Fic: Beginning Again
Title: Beginning Again
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairings: April/Chris, Chris/Jen Barkley (+ the merest hint of Leslie/Ben)
Rating: R
Word count: ~4900
Summary: This is a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is about Chris and April's affair in January 2014 (while April is married to Andy and Chris is in a long-distance relationship with Jen Barkley). This story is the less despondent step-child to it; the spring to that winter. A story about getting unstuck and moving on.
Notes: Huge thanks to saucydiva for the beta and continued enthusiasm for our twisted ship! Her name also sparkles. To avoid confusion: In this fic, Ron is Assistant City Manager after all. Leslie is the new Parks Director, and April Deputy Parks Director. The title is nicked from Leonard Woolf's autobiography of the years 1911-1918. Comments, expressing either outrage or praise or anything in between, make my day. Really.
Beginning Again
Spring doesn't come until fall that year. The leaves are turning yellow and red when Andy drops out of the police academy and goes back to shining shoes, and April moves out.
"There is nothing keeping me here," she says cynically to Chris. She snorts. "Remember that?"
Chris does, of course, remember. Although he found his first grey hair three days ago, tucked away above his left ear, his memory remains impeccable. It looks like the body will be the first to go after all, before the mind. He thinks he could recall everything April ever said to him, from the time she was a sullen college student buying him post-its through her marriage vows to every cry of passion when she comes, on top of him, her fingers strangling the sheets and her lips on his, taking his breath away, gagging him, sometimes rough enough to bruise. He can't think of a reason why he would want to; their relationship, such as it is, is one best experienced in the moment (if they think too far back or give too much thought to the consequences, they might get sick to their stomachs), but he could, if he wanted to, sit down at his desk and fill volumes and volumes with his memories of April.
"There is nothing keeping me here."
He chooses to ignore the bitterness dripping from the sentence now. "What do you have in mind?" he asks.
≈
There is a day that he spends hovering in doorways in the parks department. When Ron Swanson hears the news and marches over there, Chris follows. He doesn't know why exactly; perhaps it's just some misplaced sense of self-preservation, for there is something dangerous in Ron's expression, something almost unhinged.
"April! What are you doing." Ron says to April. It's barely a question. It's an accusation.
Chris thanks his lucky stars that Ron doesn't know everything. The nature of April's relationship to Chris is not part of today's revelations. If it was, he honestly believes he would be dead already. As it is, Chris hangs back all through Ron's lecture. Shoulder and hip against the door jamb, he remains quiet, biting his lip.
"Why is Andy telling everyone passing by the shoeshine stand that his wife moved out last night?" It isn't a factual question. It has a definite edge. Razor-sharp, laced with venom.
Behind Ron, Tom, who has up until now been so entranced by his computer screen that he can't possibly have been doing anything remotely work-related, lets out a squeak. His mouth hangs open in surprise as he's suddenly mesmerized by the exchange taking place before him.
From behind her own desk, April looks up at Ron with those large, dark eyes of hers. "Because his wife moved out last night. Obviously."
Ron balls his hands into fists. His moustache twitches.
"Andy is also having a long philosophical discussion with Kyle about how to win you back."
April drops her gaze to the papers in front of her. Chris has no idea what she said to Andy. What he does know is that she got Jean-Ralphio, who is at least employed by Hot Topic, to move in with him. She also left Andy three months' rent, for moving out without giving him much notice.
"The man is on his fifth free shoeshine of the day."
April twirls a pencil between her index finger and thumb.
"Do you care?"
She stops twirling the pencil. The room is so quiet that there's an audible thud when its tip comes to rest on the top-most paper on the desk. For a few seconds, Tom's eyes flitting back and forth between Ron and April is the only discernible movement.
"April, you guys have always had a good relationship. You've got that, and you don't just throw that away," Ron says, a note of warning in his voice.
"You would know, Lester," she says to the vomit-green TCM-TR3 form on her desk.
Ron storms from the office April shares with Tom so abruptly that he collides with Chris in the doorway. He snarls, an animal sound not directed at anyone in particular, and then takes long, hurried strides out of the parks department. April's eyes flit to Chris. If he expected them to be brimming with tears or narrowed in anger, he is mistaken. There is nothing in those eyes at all.
"Whoa-" Tom starts, but April silences him with a look so piercing it could pin a butterfly to the wall.
≈
Leslie gets wind of it two hours later. She was busy with city council affairs when the rest of the department found out, either from Ron, whose voice carries, or from Tom, who scampered out of the office after Chris when he left. Chris sees her pass his office at that characteristic half-skip she always does when she goes over to the parks department.
"Leslie Knope! Going down to the parks department?"
"Yup!"
"Let me walk with you."
He doesn't think about it. He just does it. Leslie forgets all about him being there anyway, as soon as they walk through the door and she sees that the entire department is in a state of hurriedly whispering confusion. The entire department except for her deputy, of course.
April sits through Leslie's variation on Ron's theme with the same stony-faced expression, giving only one-word replies, and Chris leans against the doorframe to her office, silent. Is his being there helpful? He hardly thinks so. But April doesn't snap at him, doesn't throw him out, so he assumes she either wants him there or doesn't care one way or the other. He doesn't have it in him to leave her alone right now, but it's not really his place to speak up for her either. He's neither in nor out.
Nobody questions his presence. Why would the city manager take such an interest in the end of the deputy park's director's marriage? Nobody asks. Nobody even seems to notice. He has become part of the furniture.
Leslie runs out of steam, gives April a tearful hug, which April half-heartedly and one-armedly returns, and then leaves, presumably to compose herself or go see Andy. Chris tries to give April a reassuring half-smile. She quickly looks away.
Leslie is replaced, less than a minute later, by Ann, whose only reaction to the news is to nod her head sagely, and ask April where she's staying for the moment.
"Chris's place," April says truthfully.
