Simple Truths - RP with kate_kildare
Lorna is working late, and Ana has the night off, so Henry winds up putting Katie to bed. Or, rather, he ends up reading her to sleep on the sofa in the common room, and, just as her breathing has steadied and her eyes flickered shut, the Demeter's security system beeps to signal that an authorized person has entered the building.
Henry sighs in relief, then gives a quick guilty glance toward the child, whose hand is still wrapped tightly around his finger. He likes spending time with Katie -- he's the one who told Ana to go ahead with her plans even though Lorna wasn't back yet -- but actually being the one to tuck her in seems overly familial. He isn't the girl's father, in this reality or any other; it won't do anybody good for him to start forgetting that.
Footsteps sound in the foyer, and Henry gently frees himself from Katie's grip. He tousles her soft curls and, satisfied she is really asleep, walks to the doorway. He hopes Lorna has had a good day. He hopes she'll be more happy to see her daughter resting than upset at missing time with her. He wonders if Lorna will want to make love tonight, and finds himself hoping for that, too -- which is not as foregone a conclusion as it seems. Their love life has revolved so completely around trying to make Lorna happy that Henry doesn't put a lot of energy into thinking about what he wants. But right now -- after some Katie time, and a long talk and a backrub -- well, it all depends on Lorna.
"Sweetheart?" Henry calls across the darkened lobby. "How was your day?"
He has a second to register that the sharp echo on the marble couldn't have been made by the sensible flats Lorna wears to the lab. And then Kate Kildare rounds a corner in Jimmy Choo heels and the little black dress to end little black dresses. "Fine and dandy, sweetheart," she says, giving the last word a Bogart inflection.
She starts to move into the common room, when Henry shoots his arm out across the doorway.
"Don't," he says softly. "I just got Katie to sleep."
Kate doesn't stop walking on time, and so her (mostly visible) cleavage crashes right into his arm. Henry moves out of the way hastily, while Kate tilts her head back to look up at him. She smells like vermouth and Chanel Number 5. "Didn't mean to interrupt your baby-daddy time."
"It's fine. Just -- come in the kitchen. That way we won't bother her, but I can still hear if she gets up."
The small kitchen on the ground floor used to be a self-service wet bar, and looks like it. Kate lifts herself onto one of the stools and slaps her Fendi bag on the counter, while Henry goes to the refrigerator and gets a bottle of Evian for each of them. He puts ice into two glasses.
Kate lets out a sigh. "I don't suppose there's a point in asking if you've got any booze." .
"Nobody who's still on the team drinks." Henry pours water into one of the glasses and hands it to her.
"Right. That's why they're still on the team." She takes the wateranyway, and chugs it.
"Fortunately," Henry says, "you brought your own alcohol supply in your bloodstream."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Do you hate having drunk friends show up at your door? I can't imagine what having drunk friends show up at my door would be like."
Henry twists the top from his bottle and starts to pour. He doesn't look at her. "You can't make me feel guilty over something that happened ten years ago."
"You were a better liar ten years ago, too." He looks up in time to see Kate smirk, and finish the drink.
"What's the angle here, Kate?" he asks her. "You show up at my house -- dressed like this -- drunk -- so, what? My girlfriend walks in, finds us in a compromising position?"
He feels like an idiot as soon as he's said it, and Kate's eyebrows shoot up. "Somebody's been watching too many movies."
"Well, if you've been out partying, and we have to kick you off the team --?"
"Partying? I'm thirty-eight years old, Henry. Give me some credit that if I'm going to get trashed, I'll do it in a socially acceptable way. But no, I -- for your information, I was on a date. With Paolo. My boyfriend. The Portuguese Man o'War."
Henry winces. "That's just disgusting on so many levels."
"Oh, hush, you. It was a perfectly legitimate date. To a nice restaurant, where I consumed -- over three hours, with food -- exactly two vodka martinis and a glass of champagne. Or, as I believe you used to call it, breakfast."
"So why break up the non-party?"
"After dinner, we were supposed to go to a premiere. Of a film, to use the word loosely, which stars, to use the word loosely, one of Paolo's former personal training clients. Paulie helped the man reduce his body mass to six point five percent, without the aid of surgery, and you would not think this was the sort of thing that a person could converse about with his professional colleagues for three hours straight and yet -- as I sat there listening to these pretty boys talk about Angelina Jolie's fat index, I remembered a time when I used to have friends who had actual vocabularies. So I paged myself, told the boys my nonexistent cat was sick, and I came out here."
