fic: last call (snl rpf)
last call
the party’s got to end some time, right? snl rpf. kristen wiig/bill hader. 5255 words.
notes: dear friends, idk if you saw the season finale of SNL the other night, but it basically left me in a glass case of emotion and i accidentally had to talk to some fic about it. so, yup, that's my defense, the end, you don't know my life. have a gif (originally typed fig, have one of those as well), that is all.
now, there is no leaving new york --
now there is no leaving new york.
(THE NATIONAL)
She will have three voicemails accumulated on her phone come Sunday night.
One will be from Amy and the first thirty seconds will just be noise, indistinguishable and garbled city distraction interrupted by tiny excited kid voices, and then Amy’s voice, as sudden and forceful as a deprived bounty hunter, “I want my shoes back, bitch,” coupled with a chirpy, “Call me!”
The second will be from her publicist, her voice gravely and tired, a “good show” tied to “we need to talk about your options,” whatever that means, and the same sign-off as Amy (though noticeably more exhausted): “Call me.”
The third (which is misleading since it will be the first message she receives that day) will be from Bill.
She will have yet to listen to it.
She’ll wonder what the odds are he demands the same of her, three for three:
Call me.
But this will be Sunday afternoon.
This is Saturday night:
Kristen picks up another beer at the after-after party and calls it a bad idea. She cheers herself, everyone else around her engaged in their own business (Mick fucking Jagger telling a story that requires a whole lot of gesticulating and Bobby looks like he’s laughing so hard he might puke on Mick fucking Jagger, and Andy’s got Jason in a headlock and Bill’s laughing at the both of them and Amy keeps darting in and out of her peripheral vision), and says aloud, to herself, “To bad ideas!”
So it’s the after-after party. She leans back heavy against the bar. She took her heels off ages ago and she snagged those cheap flats, more cardboard than actual normal shoe material, from Amy’s purse. Actually, that was at the after-after party. They were sweaty and drunk, dancing wildly, the club all black-lights and fifteen dollar cocktails.
So that makes this the after-after-after party. The venue: a sort-of-upscale bar designed to be like a dive, the sort of place the dudes always favor when they get to choose (over Abby’s predictable objections).
Mick’s still going, storytelling having shifted over to torch-singing along to “American Pie” with the better part of the Foo Fighters and Seth is twirling Amy around, letting her stumble into a crowded table, laughing the entire time. It’s around that point -- Amy’s laughter getting lost in the entire bar shouting, “THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE, THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE” -- that Bill takes her half-finished beer from her hand and leaves it on the bar, and drags her onto the makeshift dance floor with a hand on her waist, the both of them dodging Kamikaze Amy as they settle into a slow dance completely off tempo.
She blinks up at him as they dance and he looks down at her quickly before looking just past her head and smirking at something she can’t see. This is probably another bad idea and it’s like that private toast of hers with her unfinished beer (half-empty, half-full) was prophetic or something.
Bill’s singing along, at first bold and sure, and then tapering off until he’s more or less just murmuring the lyrics in her ear, like I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news is a secret missive shared only between them. And maybe it is. Maybe that lends itself to why it feels so normal and so right to hide her face against him same as he has with her -- his head bent down, his mouth at her ear, her head against his shoulder, her nose brushing against his throat. One of his hands is low on her waist, the other holding her hand, and she draws their joined hands in toward their bodies, their hands ultimately coming to rest against his chest, their feet shuffling to the same slow beat.
Everyone picks up the pace around them when the song switches over to AC/DC (a dive bar embracing its birthright), but her and Bill are still doing that slow matching sway, their hands still joined and pressed over his heart.
And Bill is still talk-singing the words in that hushed tone, and ok, wow, she had no idea how completely filthy the lyrics to “You Shook Me All Night Long” really are until hearing Bill say them against her ear. He says something about coming and thighs, or whatever, and she starts laughing, the sound muffled against him.
She’s drunk, incredibly drunk and tired, and Bill seems just as drunk as she is, but steadier than her. But that’s always been his game: the same as her, but steadier. That one variation between them creating a world of difference. He’s the steady one; she’s the fickle ship in the night, or however that expression goes.
It doesn’t go like that. She’s pretty sure. It’s something about two ships passing in the night. She’s not sure what that expression is supposed to mean either though. That the two ships just missed each other. That the two ships are captained by professional sailors and they steer their respective ships past each other in the night, all no big deal, nautical-style.
She’ll google it later, the next day in fact, when she’s curled up on her couch, hungover but too lazy to get up and draw the curtains so her entire apartment bakes in the late morning-early afternoon sunlight and her head pounds, and she’s clutching her iPhone, ignoring all the drunk texts she both sent and received last night (to Maya: WEHRE AER YO?!?!.1?!?sadfacee) (she’s too old for this to be cute and she knows that), ignoring even harder (if that’s possible) the voicemail from Bill she has yet to listen to (left at eight that morning, left when he must have hit the sidewalk right outside her apartment building, or maybe he waited until he got to the corner, when he left her block, like that was the all clear, that the achieved distance, however small, made it okay to explain his mistake (because he would call this a mistake) --
and yes, the game has been given away here, yes, we’ve let a detail slip: Bill left her apartment and he left her a voicemail at eight in the morning and yes, Kristen is a regular detective because she felt the bed shift under her as he crawled out of it, as he crawled out from beneath her, and she waited until she heard the front door close to open her eyes, and when she did the clock on the bedside table said 7:52, and when her phone rang and when she waited for it to stop ringing, when she waited for the single note chime to signify a new voicemail sounded, she reached for her phone, and the screen read 8:01).
The screen read: MISSED CALL (1): BILL. The screen read: VOICEMAIL (1).
She won’t go back to sleep, but she will stay in bed, naked and sweaty. She will have forgotten to set the A/C when she got home the night before (earlier that morning), and the night will have been warm, and his skin will have stuck to her own, and with him gone all that will cling to her skin will be the sheets kicked down low on her hips, the cloying sense that all the booze consumed the night before is attempting to escape through her pores, and his scent, uniquely male and clean. And later she will drag herself to the couch after dragging an old t-shirt over her head and she’ll make instant coffee and want to gag on the taste and she’ll mean to clean up all the shit she has saved on her DVR menu but her resolve will die out on the menu, unsure why she thought a marathon of European House Hunters was a thing worth recording.