He can't believe it when all Ann says is, "Oh, okay. Good." She even gives him a smile when she passes by him on her way out the door, like he is doing some virtuous.
He shouldn't be surprised, really. Everybody knows he and April are friends after all. And it's not just that. This is who he is, isn't it?
Mr Ethical. That's him. Mr Virtuous.
But he is surprised. Chris finds it a little hard to take, this complete and total lack of suspicion. He feels like the scarlet letter A is printed across both their chests, but it's not really. Nobody has put it there. With every passing minute it sinks in a little deeper. Nobody is going to do that. Nobody is going to stigmatize them. Nobody is going to guess.
Wherever it is everybody thinks April sleeps now-and even though by now they will undoubtedly have heard that it's over at his place-, nobody is going to suspect that she fell asleep rather suddenly with her right hand still painfully clenched in his hair, her left elbow digging uncomfortably into his side, and a slight trickle of saliva on his collar bone.
Chris has the insane urge to shout the truth from the rooftops, print two hundred official city manager notices and hang them up all around city hall-get himself fired for two things at once, why not? He does neither of those things. He goes back to his own office. Not even his secretary notices his trembling hands.
≈
"How was work?" April asks that evening, closing the front door behind her. Like it was just an ordinary day. Chris is standing at the kitchen counter, chopping garlic and onions, and wipes the tears from his eyes. He doesn't know what to say. Doesn't know the answer to that question, truth be told.
How was work? An afterthought. That's how it was. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say anything.
It does not take long for the residual workplace boundaries she brought home with her to be broken down. They were colleagues. They were friends. They were lovers. They transcended being merely colleagues so long ago, it's impossible to think about. Andy asked him to hold on to the rings at their wedding. Now, in this current permutation, it appears they're more than friends, less than lovers.
They don't have sex; this night is the only time she cries.
She goes into the bedroom, closes the door. There are no sounds coming from inside, but he's not a complete idiot.
The bed is large, king-sized, the mattress hard. He makes no sound. But even so, there must be a shift under her when he sinks down on the end opposite of where she lies spread-eagled, her face buried in the pillow, like she is trying to suffocate herself. Maybe just a shift in the air.
She lifts her head. "Get out," she says, but there's no venom in it. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her jaw is set.
She's barely keeping it together, and when Chris leans over and takes her in his arms, she doesn't resist. April sobs into his chest and he rubs a hand across her back and over her hair. There's really nothing he can say; not even he, Mr Virtuous, Mr Optimistic, can think of words to say that will make it all go away.
'Go out there and be the woman you always knew you could be.'
'Everyone's the best. We're all winners.'
'Take a deep breath and visualize yourself being carried by a cloud.'
No. Truly, there is nothing he can say. So he doesn't. Chris has been saying nothing all day. He feels like he is melting into the wallpaper. His entire being dissolves in the exquisitely serene shade of aqua.
≈
"Nice!" she exclaims, entering the condo.
"You think so?"
His condo is a little empty, but not completely. The plants are gone of course. But there's still one of his racing cycles, two cast iron tea pots, a good amount of wall art, including the painting of the procession of Tibetan monks in traditional garb. He took the dining table with him to Pawnee, but there's always the kitchen counter to sit at, and he left the armchair here, too. The bed is there, because he figured if he owned the place, he might as well keep it in enough shape to crash here, if it ever became necessary. The guest room is still completely furnished, too.
April hasn't brought much with her, just a box of kitchenware, four boxes of clothes, and one of books. But Chris hopes she'll enjoy making the place hers eventually, picking out new furniture to supplement what's here, choosing her own plants if she wants any, putting personal touches of her own on the walls and rugs on the floors, perhaps.
"Yeah, dude, love that red wall," she says.
"Thanks. You know, red and green are complementary colours. So I always had a lot of green plants here, to complement the wall. Maximum possible colour brilliance really enhances the energy flow …" He stops because April is scrunching her nose. "You, of course, are free to do whatever you like with it. Decorate it how you like, re-arrange what's here, paint the walls-"
"I can paint the walls, really?"
"Yes. Do it! I find it is extremely important to have a home that reflects one's personality and dosha type."
"Shut up," she says and kisses him.
Kissing her here feels different. In Pawnee, their kisses had become perfunctory. It has taken Chris nearly two months to figure it all out. Even with almost two decades worth of experience and contacts in the state house, he couldn't just snap his fingers and materialize a job for her. But with persistence and liberal application of the patented Chris Traeger Smile, he finally got her an interview for an administrative position with the Indiana Office of Tourism Development. Taking this job is a step back for April, strictly speaking, in the hierarchy, but it is in Indianapolis, not in Pawnee. There are more opportunities for her to grow here, and, most importantly, the chance to begin again.
Seven weeks they spent living side by side in his small house in Pawnee. Chris often found himself thinking about how that would look if anybody ever found out, either here or in Pawnee, about their affair. Like their own sordid little love nest, their secret den of forbidden lust. That couldn't be further from the truth. They shared a bed, that's true. They had sex too, though intermittently, with longer and longer intervals in between. Never sober. April drank too much wine, without enjoyment, and snapped at him when he told her to stop. She kissed him, sometimes she clung to him, but she never smiled. She dragged herself to work in the mornings, and came home wearing a mask. There was less to say. Chris saw himself becoming quieter all the time. He went on longer and longer runs.
They both knew the situation was temporary, transitional. But April especially had been feeling stuck for a long time, and things still weren't moving fast enough. She had moved out, but she hadn't moved on. It was like waiting for spring to actually melt the winter's ice, not just produce hairline cracks in it. The wait was suffocating, stifling.
Now it feels different. Her kiss. It's not mechanical. She's not doing it just because it's this thing they do, or because she's bored, because there's nothing else to do. She means it. She means it, too, when she says, "Stay? Just … just tonight."
"Okay," he says.
