She'll just crash.
So, "Fine," she relents. "You have my permission to take him for dinner – if he wants to go."
"Thanks ever so," he tells her, far too pleased with himself for having worn her down. "I appreciate your help with my paralyzing boredom."
"Uh huh," she answers doubtfully.
"Take care of yourself," he urges her, with far too much tenderness and concern. "You're allowed to be human, you know."
Tears burn against her lashes all of a sudden, and she swallows thickly, rasps, "Yeah," and then tells him, "I need to get back to work."
"Alright. Feel better."
She murmurs a thank you, and then their goodbyes, and then she ends the call and swipes her thumb gently over the screen.
He's too good to her. Spoiling her. She should stop this.
But maybe leaning on him one more time won't hurt.
.::.
By the time she leaves work, everything is too bright, and too loud. The lights vibrate and pierce into her skull like an icepick lobotomy, and she has to take a minute in the dark of the parking garage to settle her forehead on fists clenched around her steering wheel, soaking in the lack of fluorescents before she has to deal with traffic.
It doesn't do much to quell the painful, pulsing pressure, and she really just wants to get home – to her bed, and her migraine prescription, and the quiet that Robin has so kindly provided for her – so she decides to just muscle through her commute and get it over with.
Thank God that it's summer, that the sun may be starting to set (the yellow-orange glow of it reflects off the glass and chrome high-rises and does her no favors; she resorts to flipping her sun visor down in an attempt to block out what little of it she can), but at least it's not nighttime. If it was dark out, there would be headlights, and night driving with a migraine is just an exercise in torture. Every too-bright beam lances into her too-sensitive eyes like a blade when it's dark, but tonight is… bearable.
She keeps the radio off, tries to find as much silence as she can, curses the car that pulls up next to her with vibrating, pumping bass that nearly rattles both her windows and her cranium. She squints against the fading daylight, shuts her eyes at every stoplight and counts to ten, then checks the flow of opposing traffic and steals a little more darkness if she can.
It helps, a little, but it's all just a stopgap. Just what she needs to do to get home in one piece.
She makes it, but by the time she pulls into her garage, the whole left side of her head is pulsing, her skull feels like a balloon but also like it's filled with cement, and having her eyes open hurts. Her stomach is pitching dangerously, the nausea that had been rising higher and higher with every minute she'd been behind the wheel now pushing up, up, up.
She needs to get inside, now, needs to lie down and take an Imitrex and pray for sleep.
She's so anxious to make it into the house that she doesn't remember to stop her car door from slamming shut; the impact ricochets through her brain like a gunshot. Climbing the back steps somehow makes it worse, makes the pain pound and pound and her fingers shake as she tries to get the key in the door. It takes her two tries, but she manages, shutting the door quietly and heading straight for the meds she keeps in her kitchen.
She should have a few tabs of Imitrex left in the bottle down here, and she definitely has Excedrin migraine. She works open the cap on the Imitrex and finds one blessed pill inside, popping it into her mouth and washing it down with a palmful of water from the faucet.
Bed. She needs bed. Bed, and quiet, and to just lie down and take a long nap before this pain has her throwing up for the second time in twenty-four hours.
She's halfway down the hall toward the stairs before she realizes her fatal error – painfully.
The keypad to the alarm is by the front door – an inconvenience she wishes she'd thought better about when they'd installed it, and that she curses violently today when her rush to pound down some prescription relief had consumed her thoughts to the extent that she'd forgotten entirely about killing the alarm.
She remembers now, though, when it blares to life with a shrill, agonizing wail that explodes in her skull so fiercely that she actually cries out at the pain.
Oh God, this is hell, she's in hell, she lives in hell.
The front hallway swims through a blur of vertigo and tears as she stumbles to the wall and punches Henry's birthday in blindly on the keypad, her own panting breaths sounding overly harsh and loud when the room suddenly falls blessedly silent again.
The pain is excruciating, swelling up her throat, filling her mouth with thick saliva, and she has a moment to decide whether she wants to attempt the stairs or backtrack to the powder room.
She thinks of the back steps and chooses the powder room, making her way there as quickly as possible, not bothering with the light because lights are evil. She swallows heavily as she lifts the toilet seat, tips her head forward and feels an extra sharp throb of pain squeeze around her temple, and then comes the heaving.
The miserable, sloshing retching as she vomits again, and again, each wave sending a pulse of agony through her already beleaguered brain. She has a vague awareness that she's throwing up liquid, just liquid, bitter, sour liquid, and she realizes she hasn't eaten all day.