Instead she’ll google “two ships in the night” and dictionary.com will tell her:
Often said of people who meet for a brief but intense moment and then part, never to see each other again. These people are like two ships that greet each other with flashing lights and then sail off into the night. From a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
So after all that it will not apply. She will find nothing brief about any of this; there is nothing brief about seven years (except for maybe in the context of the entirety of human history, which then, yeah, seven years is nothing, seven years is a blip on the geographic anthropologic cultural cumulative record, seven years and they wouldn’t even register, nothing dynastic or enduring about that, not even a little, not at all).
Fucking Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
But that’s Sunday afternoon and this is Saturday night.
Her head is still tucked and hidden under his chin, their bodies still swaying together, their hips pressed against each other, his hand too low on her back, just above the curve of her ass.
Seven years is a lot of history to have built up between two people. Seven years, and she keeps thinking about everything ending. How there won’t be an eight. She’s not entirely sure what she means by that -- because she’s right, there won’t be an eighth year of the show for her, but that doesn’t mean, that doesn’t have to mean what she fears it means, it doesn’t make an ending, not necessarily -- but she thinks that he’s been thinking the same thing. She thinks that’s why he’s holding her like this and why he held her like that during the show and why he held her that way when she told him, definitively and for sure, she was out. She told him in a tiny Korean deli they stopped in (he wanted a bottle of this weird green tea shit he had decided was now, like, his life source or whatever) mid-afternoon back in March, and she just told him, flat-out said it without prelude (or permission; she was pretty sure Lorne had wanted to keep that on lockdown).
He had stilled completely in front of a rack of off-brand potato chips, his bottle of green tea clutched like a weapon, and his face was at first just an angry kind of confusion and then shifted into something sadder, something hurt.
“Yeah?” he said, and it was all he said. And then he was hugging her, right there in the Korean deli, in front of a rack of off-brand potato chips, his body fierce and protective as it enveloped hers, the bottle of green tea cold as it brushed against the back of her neck.
She thinks this would be more manageable if only one of them saw this as the end (the end of them is the thing she’s not saying, not even in her head, denial like a careful science with her) rather than the both of them.
And maybe that’s why she says it.
“Come home with me,” she says quietly. The crowd is starting to die down and Forte is warbling along to Neil Young with Fred and Amy has slumped over in a booth with Seth trying to prop her head up and failing. Bill snorts in her ear, dismissive but not unkind. The hand holding her own slides up her arm to her shoulder. He changed before the after party into an old threadbare t-shirt and jeans, and she likes him like this, familiar and warm, his t-shirt thin and she can feel the heat of his chest under her hand, against her own chest.
“Come home with me,” she says again, her mouth wet and open against his neck. He cradles the back of her head, his fingers rubbing against the base of her scalp. His other hand slides down to her ass, but just for a beat.
He doesn’t answer but he doesn’t pull away from her. His hand settles back on her hip. She keeps her face hidden against his neck, her chin pressed against his collarbone, and out of the corner of her eye she can see his face, looking down at her. She doesn’t look at him though. She doesn’t want to see his face. She doesn’t want to confirm whether he’s mired in some deep personal debate or if he’s already decided and the look on his face would be one of quiet apology, and he is only holding onto her now to help gentle her down or out of his own selfish motivations.
She never really or honestly considers a third option: that the look on his face would have yes writ large across it.
She doesn’t consider it, but she’s operating, optimistically, on drunk logic right now. If he comes home with her, then that means this isn’t over. If they keep dancing like this, then it’s not over. She doesn’t know what she means by it exactly. She knows she means more than the both of them, but then even at their most secluded, even at their most isolated, it never really ever was about just the two of them.
“You know I can’t do that,” he finally says, but his hand tightens on her hip.
So Kristen goes home alone.
She crawls into the backseat of a cab and she cries quietly (not over him, not really, over everything, because she's drunk and because she's alone in a cab), her mascara smearing against her fingertips when she makes the mistake of rubbing at her eyes and the cabdriver, in heavily accented English says to her, “bad night?” and she laughs and she says yes because she doesn’t know how else to explain it and he says to her, “no crying!” and she doesn’t know what to do with that either. She stops crying (of her own accord) and curses under her breath and her phone buzzes, a text from Amy: AER YUU DEAD I AM.
Kristen texts back a single word: yes.
She’s undressing for bed at four in the morning but abandons the project mid-effort, retreating to the kitchen for water, standing in her kitchen in just a bra and that little miniskirt when the intercom next to her front door buzzes.
She freezes at the fridge, the pitcher of water still in her hand, and she puts both the glass and the pitcher down on the counter, the refrigerator door still open.
She presses the button.
“ . . . yeah?” she says into the intercom. She wonders if this is how true crime stories start. The (almost) middle-aged woman alone in her apartment, drunk and half-naked, answers her intercom at four in the morning -- only to let danger in!
“Hey it’s me.”
Not that kind of danger then.
She presses the button.
This started out in Las Vegas -- New Mexico not Nevada. It was Las Vegas where they kissed for the first time and where they fucked for the first time, where they capitalized on four years worth of . . . whatever, and he fucked her in what she was sure was a haunted hotel and he was married and his wife was pregnant and she had thought to herself, ‘this is the worst thing I have ever done,’ but it was New Mexico not New York and it was him and it was her and she thought four years was an incredibly long time to want someone and to not grow tired of wanting them but she had yet to know what seven years feels like, how it’s possible to still want more, more of the same, more of that want even after all that time and even after all the times he has been inside her.
She didn’t know yet what it felt like to want eight, to want more.
But it was New Mexico, and they were making a movie. They spent fifty days in the desert. They spent fifty days chasing after an alien.
