The Trouble with Barney (4/9)
"This is the only way we can be sure everybody's clothes are staying on," he explains, "I take my bets very seriously, Scherbatsky."
He calls her Scherbatsky.
Over and over again, he calls her Scherbatsky.
She nods through the flash of attraction she feels because she seems to remember that he does indeed take gambling a little too seriously and she shouldn’t be surprised that he would turn to flat out babysitting just to be sure she didn’t cheat. But this genuinely feels like a silly waste of his precious corporate time, and certainly a waste of all of his awesomeness and leering wingman capabilities.
Four nights spent just sitting here while Robin gives him the silent treatment.
Ridiculous.
“Can’t you just ask Ted if I’m hooking up with anybody?” she asks flippantly, shrugging one shoulder and lifting the cold beer to her lips as she turns to the sofa and sits down, propping her feet up on the coffee table.
It takes her like ten seconds to realize he’s been quiet for too long. When she glances over at him he’s scratching his eyebrow and the muscles in his jaw are jumping back and forth, his teeth grinding together.
“Not really,” he answers finally when she gives him a pointed look of confusion. He just drinks his beer, then, and she seems to remember this expression on his face from some other time.
Like maybe just after they’d…after he…after Simon and all of that.
She remembers this expression on his face and she remembers Ted’s angry silence and she remembers Barney getting hit by a bus. All of it, in her opinion, ridiculous, so she spits out a question just to be sure things aren’t one thing, and to be sure he doesn’t think things are something else entirely.
“Are you and Ted fighting?” she asks, “Because I really hate that, so just apologize for whatever you did and spare us all the drama.”
He gives her an odd look and then he plops down on the sofa next to her.
“I can’t ask Ted because you two are like the royal king and queen of relapsing,” he accuses, his voice low and irritated and she thinks about what he’s said for a second and then she thinks about the way that he’s said it and she wishes Lily were here to interpret things for her. “Odds are pretty much fifty/fifty that if you’re hooking up with somebody it’s gonna be him.”
It’s not what she expected him to say. Honestly she really doesn’t have an argument for it, except for that the odds are eighty/twenty that if she’s hooking up with somebody it’s gonna be Barney. Not scientifically researched, just a guesstimate. She certainly can’t throw that argument out there so she just sits there, blank-faced and confused by him.
“Ah,” is all she can muster.
Instead of commenting further she fills the strange silence with the glory of television.
It clicks on with a hum at her coaxing, bringing ESPN into focus. She leaves it there, too lazy to surf and find something else to watch, and so they both sit staring at the injury reports and drinking their beer and she’s content to let their conversation drift right out of her mind to be replaced by stats and shooting percentages. She pretends she doesn’t feel his knee bump her thigh during the Vidal Sassoon commercial.
“That dude is totally banging that other anchor,” Barney eventually assesses. She watches the on air dynamic between the two, glad for the distraction, and she chuckles.
“Yeah, definitely.”
Barney starts to add commentary to the scripted discussion the two are having about the new Yankee stadium, saying things that are totally inappropriate and completely amusing to Robin despite the fact that they would definitely make her mother blush.
“Do you think they talk in sports metaphors while they’re doing it?” he wonders quietly, laughing at himself and downing the last of his beer. “Oh baby that’s a hole in one.” The imitation is beautifully done and she nods, giving him a high five, knowing without even looking that he’d raised his hand for one.
“Oh god, right there, I love it when you take it down the middle for a layup,” she counters, her voice hitching and her lips pursing, mocking the woman wearing the lavender suit on screen.
“The ball is all up in your court, I dare you to double dribble.”
“Puck me,” she’s laughing and he laughs too and they clink their now-empty beer bottles, pleased with their witty dialogue because even if it’s something an eighth grade boy would say Barney and Robin usually still find it funny.
This feels better and good and maybe closer to normal until a second or two later when his laughter slows down and she feels him watching her.
And just like that things are weird again.
“What,” she states flatly.