She'd had yogurt for breakfast and then coffee, and coffee, those two Thin Mints, and more coffee.
No wonder she feels like shit.
The retching stops for a moment, and she can hear the vague echo of her heavy breaths reverberate in the porcelain, can smell sick and the slight chemical smell of toilet bowl cleaner, and, God, those aren't helping, none of this is helping.
She needs to get her head out of this toilet.
She lifts it slowly, eyes still shut, and tries to regulate her breathing.
She should flush, but she only wants to do that once, wouldn't do it at all if she wasn't determined to take a nap and afraid Henry would come home to a toilet full of vomit before she wakes up. So she should flush, but she wants to wait until she's sure the vomiting is done, and she only has to hear the migraine-amplified whooshing once.
When she hears Robin's voice, she thinks she's actually hallucinating from the pain. It's that bad, she would believe it.
It's a gentle, "Regina, love," and then his hand on her shoulder, and she can't even bring herself to be embarrassed. She will be tomorrow, probably, but right now all she can think about now is how it hurts so much she can't think.
And Robin is there, and she likes Robin, and that's good.
"Babe, are you alright?" he asks her, and God bless him, he keeps his voice down as he does it—he must have remembered she'd said she had a migraine brewing. Regina could kiss him for the consideration but he'd probably rather she didn't.
She lifts one shaky hand and presses it to her left eyeball, the heel of her hand digging in as she whimpers. She's pretty fucking far from alright.
She hadn't realized her whimper had been a word – Migraine – until he murmurs a sympathetic, "It got the best of you, hmm?" and then, "Can I help?"
Her stomach still feels shaky, and she realizes with another pitiful whine that she just threw up the last Imitrex in that bottle before it had a chance to dissolve, much less do her any good. There should be another upstairs; God, she hopes there's another upstairs.
She manages to mutter, "C-cold pack," before another stab into her eyeball has her wincing.
"Freezer?" he asks, and she nods, and well, that was a mistake. "Alright, I'll get it," he assures, moving back from her slightly. She turns her head automatically to follow him, she doesn't know why, because it has another throb of pain echoing in her skull, and the nausea that hadn't quite abated rears up with a vengeance.
She pitches forward over the toilet again and gags up another wet slosh, and Robin's hand is on her back again, rubbing circles between her shoulder blades as she retches another time.
"Do you need a doctor?" he asks as she white knuckles the back of the toilet, her other hand fisting at her crown to keep her hair out of the way.
"No," she gasps, because this is awful, but no, she doesn't. She can beat it into submission if she just gets, "Cold pack. Water. Drugs."
"Ice water or no?"
"Cool – no ice," because the last thing she needs is a brain freeze.
"Which drugs?"
"Upstairs," she manages. "I need to get—nightstand—upstairs…"
"Okay, hold on," he urges, and she thinks she feels a phantom kiss on the back of her head but she's vomiting again a second later, so she can't be sure.
He's gone for hours.
It can't be hours, but it feels like forever as she empties what's left in her stomach, until it's just dry heaving and spit and stomach acid, and she's debating again whether to flush. She realizes with a flood of relief that Robin can do it once she's upstairs, assuming he is not, in fact, a hallucinatory mirage and does actually return to her.
He comes back, finally, pressing the heavenly cold of the gel ice pack into her hand. Regina lifts it to her temple and breathes a sigh of relief.
"Can you handle mouthwash?" he asks her, and she sighs a grateful, Please.
It's Henry's Scope, not her Listerine, thank God—she can tell from the sweeter minty scent of it. She's not sure she could handle the burning intensity right now, but this she can stomach for a minute. She hopes.
He helps her tip the bottle straight to her lips, and that's not how it works, you fill the cap and then — oh, fuck it, it doesn't matter. Regina takes a little sip, just enough to swish away the sourness in her mouth and then she leans forward and spits it into the entirety of her stomach contents, and gratefully takes the cup of water he presses into her hand next.
She sips once, twice, and then it occurs to her to ask, "Why are you here?"
"We were on the way back to the house; I heard the alarm," he explains. "I got the boys to my place then came to check on you."
Regina grunts a little in acknowledgement, but doesn't offer up anything else. Her head feels like it's going to split right down the middle and crack open like a canteloupe.
"I didn't know which bottle it was," he tells her next, and she hears the soft rattle of capsules in prescription bottles. It sounds like dice rattling in Vegas, too loud, too much. She just wants her bed…
She tells him, "Imitrex," and winces a little as he leans away from her, pulling the door open further to read the labels.