New Mexico was the fresh jalapenos she’d pluck out of a jar and pop in her mouth and tequila shots, tequila gulped straight from the bottle, tequila on the flat of Bill’s tongue, the hollow of his throat from when he had spilled it earlier, the salt on his skin from sweat and the heat, the weather flashing from impossible heat to biblical rainstorms.
The thunder would make the hotel shake. The old antique mirror mounted on the old oak dresser in her hotel room would rattle against its frame and the dresser, and she’d feel the same tremble in her bones, and that fit, that matched the tremble she’d innately feel with Bill between her legs, a different force of nature, the same untenable disaster to reckon with, but Bill was steady, never a surprise flash on the horizon.
He never trembled like she did, and she was never sure if that was just a surprise or a greater disappointment.
New Mexico was dangerous though. New Mexico lulled her into a false way of thinking.
New Mexico felt like the start of something.
It became all to easy to begin to think things could always be like this: dust and thunder, ghosts wandering an old hotel, him wandering over and inside her.
Contrary to popular conceit (and advertising slogan), it didn’t stay in Las Vegas -- Nevada, New Mexico, or otherwise.
But then it never really started in Las Vegas.
Yet another slippery way of thinking. Yet another lie: to ever think this started and belonged anywhere but New York.
Bill only knocks at her front door once.
She answers the door, and she didn’t bother putting on a shirt, she didn’t bother changing. She didn’t see a point.
He eyes her darkly but with wide eyes and swallows hard. Before the door is even shut, he’s on her, and they’re kissing messily against the wall next to the front door and next to that little table where she puts her mail and her keys and when her hip bangs against the side of it, her keys jangle noisily to the floor, and she leaves them there, aware that in the morning she’ll be looking for them in a panic.
“I thought you said . . . ” she says against his mouth, and he tugs on her bottom lip, his knee pushing in between her legs as her head knocks back against the wall.
“Shut up,” he says, but he says it amused, and he kisses her again, deep and searching, and when she moves against him, her skirt climbs that much higher up her thighs. His hands follow.
There’s a newness to this, but then, somehow it always manages to feel new with him. Each time since they were out west, each time they collided after dress and before the live show, one of them always snarling never again but not meaning it, as they buttoned their jeans or pushed their hair out of their face, reddened cheeks and swollen mouth always giving them away; each time one of them found the other at an after party, each writing night when boredom and ineptitude gave way to them fucking on the couch in her dressing room; each time she called him and he came over, the both of them pretending that These Were Things Friends Did, maintaining the act even when she had him on his knees, her legs spread, and his mouth on her cunt.
Each time. New and familiar. Two diametrically opposed ideas. Much like the way she never considered he’d actually come here yet her drunken optimism telling her if he did everything would be normal and everything would be okay.
He’s here and there’s nothing normal about it.
There’s a feel of finality to it all. The way his mouth can’t seem to get enough of her mouth, the way his hands scramble against first her bra and then her breasts, the way he yanks too hard at the zipper on her skirt, grabs at her panties and leaves her bare for him on her bed.
He has that same look on his face he’s had all night. Like there’s a time limit here and if he’s not careful she’s going to disappear before his very eyes. But she decides she’s not going to let that happen. She reaches at him and pulls at the hem of his shirt, fast and clumsy with his belt, and she decides this isn’t going to be the end. Even though she’s sure that’s why he came here, even though she knows that’s the justification he has rolling in his head, had rolling in his head when he made whatever excuse to his wife before coming here -- if it’s the end, that makes this forgivable. That’s what he thinks.
She thinks it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care about forgiveness. That’s not a factor for her. And that’s bad and she thinks she should feel bad, but she doesn’t.
Bill’s steady and she’s fickle. Bill’s steadiness makes him want forgiveness, makes him want to be good. But he’s not really. He’s a good man but he doesn’t always do good things. That’s what she thinks.
It’s what she knows.
She knows, for example, Bill always assumes that if he’s willing to cheat on Maggie then Kristen must be willing to cheat on whoever she’s with at the time. And the thing is, he’s not wrong. She doesn’t know what that says about her, but then, it’s not like she has a long history of infidelity. It’s not like she cheats with multiple men; she just cheats on multiple men with the same man.
Different ways to say the same dirty thing.
He’s talking to her while he fucks her. They’re a lethal combination of drunk and emotional, and she wants to tell him to be quiet, she wants to tell him that, but she also wants to hear him. Bill keeps saying these truly terrible things, his voice cracking as he says them, things like fuck me, fuck me, things like Jesus fucking Christ I want this all the fucking time, I want you all the fucking time, and then he’s saying he loves her, he's telling her he loves her; he’s saying, I love you, I love you so fucking much, his mouth hot over hers and that isn’t fair, that hurts, that isn’t a thing they say to each other. That’s a thing they might mean but they don’t say. She rolls her head away, baring her throat, and he’s grabbing her by the jaw, feral yet desperate, and what she wants to say is you don’t mean that but she doesn’t want to confirm that.
“You love me?” she hears herself hiss anyway, rolling her hips, everything about her sibilant and strange, even to herself. He fucks her harder, and she thinks that’s what she wanted from him. He fucks her harder, getting aggressive with her as he grits out a single word over and over: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The loose slat in her headboard bangs against the wall and her heels skid down first the back of his thighs and then against the sheets as she tries to find some traction against him.
They’re rough with each other, rough against each other, and it’s when Bill’s on his knees, Kristen’s back against the noisy headboard, her legs wrapped around him, at his mercy, her arms coiled around his neck, that she hears him.
“Don’t go,” he pants, his mouth at her jaw. And she knows, she knows he doesn’t mean the show and he doesn’t mean the job, she knows she was right and they’re thinking along the same track. “Don’t go, don’t leave, don’t go.”
“Don’t leave,” and she smashes her mouth against his, swallowing his words and biting his tongue.
He stays the night.
The night, if you can even call it that. It’s after five AM by the time they’re laying there in her bed, holding each other. And that abnormality right there -- he stays -- confirms everything: he thinks this is the end.