"You drove?"
"I took a cab."
"Is it waiting outside?"
"Is it -- what? No! God. I have a room here. I have clothes, I have an office. And the only thing I wanted to do less than go to an asinine movie and then have sex with someone I apparently don't even like very much was to go home by myself. So I thought if I came here, you'd talk to me, and even if you didn't I could spend the night and wake up in the morning and we could do some work. Because tomorrow's a workday, and even if everything else sucks we can still work together." She looks up at him. "Right?"
Henry lets out a deep sigh. "Right." He reaches across the counter and puts his hand over hers. "Kate, I'm sorry. I'd like to try and be a better friend. I really would. Just -- with everything that's happened -- with the way you and Lorna haven't gotten along -- I'm sorry if I jumped to any conclusions --" He looks down and sees her lip trembling, her body starting to shake. "Listen --" He puts his arm around her. "Kate --"
"God -- God, Henry --" Her face pushes against his chest and her voice rises up. "God, you are such a pushover."
He steps back from her. He can't believe she's laughing. "Kate --"
"Listen, honeybear --" Kate wipes a tear from her eye. "I meant everything I said about friendship - and work -- and being a team. But I could get you into a compromising position in front of your girlfriend, so easily , and you wouldn't even know what hit you. So. Now that I've proved that point -- " Almost before he can detect the transition, she sits up straight, looking completely sober, and reaches casually into her bag for her StarkPhone. She punches a few buttons to pull up a picture, then slides it across the table toward Henry. "US Weekly goes to press tomorrow. They want to run this. I don't think it's worth fighting, but I wanted to check with you."
Henry turns the phone around and immediately sees a flash of Lorna's green hair. "More canoodling?"
"Well, for your sake, I hope . . .Well, I won't lie, I'm not sure what I hope."
It takes Henry a second to realize that the dark-haired young man Lorna is snuggled against in some Beverly Hills sidewalk café is not him. It only takes a few more seconds -- but enough to feel a sick little surge in his stomach , of the variety that he was pretty sure he should have outgrown around his sophomore year of high school -- to realize what he's looking at. "Oh, Christ, Kate." And now he's breathing again. "I don't care if they run that. That's Jean-Paul Beaubier." He pushes the phone back toward her. "You ought to recognize him if you read those kinds of magazines for a living."
"I know who the very pretty boy is." She slides the phone back into her purse. "I just don't know what he is to Lorna Dane."
Henry turns to his own neglected Evian and starts to pour it over a glass of ice. "That very pretty, very gay boy is one of Lorna's best friends."
"Ahh," Kate says, a hard sound like a door slamming shut. "It's true, then. Henry Hellrung really is every fag hag's dream come true."
He drops the glass. He doesn't even hear it breaking. "What the hell makes you think it's okay to say that?"
"It's not a slur, Henry."
"I don't think you get to decide --" He stops, goes to the doorway, looks to see that Katie hasn't stirred, then turns back to Kate and speaks in a lower voice -- "I don’t think you get to decide what it's okay to call somebody else."
Kate puts a hand out to stop him moving forward, and bends down. "Don't step on that, you moron." She stoops to pick up the broken glass with her hands. "It's not a slur," she repeats, lifting the larger pieces and setting them on the counter. "If anything, it's self-deprecation."
"Oh, come on. You're not -- I'm not -- I swear to God, when you get an idea in your head --"
"When I get an idea in my head?" Kate repeats. She throws the smallest glass shards, blindly, toward the sink, where they clatter in and down the drain. "You're acting like I just made this up out of thin air. Did you not tell me, three years ago, when you and Alison split up -- did you not tell me you didn't like women anymore -- and that was why you were getting divorced?"
"Oh." Henry raises a hand to the back of his neck. "I can't deny that I might have said something like that."
Kate puts a hand on her hip and tilts her head to the side. "Coming out to someone isn't really a thing most people do and just forget."
"Well, I probably explained it in the way that, at the time, seemed simpler --"
"Oh, yeah, I get that." She steps toward him. "Lying is totally easier than telling the truth."