He shows her the Thai grocery shop around the corner and they make panang curry together. Every time she passes by him to get something from the fridge, she trails her hand across his back. It's a slight gesture, almost absent-minded. He smiles.
They explore each other's bodies as if they're brand-new territory. He recalls how much he loves her breasts, the small and firm perfect half-spheres. April spends an indecently long time caressing his thighs, and when she finally takes him into her mouth, he remembers, for the first time in a long time, why they started this at all. Why it was they never seemed to be able to stop.
≈
Chris drives up to Indy again three weeks later. He thinks he's prepared for anything, but has to admit that he hadn't expected to find his kitchen painted bright yellow. Chris is definitely synaesthetic, but nothing about April, nothing she's ever said or done, has ever caused him to visualize canola yellow. Ochre is the closest thing to yellow he associates with her. That's her last name, Ludgate. The name April itself is a kind of Easter green. The canola yellow is nice, though. It does go extremely well with the dark brown kitchen cupboards.
"Hi," April says. She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him, very quickly and lightly, several times.
"So how's it going?" he asks.
"Good," she says, and smiles. Her energy is infectious; Chris rocks them both from side to side a few times. There's something jovial to it, which is not something they've ever had before. The first time they kissed, they trembled. That stopped, in time, but things between them have always felt heavy. Ponderous, almost grave. And necessary. Like they were getting sucked into something. Never like they could take flight.
He feels such a wave of relief wash over him that he hoists her up on the kitchen counter and kisses her until they're both breathless. In between kisses, he asks her how she's settling in. How's she liking the job (Oh, it's fine.), the city (It's pretty great, actually.), does she want to keep the racing cycle or is she just waiting for him to take it away (She doesn't care either way but doesn't mind having it around, really. She's even cycled through the nearby park a few times.), what else is new (She's actually thinking about going back to school, part-time maybe, though no decision has been made.)
He carries her over to the bedroom and undresses her, and there's a lightness to that, too. She divests him of his shirt so enthusiastically that a button comes off. "Oops," she says. He grins against her lips.
Sleeping with her is fun. She teases him mercilessly, with her fingers and her tongue, until he has to choke out, "Aaaah. I'm … ahh … April, I'm close. Fair warning. I'm going to-"
"No, don't," she giggles, and climbs on top of him, finally. He gulps when she lowers herself onto him, and they both have to laugh. He may be superhuman, but he hasn't felt so like a schoolboy since he was one.
Afterwards, she rests her head on his chest and draws circles on it, lazily, with her fingers. He runs his through her hair.
"So Chris," she says after a while.
"Hmm?"
"What are you gonna do about Jen?"
It knocks the wind out of him. She doesn't ask it with any kind of bite. There's no hint of accusation or regret. It's an honest question, that's all. And Chris finds that he has no idea. Neither of what to say in reply, nor of what he is going to do. The last time he and his girlfriend spoke on the phone was two weeks ago. Jen told him all about her senate candidate, a man so hyper-qualified and ruthless, she thinks she might just be running his presidential campaign in 2016. Chris told her … he can't remember what he told her. Jen emailed him three days ago, too, and it's the second email in a row from her that he is avoiding.
"…"
"Do you love her?"
"I … well … I do, yes."
April turns her head and looks up at him, her hand and cheek still resting on his chest.
"And don't you think you guys could try to, like, move forward?"
"It's …," he sighs. Not meeting April's eyes, he says, "It's complicated."
Chris knows that he loves Jen. He loves her deeply, purely, and theoretically. When he thinks of her it is with the greatest tenderness only. He puts her on a pedestal, into a category of one. At the same time, he never really thinks about her at all. He understands now, all of a sudden, that these days the fact that Jen is an actual person never enters his mind. She has become an abstract concept to him, a remote and never-realized possibility. A source of continual anguish and intermittent joy.
April sits up, facing him more directly. "Is it? That complicated, I mean. Seems to me you love her, but you also need more from her. Don't you think you should, I don't know, just tell her that?"
His vision blurs and there's a lump in his throat. He can't answer her. This revelation is too upsetting. It hits him like a train an unsuspecting wanderer, meandering across tracks long overgrown with weeds.
"Hey," April says. She kisses him and then she lies back down, wrapping her arms around him again.
≈
They're huddled together, bent over a large table, studying the papers spread all across it. Jen makes a gesture and Ben nods. They look satisfied, smug even, as they plot some incumbent senator's demise.
Chris feels a stab of jealousy for the way they understand each other, the kind of shorthand they have developed where simple gestures are as meaningful as five-minute explanations. Ben and Jen only have that because they work together intensely, every single day. Chris wonders if Ben feels the same way about him and Leslie. They don't form quite the close-knit team that Jen and Ben make, but they do work in the same building. Leslie's office is only about a hundred feet from his, they run across each other in the halls all the time, and Chris has more meetings with Councilwoman Knope than with anyone else in city hall.
This is the perfect absurdity of their lives, he thinks. Once it was just Ben and Chris, it was that simple. A lifetime ago, or so it feels. It became Ben and Leslie, Chris and Jen-but also, paradoxically, perversely even, Ben and Jen, Chris and Leslie. God plays dice with the universe after all, throwing the players on the table where they group and re-group, forming ever-new constellations. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, nothing any of them could or should have done about it.
He shakes his head. It won't do to be thinking about the inevitability of his situation when he's here to change it. The movement of his head is all it takes for them to notice him.
"Hey man." Ben lifts his hand from behind the table.
"Heyyy, Chris!" Jen says, much more enthusiastically, and approaches him.
She smiles, and that's how he knows his girlfriend loves him. It's the way she smiles at him. The difference from her ordinary smile is perhaps not so much in kind as it is in wattage. But she smiled at him like that the second day, after they had sex in a supply closet. She cocked her head and told him she'd miss him, but it was the smile, most of all, that gave him the courage to ask if they could keep it going somehow.