“Don’t become a stranger,” she mutters into his chest. “Don’t disappear on me.”
He chuckles, his hand tangling in her hair. Her eyes are closed but she feels him when he kisses her forehead, his lips pressed there for a beat too long, too tender, making something in her ache, mean and needy.
He doesn’t say anything.
She says, “Don’t -- ,” and then stops, hating herself for saying anything. Hating him for choosing now to go quiet.
He pulls her body closer to his. She buries her face in the crook of his neck and their legs stick to each other. She can taste the salt on his skin.
Sunday afternoon and she listens to his voicemail.
She throws her phone down on the couch and goes to take a shower.
They’ve gone off balance, is what she thinks.
The thing is, they’ve lost their context. Working together was like their own little tax shelter. And, okay, she really doesn’t know much of anything about taxes (she has an accountant for a reason), but she thinks that’s how it works. You have your money, and you have the government who wants your money, so you have those tax shelter things where you can hide your money and it can be safe. And that’s what this job was, in a way. They could hide what they were doing and they’d be safe. Or maybe that makes it more like insurance than a tax shelter; she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know why she keeps circling poorly conceived business metaphors.
So, in a way, they started and ended with that job. The job gave them plausible deniability. The job was an excuse. Without that, she’s not sure what they have.
She’s not sure what he thinks they have.
She listens to the voicemail again.
And this is Sunday night.
He calls her again. This time she picks up. She weighs the option of not answering for a beat and then decides against it, no clear argument in defense of either avenue -- to answer or not to answer.
“So which is it,” he says, deeply amused, “you ignoring me or are you going to pull the, “what? oh jeez oh man you called?! I must have missed that voicemail! I forgot I even owned a phone!’ routine on me or what.”
“Shut up,” she drawls. She pauses, tries to repress the smile pulling at her lips (like he could see her something, which he totally can’t, but she didn’t think it’d be fair to let that smile fill her voice with humor or however that works). “The former, by the way.”
He hums a note of assent.
“Just as I suspected,” he says, and she doesn’t say anything in reply. She picks at the chipped nail polish on her left index finger.
“What’s going on?” he finally asks.
She doesn’t really have an answer for that. She could tell him about how she took some stuff to the dry cleaner’s after she showered only to remember they were closed when she was a block away. So she took her dry cleaning with her to that small coffeehouse with all the fair trade signs and organic beans or whatever and sat with her dirty clothes and drank a latte while reading an old Travel magazine someone left behind. She read a five-page article about Brussels and told herself that she might want to go there but probably wouldn’t and she read about the best beaches in America and about the state of Indiana and why Indiana was a place anyone would want to go to beyond familial obligations or their own birth inside those state lines. She did not think Indiana was a place she wanted to go. And then she went home. Ordered Thai food and watched Game of Thrones even though she had missed the better part of the season and hadn’t read the books. And then Bill called.
“I’m really mad at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow right now,” she says casually. She can hear Bill do that soft laugh thing of his, where it’s more of a wide toothy smile, his whole face crinkled up, and he can’t help but laugh a little, all breathy and almost soundless.
“Yeah,” he says, “That guy,” like such a thing doesn’t need an explanation at all. He doesn’t ask her why, and she’s glad about that. She doesn’t want to explain the whole two ships in the night business. But if she did, she’s pretty sure Bill would get it. Maybe he already does get it and he hated Longfellow before she did because he hates that whole ship thing too.
“Did you, uh -- did you get my message?” And there. He finally has said it.
“I did,” she says evenly. He doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t know what he’s waiting for.
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean,” she says and he laughs, the sound unexpectedly cruel.
“What the fuck, Kristen,” but he says it good-natured, at odds with the laugh that came before. He’s outside. She can hear the sounds of the city and she wonders if he’s with his daughter, she wonders if he’s alone, gone for a late-night walk under god knows what pretext.
“What the fuck, Bill,” she parrots back. He sighs and she slumps down lower on the couch.
“You staying in town this week?” he asks suddenly.
“ . . . yeah.”
“I gotta do Jimmy’s show on Friday, but you, I don’t know, wanna meet up. After.”
“What are you doing?” she asks, her tone flat.
“I’m not letting you leave,” he says lightly, and then he laughs again. Kristen rolls her eyes.
“Does that make me your hostage?”
“Yeah and I’m really banking on Stockholm Syndrome succeeding here,” he teases. He pauses. “No, you’re not my hostage. We’re just, we’re entering phase two or something.”
“Phase two,” she repeats back, her mouth pulling into a smile despite herself.
“Yeah, you know, transitioning. From, like, fucking, I don’t know, co-worker to, to, co . . . ”
“Co-people?” she mocks.
“I was weighing co-lovers -- ”
“ -- ew -- ”
“ -- but sure, something like that.” He clears his throat. “I read an article in Forbes that said something about not totally defining yourself by your job, because that was super bad news.”
“You read Forbes?”
“I was at the doctor’s. Maybe it was Men's Health. But that's not, that’s not my point. We are no longer defined by the job, Wiig. Now come grab dinner or some overpriced booze with me Friday.”
She purses her lips. It’s a dangerous way of thinking. It’s Las Vegas, New Mexico and its haunted hotel room and jalapenos that made her eyes water and the sunburn on the back of Bill’s neck she’d trace with the pad of her finger and make him shiver all over again. Slippery and dangerous thinking.
So she says one word:
Yes.
She received three voicemails on Sunday. One from Amy, one from her publicist, and one from Bill.
“Hey, uh, it’s me, it’s, yeah, it’s early, and you’re sleeping, and I didn’t want -- I’m, um, sorry, I had to -- I had to go, and I thought . . . yeah, fuck it. I just thought that I’d . . . call, and I, I don’t fucking know.”
A pause. A car horn followed by another. The sound of him breathing.
“I know what I said. And I meant it. I meant, I meant everything. And . . . I’m sorry, I meant it all, and just, call me. Okay.
“Call me.”
Dead air.
Three for three.
She didn't call any of them back.
