Thanks for all the lovely feedback on the last two chapters - hopefully you'll like this one, too. :D Insert a standard disclaimer here.
This Brilliant Dance
(So this is strange,
our sidestepping has come to be a brilliant dance
where nobody leads at all,
where nobody leads at all.)
She wakes up at three forty-two the next morning and tosses and turns until four-oh-eight, when she thinks with some irritation, Screw it, I'm leaving. There are things she needs to take care of, chemists she needs to visit, needs to get home for a fresh change of clothes.
So she gets up as carefully as possible, levering herself up from Jack's bed with as much silent ease as being an agent ever taught her. He mutters in his sleep, moves slightly, but she holds her breath for a second and he falls still again.
Quickly and quietly, she dresses, debates whether or not to wear the same underwear as yesterday. Decides to go without but reminds herself to cross her legs on the train, especially as she elected not to wear her crumpled pantyhose. Unless she wants to be viewed as a hooker, and she really hates when that happens.
She catches the subway home. It's only a few stops, but it's still dark enough for her to feel slightly intimidated. Keeping a tight hold on her handbag, but she always does that – she figures that she's a city girl at heart, she holds her purse tight under her arm with the clasp at the front where she can see it. She hasn't got her briefcase today – anyway, she feels like a fraud carrying a briefcase, like a little kid dressing up in her mother's clothes.
Not that her mother ever had a briefcase, or anything.
By half past eight, she's been home and gone out again. She's decided to pull her hair back in a formal, severe-looking ponytail. Apparently there's something about long, flowing curls that makes men want to have sex with women, and she doesn't want men to think that about her today, for some reason. Not when her inner thighs are sore, not when she has to choose a high-necked shirt to cover the hickies.
She also spent ten minutes staring into the mirror on her dresser and pulling at her skin; she can feel it beginning to lose its elasticity, can feel jowls beginning to form either side of her chin. Can see flakes of eye makeup seeping into the wrinkles around her eyes.
Before work, she goes to a chemist and, unobtrusively, asks for the morning-after pill. She receives a little white packet and is told that she has to take it within forty-eight hours or it won't work. Outside the shop, she draws the packet out from its small paper bag; she stares at it for a moment and then, with a flourish, flings it into a garbage can.
She supposes that it will be nice to have something to remember Jack by, when she gets to Florida.
When she gets into the office, ten minutes late because she accidentally started talking to the doorman for the first time in five years, Danny beckons her over to his desk.
"Go out with me tonight," he says quickly.
Sam blinks. "Uh, okay."
Danny rolls his eyes. "Not as a date—"
"Obviously," she says dryly.
"Obviously," he agrees, and then smiles. "Go out with me tonight."
She pauses for a second, but can think of no reason why not. For a moment she remembers Jack's dark eyes and how he said that they could be great in three days, and how she's leaving the day after tomorrow, but she shakes those thoughts from her mind. "Sure," she answers lightly.
Danny beams.
Rob avoids her for the whole of the day. The red mark on his cheek has disappeared, but Sam figures that he probably won't forget it. She's glad. She hopes he won't. She hopes that one day some other girl will hit him harder. She doesn't know why she hates him so much.
Something about his goddamn face.
Jack assigns her to work with Rob and Danny, much to her chagrin, because they have to interview an entire department of people at an accountancy firm, where the missing person invested all his money and promptly disappeared two days afterwards. Jack thinks there's probably something crooked going on there; Sam agrees with him. Of course, she mostly agrees with him, these days.
Danny drives them, Rob getting antsy in the back seat because his manhood's being stamped on, probably. Sam thinks he has an inferiority complex. She thinks he probably has a dick the size of a pea, and makes a mental note to tell Danny that later. He'll appreciate the joke; Viv would probably stare at her for a second, and Jack would look at her as if she's mad, and Martin would be shocked, but Danny'll laugh.
She sits next to Danny in the front, and after a quiet few minutes of driving, she says, "How's Will?"