Now that smile also releases a nauseating wave of guilt. He feels like he's going to vomit and then faint. But they never said their relationship was exclusive. In fact, their relationship is not really anything at all, he feels, nothing at all but fun and sex. Still, there is a difference between hooking up with various men for a night here and there in hotel rooms and carrying on with a 25-year-old for over a year. The same 25-year-old to whom he is now renting out his condo.
Jen kisses him hello and leaves Ben to wrap things up for the night. Chris and Ben don't stop to chat or catch up. They never really do now. Chris sees his old partner occasionally when he's with Jen, but he learns more about Ben's life from Leslie than from Ben himself. And Jen is remarkably good about delegating her work when Chris visits. She doesn't pick him up from the airport. She tells him where to meet her, usually some senate office building or a makeshift campaign headquarters in an empty storefront. But she's never left him sitting in her apartment while running off to take care of some Very Important Business either, nothing like that. It's not her style. It's one of the things he loves about her.
The drive to her apartment isn't far, but they get stuck in some DC traffic. The weather is unseasonably cold, sleet forcing drivers to inch forward at an agonizingly slow pace. Chris looks over at Jen.
Her red lips, he thinks. That's another thing he loves about her. Her signature pearl necklace. He loves the sound it makes on the nightstand when she takes it off. The great cascade of her hair. He loves brushing it a hundred strokes. He loves the way Jen undresses in front of him with complete self-confidence. How she'll walk stark naked through the apartment, heedless of whether curious neighbours are watching at their windows. He loves that she can keep up with him, in all things, but never lets him suck her into his supplement-addiction or his scheme of running to the moon. He loves the firmness with which she dismisses her colleagues' phone calls when she wants to remain undisturbed with him. He loves that she can't sleep with his arms around her, but will sometimes, in the early morning, still half asleep, press her face into the centre of his chest. He loves the perpetual slight mess in her apartment. Her extravagant belly laugh. That she never has anything edible around, but will pull strings to get them a table at DC's hottest new restaurant that same night. The way she spends an hour skimming newspapers in three languages every morning. That they can't walk two blocks from her apartment to their regular breakfast place without bumping into three acquaintances of hers, all of whom eye him enviously. The faded jeans and tank top she'll wear on a Sunday morning. The reading glasses that she never wears on the job. The sadness in her eyes when she talks about her grandfather, the Chicagoan postmaster-
"Everything okay?"
He clears his throat. "Yes. Excellent."
"You're quiet."
"I'm sorry. Just thinking."
She narrows her eyes and stops the car. "Okay, well, here we are!"
≈
"So what you're saying is you've been fucking a twenty-something for a year. And you promoted her. And you found her a new job. And she's currently living in a property you own."
Chris buries his head in his hands. He's sitting on her coral-red damask sofa, Jen standing in front of him.
"This is remarkably depraved. I mean, this is practically Washington-political-intrigue-level depraved. And nobody even has the slightest inkling? Hah. The town of Pawnee's even more stupid than I thought!"
"I'm so sorry." Chris looks up her. Jen doesn't look particularly angry. It's hard to tell, but he doesn't think she's about to kick him to the curb, right here right now. If anything, there's a note in her voice of … it's not exactly amusement, no, but maybe something like an appreciation of the incongruity of it all.
"Jen, there is-literally-nothing I can say that would excuse it, so I am not going to try."
Jen crosses her arms in front of her chest.
"But I want you to know that I have feelings for you. Strong feelings. Very strong feelings that haven't been affected by this … affair at all. And I know we've always kept it casual between us, we haven't really been exclusive-" He looks at her questioningly.
"'Course we haven't."
"Exactly." He nods. "But I have realized, through all this, that I don't think I can do that anymore. I don't want to."
"What are you saying?" She sinks down on the armchair opposite him. "You're breaking up with me, is that it?"
"No, I am saying the opposite. That I would like for us to try to have a relationship. A real relationship. Where we see don't go longer than a couple of weeks without seeing each other, take vacations together and don't consider ourselves available for seeing other people, romantically."
Jen has cocked her head and has started playing with a strand of her hair. Chris takes a deep breath.
"I would also like it if you came to Pawnee, every once in a while."
She raises an eyebrow and purses her lips, just slightly.
"Or I would not, theoretically, be unwilling to relocate to Washington. But I would like for us to have a commitment. I would like for us to try. I … well. I found my first grey hair a couple months ago."
Jen is looking at him intently, now with a kind of half-smile.
"I'm not saying it isn't going to be difficult, maybe it'll be the hardest thing you've ever done. But I think we could be quite literally spectacular together, you and I. Don't you?"
Chris has seen this expression on her before, when she first told him she would miss him. When he came to visit her in Washington the second time and she said she really liked him. And, once, in bed during a moment of uncharacteristic emotional honesty, when she said, "You feel amazing, Chris. Being with you feels amazing. I don't know what I did before I met you." It was the closest thing to "I love you" she's ever said.
They regard each other now, calmly, nakedly. He realizes he's holding his breath, and forces himself to take a deep breath in through his nose, filling his lungs completely, and then to breathe out twice as long. It's a while before Jen breaks the silence.
"Yeah. Okay." She clears her throat, then breaks into a grin. "What the hell, right? Let's try!"
"Jen! Barkley!" Her name is emerald and burgundy. And it sparkles.
Chris closes the distance between them faster than should be humanly possible. This feels even better than finally winning the Indiana Breast Cancer Awareness Triathlon three years ago, which is what he would previously have described as easily the best feeling in the world. Saying they'll try is not a guarantee for anything, he knows that. But for the moment at least, he doesn't feel like he is being tossed around by particularly vindictive fates anymore, or like he is losing his entire sense of self. This is the way of the world. Forward motion. Chris feels elated. Every cell of his body vibrates with it, again.
