She comes every Friday.
Like a rush of stifling hot air she's in the small apartment, sucking in the attention like an insect, oozing self assurance and draining the ease from his muscles.
She's everywhere at once; her boisterous laugh intoxicating the Gomez family and her large smile swallowing them up in their stunned state. It's impossible to look anywhere else but at her, even when Pepper mutters out the occasional conversational musing or Herman makes a lame joke. Everyone looks to Kate for her reaction—will she laugh? Will she go off on her own story? Kate, Kate, Kate.
Freddie's crazy for her, following her about the house as if it weren't even his, as if he were on a tour that he was afraid to get lost on. He isn't doing any better in school, but that doesn't prompt Herman or Pepper to speak up—Kate still helps him… study.
Herman thinks that Pepper must feel comforted by the strength that Kate has, the way she smiles for no reason, the way her son looks at her when he thinks no one is looking.
Herman just loves Kate's noise: her impossible laugh, her constantly fluctuating voice, her purposeful stomping. Everything about her is so obnoxious and consuming that he often loses sight of Pepper. His wife sinks into the grey walls, barely able to smile, unable to slouch in her seat or release her fingers from their grip in her lap.
He doesn't even look up now as Pepper and Freddie, mere mice in comparison to Kate—smaller, even—shuffle into the kitchen with piled dishes that clank with their unsteady grips.
Kate looks across the table as soon as the door hisses shut, straight at him, the heat still in her cheeks from her last burst of laughter and that same frightening look in her eyes that never fails to blank his mind. Her fingers curl like spiders' legs from beneath her chin, red nails tapping at her lips, propping her strange face up into the light as the silence begins to darken and swell in the room around them.
Herman hates himself in that moment; hates the heat buzzing in his veins, hates the sparks in his fingers and toes. He wills himself to break her gaze, swallowing pathetically and fiddling with his fingers to ignore the urge to reach across the table to wipe the smudge of grease from the hollow beside her collarbone.
The grease. Talk about it.
"How's workin' with Stanley going?" Jesus, his voice nearly cracks from the nerves. From this too loud, too bright-eyed, too strange teenage girl. "Aren't you working on the Pip-boys nowadays?"
Her smile is slow in its growth, making him feel like he asked something endlessly stupid and she finds it endlessly adorable.
Of course Freddie loves her; the kid's a borderline masochist, apparently.
"I'm an engineer. Stanley isn't my boss, you know." She sloshes her orange juice about in her cup—it just reminds him of how off-putting it was that she wanted a breakfast drink at dinner time—and smiles at him from under a shadow of an expression. "And my work is going well, there is always something to fix in this tin can. Keeps me busy, hm?"
"I hear that." Herman sighs, staring at the wine in his coffee mug.
There are no more wine glasses; I broke the last one the other day. Pepper told him this a few minutes before Doc's kid had arrived, her face flushed and her eyes watering with the rush to plate Kate's perfect dinner: mashed potatoes—the ones from the box, ultra-rare steak, and carrots with crimson juices from the steak poured over the whole thing like syrup.
Herman had only nodded, nearly laughed, and poured 200 year old wine into a vault-issued coffee cup.
"My knees are sure sore, though…"
Herman's eyes shift up to her awaiting gaze, not nearly as taken aback by the heat in her eyes as he was the first time he saw it in the diner two months ago, but still a tad thrown off by the images growing in his mind.
Just a kid, Herman, Jesus.
Not really, turning 18 in two weeks.
Freddie's girl. Your son.
Oh.
"Oh." He says, swallowing uncomfortably once more and downing his wine in one go.
"Yeah," She draws out the word, very obviously watching him. "Most days I feel like one of those dogs that you hear about in the books and such, y' know what I mean?"
Herman blinks at her.
"I'm always on all fours, trying to squeeze into those tight spaces." She laughs lightly as her hands flutter about in explanation, like she isn't pouring all of this horrible innuendo out into the air. "You wouldn't believe the kinds of things this gal has to tinker with; stuff you wouldn't even think existed!"
"Hah." His voice finally cracks, privately piecing together 'dog' and 'all fours' and 'style'. That was what O'Brian had called it, right? Dog-style? Dogged-style? "You oughta… um…"
"Hm?" She interrupts, catching his eye as she chastely licks leftover orange juice from the cleft just above her upper lip.
"I was saying," He pauses warily, glancing at the kitchen door as he hears Freddie groan loudly—the usual sound that follows 'Do your chores.' or 'How is school?'. "You oughta talk to Wally Mack about borrowing some knee pads."
It is her turn to draw a blank, though she manages to look confused in such a way that Herman feels idiotic and inadequate to the world. He nearly glares at her.
