What He Offered
Chapter 5 Calamity Day
The phone pinged, loud in the silence, startling. Bones really hoped it wasn't a text from Booth; she wasn't kindly disposed toward him at the moment. Fortunately, it was no more than the monthly reminder of payment due from her wireless carrier.
She was glad of the interruption; she wasn't quite prepared to read on. She was smarting; it surprised her, how much it stung her, even now, to see in black and white how much he'd disliked her. She corrected herself: how ambivalent his feelings had been. "Vic" had liked her just fine, but then, as she'd once told Angela in disgust, men always did. Unlike most women, men had use for her as a sexual partner.
In high school, she'd ached to be liked, to be accepted into the crowd, to fit in, but she had never managed it: the girls thought her weird and off-putting, and the boys were repelled by her nerdy awkwardness. It wasn't until college than men started to notice her, and it didn't take a genius to realize they weren't particularly interested in her brain.
In grad school, Michael Stires came into her life, and changed it forever. Handsome, charming, unscrupulous Michael! A line from Shakespeare's Hamlet popped into her head: One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. It had taken her a very long time to see the truth of him, far too long, in fact. But then, as Booth always told her, reading people was not her forte.
As good a professor as he was in the classroom, as brilliant a mentor as he was in the field, it was in the bedroom that Michael was undisputed master and she his willing apprentice. He'd had scores of women before they met, and he was nothing if not generous in sharing all the knowledge he'd amassed. He taught her the exquisite pleasure her own body offered her as well as those she had a right to demand as her due from any prospective lover and the wonderful and varied pleasures she could bestow in her turn. He would not permit any shyness in matters of the flesh: together they explored if not all the positions pictured in the Kama Sutra, then, a goodly number of them. Looking back, she thought there were probably many skilled courtesans who had been less carefully-instructed in the erotic arts than she. Michael had made it clear from the outset: what they engaged in was strictly of the body, a physical discipline, like karate or yoga. No strings, never any strings.
So, yes, she could make men like her. With her training, she could enslave them, if she so chose: giving great sex was indeed power. And, she had wanted Booth to like her, so very much. So she had come out to him (or was that come 'on' …) and it was all going so well, until he dropped that bombshell about 'it going somewhere.' She had no experience with relationships that lasted, that was not her area of expertise, she would flounder about like a fish out of water, and more than likely fail abysmally. That would not be fair to either of them. She had covered over her panic with a merry smile, and jumped into that taxi as into a lifeboat. But, she couldn't resist that one last look over her shoulder at him, standing slightly off-kilter in the rain.
The next morning, she was thoroughly embarrassed, and grateful that her vicious hangover gave her the excuse to hide her eyes behind over-sized sunglasses. But that was probably not what Booth remembered. With some trepidation, she read on.
The Tale of Twin Booths, cont'd
The next morning, Vic had a major hangover and not the least recollection of Tim's confession. For his part, Tim didn't feel the need to share his insight into Temperance Brennan's true character; she'd been fired. Chances of their running into her again were remote. Except, suddenly, they weren't: Vic was told to hire the Jeffersonian team back again. For Tim, the reinstatement was the worst possible news, but Vic was psyched. He burst into Brennan's office, trumpeting, "You're back, baby!" as if he expected her to jump for joy. That was far from the case, as anyone with the least sensitivity to body language would have realized. Brennan was royally peeved, and it didn't help matters that Vic, in his disappointment at her distinct lack of enthusiasm, assumed a curt and imperious tone with her. Later, while the FBI and Jeffersonian techs searched for evidence in the trunk of the prime suspect's car, Vic tried to make nice, but Brennan was annoyed, and said as much. When pressed as to why, she put her bad mood down to Vic's having plied her with liquor the previous evening in order to fire her, but that was so lame an explanation, Vic immediately called her on it. She did not deign to reply, leaving Vic as much in the dark as before.
Tim understood her anger very well. Having had a chance to evaluate what had led up to their fiasco of an evening, she must have decided that Vic had misled her about his expectations. Whether he had done so intentionally or not was immaterial. The fact was he had misrepresented himself, and now she found herself in an awkward position. Knowing he wanted more than casual sex, she couldn't respond to his light flirtation as she had the previous day — she didn't want to offer false encouragement — and it irked her that he couldn't, or wouldn't, see that things had changed. So, she turned on him, becoming ever more ill-humored, scornful, lofty and insulting. Vic, completely clueless as regards her beef, felt subject to unwarranted attack, and grew progressively hotter and hotter under the collar, until inevitably he snapped.
Looking back, Tim often wondered what might have happened if he had told Vic what he suspected about Brennan before the three met up again. Might the upward spiraling of their tempers and the consequent explosion have been avoided? It was useless to speculate. At the end of his tether, seething with frustration and hurt, Vic grabbed Brennan by the upper arm and ushered her bodily from the conference room where they'd been speaking to the victim's mother, and Brennan, her outrage at its peak, hauled off and slapped him across the cheek with all her might.
Watching the two of them face off, Tim thought he had never seen two people so livid with each other, two people, who, on the surface, seemed totally different, but who, underneath it all, were exactly alike. Betrayed, the both of them: Brennan, feeling duped, sexually frustrated, and wrong-footed, and Vic, feeling provoked, blind-sided and dismissed. Like Cassandra of old, Tim had seen disaster coming and had given timely warning, all to no avail. He took no pleasure in being right.
"Did you see that?" Vic asked Tim, as Brennan swept up her trench coat and stormed from the room.
"Yeah, Vic, sorry." He gestured to his twin's reddened cheekbone. "Hurt much?"
"Like a bastard. What the hell was her problem, anyway?"
"It's complicated, bro. Like I said before, let it go. Women leave, right? That's what you always say."
"Damn straight," Vic said, moving his jaw gingerly side to side. "Damn…"