But he called her.
fin.
the party’s got to end some time, right? snl rpf. kristen wiig/bill hader. 5255 words.
notes: dear friends, idk if you saw the season finale of SNL the other night, but it basically left me in a glass case of emotion and i accidentally had to talk to some fic about it. so, yup, that's my defense, the end, you don't know my life. have a gif (originally typed fig, have one of those as well), that is all.
now, there is no leaving new york --
now there is no leaving new york.
(THE NATIONAL)
She will have three voicemails accumulated on her phone come Sunday night.
One will be from Amy and the first thirty seconds will just be noise, indistinguishable and garbled city distraction interrupted by tiny excited kid voices, and then Amy’s voice, as sudden and forceful as a deprived bounty hunter, “I want my shoes back, bitch,” coupled with a chirpy, “Call me!”
The second will be from her publicist, her voice gravely and tired, a “good show” tied to “we need to talk about your options,” whatever that means, and the same sign-off as Amy (though noticeably more exhausted): “Call me.”
The third (which is misleading since it will be the first message she receives that day) will be from Bill.
She will have yet to listen to it.
She’ll wonder what the odds are he demands the same of her, three for three:
Call me.
But this will be Sunday afternoon.
This is Saturday night:
Kristen picks up another beer at the after-after party and calls it a bad idea. She cheers herself, everyone else around her engaged in their own business (Mick fucking Jagger telling a story that requires a whole lot of gesticulating and Bobby looks like he’s laughing so hard he might puke on Mick fucking Jagger, and Andy’s got Jason in a headlock and Bill’s laughing at the both of them and Amy keeps darting in and out of her peripheral vision), and says aloud, to herself, “To bad ideas!”
So it’s the after-after party. She leans back heavy against the bar. She took her heels off ages ago and she snagged those cheap flats, more cardboard than actual normal shoe material, from Amy’s purse. Actually, that was at the after-after party. They were sweaty and drunk, dancing wildly, the club all black-lights and fifteen dollar cocktails.
So that makes this the after-after-after party. The venue: a sort-of-upscale bar designed to be like a dive, the sort of place the dudes always favor when they get to choose (over Abby’s predictable objections).
Mick’s still going, storytelling having shifted over to torch-singing along to “American Pie” with the better part of the Foo Fighters and Seth is twirling Amy around, letting her stumble into a crowded table, laughing the entire time. It’s around that point -- Amy’s laughter getting lost in the entire bar shouting, “THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE, THIS’LL BE THE DAY THAT I DIE” -- that Bill takes her half-finished beer from her hand and leaves it on the bar, and drags her onto the makeshift dance floor with a hand on her waist, the both of them dodging Kamikaze Amy as they settle into a slow dance completely off tempo.
She blinks up at him as they dance and he looks down at her quickly before looking just past her head and smirking at something she can’t see. This is probably another bad idea and it’s like that private toast of hers with her unfinished beer (half-empty, half-full) was prophetic or something.
Bill’s singing along, at first bold and sure, and then tapering off until he’s more or less just murmuring the lyrics in her ear, like I met a girl who sang the blues, and I asked her for some happy news is a secret missive shared only between them. And maybe it is. Maybe that lends itself to why it feels so normal and so right to hide her face against him same as he has with her -- his head bent down, his mouth at her ear, her head against his shoulder, her nose brushing against his throat. One of his hands is low on her waist, the other holding her hand, and she draws their joined hands in toward their bodies, their hands ultimately coming to rest against his chest, their feet shuffling to the same slow beat.
Everyone picks up the pace around them when the song switches over to AC/DC (a dive bar embracing its birthright), but her and Bill are still doing that slow matching sway, their hands still joined and pressed over his heart.
And Bill is still talk-singing the words in that hushed tone, and ok, wow, she had no idea how completely filthy the lyrics to “You Shook Me All Night Long” really are until hearing Bill say them against her ear. He says something about coming and thighs, or whatever, and she starts laughing, the sound muffled against him.
She’s drunk, incredibly drunk and tired, and Bill seems just as drunk as she is, but steadier than her. But that’s always been his game: the same as her, but steadier. That one variation between them creating a world of difference. He’s the steady one; she’s the fickle ship in the night, or however that expression goes.
It doesn’t go like that. She’s pretty sure. It’s something about two ships passing in the night. She’s not sure what that expression is supposed to mean either though. That the two ships just missed each other. That the two ships are captained by professional sailors and they steer their respective ships past each other in the night, all no big deal, nautical-style.
She’ll google it later, the next day in fact, when she’s curled up on her couch, hungover but too lazy to get up and draw the curtains so her entire apartment bakes in the late morning-early afternoon sunlight and her head pounds, and she’s clutching her iPhone, ignoring all the drunk texts she both sent and received last night (to Maya: WEHRE AER YO?!?!.1?!?sadfacee) (she’s too old for this to be cute and she knows that), ignoring even harder (if that’s possible) the voicemail from Bill she has yet to listen to (left at eight that morning, left when he must have hit the sidewalk right outside her apartment building, or maybe he waited until he got to the corner, when he left her block, like that was the all clear, that the achieved distance, however small, made it okay to explain his mistake (because he would call this a mistake) --
and yes, the game has been given away here, yes, we’ve let a detail slip: Bill left her apartment and he left her a voicemail at eight in the morning and yes, Kristen is a regular detective because she felt the bed shift under her as he crawled out of it, as he crawled out from beneath her, and she waited until she heard the front door close to open her eyes, and when she did the clock on the bedside table said 7:52, and when her phone rang and when she waited for it to stop ringing, when she waited for the single note chime to signify a new voicemail sounded, she reached for her phone, and the screen read 8:01).
The screen read: MISSED CALL (1): BILL. The screen read: VOICEMAIL (1).
She won’t go back to sleep, but she will stay in bed, naked and sweaty. She will have forgotten to set the A/C when she got home the night before (earlier that morning), and the night will have been warm, and his skin will have stuck to her own, and with him gone all that will cling to her skin will be the sheets kicked down low on her hips, the cloying sense that all the booze consumed the night before is attempting to escape through her pores, and his scent, uniquely male and clean. And later she will drag herself to the couch after dragging an old t-shirt over her head and she’ll make instant coffee and want to gag on the taste and she’ll mean to clean up all the shit she has saved on her DVR menu but her resolve will die out on the menu, unsure why she thought a marathon of European House Hunters was a thing worth recording.