"He's the uh… Well isn't he the new couch for the Little League?"
"Yes." She snorts in disgust, reminding Herman that Wally Mack isn't very well liked by Freddie and Kate. "But what does that have to do with anything, Mr. Gomez?"
He curls his toes at the last note: Mr. Gomez. He likes the sound of it, or maybe the way she says it. Not like a teenage girl talking to her boyfriend's dad, more like a young woman teasing a colleague.
At this point, however, the whole conversation has been upended by his odd way of approaching social interactions—perhaps it's the married man attempting to befuddle this girl's strange fascination with him, before she becomes embarrassed by rejection.
"Well, suppose you wore knee pads to your next fix-'er-up," He leans forward with a smile, his previous awkward manner lightening a tad as Freddie re-enters the room with a redness to his face that speaks frustration in it's usual volumes. What a guy… "Don't those ballplayers wear knee-pads Freddie? Well, anyway, don't you think that if you wore some, you could end a work day with less pain and… more gain!"
Freddie groans once more, leaning over to let his forehead fall against the table loudly. "Pop, come on!"
"What?" Herman frowns, attempting to make himself heard over Kate's booming laugh. "I think that's a great idea, what do you think Pep?"
Pepper blinks upon her address, touching a hand to her neck and letting her mouth bob open in confusion.
"I think it's marvelous." Kate finally comes up for air, her face as red as her lipstick and her eyes watering. "Just swell, Mr. Gomez. Truly."
"You think so?" Herman smiles back at her, raising his brow at Freddie. "See pal? She thinks so."
"It's just—!" Freddie looks to be about to bust a damn vein, he's so busy whirling his head between his father and a giggling Kate that he doesn't seem to be breathing too well. "Do you have to talk like that dad?"
"Talk like what?" Herman sighs, watching with a touch of disappointment as Kate stands up in a flurry and straightens her vault suit with plucks and tugs. Most things get fixed around her and Herman finds himself growing dangerously accustomed to Pep's momentary calm and Freddie's beaming face. It's all fleeting right before his eyes, though: Freddie is getting overtly flustered by his embarrassment and Pepper's getting meek and grey again at his side, her eyes following Kate's movements with exact precision. "I was just saying—,"
"Well!" Kate's voice is thunder as she throws her hands up in dramatics. "I'm off! I promised my dad I'd help him with the auto-doc; try to get it up and running again and all that." She turns to Freddie before he can protest. "You wanna walk me home?"
"Oh—ah—um… Yeah, Katie, sure." Freddie's body almost collapses with defeat, his shoulders and head melting down into his body as he makes his way towards the door.
"Kate!" Pepper blurts out, drawing the attention of the room. Herman holds his breath upon seeing his wife's sudden change of expression—meek to near hysterical. She hates lots of attention all at once. "K-… Kate. Would you… like, the… well, the brownies—,"
"Ah! Yes!" Kate leans her head to the side, staring at his wife like she's some sort of child. Herman grinds his teeth. "Thank you for reminding me!"
And then they're alone again; Freddie's back disappears behind the automatic door and Pep scurries off to dig up the brownies she 'made'. Lucy Palmer dropped them by this morning…
Kate is back on him again as soon as the silence swallows them up, her odd eyes daring him to make a sound of protest as she makes her way around the table with slow, deliberate steps.
She sits beside him, plopping down loudly into the seat where Pepper had sat previously. She's close, too close for his comfort; the smallest brush of her arm touches at his bicep.
With a movement too fast for him to deflect, her hand is on his knee, patting it lightly.
"Hey!" He snaps out of reflex, tensing against her approaching face.
Though she doesn't kiss him like he had thought she would do—not on his lips at least. Herman's back stiffens in alarm as Kate presses a warm, lingering kiss at the corner of his jaw, just beside his ear—the way her hand squeezes his knee in unison with the kiss makes a gasp hiss through his teeth.
"I like you." She whispers.
Her words are so juvenile, so strangely childish and familiar that a shiver runs down Herman's back, his fingers digging into the chair beneath him.
His wife isn't in the kitchen, his son not waiting out in the hall just beyond the front door—he is here beside this girl, her lips brushing along his earlobe as she leans away from him, her heat leaving him like a sigh.
He is 16 again, in a dark closet with Ellen, fumbling with the zipper of his vault suit, trying not to laugh at her drunken giggling.
Herman turns slowly to the seat next to him, where she once was. She is gone, smiling at his wife by the door with a plate of brownies tucked under her arm, backing out into the hall.
Kate's eyes, dark and loaded with challenge, are the last thing he sees of her before the door hisses shut.