(no subject)
Title: Dinner (even though, um, that was a long time ago) part 4 (last part? or perhaps penultimate part? we'll see)
Spoilers: Up 'til episode 5, plus I guess the Rex/Maisy stuff
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If I owned them, would he have died? I think not.
Bree pulled away from her husband and blinked rapidly, silently willing her eyes to return to normal.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “We did say that we’d discuss this in the morning after all. I’m going to go change.” Coldness seemed to emanate from her body as she walked away, and Rex shivered. Bree managed to muster so much dignity, even when tear-stained and barely clothed.
Rex waited, barely moving, barely thinking, in the hallway until a reasonable interval of time had passed. Then he almost tiptoed into their-or perhaps “her”-bedroom and peered through the doorframe. She had changed into one of her plain white cotton nightgowns and was sitting in her gable as she peered out the window.
“Done?” he asked timidly. Bree nodded, and so he walked over to the bed and pulled down the sheets. It was hard to imagine, he realized as he glanced at the clock, but it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Rex was dead tired and the night was only getting longer and longer as he stumbled into bed. Bree waited a few minutes, watching as he got himself settled; then she carefully walked over and climbed in next to him, being careful not to let her body touch her husband’s. He fell asleep quickly, but she lay awake for some time.
As she listened to him sleep, Bree was struck with a sudden fierce possessiveness. He was hers and no one else’s, and she didn’t want to share. His heart and his mind and his body belonged to her and she wanted them. And, well, then how could she not forgive him in the morning.
But then she heard Maisy Gibbons moaning in ecstasy with Rex on top of her…or was she maybe on top, and did he cry when he came with Maisy or were those tears reserved for his wife?
No. These thoughts were just going to drive her crazy. It was better not to know and just to move on.
But she couldn’t.
But she loved him, and he wanted her back, and why couldn’t that have been enough?
She suddenly wished that she had never found out. They could have pretended it had never happened if only she hadn’t found out, if only she hadn’t listened to the serpent and eaten the apple and forced them both to live with the painful consequences. If only he had decided that he wanted her again before they’d come upstairs…if only she hadn’t been so blatant in her come-ons…if only…if only he hadn’t slept with their neighbor and ruined her trust and broken her world into thousands of pieces.
At least he was being honest with her.
Still, it hurt to look at him.
It hurt to look away from him.
It hurt to touch him.
It hurt not to be able to touch him.
It just hurt.
She was too worn out to cry, so she just fell asleep and hoped that everything would look better in the morning. Maybe, just maybe, she would get lucky and everything would turn out to have been nothing more than a bad dream. Mary Alice would still be alive and happy. Zach would not have problems…Andrew would be well behaved…and Rex would be the husband she’d always wanted him to be.
No. He’d be the husband he’d been when they were first married. Now that she thought about it, that was what she really wanted, anyway.
And it almost worked. When the morning light streamed in through the east-facing window, Bree van de Kamp awoke to the warm, comfortable feeling of the end of a restful sleep and her husband’s arms around her. In the brief moment before consciousness hit her, everything was perfect. Then it all came crashing down, and she pulled away from Rex and got out of bed.
He lay there, so still, and she stood watching him for a long moment. She liked her husband best, these days, when he was asleep. He couldn’t hurt her when he was sleeping, couldn’t tell her that he didn’t feel like having sex tonight, honey, couldn’t complain about her fastidiousness or her taste in flowers or music and certainly couldn’t make love with anyone else. No, when he was sleeping peacefully in her bed, he belonged wholly to her and she could, if she cared to, pretend that life was beautiful until he woke and shattered the lovely illusion.
There would be no more pretending for her this morning. Bree walked over and prepared to wake Rex, but she was reluctant.
Couldn’t she pretend until she’d finished showering?
He was tired. Would it really be wise to wake him just to wake him? Wouldn’t it be kinder just to let him sleep?
Did she really feel like being kind?
Her hands went lightly to his shoulders, her fingers beginning to gently massage them.
“Rex. Rex,” she said, her whisper smooth and caressing. “Rex, wake up.”
In the half-dream that exists between the fogginess of sleep and the harsh reality of the waking hours, Rex could only hear the sound of his wife’s voice and feel her hands on his body and so he lingered in sleep as long as he could so that he could enjoy the sensations without having to accept the way he’d managed to screw over his life.
“Rex, darling, damnit, wake up!” And there it was: the beautiful and intriguing paradox that was his wife, simultaneously loving and harsh, the endearment followed immediately by what was for her coarse language.
“I’m awake,” he said groggily, immediately, as he began to sit up and rub his eyes. “Good morning, beautiful.” She pulled back and he inwardly kicked himself.