“Why do you relapse with Ted all the time?” The question sounds genuinely curious so she feels she should muster a genuine answer, despite the fact that she’d thought this conversation had ended like a half hour ago.
“Boredom,” she spits automatically, but then she shakes her head, because if she’s honest that’s not quite right. She expands. “Ted’s a nice guy, probably the best guy I’ll ever date. So when I’m not seeing anyone sometimes I just…” She shrugs. It’s embarrassing, really, something she would certainly never admit to anybody except Barney. Lonely is a four letter word in Robin’s book, so she ignores it as often as possible. Not unlike the way she ignores the tug in her chest these days every time Barney’s in the room and not unlike the way she ignores the fact that she’s just confessed something grossly personal to the king of impersonal and shallow.
Only she’s starting to find him less impersonal every day, and less shallow every minute.
She thinks about that for all of three milliseconds before shaking her head and focusing deliberately on the way the water is dripping really slowly from the bathroom sink and she can hear it and Marshall would tell her she’s causing global warming and singlehandedly killing the gorillas so she should really go do something about that…
“You’re delusional,” Barney mutters.
Ok.
She thinks she must’ve heard him wrong. She was talking to herself after all, so there’s a possibility she’d missed something.
“I’m sorry?” she asks.
“You are deluded.”
Yeah…she’d heard him right.
“That’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard you say,” Barney accuses. Getting up, he grabs her empty bottle and moves fast into the kitchen. She hears the refrigerator door open and she offers an incredulous look to the empty living room.
“How is that crazy?”
He scoffs when he comes back, handing her a freezing cold bottle. “Ted is not the best guy you’ll ever date. He is the best guy you’ve dated, but not the best guy you will ever date. There are better men out there,” he promises, raising his eyebrows and tipping his head, “Men with cojones. That is what you need.”
She stares at him. “I need cojones?”
“Yes. You need cojones. You need a challenge."
She thinks of the other night and of Molly and Rita and Die Hard and she thinks she actually agrees with him.
“And,” he drawls, pointing at her, “I hate to be the one to tell you this, but Ted is an old woman.” He gives her that ‘you know I’m right’ facial expression, somehow completely serious and concerned despite his outlandish argument. “You say jump to Ted Willamina Mosby and instead of saying how high he says I can’t, I might throw my back out.”
The imitation draws a smile to her face and she shakes her head.
“I tell you jump? You say…” he pauses in thought “…something awesome like from how many thousand feet. Ted is wrong for you,” he promises again, “And you, Scherbatsky,” he points a finger at her for a second time and grins, “you are delusional.”
Goddamn it he calls her Scherbatsky, and there’s that tug in her chest that she so desperately wishes would go away, but instead of it going away it sits there and it mocks her and she feels endeared and affected and caught up in him so she clenches her jaw until the affection morphs and somehow turns into the anger she’d forgotten about, her hidden irritation floating back up to the surface.
She finds herself thanking god that the anger and irritation have arrived to cover up any of the other emotions she might be feeling. Non-emotions. Whatever else she’s feeling, which is nothing.
“Hold on a second,” she warns.
“What? He is, and you are,” Barney reiterates. “That whole relationship was a waste of your time, and I’m telling you this now because you have that look on your face and I would recognize it any hour of any day from thirty five feet away. You are looking hot and bothered,” he assesses and she feels her neck flush as he watches her, takes her in, grins at her like he can maybe see right through her, but when he opens his mouth she knows he can’t. “Relapse is not the answer, Robin. I’m here to protect you from yourself.”
Funny, she thinks, she wonders if he’d be saying that if he knew what exactly she’d been thinking all day. Actually he probably would say it. The guy always trumpeting the ‘benefits of strange’ knows nothing about relapsing, she reminds herself, and he has most definitely moved on from his Metro-News-One-Night-Stand.
She opens her mouth and lashes out before she can control herself.
“How do you know anything about this, Barney? You have the attention span of a goldfish.”