Fandom: Parks and Recreation
Pairings: April/Chris, Chris/Jen Barkley (+ the merest hint of Leslie/Ben)
Rating: R
Word count: ~4900
Summary: This is a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which is about Chris and April's affair in January 2014 (while April is married to Andy and Chris is in a long-distance relationship with Jen Barkley). This story is the less despondent step-child to it; the spring to that winter. A story about getting unstuck and moving on.
Notes: Huge thanks to saucydiva for the beta and continued enthusiasm for our twisted ship! Her name also sparkles. To avoid confusion: In this fic, Ron is Assistant City Manager after all. Leslie is the new Parks Director, and April Deputy Parks Director. The title is nicked from Leonard Woolf's autobiography of the years 1911-1918. Comments, expressing either outrage or praise or anything in between, make my day. Really.
Beginning Again
Spring doesn't come until fall that year. The leaves are turning yellow and red when Andy drops out of the police academy and goes back to shining shoes, and April moves out.
"There is nothing keeping me here," she says cynically to Chris. She snorts. "Remember that?"
Chris does, of course, remember. Although he found his first grey hair three days ago, tucked away above his left ear, his memory remains impeccable. It looks like the body will be the first to go after all, before the mind. He thinks he could recall everything April ever said to him, from the time she was a sullen college student buying him post-its through her marriage vows to every cry of passion when she comes, on top of him, her fingers strangling the sheets and her lips on his, taking his breath away, gagging him, sometimes rough enough to bruise. He can't think of a reason why he would want to; their relationship, such as it is, is one best experienced in the moment (if they think too far back or give too much thought to the consequences, they might get sick to their stomachs), but he could, if he wanted to, sit down at his desk and fill volumes and volumes with his memories of April.
"There is nothing keeping me here."
He chooses to ignore the bitterness dripping from the sentence now. "What do you have in mind?" he asks.
≈
There is a day that he spends hovering in doorways in the parks department. When Ron Swanson hears the news and marches over there, Chris follows. He doesn't know why exactly; perhaps it's just some misplaced sense of self-preservation, for there is something dangerous in Ron's expression, something almost unhinged.
"April! What are you doing." Ron says to April. It's barely a question. It's an accusation.
Chris thanks his lucky stars that Ron doesn't know everything. The nature of April's relationship to Chris is not part of today's revelations. If it was, he honestly believes he would be dead already. As it is, Chris hangs back all through Ron's lecture. Shoulder and hip against the door jamb, he remains quiet, biting his lip.
"Why is Andy telling everyone passing by the shoeshine stand that his wife moved out last night?" It isn't a factual question. It has a definite edge. Razor-sharp, laced with venom.
Behind Ron, Tom, who has up until now been so entranced by his computer screen that he can't possibly have been doing anything remotely work-related, lets out a squeak. His mouth hangs open in surprise as he's suddenly mesmerized by the exchange taking place before him.
From behind her own desk, April looks up at Ron with those large, dark eyes of hers. "Because his wife moved out last night. Obviously."
Ron balls his hands into fists. His moustache twitches.
"Andy is also having a long philosophical discussion with Kyle about how to win you back."
April drops her gaze to the papers in front of her. Chris has no idea what she said to Andy. What he does know is that she got Jean-Ralphio, who is at least employed by Hot Topic, to move in with him. She also left Andy three months' rent, for moving out without giving him much notice.
"The man is on his fifth free shoeshine of the day."
April twirls a pencil between her index finger and thumb.
"Do you care?"
She stops twirling the pencil. The room is so quiet that there's an audible thud when its tip comes to rest on the top-most paper on the desk. For a few seconds, Tom's eyes flitting back and forth between Ron and April is the only discernible movement.
"April, you guys have always had a good relationship. You've got that, and you don't just throw that away," Ron says, a note of warning in his voice.
"You would know, Lester," she says to the vomit-green TCM-TR3 form on her desk.
Ron storms from the office April shares with Tom so abruptly that he collides with Chris in the doorway. He snarls, an animal sound not directed at anyone in particular, and then takes long, hurried strides out of the parks department. April's eyes flit to Chris. If he expected them to be brimming with tears or narrowed in anger, he is mistaken. There is nothing in those eyes at all.
"Whoa-" Tom starts, but April silences him with a look so piercing it could pin a butterfly to the wall.
≈
Leslie gets wind of it two hours later. She was busy with city council affairs when the rest of the department found out, either from Ron, whose voice carries, or from Tom, who scampered out of the office after Chris when he left. Chris sees her pass his office at that characteristic half-skip she always does when she goes over to the parks department.
"Leslie Knope! Going down to the parks department?"
"Yup!"
"Let me walk with you."
He doesn't think about it. He just does it. Leslie forgets all about him being there anyway, as soon as they walk through the door and she sees that the entire department is in a state of hurriedly whispering confusion. The entire department except for her deputy, of course.
April sits through Leslie's variation on Ron's theme with the same stony-faced expression, giving only one-word replies, and Chris leans against the doorframe to her office, silent. Is his being there helpful? He hardly thinks so. But April doesn't snap at him, doesn't throw him out, so he assumes she either wants him there or doesn't care one way or the other. He doesn't have it in him to leave her alone right now, but it's not really his place to speak up for her either. He's neither in nor out.
Nobody questions his presence. Why would the city manager take such an interest in the end of the deputy park's director's marriage? Nobody asks. Nobody even seems to notice. He has become part of the furniture.
Leslie runs out of steam, gives April a tearful hug, which April half-heartedly and one-armedly returns, and then leaves, presumably to compose herself or go see Andy. Chris tries to give April a reassuring half-smile. She quickly looks away.
Leslie is replaced, less than a minute later, by Ann, whose only reaction to the news is to nod her head sagely, and ask April where she's staying for the moment.
"Chris's place," April says truthfully.