He shoots a glance sideways at her and says, "I wouldn't know. You know I broke up with him a while back."
In the back seat, Rob says, "What?"
Sam looks sideways at Danny, who's raising an eyebrow at her and smirking slightly. He knows exactly what she's done and she knows that he doesn't mind. She twists round in her seat and says vaguely, "Danny broke up with his boyfriend Will a while back," to clarify the situation.
Rob's mouth is hanging open. "You – you go out with guys?" he asks.
"Yes," Danny returns blandly. "So?"
"Nothing," Rob stammers, and cringes back into his seat as if Danny's about to leap on him and attempt to have wild tempestuous sex with him. Sam rather doubts that this is about to happen, especially as Danny's attempting to manoeuvre the car through a particularly tricky intersection. Also, Rob isn't his type.
Sometimes she wonders that she knows things like that.
There's an awkward silence.
Finally Danny breaks it by saying, "I called Martin last night."
Sam glances quickly sideways. His face is expressionless, but there's a kind of twist around his lips that suggests he's trying to hide a smile.
"Oh yeah? What'd you guys talk about?"
"Stuff." Danny cocks his head minutely at Rob. "I'll tell you later."
"You better," Sam tells him severely, and reaches across to squeeze his shoulder.
Back in the office, Sam thinks that maybe Jack's ignoring her.
Because he's walked past her desk four times, and not once in those four times has he actually said anything to her. Or looked at her, for that matter. And he never ignores her – he didn't ignore her the day after he broke up with her for the first time. He said hi, and then bent down to say sorry yet again in a hoarse whisper.
Today, however, he appears to be pretending that she doesn't even exist.
She tells herself that if that's the way he wants to deal with stuff, it's his prerogative, and it's certainly not her problem.
Still, though, she can't help being slightly hurt. She's sick of being hurt by Jack, she realises suddenly, sick and tired of how he picks her up and discards her again, and all the fake promises he's made her over the years, such as 'we could be great in three days', and he's not even talking to her.
Of course, there's the little voice in the back of her head that's saying, Yeah, but you walked out on him this morning, didn't you, but she ignores it.
All of a sudden she regrets throwing away the little packet that she got from the chemist's.
When she goes out with Danny, he takes her to a small bar that's only a ten-minute walk away from the office. She's sure that she's walked down that street a million times before, but she'd never thought of entering that particular bar before; when she tells him this, he smirks and tells her that she's been missing out.
He's right, she discovers. It's a nice bar, with a good atmosphere, and Danny appears to know the bartender because their drinks arrive in record time. Sam gets a weird blue cocktail that tastes of drain cleaner, not that she's ever tasted drain cleaner but it tastes the way she imagines it would do, and Danny stares into his sparkling water with a slightly rueful expression.
"Tell me," she begins, when they're both settled on green velvet barstools, "what Martin said to you last night."
Danny stirs the lime around his glass with a straw. The ice cubes clank against the sides of the glass as he smirks to himself. "Not much," he says lightly.
Sam shoots him a Look. "Taylor, you can't tell me you talked to Martin and clam up right after that. Did you—did you fight, did you talk?"
"We talked," he confirms. And his face turns suddenly closed in, and wistful. "I didn't realise," he says carefully, "how empty the office is without him. It's just that goddamn Rob and come on, like he could ever replace Martin."
"I hate Rob," Sam agrees with some vehemence.
"I know you do," Danny says fervently. "And now you made him hate me. Go you."
She can tell he's joking, sort of, but looks shamefaced anyway. "You didn't mind that I said that, did you?"
He shrugs. "Don't really care, to be honest. I don't want to be all buddy-buddy with people who think the way I choose to live my life is sick. Although," he allows himself a smile, "it was kind of fun having him run round after me half the time."
"Also annoying?"
"Yes," he confirms, "also annoying."
"Martin still liking Seattle?" she queries.