"I didn't say easier, I said simpler. And I also said 'seemed'. It's entirely possible I hadn't been sober long enough to understand how to deal with sex when I was cogent enough to make actual choices. And before I met Lorna, I hadn't slept with a woman since --"
"Since the last time you and Alison tried to conceive the old fashioned way, which was, I'd assume, at least six months before you separated?" Henry doesn't bother to answer, because there's no point in telling her that she's guessed exactly right.
Kate decides, at this moment, to start taking off her shoes.
Henry sits down on the barstool and slumps his head into his hands. "It's not like my relationships with men have ever gotten anywhere." He looks up at her. "Is that what this is about? You can't accept my relationship with Lorna because it means something I told you four years ago might not have been exactly accurate?"
"Henry --" Holding the shoes in her hands, Kate slams one heel down on the counter, pulls herself up onto the stool beside him, and sets down the other more gently. "Henry, please don't be an idiot. I know exactly what happened. You've spent the last four years trying to figure yourself out. Which was never going to happen. It was pretty inevitable, eventually, somebody would make your mind up for you."
"And you think that's what Lorna did? Is that your problem with her?"
As they're talking. Kate puts her hands on the backs of the shoes and starts flipping them up and down, so that the toes tap against the countertop. Under the bar, her bare foot swings and brushes Henry's leg. "Of course she did," she says matter-of-factly. "And no, that's not my problem."
Henry moves his knee away from her, then reaches over and puts his hand down over her knuckles. She looks at him hard, but stops tapping the shoes, and moves her hands away.
"I love Lorna," Henry says.
"Believe it or not, I don't actually doubt that." She slides off the seat and picks up her shoes. "And I'll play nice from now on, with you and with her. Because frankly, keeping up this kind of snit takes a lot of energy that I'm not going to have once the Order is back on its feet. But just to be clear, I don't have a problem with a woman cutting through all your dithering and staking a claim on you. In spite of what a flipping pain in the ass you can be, you're still not a bad catch. So I don't mind."
"You don't?"
"Nope. And I promise, I'm over it. I'm never going to mention it again. I just feel like an idiot when I realize --" She holds the shoes by the straps now and slings them over one shoulder "-- that woman should have been me."
She walks out of the room, and Henry knows there are things he ought to say to her, but none of them seems to amount to very much right now. So he looks in on Katie, who is still fast asleep, and then he comes back to the kitchen and gets on his knees, making sure there won't be any stray glass on the floor when Lorna gets home.
Henry sighs in relief, then gives a quick guilty glance toward the child, whose hand is still wrapped tightly around his finger. He likes spending time with Katie -- he's the one who told Ana to go ahead with her plans even though Lorna wasn't back yet -- but actually being the one to tuck her in seems overly familial. He isn't the girl's father, in this reality or any other; it won't do anybody good for him to start forgetting that.
Footsteps sound in the foyer, and Henry gently frees himself from Katie's grip. He tousles her soft curls and, satisfied she is really asleep, walks to the doorway. He hopes Lorna has had a good day. He hopes she'll be more happy to see her daughter resting than upset at missing time with her. He wonders if Lorna will want to make love tonight, and finds himself hoping for that, too -- which is not as foregone a conclusion as it seems. Their love life has revolved so completely around trying to make Lorna happy that Henry doesn't put a lot of energy into thinking about what he wants. But right now -- after some Katie time, and a long talk and a backrub -- well, it all depends on Lorna.
"Sweetheart?" Henry calls across the darkened lobby. "How was your day?"
He has a second to register that the sharp echo on the marble couldn't have been made by the sensible flats Lorna wears to the lab. And then Kate Kildare rounds a corner in Jimmy Choo heels and the little black dress to end little black dresses. "Fine and dandy, sweetheart," she says, giving the last word a Bogart inflection.
She starts to move into the common room, when Henry shoots his arm out across the doorway.
"Don't," he says softly. "I just got Katie to sleep."
Kate doesn't stop walking on time, and so her (mostly visible) cleavage crashes right into his arm. Henry moves out of the way hastily, while Kate tilts her head back to look up at him. She smells like vermouth and Chanel Number 5. "Didn't mean to interrupt your baby-daddy time."
"It's fine. Just -- come in the kitchen. That way we won't bother her, but I can still hear if she gets up."
The small kitchen on the ground floor used to be a self-service wet bar, and looks like it. Kate lifts herself onto one of the stools and slaps her Fendi bag on the counter, while Henry goes to the refrigerator and gets a bottle of Evian for each of them. He puts ice into two glasses.