Instead she’ll google “two ships in the night” and dictionary.com will tell her:
Often said of people who meet for a brief but intense moment and then part, never to see each other again. These people are like two ships that greet each other with flashing lights and then sail off into the night. From a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
So after all that it will not apply. She will find nothing brief about any of this; there is nothing brief about seven years (except for maybe in the context of the entirety of human history, which then, yeah, seven years is nothing, seven years is a blip on the geographic anthropologic cultural cumulative record, seven years and they wouldn’t even register, nothing dynastic or enduring about that, not even a little, not at all).
Fucking Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
But that’s Sunday afternoon and this is Saturday night.
Her head is still tucked and hidden under his chin, their bodies still swaying together, their hips pressed against each other, his hand too low on her back, just above the curve of her ass.
Seven years is a lot of history to have built up between two people. Seven years, and she keeps thinking about everything ending. How there won’t be an eight. She’s not entirely sure what she means by that -- because she’s right, there won’t be an eighth year of the show for her, but that doesn’t mean, that doesn’t have to mean what she fears it means, it doesn’t make an ending, not necessarily -- but she thinks that he’s been thinking the same thing. She thinks that’s why he’s holding her like this and why he held her like that during the show and why he held her that way when she told him, definitively and for sure, she was out. She told him in a tiny Korean deli they stopped in (he wanted a bottle of this weird green tea shit he had decided was now, like, his life source or whatever) mid-afternoon back in March, and she just told him, flat-out said it without prelude (or permission; she was pretty sure Lorne had wanted to keep that on lockdown).
He had stilled completely in front of a rack of off-brand potato chips, his bottle of green tea clutched like a weapon, and his face was at first just an angry kind of confusion and then shifted into something sadder, something hurt.
“Yeah?” he said, and it was all he said. And then he was hugging her, right there in the Korean deli, in front of a rack of off-brand potato chips, his body fierce and protective as it enveloped hers, the bottle of green tea cold as it brushed against the back of her neck.
She thinks this would be more manageable if only one of them saw this as the end (the end of them is the thing she’s not saying, not even in her head, denial like a careful science with her) rather than the both of them.
And maybe that’s why she says it.
“Come home with me,” she says quietly. The crowd is starting to die down and Forte is warbling along to Neil Young with Fred and Amy has slumped over in a booth with Seth trying to prop her head up and failing. Bill snorts in her ear, dismissive but not unkind. The hand holding her own slides up her arm to her shoulder. He changed before the after party into an old threadbare t-shirt and jeans, and she likes him like this, familiar and warm, his t-shirt thin and she can feel the heat of his chest under her hand, against her own chest.
“Come home with me,” she says again, her mouth wet and open against his neck. He cradles the back of her head, his fingers rubbing against the base of her scalp. His other hand slides down to her ass, but just for a beat.
He doesn’t answer but he doesn’t pull away from her. His hand settles back on her hip. She keeps her face hidden against his neck, her chin pressed against his collarbone, and out of the corner of her eye she can see his face, looking down at her. She doesn’t look at him though. She doesn’t want to see his face. She doesn’t want to confirm whether he’s mired in some deep personal debate or if he’s already decided and the look on his face would be one of quiet apology, and he is only holding onto her now to help gentle her down or out of his own selfish motivations.
She never really or honestly considers a third option: that the look on his face would have yes writ large across it.
She doesn’t consider it, but she’s operating, optimistically, on drunk logic right now. If he comes home with her, then that means this isn’t over. If they keep dancing like this, then it’s not over. She doesn’t know what she means by it exactly. She knows she means more than the both of them, but then even at their most secluded, even at their most isolated, it never really ever was about just the two of them.
“You know I can’t do that,” he finally says, but his hand tightens on her hip.
So Kristen goes home alone.
She crawls into the backseat of a cab and she cries quietly (not over him, not really, over everything, because she's drunk and because she's alone in a cab), her mascara smearing against her fingertips when she makes the mistake of rubbing at her eyes and the cabdriver, in heavily accented English says to her, “bad night?” and she laughs and she says yes because she doesn’t know how else to explain it and he says to her, “no crying!” and she doesn’t know what to do with that either. She stops crying (of her own accord) and curses under her breath and her phone buzzes, a text from Amy: AER YUU DEAD I AM.
Kristen texts back a single word: yes.
She’s undressing for bed at four in the morning but abandons the project mid-effort, retreating to the kitchen for water, standing in her kitchen in just a bra and that little miniskirt when the intercom next to her front door buzzes.
She freezes at the fridge, the pitcher of water still in her hand, and she puts both the glass and the pitcher down on the counter, the refrigerator door still open.
She presses the button.
“ . . . yeah?” she says into the intercom. She wonders if this is how true crime stories start. The (almost) middle-aged woman alone in her apartment, drunk and half-naked, answers her intercom at four in the morning -- only to let danger in!
“Hey it’s me.”
Not that kind of danger then.
She presses the button.
This started out in Las Vegas -- New Mexico not Nevada. It was Las Vegas where they kissed for the first time and where they fucked for the first time, where they capitalized on four years worth of . . . whatever, and he fucked her in what she was sure was a haunted hotel and he was married and his wife was pregnant and she had thought to herself, ‘this is the worst thing I have ever done,’ but it was New Mexico not New York and it was him and it was her and she thought four years was an incredibly long time to want someone and to not grow tired of wanting them but she had yet to know what seven years feels like, how it’s possible to still want more, more of the same, more of that want even after all that time and even after all the times he has been inside her.
She didn’t know yet what it felt like to want eight, to want more.
But it was New Mexico, and they were making a movie. They spent fifty days in the desert. They spent fifty days chasing after an alien.