He can't believe it when all Ann says is, "Oh, okay. Good." She even gives him a smile when she passes by him on her way out the door, like he is doing some virtuous.
He shouldn't be surprised, really. Everybody knows he and April are friends after all. And it's not just that. This is who he is, isn't it?
Mr Ethical. That's him. Mr Virtuous.
But he is surprised. Chris finds it a little hard to take, this complete and total lack of suspicion. He feels like the scarlet letter A is printed across both their chests, but it's not really. Nobody has put it there. With every passing minute it sinks in a little deeper. Nobody is going to do that. Nobody is going to stigmatize them. Nobody is going to guess.
Wherever it is everybody thinks April sleeps now-and even though by now they will undoubtedly have heard that it's over at his place-, nobody is going to suspect that she fell asleep rather suddenly with her right hand still painfully clenched in his hair, her left elbow digging uncomfortably into his side, and a slight trickle of saliva on his collar bone.
Chris has the insane urge to shout the truth from the rooftops, print two hundred official city manager notices and hang them up all around city hall-get himself fired for two things at once, why not? He does neither of those things. He goes back to his own office. Not even his secretary notices his trembling hands.
≈
"How was work?" April asks that evening, closing the front door behind her. Like it was just an ordinary day. Chris is standing at the kitchen counter, chopping garlic and onions, and wipes the tears from his eyes. He doesn't know what to say. Doesn't know the answer to that question, truth be told.
How was work? An afterthought. That's how it was. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say anything.
It does not take long for the residual workplace boundaries she brought home with her to be broken down. They were colleagues. They were friends. They were lovers. They transcended being merely colleagues so long ago, it's impossible to think about. Andy asked him to hold on to the rings at their wedding. Now, in this current permutation, it appears they're more than friends, less than lovers.
They don't have sex; this night is the only time she cries.
She goes into the bedroom, closes the door. There are no sounds coming from inside, but he's not a complete idiot.
The bed is large, king-sized, the mattress hard. He makes no sound. But even so, there must be a shift under her when he sinks down on the end opposite of where she lies spread-eagled, her face buried in the pillow, like she is trying to suffocate herself. Maybe just a shift in the air.
She lifts her head. "Get out," she says, but there's no venom in it. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her jaw is set.
She's barely keeping it together, and when Chris leans over and takes her in his arms, she doesn't resist. April sobs into his chest and he rubs a hand across her back and over her hair. There's really nothing he can say; not even he, Mr Virtuous, Mr Optimistic, can think of words to say that will make it all go away.
'Go out there and be the woman you always knew you could be.'
'Everyone's the best. We're all winners.'
'Take a deep breath and visualize yourself being carried by a cloud.'
No. Truly, there is nothing he can say. So he doesn't. Chris has been saying nothing all day. He feels like he is melting into the wallpaper. His entire being dissolves in the exquisitely serene shade of aqua.
≈
"Nice!" she exclaims, entering the condo.
"You think so?"
His condo is a little empty, but not completely. The plants are gone of course. But there's still one of his racing cycles, two cast iron tea pots, a good amount of wall art, including the painting of the procession of Tibetan monks in traditional garb. He took the dining table with him to Pawnee, but there's always the kitchen counter to sit at, and he left the armchair here, too. The bed is there, because he figured if he owned the place, he might as well keep it in enough shape to crash here, if it ever became necessary. The guest room is still completely furnished, too.
April hasn't brought much with her, just a box of kitchenware, four boxes of clothes, and one of books. But Chris hopes she'll enjoy making the place hers eventually, picking out new furniture to supplement what's here, choosing her own plants if she wants any, putting personal touches of her own on the walls and rugs on the floors, perhaps.
"Yeah, dude, love that red wall," she says.
"Thanks. You know, red and green are complementary colours. So I always had a lot of green plants here, to complement the wall. Maximum possible colour brilliance really enhances the energy flow …" He stops because April is scrunching her nose. "You, of course, are free to do whatever you like with it. Decorate it how you like, re-arrange what's here, paint the walls-"
"I can paint the walls, really?"
"Yes. Do it! I find it is extremely important to have a home that reflects one's personality and dosha type."
"Shut up," she says and kisses him.
Kissing her here feels different. In Pawnee, their kisses had become perfunctory. It has taken Chris nearly two months to figure it all out. Even with almost two decades worth of experience and contacts in the state house, he couldn't just snap his fingers and materialize a job for her. But with persistence and liberal application of the patented Chris Traeger Smile, he finally got her an interview for an administrative position with the Indiana Office of Tourism Development. Taking this job is a step back for April, strictly speaking, in the hierarchy, but it is in Indianapolis, not in Pawnee. There are more opportunities for her to grow here, and, most importantly, the chance to begin again.
Seven weeks they spent living side by side in his small house in Pawnee. Chris often found himself thinking about how that would look if anybody ever found out, either here or in Pawnee, about their affair. Like their own sordid little love nest, their secret den of forbidden lust. That couldn't be further from the truth. They shared a bed, that's true. They had sex too, though intermittently, with longer and longer intervals in between. Never sober. April drank too much wine, without enjoyment, and snapped at him when he told her to stop. She kissed him, sometimes she clung to him, but she never smiled. She dragged herself to work in the mornings, and came home wearing a mask. There was less to say. Chris saw himself becoming quieter all the time. He went on longer and longer runs.
They both knew the situation was temporary, transitional. But April especially had been feeling stuck for a long time, and things still weren't moving fast enough. She had moved out, but she hadn't moved on. It was like waiting for spring to actually melt the winter's ice, not just produce hairline cracks in it. The wait was suffocating, stifling.
Now it feels different. Her kiss. It's not mechanical. She's not doing it just because it's this thing they do, or because she's bored, because there's nothing else to do. She means it. She means it, too, when she says, "Stay? Just … just tonight."
"Okay," he says.