“Good morning,” Bree told him stiffly, but she didn’t say anything more and she didn’t pull the blankets away from him but just let him sit there, leaning against the pillows as he finished waking up.
He looked at her and suddenly didn’t want to look at anything else. Yes, his wife was an incomprehensible paradox, but that was why he loved her. She could revile him and cry over him and tell him in no uncertain terms that she wanted him gone, and still she took care of him and was polite to him and it was maddening that he couldn’t figure out whether or not he had a chance with her. Now that he thought about it, she’d always been this way. Even when he had first met her, she had kept him guessing. He could still hear her young voice in his head as they agreed that Rehnquist’s concurrence in Gregg v. Georgia had been brilliant and her pretty laughter as they trashed each and every one of Earl Warren’s decisions, “may he rest in peace.” He had walked her back to her dorm that night madly in love, and much later had learned that she had felt the same way, but at the time he’d had no idea whether or not he was ever going to see the beautiful, elusive young woman again.
She still kept him guessing more than twenty years later, only this time it was even worse, because now he was more than madly in love with her. Now he was her husband and she was his wife and there was a soft voice in the back of his mind that kept murmuring, “You can’t live without her.”
“I’m going to take a shower now,” she said coolly. “I won’t be long.” She turned slowly, and the voice in the back of his mind hissed at him, “Say something.”
“Bree?”
She turned back towards him, eyebrows raised, and he motioned her over.
“Sit down. I need to talk to you.” And he looked as if he meant it, so she walked over to the bed and sat next to his feet, which he then swung over the edge of the bed so that he could put his arm around her. She stiffened but didn’t push him away.
“Bree, honey,” said Rex, trying to organize his thoughts which were still only one sentence ahead of his mouth.
“Yes?” she said, and she looked at him with those arresting green eyes, and she was beautiful and she was vulnerable and she was dangerous and she was…
Well, whatever she was or was not, he couldn’t live without her and there was no point in even pretending that he could.
“Do you remember the day we met?” Surprised, she smiled at the fond memory.
“Of course I do. How could I ever forget?”
“You were wearing a yellow dress,” he continued, “and white sandals with high heels that made you taller than I am.”
“I didn’t really like them,” she said reminiscently, “but they were a gift from my stepmother, and I liked that she’d at least pretended to love me the way that a mother would have,” Bree told him as she fiddled with her engagement ring, and he pulled her closer to him. “Although I suppose there was a hint of maliciousness even there,” she added with a smile that was half whimsical, half regretful.
“What do you mean?”
“They were a going-to-college present given one week before Labor Day.” He thought about that for a moment before it dawned on him.
“It’s tacky to wear white shoes after Labor Day?”
“Unless you’re a bride,” she agreed. They sat in silence for a moment before he continued.
“And you had long hair that sort of fell around your shoulders, not quite curly and not quite straight, and it was gorgeously, brilliantly red, so much so that I wondered if it was your natural color. Or I would have, if I could’ve thought properly.”
“I wouldn’t have picked red hair, anyway, if it had been my choice,” Bree mused. “I always had to be the harlot in Bible school plays. Mary Magdalene, the reformed sinner-that was me.”
“That’s why it wasn’t your choice,” Rex told her seriously as he ran his fingers through the offensively colored hair. “I looked at you, and you…you were a goddess. You were my Diana.”
“Diana?” she asked, puzzled. “The goddess of the hunt?”
“Yes,” he said firmly, “Diana, goddess of the hunt, but protector of the wild animals. Guardian of women in childbirth, but forever a maiden and never a mother herself. She was a paradox, just like you. And she was beautiful and she was athletic and intelligent and well born, and she was chaste. She was everything a man could want and yet no man ever got her.” His hand dropped from her hair back to her waist.
“And then there was the day that I asked you to marry me, and it was the most nerve-racking day of my life, and I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been a little bit drunk because as long as I didn’t ask you, you couldn’t say ‘no.’ But you said ‘yes,’” Rex said, and his face unconsciously registered a vague disbelief. “And I thought, then, that I could never love you more than I did that day, that no man could ever love a woman more than I loved you. But, see, I did.”
Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no…
She had lost the upper hand. He was in love with Maisy, not just sleeping with her, not just breaking his wedding vows but shattering them into a million pieces. He didn’t want her back anymore and now he was explaining why. She should’ve just taken the shower, but no, she had had to listen to him, had had to eat yet another apple even though she knew that it was wrong. And now he was gone and, oh, but she still wanted him and she still needed him and he was about to break her heart again.