New Mexico was the fresh jalapenos she’d pluck out of a jar and pop in her mouth and tequila shots, tequila gulped straight from the bottle, tequila on the flat of Bill’s tongue, the hollow of his throat from when he had spilled it earlier, the salt on his skin from sweat and the heat, the weather flashing from impossible heat to biblical rainstorms.
The thunder would make the hotel shake. The old antique mirror mounted on the old oak dresser in her hotel room would rattle against its frame and the dresser, and she’d feel the same tremble in her bones, and that fit, that matched the tremble she’d innately feel with Bill between her legs, a different force of nature, the same untenable disaster to reckon with, but Bill was steady, never a surprise flash on the horizon.
He never trembled like she did, and she was never sure if that was just a surprise or a greater disappointment.
New Mexico was dangerous though. New Mexico lulled her into a false way of thinking.
New Mexico felt like the start of something.
It became all to easy to begin to think things could always be like this: dust and thunder, ghosts wandering an old hotel, him wandering over and inside her.
Contrary to popular conceit (and advertising slogan), it didn’t stay in Las Vegas -- Nevada, New Mexico, or otherwise.
But then it never really started in Las Vegas.
Yet another slippery way of thinking. Yet another lie: to ever think this started and belonged anywhere but New York.
Bill only knocks at her front door once.
She answers the door, and she didn’t bother putting on a shirt, she didn’t bother changing. She didn’t see a point.
He eyes her darkly but with wide eyes and swallows hard. Before the door is even shut, he’s on her, and they’re kissing messily against the wall next to the front door and next to that little table where she puts her mail and her keys and when her hip bangs against the side of it, her keys jangle noisily to the floor, and she leaves them there, aware that in the morning she’ll be looking for them in a panic.
“I thought you said . . . ” she says against his mouth, and he tugs on her bottom lip, his knee pushing in between her legs as her head knocks back against the wall.
“Shut up,” he says, but he says it amused, and he kisses her again, deep and searching, and when she moves against him, her skirt climbs that much higher up her thighs. His hands follow.
There’s a newness to this, but then, somehow it always manages to feel new with him. Each time since they were out west, each time they collided after dress and before the live show, one of them always snarling never again but not meaning it, as they buttoned their jeans or pushed their hair out of their face, reddened cheeks and swollen mouth always giving them away; each time one of them found the other at an after party, each writing night when boredom and ineptitude gave way to them fucking on the couch in her dressing room; each time she called him and he came over, the both of them pretending that These Were Things Friends Did, maintaining the act even when she had him on his knees, her legs spread, and his mouth on her cunt.
Each time. New and familiar. Two diametrically opposed ideas. Much like the way she never considered he’d actually come here yet her drunken optimism telling her if he did everything would be normal and everything would be okay.
He’s here and there’s nothing normal about it.
There’s a feel of finality to it all. The way his mouth can’t seem to get enough of her mouth, the way his hands scramble against first her bra and then her breasts, the way he yanks too hard at the zipper on her skirt, grabs at her panties and leaves her bare for him on her bed.
He has that same look on his face he’s had all night. Like there’s a time limit here and if he’s not careful she’s going to disappear before his very eyes. But she decides she’s not going to let that happen. She reaches at him and pulls at the hem of his shirt, fast and clumsy with his belt, and she decides this isn’t going to be the end. Even though she’s sure that’s why he came here, even though she knows that’s the justification he has rolling in his head, had rolling in his head when he made whatever excuse to his wife before coming here -- if it’s the end, that makes this forgivable. That’s what he thinks.
She thinks it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t care about forgiveness. That’s not a factor for her. And that’s bad and she thinks she should feel bad, but she doesn’t.
Bill’s steady and she’s fickle. Bill’s steadiness makes him want forgiveness, makes him want to be good. But he’s not really. He’s a good man but he doesn’t always do good things. That’s what she thinks.
It’s what she knows.
She knows, for example, Bill always assumes that if he’s willing to cheat on Maggie then Kristen must be willing to cheat on whoever she’s with at the time. And the thing is, he’s not wrong. She doesn’t know what that says about her, but then, it’s not like she has a long history of infidelity. It’s not like she cheats with multiple men; she just cheats on multiple men with the same man.
Different ways to say the same dirty thing.
He’s talking to her while he fucks her. They’re a lethal combination of drunk and emotional, and she wants to tell him to be quiet, she wants to tell him that, but she also wants to hear him. Bill keeps saying these truly terrible things, his voice cracking as he says them, things like fuck me, fuck me, things like Jesus fucking Christ I want this all the fucking time, I want you all the fucking time, and then he’s saying he loves her, he's telling her he loves her; he’s saying, I love you, I love you so fucking much, his mouth hot over hers and that isn’t fair, that hurts, that isn’t a thing they say to each other. That’s a thing they might mean but they don’t say. She rolls her head away, baring her throat, and he’s grabbing her by the jaw, feral yet desperate, and what she wants to say is you don’t mean that but she doesn’t want to confirm that.
“You love me?” she hears herself hiss anyway, rolling her hips, everything about her sibilant and strange, even to herself. He fucks her harder, and she thinks that’s what she wanted from him. He fucks her harder, getting aggressive with her as he grits out a single word over and over: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
The loose slat in her headboard bangs against the wall and her heels skid down first the back of his thighs and then against the sheets as she tries to find some traction against him.
They’re rough with each other, rough against each other, and it’s when Bill’s on his knees, Kristen’s back against the noisy headboard, her legs wrapped around him, at his mercy, her arms coiled around his neck, that she hears him.
“Don’t go,” he pants, his mouth at her jaw. And she knows, she knows he doesn’t mean the show and he doesn’t mean the job, she knows she was right and they’re thinking along the same track. “Don’t go, don’t leave, don’t go.”
“Don’t leave,” and she smashes her mouth against his, swallowing his words and biting his tongue.
He stays the night.
The night, if you can even call it that. It’s after five AM by the time they’re laying there in her bed, holding each other. And that abnormality right there -- he stays -- confirms everything: he thinks this is the end.