Kate lets out a sigh. "I don't suppose there's a point in asking if you've got any booze." .
"Nobody who's still on the team drinks." Henry pours water into one of the glasses and hands it to her.
"Right. That's why they're still on the team." She takes the wateranyway, and chugs it.
"Fortunately," Henry says, "you brought your own alcohol supply in your bloodstream."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Do you hate having drunk friends show up at your door? I can't imagine what having drunk friends show up at my door would be like."
Henry twists the top from his bottle and starts to pour. He doesn't look at her. "You can't make me feel guilty over something that happened ten years ago."
"You were a better liar ten years ago, too." He looks up in time to see Kate smirk, and finish the drink.
"What's the angle here, Kate?" he asks her. "You show up at my house -- dressed like this -- drunk -- so, what? My girlfriend walks in, finds us in a compromising position?"
He feels like an idiot as soon as he's said it, and Kate's eyebrows shoot up. "Somebody's been watching too many movies."
"Well, if you've been out partying, and we have to kick you off the team --?"
"Partying? I'm thirty-eight years old, Henry. Give me some credit that if I'm going to get trashed, I'll do it in a socially acceptable way. But no, I -- for your information, I was on a date. With Paolo. My boyfriend. The Portuguese Man o'War."
Henry winces. "That's just disgusting on so many levels."
"Oh, hush, you. It was a perfectly legitimate date. To a nice restaurant, where I consumed -- over three hours, with food -- exactly two vodka martinis and a glass of champagne. Or, as I believe you used to call it, breakfast."
"So why break up the non-party?"
"After dinner, we were supposed to go to a premiere. Of a film, to use the word loosely, which stars, to use the word loosely, one of Paolo's former personal training clients. Paulie helped the man reduce his body mass to six point five percent, without the aid of surgery, and you would not think this was the sort of thing that a person could converse about with his professional colleagues for three hours straight and yet -- as I sat there listening to these pretty boys talk about Angelina Jolie's fat index, I remembered a time when I used to have friends who had actual vocabularies. So I paged myself, told the boys my nonexistent cat was sick, and I came out here."
"You drove?"
"I took a cab."
"Is it waiting outside?"
"Is it -- what? No! God. I have a room here. I have clothes, I have an office. And the only thing I wanted to do less than go to an asinine movie and then have sex with someone I apparently don't even like very much was to go home by myself. So I thought if I came here, you'd talk to me, and even if you didn't I could spend the night and wake up in the morning and we could do some work. Because tomorrow's a workday, and even if everything else sucks we can still work together." She looks up at him. "Right?"
Henry lets out a deep sigh. "Right." He reaches across the counter and puts his hand over hers. "Kate, I'm sorry. I'd like to try and be a better friend. I really would. Just -- with everything that's happened -- with the way you and Lorna haven't gotten along -- I'm sorry if I jumped to any conclusions --" He looks down and sees her lip trembling, her body starting to shake. "Listen --" He puts his arm around her. "Kate --"
"God -- God, Henry --" Her face pushes against his chest and her voice rises up. "God, you are such a pushover."
He steps back from her. He can't believe she's laughing. "Kate --"
"Listen, honeybear --" Kate wipes a tear from her eye. "I meant everything I said about friendship - and work -- and being a team. But I could get you into a compromising position in front of your girlfriend, so easily , and you wouldn't even know what hit you. So. Now that I've proved that point -- " Almost before he can detect the transition, she sits up straight, looking completely sober, and reaches casually into her bag for her StarkPhone. She punches a few buttons to pull up a picture, then slides it across the table toward Henry. "US Weekly goes to press tomorrow. They want to run this. I don't think it's worth fighting, but I wanted to check with you."
Henry turns the phone around and immediately sees a flash of Lorna's green hair. "More canoodling?"
"Well, for your sake, I hope . . .Well, I won't lie, I'm not sure what I hope."
It takes Henry a second to realize that the dark-haired young man Lorna is snuggled against in some Beverly Hills sidewalk café is not him. It only takes a few more seconds -- but enough to feel a sick little surge in his stomach , of the variety that he was pretty sure he should have outgrown around his sophomore year of high school -- to realize what he's looking at. "Oh, Christ, Kate." And now he's breathing again. "I don't care if they run that. That's Jean-Paul Beaubier." He pushes the phone back toward her. "You ought to recognize him if you read those kinds of magazines for a living."