“I meant you,” Rex said softly as he saw the fear that flashed across his wife’s face. “Oh, God, how I love you,” and his arm tightened around her waist to the point that he was afraid that he was going to hurt her. “I loved you-I love you-so much that I would have been-was-willing to give up everything that I wanted to be the husband you wanted. And finally…finally it dawned on me that I was missing something, that there was something that I wanted that I wasn’t getting.”
“Rex, if there was anything you wanted from me…”
“I didn’t want to ask you. Just like I didn’t want to ask you to marry me. You could’ve said ‘no.’”
“I would never have said ‘no’ to you, darling,” she said seriously. “Never.”
“But…but you would’ve wished you had,” and his voice was a whisper now. “And I couldn’t do that to you, no matter how angry you made me. I…I didn’t want to make you do anything you didn’t want to do.” She said nothing for a moment as she looked down at her hands and he slowly rubbed her back. Suddenly she reached for his other hand, his left hand, which had been resting in his lap. She caressed his wedding ring gently, the wedding ring she had put on his finger nearly eighteen years ago, and the intimate gesture threw him.
“‘With this ring, I thee wed,’” she quoted softly. “‘With my body, I thee worship.’”
“‘And with all my worldly goods, I thee endow, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’” he said along with her, gripping the hand that he now remembered wore his ring.
“I don’t take that promise lightly,” she said quietly. “You are my husband. If there’s something you want…something you need…I want to be the one to give it to you. Always.”
“I’m not sure if you’ll feel that way once you hear what it is,” he said, hesitating.
“But can you really live with the not knowing?” she asked quietly. “Sometimes, you just have to eat the apple…open the box…and know the truth.”
For any non-Americans, Gregg v. Georgia was a 1976 Supreme Court ruling passed under the Burger court that made the death penalty legal again, reversing the decision of 1972's Furman v. Georgia. William Rehnquist wrote a concurrence to the majority, which means that he agreed with the majority opinion (death penalty = Constitutional), but for different reasons. Have I read his whole concurrence? No, and it's complicated, and I don't entirely understand it...but I thought that Bree and Rex might have. Earl Warren was also a Supreme Court Justice, the Chief Justice during some pretty important liberal stuff. Not that I think that Bree and Rex would have disagreed with Brown v. Board of Ed...but I generally figured that they would not have been fans of his. He died in '74.
Enough history. Hope everyone enjoyed. Yay for comments!
Spoilers: Up 'til episode 5, plus I guess the Rex/Maisy stuff
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: If I owned them, would he have died? I think not.
Bree pulled away from her husband and blinked rapidly, silently willing her eyes to return to normal.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “We did say that we’d discuss this in the morning after all. I’m going to go change.” Coldness seemed to emanate from her body as she walked away, and Rex shivered. Bree managed to muster so much dignity, even when tear-stained and barely clothed.
Rex waited, barely moving, barely thinking, in the hallway until a reasonable interval of time had passed. Then he almost tiptoed into their-or perhaps “her”-bedroom and peered through the doorframe. She had changed into one of her plain white cotton nightgowns and was sitting in her gable as she peered out the window.
“Done?” he asked timidly. Bree nodded, and so he walked over to the bed and pulled down the sheets. It was hard to imagine, he realized as he glanced at the clock, but it wasn’t even ten o’clock yet. Rex was dead tired and the night was only getting longer and longer as he stumbled into bed. Bree waited a few minutes, watching as he got himself settled; then she carefully walked over and climbed in next to him, being careful not to let her body touch her husband’s. He fell asleep quickly, but she lay awake for some time.
As she listened to him sleep, Bree was struck with a sudden fierce possessiveness. He was hers and no one else’s, and she didn’t want to share. His heart and his mind and his body belonged to her and she wanted them. And, well, then how could she not forgive him in the morning.
But then she heard Maisy Gibbons moaning in ecstasy with Rex on top of her…or was she maybe on top, and did he cry when he came with Maisy or were those tears reserved for his wife?
No. These thoughts were just going to drive her crazy. It was better not to know and just to move on.
But she couldn’t.
But she loved him, and he wanted her back, and why couldn’t that have been enough?
She suddenly wished that she had never found out. They could have pretended it had never happened if only she hadn’t found out, if only she hadn’t listened to the serpent and eaten the apple and forced them both to live with the painful consequences. If only he had decided that he wanted her again before they’d come upstairs…if only she hadn’t been so blatant in her come-ons…if only…if only he hadn’t slept with their neighbor and ruined her trust and broken her world into thousands of pieces.
At least he was being honest with her.
Still, it hurt to look at him.
It hurt to look away from him.
It hurt to touch him.