“Don’t become a stranger,” she mutters into his chest. “Don’t disappear on me.”
He chuckles, his hand tangling in her hair. Her eyes are closed but she feels him when he kisses her forehead, his lips pressed there for a beat too long, too tender, making something in her ache, mean and needy.
He doesn’t say anything.
She says, “Don’t -- ,” and then stops, hating herself for saying anything. Hating him for choosing now to go quiet.
He pulls her body closer to his. She buries her face in the crook of his neck and their legs stick to each other. She can taste the salt on his skin.
Sunday afternoon and she listens to his voicemail.
She throws her phone down on the couch and goes to take a shower.
They’ve gone off balance, is what she thinks.
The thing is, they’ve lost their context. Working together was like their own little tax shelter. And, okay, she really doesn’t know much of anything about taxes (she has an accountant for a reason), but she thinks that’s how it works. You have your money, and you have the government who wants your money, so you have those tax shelter things where you can hide your money and it can be safe. And that’s what this job was, in a way. They could hide what they were doing and they’d be safe. Or maybe that makes it more like insurance than a tax shelter; she doesn’t know, and she doesn’t know why she keeps circling poorly conceived business metaphors.
So, in a way, they started and ended with that job. The job gave them plausible deniability. The job was an excuse. Without that, she’s not sure what they have.
She’s not sure what he thinks they have.
She listens to the voicemail again.
And this is Sunday night.
He calls her again. This time she picks up. She weighs the option of not answering for a beat and then decides against it, no clear argument in defense of either avenue -- to answer or not to answer.
“So which is it,” he says, deeply amused, “you ignoring me or are you going to pull the, “what? oh jeez oh man you called?! I must have missed that voicemail! I forgot I even owned a phone!’ routine on me or what.”
“Shut up,” she drawls. She pauses, tries to repress the smile pulling at her lips (like he could see her something, which he totally can’t, but she didn’t think it’d be fair to let that smile fill her voice with humor or however that works). “The former, by the way.”
He hums a note of assent.
“Just as I suspected,” he says, and she doesn’t say anything in reply. She picks at the chipped nail polish on her left index finger.
“What’s going on?” he finally asks.
She doesn’t really have an answer for that. She could tell him about how she took some stuff to the dry cleaner’s after she showered only to remember they were closed when she was a block away. So she took her dry cleaning with her to that small coffeehouse with all the fair trade signs and organic beans or whatever and sat with her dirty clothes and drank a latte while reading an old Travel magazine someone left behind. She read a five-page article about Brussels and told herself that she might want to go there but probably wouldn’t and she read about the best beaches in America and about the state of Indiana and why Indiana was a place anyone would want to go to beyond familial obligations or their own birth inside those state lines. She did not think Indiana was a place she wanted to go. And then she went home. Ordered Thai food and watched Game of Thrones even though she had missed the better part of the season and hadn’t read the books. And then Bill called.
“I’m really mad at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow right now,” she says casually. She can hear Bill do that soft laugh thing of his, where it’s more of a wide toothy smile, his whole face crinkled up, and he can’t help but laugh a little, all breathy and almost soundless.
“Yeah,” he says, “That guy,” like such a thing doesn’t need an explanation at all. He doesn’t ask her why, and she’s glad about that. She doesn’t want to explain the whole two ships in the night business. But if she did, she’s pretty sure Bill would get it. Maybe he already does get it and he hated Longfellow before she did because he hates that whole ship thing too.
“Did you, uh -- did you get my message?” And there. He finally has said it.
“I did,” she says evenly. He doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t know what he’s waiting for.
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean,” she says and he laughs, the sound unexpectedly cruel.
“What the fuck, Kristen,” but he says it good-natured, at odds with the laugh that came before. He’s outside. She can hear the sounds of the city and she wonders if he’s with his daughter, she wonders if he’s alone, gone for a late-night walk under god knows what pretext.
“What the fuck, Bill,” she parrots back. He sighs and she slumps down lower on the couch.
“You staying in town this week?” he asks suddenly.
“ . . . yeah.”
“I gotta do Jimmy’s show on Friday, but you, I don’t know, wanna meet up. After.”
“What are you doing?” she asks, her tone flat.
“I’m not letting you leave,” he says lightly, and then he laughs again. Kristen rolls her eyes.
“Does that make me your hostage?”
“Yeah and I’m really banking on Stockholm Syndrome succeeding here,” he teases. He pauses. “No, you’re not my hostage. We’re just, we’re entering phase two or something.”
“Phase two,” she repeats back, her mouth pulling into a smile despite herself.
“Yeah, you know, transitioning. From, like, fucking, I don’t know, co-worker to, to, co . . . ”
“Co-people?” she mocks.
“I was weighing co-lovers -- ”
“ -- ew -- ”
“ -- but sure, something like that.” He clears his throat. “I read an article in Forbes that said something about not totally defining yourself by your job, because that was super bad news.”
“You read Forbes?”
“I was at the doctor’s. Maybe it was Men's Health. But that's not, that’s not my point. We are no longer defined by the job, Wiig. Now come grab dinner or some overpriced booze with me Friday.”
She purses her lips. It’s a dangerous way of thinking. It’s Las Vegas, New Mexico and its haunted hotel room and jalapenos that made her eyes water and the sunburn on the back of Bill’s neck she’d trace with the pad of her finger and make him shiver all over again. Slippery and dangerous thinking.
So she says one word:
Yes.
She received three voicemails on Sunday. One from Amy, one from her publicist, and one from Bill.
“Hey, uh, it’s me, it’s, yeah, it’s early, and you’re sleeping, and I didn’t want -- I’m, um, sorry, I had to -- I had to go, and I thought . . . yeah, fuck it. I just thought that I’d . . . call, and I, I don’t fucking know.”
A pause. A car horn followed by another. The sound of him breathing.
“I know what I said. And I meant it. I meant, I meant everything. And . . . I’m sorry, I meant it all, and just, call me. Okay.
“Call me.”
Dead air.
Three for three.
She didn't call any of them back.
But he called her.
fin.