"I know who the very pretty boy is." She slides the phone back into her purse. "I just don't know what he is to Lorna Dane."
Henry turns to his own neglected Evian and starts to pour it over a glass of ice. "That very pretty, very gay boy is one of Lorna's best friends."
"Ahh," Kate says, a hard sound like a door slamming shut. "It's true, then. Henry Hellrung really is every fag hag's dream come true."
He drops the glass. He doesn't even hear it breaking. "What the hell makes you think it's okay to say that?"
"It's not a slur, Henry."
"I don't think you get to decide --" He stops, goes to the doorway, looks to see that Katie hasn't stirred, then turns back to Kate and speaks in a lower voice -- "I don’t think you get to decide what it's okay to call somebody else."
Kate puts a hand out to stop him moving forward, and bends down. "Don't step on that, you moron." She stoops to pick up the broken glass with her hands. "It's not a slur," she repeats, lifting the larger pieces and setting them on the counter. "If anything, it's self-deprecation."
"Oh, come on. You're not -- I'm not -- I swear to God, when you get an idea in your head --"
"When I get an idea in my head?" Kate repeats. She throws the smallest glass shards, blindly, toward the sink, where they clatter in and down the drain. "You're acting like I just made this up out of thin air. Did you not tell me, three years ago, when you and Alison split up -- did you not tell me you didn't like women anymore -- and that was why you were getting divorced?"
"Oh." Henry raises a hand to the back of his neck. "I can't deny that I might have said something like that."
Kate puts a hand on her hip and tilts her head to the side. "Coming out to someone isn't really a thing most people do and just forget."
"Well, I probably explained it in the way that, at the time, seemed simpler --"
"Oh, yeah, I get that." She steps toward him. "Lying is totally easier than telling the truth."
"I didn't say easier, I said simpler. And I also said 'seemed'. It's entirely possible I hadn't been sober long enough to understand how to deal with sex when I was cogent enough to make actual choices. And before I met Lorna, I hadn't slept with a woman since --"
"Since the last time you and Alison tried to conceive the old fashioned way, which was, I'd assume, at least six months before you separated?" Henry doesn't bother to answer, because there's no point in telling her that she's guessed exactly right.
Kate decides, at this moment, to start taking off her shoes.
Henry sits down on the barstool and slumps his head into his hands. "It's not like my relationships with men have ever gotten anywhere." He looks up at her. "Is that what this is about? You can't accept my relationship with Lorna because it means something I told you four years ago might not have been exactly accurate?"
"Henry --" Holding the shoes in her hands, Kate slams one heel down on the counter, pulls herself up onto the stool beside him, and sets down the other more gently. "Henry, please don't be an idiot. I know exactly what happened. You've spent the last four years trying to figure yourself out. Which was never going to happen. It was pretty inevitable, eventually, somebody would make your mind up for you."
"And you think that's what Lorna did? Is that your problem with her?"
As they're talking. Kate puts her hands on the backs of the shoes and starts flipping them up and down, so that the toes tap against the countertop. Under the bar, her bare foot swings and brushes Henry's leg. "Of course she did," she says matter-of-factly. "And no, that's not my problem."
Henry moves his knee away from her, then reaches over and puts his hand down over her knuckles. She looks at him hard, but stops tapping the shoes, and moves her hands away.
"I love Lorna," Henry says.
"Believe it or not, I don't actually doubt that." She slides off the seat and picks up her shoes. "And I'll play nice from now on, with you and with her. Because frankly, keeping up this kind of snit takes a lot of energy that I'm not going to have once the Order is back on its feet. But just to be clear, I don't have a problem with a woman cutting through all your dithering and staking a claim on you. In spite of what a flipping pain in the ass you can be, you're still not a bad catch. So I don't mind."
"You don't?"
"Nope. And I promise, I'm over it. I'm never going to mention it again. I just feel like an idiot when I realize --" She holds the shoes by the straps now and slings them over one shoulder "-- that woman should have been me."
She walks out of the room, and Henry knows there are things he ought to say to her, but none of them seems to amount to very much right now. So he looks in on Katie, who is still fast asleep, and then he comes back to the kitchen and gets on his knees, making sure there won't be any stray glass on the floor when Lorna gets home.