He shows her the Thai grocery shop around the corner and they make panang curry together. Every time she passes by him to get something from the fridge, she trails her hand across his back. It's a slight gesture, almost absent-minded. He smiles.
They explore each other's bodies as if they're brand-new territory. He recalls how much he loves her breasts, the small and firm perfect half-spheres. April spends an indecently long time caressing his thighs, and when she finally takes him into her mouth, he remembers, for the first time in a long time, why they started this at all. Why it was they never seemed to be able to stop.
≈
Chris drives up to Indy again three weeks later. He thinks he's prepared for anything, but has to admit that he hadn't expected to find his kitchen painted bright yellow. Chris is definitely synaesthetic, but nothing about April, nothing she's ever said or done, has ever caused him to visualize canola yellow. Ochre is the closest thing to yellow he associates with her. That's her last name, Ludgate. The name April itself is a kind of Easter green. The canola yellow is nice, though. It does go extremely well with the dark brown kitchen cupboards.
"Hi," April says. She throws her arms around his neck and kisses him, very quickly and lightly, several times.
"So how's it going?" he asks.
"Good," she says, and smiles. Her energy is infectious; Chris rocks them both from side to side a few times. There's something jovial to it, which is not something they've ever had before. The first time they kissed, they trembled. That stopped, in time, but things between them have always felt heavy. Ponderous, almost grave. And necessary. Like they were getting sucked into something. Never like they could take flight.
He feels such a wave of relief wash over him that he hoists her up on the kitchen counter and kisses her until they're both breathless. In between kisses, he asks her how she's settling in. How's she liking the job (Oh, it's fine.), the city (It's pretty great, actually.), does she want to keep the racing cycle or is she just waiting for him to take it away (She doesn't care either way but doesn't mind having it around, really. She's even cycled through the nearby park a few times.), what else is new (She's actually thinking about going back to school, part-time maybe, though no decision has been made.)
He carries her over to the bedroom and undresses her, and there's a lightness to that, too. She divests him of his shirt so enthusiastically that a button comes off. "Oops," she says. He grins against her lips.
Sleeping with her is fun. She teases him mercilessly, with her fingers and her tongue, until he has to choke out, "Aaaah. I'm … ahh … April, I'm close. Fair warning. I'm going to-"
"No, don't," she giggles, and climbs on top of him, finally. He gulps when she lowers herself onto him, and they both have to laugh. He may be superhuman, but he hasn't felt so like a schoolboy since he was one.
Afterwards, she rests her head on his chest and draws circles on it, lazily, with her fingers. He runs his through her hair.
"So Chris," she says after a while.
"Hmm?"
"What are you gonna do about Jen?"
It knocks the wind out of him. She doesn't ask it with any kind of bite. There's no hint of accusation or regret. It's an honest question, that's all. And Chris finds that he has no idea. Neither of what to say in reply, nor of what he is going to do. The last time he and his girlfriend spoke on the phone was two weeks ago. Jen told him all about her senate candidate, a man so hyper-qualified and ruthless, she thinks she might just be running his presidential campaign in 2016. Chris told her … he can't remember what he told her. Jen emailed him three days ago, too, and it's the second email in a row from her that he is avoiding.
"…"
"Do you love her?"
"I … well … I do, yes."
April turns her head and looks up at him, her hand and cheek still resting on his chest.
"And don't you think you guys could try to, like, move forward?"
"It's …," he sighs. Not meeting April's eyes, he says, "It's complicated."
Chris knows that he loves Jen. He loves her deeply, purely, and theoretically. When he thinks of her it is with the greatest tenderness only. He puts her on a pedestal, into a category of one. At the same time, he never really thinks about her at all. He understands now, all of a sudden, that these days the fact that Jen is an actual person never enters his mind. She has become an abstract concept to him, a remote and never-realized possibility. A source of continual anguish and intermittent joy.
April sits up, facing him more directly. "Is it? That complicated, I mean. Seems to me you love her, but you also need more from her. Don't you think you should, I don't know, just tell her that?"
His vision blurs and there's a lump in his throat. He can't answer her. This revelation is too upsetting. It hits him like a train an unsuspecting wanderer, meandering across tracks long overgrown with weeds.
"Hey," April says. She kisses him and then she lies back down, wrapping her arms around him again.
≈
They're huddled together, bent over a large table, studying the papers spread all across it. Jen makes a gesture and Ben nods. They look satisfied, smug even, as they plot some incumbent senator's demise.
Chris feels a stab of jealousy for the way they understand each other, the kind of shorthand they have developed where simple gestures are as meaningful as five-minute explanations. Ben and Jen only have that because they work together intensely, every single day. Chris wonders if Ben feels the same way about him and Leslie. They don't form quite the close-knit team that Jen and Ben make, but they do work in the same building. Leslie's office is only about a hundred feet from his, they run across each other in the halls all the time, and Chris has more meetings with Councilwoman Knope than with anyone else in city hall.
This is the perfect absurdity of their lives, he thinks. Once it was just Ben and Chris, it was that simple. A lifetime ago, or so it feels. It became Ben and Leslie, Chris and Jen-but also, paradoxically, perversely even, Ben and Jen, Chris and Leslie. God plays dice with the universe after all, throwing the players on the table where they group and re-group, forming ever-new constellations. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it, nothing any of them could or should have done about it.
He shakes his head. It won't do to be thinking about the inevitability of his situation when he's here to change it. The movement of his head is all it takes for them to notice him.
"Hey man." Ben lifts his hand from behind the table.
"Heyyy, Chris!" Jen says, much more enthusiastically, and approaches him.
She smiles, and that's how he knows his girlfriend loves him. It's the way she smiles at him. The difference from her ordinary smile is perhaps not so much in kind as it is in wattage. But she smiled at him like that the second day, after they had sex in a supply closet. She cocked her head and told him she'd miss him, but it was the smile, most of all, that gave him the courage to ask if they could keep it going somehow.