"Yeah," Danny says, face brightening, "he says it's great. He's got a whole bunch of old friends who live there, from when he used to work there, and he says he liked seeing them all again."
"Isn't Seattle where his ex-fiancée lives?" And Sam wishes she could bite the words back but Danny merely shrugs again, trailing one finger around the rim of his glass.
"Yeah, Caroline lives there. With her husband and baby," Danny adds, and Sam can see that he's trying not to smile. "Anyway, it's not like Fitzy would want her back. It was him that split up with her in the first place, he told me."
Sam frowns. "He told me it was the other way round."
"Yeah, he told people that so he wouldn't have to tell them why he broke up with her."
"And that was…?"
"Because he likes guys." Danny shrugs. "Martin's weird. He knows what he wants but he never lets himself take it." Pause, and then a reflective tone of voice. "He wants to be… normal."
"Normal's not your thing?" Sam asks.
Danny's lips curl upwards. "Normal was never my thing."
She knows exactly what he means.
Three hours later, and she's more than a little drunk. Well, not drunk, more overly happy and talkative, and her moods are swinging from happy to depressed to time-to-slit-her-wrists, back to deliriously happy.
So yeah, maybe drunk's a good word.
Danny's staring at her with a half-amused, half-terrified expression on his face. She figures that it might have something to do with the five empty wineglasses at her elbow, but she's not entirely sure.
"So the reason," she says loudly, "that Martin went out with me was that he wanted to be normal."
Danny looks uncomfortable. "Possibly, yeah."
She squints suspiciously into space for a moment. "Fine," she says then, "Fine. There are some guys that go out with me for reasons other than, because they want to be normal. Like Keller. Remember Keller?"
"How could I forget," says Danny dryly.
"And Jack." Sam twirls the stem of her glass between her thumb and forefinger idly. She can see Danny watching it warily, and shoots him an annoyed glance. "I won't drop it."
"Never thought you would do," he says smoothly, in that humouring-people way that he has sometimes, like, oh, she probably drank more than she can handle so I have to be ultra nice to her, or something.
He's smiling at her benignly, kindly, so she decides to shatter his illusions and says lazily, "You know, I spent the night with Jack last night."
He nods. "Yeah, I thought something like that might have happened."
She jabs at his chest. "You're too perceptive." And she can still speak, words only a little garbled, and she's impressed with herself.
"Am I?" he asks, still smiling.
"Yeah." She sighs and drops her head into her hands. "Oh God, it was such a mistake."
Danny sniggers slightly and says, "Oh yeah? Why?"
It's probably too much information to say, "Because the condom broke," but she says it anyway.
Danny's expression changes from amused to somewhat nauseated. Sam thinks that probably her answer wasn't what he was expecting. She can't blame him. "Okay," he says. "Wow, that was too much information."
"Sorry," Sam laughs, feeling sort of as if she's floating.
"So, uh," says Danny, looking deeply uncomfortable, as if he feels like a dad giving her The Talk. "What'd you do about it?"
She shrugs, and nearly falls off her stool. After she's collected herself, she says, "Not much."
He frowns slightly. "What do you mean, not much?"
"I mean, not much!" She sighs. "Well, I bought the morning after pill."
"Good," Danny says, sounding slightly reassured.
"Didn't take it, though." She makes a face, and says, "Oops!" dryly.
Danny looks aghast, and in a way she's kind of enjoying leading him on, stringing him along. She likes to be unpredictable, sometimes. Most of the time she likes to think that she can be depended on, but unpredictability can be fun, too. "Oh my God, Sam," he says in a strangled-sounding voice.
"I know!" she laughs, a slight edge of hysteria to her voice. "Jesus, I have no idea what the hell's gonna happen to me in Florida."
He looks away for a second, and then glances back at her, his lips pressed in a straight line. "What part are you going to, anyway?"
"Miami." She wiggles her eyebrows impressively.
He nods. "Alright, great. I'm sure you'll have a great time there."
"Me too," she agrees, and for a second she almost believes herself.