Regina doesn't realize until just then that they're practically in the dark; he's wedged himself in here with her and shut the door nearly all the way behind them.
He's a wonderful man. A caring, kind, wonderful man, and her bitch of a mother can go and hang for keeping her from him for all Regina cares.
Robin fishes out the proper pill and urges her, "Open your mouth," before dropping it onto her tongue.
Right.
She's still holding the water.
She lifts it and sips again to wash down the pill, and now she just needs to keep from throwing this one up, and maybe she can get some sleep.
"What now?" he urges, and she pleads, Bed.
The cup gets nipped from her fingers, settles onto the countertop with a soft clink that bounces hard inside her temples, and then there are strong, steady hands guiding her up onto her feet, an arm looping around her waist, and the wash of too much light illuminating the inside of her eyelids.
"I've got you," he murmurs, and she knows he will, he does, so she doesn't bother opening her eyes. She lets him lead her to the stairs, then up them one by one, her left temple pulsing with every other step.
She practically collapses on top of her bed, climbing in and curling fetal around her pillow, pressing the cold-pack against her skin without a care as to whether the icy surface will freeze it. Robin does care, apparently, though, because a minute later (once he's eased the shoes off her feet, and unzipped the back of her skirt, and tugged the covers from the far side of the bed to wrap around her like a cozy little burrito), he's lifting the pack away gently, returning it a second later with a layer of soft cotton between it and her temple.
She can hear the scrape of the drapery loops on their rods as he tugs her curtains over the sheers, shutting out the rest of the light, and then his hand is gentle on her shoulder again.
"Anything else I can do?"
It sounds like Everest, but she knows, "I need food. I haven't… I need something."
"Can you eat right now?" he questions doubtfully, and who can blame him after what he walked in on.
"Just… a few slices of bread, and more water – the bottle you gave me when I was sick is in the dishwasher. It's clean, I ran it this morning."
"Okay," he murmurs, his palm coasting up and down her bicep again, and then he asks, "Do you want me to stay a while?"
She doesn't. She's in too much pain to be embarrassed, but there's plenty of time for that tomorrow, and the less he sees of her in this state the better. So she mutters something about, no, the boys, she'll be okay…
Robin retrieves everything she asks for, then he lifts that ice pack away again, presses a soft kiss to the nexus of the pain and pressure, then eases it gently back into place and leaves her again.
She doesn't sleep.
Wants to, prays to, but doesn't. The meds seem to take forever to kick in, and she has to focus to chew and swallow and keep down the bites of bread she keeps clumsily fumbling off the two slices of seven-grain Robin had left on a plate within reach. She makes it through most of one, half a bottle of water.
And then she has to pee, a Herculean task she manages to accomplish without turning on any lights or throwing up any of her bread.
The pain is ebbing a bit. Squeezing and pulsing but not stabbing quite as much.
It doesn't abate enough for sleep, though. Not even when she strips herself out of her work clothes after using the bathroom, pulling on his hoodie again and tucking herself into bed properly.
She forces down the rest of that single slice of bread, leaves the other on her nightstand and curls up with her water bottle like it's something far more comforting than a cylinder of plastic she sips softly at every few minutes.
It's dark outside by the time sleep finally pulls her under.
When she wakes in the morning to the beeping of her alarm, she's disoriented and sleep-drunk, migraine hungover and exhausted before she even begins. Her head still aches dully, but it's just an echo.
Still, echoes are ominous, and she takes another Imitrex just to be on the safe side.
Her body feels like lead. Heavy and clumsy and under-rested. She'd slept for hours, but between the catch-up from the night before and the pain of the migraine, it clearly hadn't been particularly rejuvenating.
She checks on Henry, peeks into his room and finds it empty.
That's… unexpected. Robin was taking him for dinner and his lesson, but she'd imagined he'd be home by bedtime.
Then again, Robin had watched her vomit half her brain out last night, so it shouldn't surprise her all that much that he'd kept Henry overnight.
Still, he could have asked, or told her, or…
It occurs to her that he probably had, and she checks her phone, finding that, sure enough, there's a text from him: The boys wanted a sleepover. Didn't figure you'd mind. Let me know when you're feeling better.
It's far too early for him to be awake, but she texts him anyway: I'm awake. I'm alive. Thank you for last night.
And then she takes a deep breath, and prays that Tuesday is a better day.