It hurt not to be able to touch him.
It just hurt.
She was too worn out to cry, so she just fell asleep and hoped that everything would look better in the morning. Maybe, just maybe, she would get lucky and everything would turn out to have been nothing more than a bad dream. Mary Alice would still be alive and happy. Zach would not have problems…Andrew would be well behaved…and Rex would be the husband she’d always wanted him to be.
No. He’d be the husband he’d been when they were first married. Now that she thought about it, that was what she really wanted, anyway.
And it almost worked. When the morning light streamed in through the east-facing window, Bree van de Kamp awoke to the warm, comfortable feeling of the end of a restful sleep and her husband’s arms around her. In the brief moment before consciousness hit her, everything was perfect. Then it all came crashing down, and she pulled away from Rex and got out of bed.
He lay there, so still, and she stood watching him for a long moment. She liked her husband best, these days, when he was asleep. He couldn’t hurt her when he was sleeping, couldn’t tell her that he didn’t feel like having sex tonight, honey, couldn’t complain about her fastidiousness or her taste in flowers or music and certainly couldn’t make love with anyone else. No, when he was sleeping peacefully in her bed, he belonged wholly to her and she could, if she cared to, pretend that life was beautiful until he woke and shattered the lovely illusion.
There would be no more pretending for her this morning. Bree walked over and prepared to wake Rex, but she was reluctant.
Couldn’t she pretend until she’d finished showering?
He was tired. Would it really be wise to wake him just to wake him? Wouldn’t it be kinder just to let him sleep?
Did she really feel like being kind?
Her hands went lightly to his shoulders, her fingers beginning to gently massage them.
“Rex. Rex,” she said, her whisper smooth and caressing. “Rex, wake up.”
In the half-dream that exists between the fogginess of sleep and the harsh reality of the waking hours, Rex could only hear the sound of his wife’s voice and feel her hands on his body and so he lingered in sleep as long as he could so that he could enjoy the sensations without having to accept the way he’d managed to screw over his life.
“Rex, darling, damnit, wake up!” And there it was: the beautiful and intriguing paradox that was his wife, simultaneously loving and harsh, the endearment followed immediately by what was for her coarse language.
“I’m awake,” he said groggily, immediately, as he began to sit up and rub his eyes. “Good morning, beautiful.” She pulled back and he inwardly kicked himself.
“Good morning,” Bree told him stiffly, but she didn’t say anything more and she didn’t pull the blankets away from him but just let him sit there, leaning against the pillows as he finished waking up.
He looked at her and suddenly didn’t want to look at anything else. Yes, his wife was an incomprehensible paradox, but that was why he loved her. She could revile him and cry over him and tell him in no uncertain terms that she wanted him gone, and still she took care of him and was polite to him and it was maddening that he couldn’t figure out whether or not he had a chance with her. Now that he thought about it, she’d always been this way. Even when he had first met her, she had kept him guessing. He could still hear her young voice in his head as they agreed that Rehnquist’s concurrence in Gregg v. Georgia had been brilliant and her pretty laughter as they trashed each and every one of Earl Warren’s decisions, “may he rest in peace.” He had walked her back to her dorm that night madly in love, and much later had learned that she had felt the same way, but at the time he’d had no idea whether or not he was ever going to see the beautiful, elusive young woman again.
She still kept him guessing more than twenty years later, only this time it was even worse, because now he was more than madly in love with her. Now he was her husband and she was his wife and there was a soft voice in the back of his mind that kept murmuring, “You can’t live without her.”
“I’m going to take a shower now,” she said coolly. “I won’t be long.” She turned slowly, and the voice in the back of his mind hissed at him, “Say something.”
“Bree?”
She turned back towards him, eyebrows raised, and he motioned her over.
“Sit down. I need to talk to you.” And he looked as if he meant it, so she walked over to the bed and sat next to his feet, which he then swung over the edge of the bed so that he could put his arm around her. She stiffened but didn’t push him away.
“Bree, honey,” said Rex, trying to organize his thoughts which were still only one sentence ahead of his mouth.
“Yes?” she said, and she looked at him with those arresting green eyes, and she was beautiful and she was vulnerable and she was dangerous and she was…
Well, whatever she was or was not, he couldn’t live without her and there was no point in even pretending that he could.
“Do you remember the day we met?” Surprised, she smiled at the fond memory.
“Of course I do. How could I ever forget?”
“You were wearing a yellow dress,” he continued, “and white sandals with high heels that made you taller than I am.”