Now that smile also releases a nauseating wave of guilt. He feels like he's going to vomit and then faint. But they never said their relationship was exclusive. In fact, their relationship is not really anything at all, he feels, nothing at all but fun and sex. Still, there is a difference between hooking up with various men for a night here and there in hotel rooms and carrying on with a 25-year-old for over a year. The same 25-year-old to whom he is now renting out his condo.
Jen kisses him hello and leaves Ben to wrap things up for the night. Chris and Ben don't stop to chat or catch up. They never really do now. Chris sees his old partner occasionally when he's with Jen, but he learns more about Ben's life from Leslie than from Ben himself. And Jen is remarkably good about delegating her work when Chris visits. She doesn't pick him up from the airport. She tells him where to meet her, usually some senate office building or a makeshift campaign headquarters in an empty storefront. But she's never left him sitting in her apartment while running off to take care of some Very Important Business either, nothing like that. It's not her style. It's one of the things he loves about her.
The drive to her apartment isn't far, but they get stuck in some DC traffic. The weather is unseasonably cold, sleet forcing drivers to inch forward at an agonizingly slow pace. Chris looks over at Jen.
Her red lips, he thinks. That's another thing he loves about her. Her signature pearl necklace. He loves the sound it makes on the nightstand when she takes it off. The great cascade of her hair. He loves brushing it a hundred strokes. He loves the way Jen undresses in front of him with complete self-confidence. How she'll walk stark naked through the apartment, heedless of whether curious neighbours are watching at their windows. He loves that she can keep up with him, in all things, but never lets him suck her into his supplement-addiction or his scheme of running to the moon. He loves the firmness with which she dismisses her colleagues' phone calls when she wants to remain undisturbed with him. He loves that she can't sleep with his arms around her, but will sometimes, in the early morning, still half asleep, press her face into the centre of his chest. He loves the perpetual slight mess in her apartment. Her extravagant belly laugh. That she never has anything edible around, but will pull strings to get them a table at DC's hottest new restaurant that same night. The way she spends an hour skimming newspapers in three languages every morning. That they can't walk two blocks from her apartment to their regular breakfast place without bumping into three acquaintances of hers, all of whom eye him enviously. The faded jeans and tank top she'll wear on a Sunday morning. The reading glasses that she never wears on the job. The sadness in her eyes when she talks about her grandfather, the Chicagoan postmaster-
"Everything okay?"
He clears his throat. "Yes. Excellent."
"You're quiet."
"I'm sorry. Just thinking."
She narrows her eyes and stops the car. "Okay, well, here we are!"
≈
"So what you're saying is you've been fucking a twenty-something for a year. And you promoted her. And you found her a new job. And she's currently living in a property you own."
Chris buries his head in his hands. He's sitting on her coral-red damask sofa, Jen standing in front of him.
"This is remarkably depraved. I mean, this is practically Washington-political-intrigue-level depraved. And nobody even has the slightest inkling? Hah. The town of Pawnee's even more stupid than I thought!"
"I'm so sorry." Chris looks up her. Jen doesn't look particularly angry. It's hard to tell, but he doesn't think she's about to kick him to the curb, right here right now. If anything, there's a note in her voice of … it's not exactly amusement, no, but maybe something like an appreciation of the incongruity of it all.
"Jen, there is-literally-nothing I can say that would excuse it, so I am not going to try."
Jen crosses her arms in front of her chest.
"But I want you to know that I have feelings for you. Strong feelings. Very strong feelings that haven't been affected by this … affair at all. And I know we've always kept it casual between us, we haven't really been exclusive-" He looks at her questioningly.
"'Course we haven't."
"Exactly." He nods. "But I have realized, through all this, that I don't think I can do that anymore. I don't want to."
"What are you saying?" She sinks down on the armchair opposite him. "You're breaking up with me, is that it?"
"No, I am saying the opposite. That I would like for us to try to have a relationship. A real relationship. Where we see don't go longer than a couple of weeks without seeing each other, take vacations together and don't consider ourselves available for seeing other people, romantically."
Jen has cocked her head and has started playing with a strand of her hair. Chris takes a deep breath.
"I would also like it if you came to Pawnee, every once in a while."
She raises an eyebrow and purses her lips, just slightly.
"Or I would not, theoretically, be unwilling to relocate to Washington. But I would like for us to have a commitment. I would like for us to try. I … well. I found my first grey hair a couple months ago."
Jen is looking at him intently, now with a kind of half-smile.
"I'm not saying it isn't going to be difficult, maybe it'll be the hardest thing you've ever done. But I think we could be quite literally spectacular together, you and I. Don't you?"
Chris has seen this expression on her before, when she first told him she would miss him. When he came to visit her in Washington the second time and she said she really liked him. And, once, in bed during a moment of uncharacteristic emotional honesty, when she said, "You feel amazing, Chris. Being with you feels amazing. I don't know what I did before I met you." It was the closest thing to "I love you" she's ever said.
They regard each other now, calmly, nakedly. He realizes he's holding his breath, and forces himself to take a deep breath in through his nose, filling his lungs completely, and then to breathe out twice as long. It's a while before Jen breaks the silence.
"Yeah. Okay." She clears her throat, then breaks into a grin. "What the hell, right? Let's try!"
"Jen! Barkley!" Her name is emerald and burgundy. And it sparkles.
Chris closes the distance between them faster than should be humanly possible. This feels even better than finally winning the Indiana Breast Cancer Awareness Triathlon three years ago, which is what he would previously have described as easily the best feeling in the world. Saying they'll try is not a guarantee for anything, he knows that. But for the moment at least, he doesn't feel like he is being tossed around by particularly vindictive fates anymore, or like he is losing his entire sense of self. This is the way of the world. Forward motion. Chris feels elated. Every cell of his body vibrates with it, again.