She’s expecting a scoff. She’s expecting him to accept it, maybe, and move on to more accusations about Ted needing a wheelchair. She’s expecting him to do something sleazy like laugh and nod and straighten his tie in pride, but instead his face goes eerily blank, angry, and - honestly - she’s confused. She’s genuinely surprised. She absolutely didn’t expect that to bother him.
On a separate more self-centered note, she certainly didn’t think it was clear that she was starting to itch for a little one on one action, that itch being the result of all of this abstaining she’d been forced into and definitely not the result of all of the Barney she’d been forced into as a result of all of the abstaining.
She clears her throat and glares at him. “And, by the way, I do not have a look,” she argues feebly.
Now Barney does scoff, but it’s cool and biting and it does not make her feel better.
“You do. And I love winning a bet, but I will not accept my victory if you lose by sleeping with Ted.”
She just stares at him, shocked by this because his tone of voice is icy cold and serious and she had no idea he was so…she just had no idea. She has no idea about much of anything.
She reminds herself to feel angry.
“I will also refuse to accept victory if you lose by sleeping with Simon,” he adds, giving her a pointed look, and she feels her blood pressure kick up a notch, “or Bob. Or what’s his name…oh right,” he snaps his fingers, “TED, who you cheated on Bob with during one of your ten thousand relapses.”
“So if Ted’s so wrong for me,” she interrupts, flustered, challenging him and losing her cool a little bit, “if Ted’s wrong for me and Simon’s wrong for me and Bob’s wrong for me than where does that leave me, Barney?” she asks him, pissed, tired of this and showing it probably a little too much.
He watches her, and her chest tightens and for a second she almost backs down.
Then he shrugs, sighs, shifts in his seat, swallows visibly and takes his blackberry back out of his pocket.
She grabs it from him and he looks at her, surprised.
“Come on, you just totally beat up on an entire year of my life. Actually even more than a year of my life, so, who’s right for me? Who’s my guy, Barney? Drop some knowledge, fill me in on this secret to my happiness that you’ve apparently been holding ransom this whole time. Where is this guy with cojones who’ll challenge me and make my life so much better?”
“I don’t know,” he spits. She thinks maybe he’s lying. “I don’t know who’s right for you but sleeping with Ted over and over again just makes you look,” and he freezes there, thinking twice which sets off warning bells in Robin’s overly-confused brain because Barney hardly ever thinks twice.
“Go ahead,” she demands.
“Whatever, it makes you…both look pathetic,” he finishes, faking some kind of casual attitude and pretending he doesn’t know what he just said.
She practically flinches, the word pathetic bouncing around in her brain like a basketball, the truth in it ringing like the bell in the boxers ring, telling her this game is over. She’s felt too much and pushed too far and she doesn’t understand anything about the look on his face right now, the defensive, veiled, self-protecting look on his face. She doesn’t understand anything about that look except she thinks she might have seen it in the mirror earlier, pinched and irritated, and she knows this bet can’t be worth this.
She knows, but she can’t back down for some reason she does not want to name, and she thinks of the anchors on ESPN. For a second she’s jealous of their faux smiles, because for once she’s having a hard time mustering one.
“Here,” she says and she tosses his phone into his lap. “Go home, Barney.”
He laughs unconvincingly, trying to cover up one thing with something else, and he shakes his head at her.
“Come on,” he mutters. She presses her lips together and shrugs, exhausted. “Hey...don't...Scherbatsky,” he eventually pleads quietly and she feels that pinch and she feels that slip of nostalgia so she turns off the TV and gets up, walking away from him, heading into her bedroom because she so badly wants to be somewhere that he isn’t.
Before she slams the door she thinks about hockey rinks and daddy issues, she thinks about innocent kisses and less-innocent touches and she thinks about suits and bros and boys telling girls that they’re pretty…and she pinches the bridge of her nose in discomfort.
“Don’t call me Scherbatsky,” she tells him, honest and genuine and asking him a favor.
And then she goes to bed.
(Chapter 5)