“I didn’t really like them,” she said reminiscently, “but they were a gift from my stepmother, and I liked that she’d at least pretended to love me the way that a mother would have,” Bree told him as she fiddled with her engagement ring, and he pulled her closer to him. “Although I suppose there was a hint of maliciousness even there,” she added with a smile that was half whimsical, half regretful.
“What do you mean?”
“They were a going-to-college present given one week before Labor Day.” He thought about that for a moment before it dawned on him.
“It’s tacky to wear white shoes after Labor Day?”
“Unless you’re a bride,” she agreed. They sat in silence for a moment before he continued.
“And you had long hair that sort of fell around your shoulders, not quite curly and not quite straight, and it was gorgeously, brilliantly red, so much so that I wondered if it was your natural color. Or I would have, if I could’ve thought properly.”
“I wouldn’t have picked red hair, anyway, if it had been my choice,” Bree mused. “I always had to be the harlot in Bible school plays. Mary Magdalene, the reformed sinner-that was me.”
“That’s why it wasn’t your choice,” Rex told her seriously as he ran his fingers through the offensively colored hair. “I looked at you, and you…you were a goddess. You were my Diana.”
“Diana?” she asked, puzzled. “The goddess of the hunt?”
“Yes,” he said firmly, “Diana, goddess of the hunt, but protector of the wild animals. Guardian of women in childbirth, but forever a maiden and never a mother herself. She was a paradox, just like you. And she was beautiful and she was athletic and intelligent and well born, and she was chaste. She was everything a man could want and yet no man ever got her.” His hand dropped from her hair back to her waist.
“And then there was the day that I asked you to marry me, and it was the most nerve-racking day of my life, and I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been a little bit drunk because as long as I didn’t ask you, you couldn’t say ‘no.’ But you said ‘yes,’” Rex said, and his face unconsciously registered a vague disbelief. “And I thought, then, that I could never love you more than I did that day, that no man could ever love a woman more than I loved you. But, see, I did.”
Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no…
She had lost the upper hand. He was in love with Maisy, not just sleeping with her, not just breaking his wedding vows but shattering them into a million pieces. He didn’t want her back anymore and now he was explaining why. She should’ve just taken the shower, but no, she had had to listen to him, had had to eat yet another apple even though she knew that it was wrong. And now he was gone and, oh, but she still wanted him and she still needed him and he was about to break her heart again.
“I meant you,” Rex said softly as he saw the fear that flashed across his wife’s face. “Oh, God, how I love you,” and his arm tightened around her waist to the point that he was afraid that he was going to hurt her. “I loved you-I love you-so much that I would have been-was-willing to give up everything that I wanted to be the husband you wanted. And finally…finally it dawned on me that I was missing something, that there was something that I wanted that I wasn’t getting.”
“Rex, if there was anything you wanted from me…”
“I didn’t want to ask you. Just like I didn’t want to ask you to marry me. You could’ve said ‘no.’”
“I would never have said ‘no’ to you, darling,” she said seriously. “Never.”
“But…but you would’ve wished you had,” and his voice was a whisper now. “And I couldn’t do that to you, no matter how angry you made me. I…I didn’t want to make you do anything you didn’t want to do.” She said nothing for a moment as she looked down at her hands and he slowly rubbed her back. Suddenly she reached for his other hand, his left hand, which had been resting in his lap. She caressed his wedding ring gently, the wedding ring she had put on his finger nearly eighteen years ago, and the intimate gesture threw him.
“‘With this ring, I thee wed,’” she quoted softly. “‘With my body, I thee worship.’”
“‘And with all my worldly goods, I thee endow, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’” he said along with her, gripping the hand that he now remembered wore his ring.
“I don’t take that promise lightly,” she said quietly. “You are my husband. If there’s something you want…something you need…I want to be the one to give it to you. Always.”
“I’m not sure if you’ll feel that way once you hear what it is,” he said, hesitating.
“But can you really live with the not knowing?” she asked quietly. “Sometimes, you just have to eat the apple…open the box…and know the truth.”
For any non-Americans, Gregg v. Georgia was a 1976 Supreme Court ruling passed under the Burger court that made the death penalty legal again, reversing the decision of 1972's Furman v. Georgia. William Rehnquist wrote a concurrence to the majority, which means that he agreed with the majority opinion (death penalty = Constitutional), but for different reasons. Have I read his whole concurrence? No, and it's complicated, and I don't entirely understand it...but I thought that Bree and Rex might have. Earl Warren was also a Supreme Court Justice, the Chief Justice during some pretty important liberal stuff. Not that I think that Bree and Rex would have disagreed with Brown v. Board of Ed...but I generally figured that they would not have been fans of his. He died in '74.
Enough history. Hope everyone enjoyed. Yay for comments!