'Storm in the Heartland' [Angie Harmon/Stephanie March, Angie Harmon/Kristin Chenoweth] [2/2]
Title: "Storm in the Heartland"
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: Misc. actress RPF
Art: HERE, by karneol_vision
Rating: R
Warnings: Het, sexual themes
Pairing: Angie Harmon/Stephanie March, Angie Harmon/Kristin Chenoweth, (Angie Harmon/Jason Sehorn)
Word Count: ~15,000
Summary/Disclaimer/Author's Notes: See Part One.
Part One.
---<---<---@
Jason tells her later that his mom had turned back to talk to her against his will - not that he hadn’t been interested, but he’d just gone through a divorce and wanted to stay clear of women for a while.
Despite that, they soon found themselves at dinner and a movie that was mediocre at best but would change both of their lives forever.
--
Jason makes Angie feels like no-one ever has before. She remembers tinges of these kinds of emotions with Steph, but their relationship was so long ago and got derailed so quickly, and she doesn’t like to think about it because it brings back memories of her dripping pool water all over Mrs. March’s kitchen floor.
She and Jason talk about buying a house together and having children, and she wants to pinch herself because nothing in her past had made her think she was special enough for this strong, supportive man who wants to make a life with her - with her. She gets the absurd urge from time to time to ask if he’s confused her with someone else, someone more worthy of him, because she’s just… she’s not that good.
--
It’s Jay Leno of all people who asks her if she wants to marry Jason. They’re backstage at his show, which she’s been invited to appear on for no reason she can fathom. Sure, she acts on Law & Order, but it’s an ensemble cast and all the other members are a lot more interesting than she is. The other guest on the show tonight is Elton John, and just… really?
“I hear you’re pretty serious with this guy,” Jay says, sitting in a spare chair in her dressing room with one leg crossed over the other, exposing a black sock. She watches his show on occasion, thinks he’s funny and nice and doesn’t mean any harm, but she’s already told him she doesn’t like to talk about her personal life in public and requests again that he avoid the topic during the interview.
“Sure, sure, I understand,” Jay says in that enigmatic Leno way of his, an earnestness in his eyes that she hopes is sincere. “But do you think you guys are going to get married?”
She feels the heat prickling up her neck, all the way to her cheekbones. “Definitely,” she murmurs.
--
She figures Jay just asked her those things backstage as a way of blowing off steam, satisfying his curiosity while not making the rest of the country privy to the information, so when he brings up Jason during the interview, she can barely believe it. No-one warned her he was like this, that he directly disobeyed people’s wishes live on the air, and she thinks she’ll definitely be more famous than Dick Wolf if she goes to jail for killing Jay Leno.
--
When Jay calls Jason onto the stage in front of Elton John, the studio audience, and a good portion of the American public, she wants to sink into the ground. She’s about to get up and hug Jason and murmur into his ear that she is never doing The Tonight Show again as long as she lives when he drops to one knee in front of her, and it feels like she’s sucking all the air out of the room with her gasp.
--
A couple of months after they get engaged, Angie hears through the grapevine that the powers that be hired a long-term Assistant District Attorney for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit following the success of season one - a relief for her, because Abbie had to do double duty for homicide and sex crimes for a while there, and thus, so too had Angie.
The person she gets the information from doesn’t have a lot more details - the actress isn’t well known, basically just has a bit part in Early Edition and some theater work to her name, along with a surname that’s also a month, which makes her sound like a calendar girl. Angie snickers when she hears this. Knowing Dick Wolf and co.’s penchant for a pretty face, it isn’t too hard to believe.
She doesn’t find out the new girl’s actual name for a while after that, and when she hears it’s Stephanie March, she just about falls over.
--
She never told Jason about Steph - nor anybody else, for that matter - and when he picks up on the fact that something’s going on with her, she considers changing that state of affairs but ultimately decides against it because she can’t bear the thought of him looking at her differently. If she tells him, who’s to know that he won’t kiss her lips and think of how they were once pressed to another girl’s forever afterwards? His whole perception of her might change, and she figures she’s better off keeping it her dirty little secret, something no-one would ever think of associating with all-American Angie from the Texas heartland.
--
She avoids having to face Steph for as long as possible, but inevitably there’ll be an industry event or a Law & Order crossover cameo that will make their paths cross, and sooner or later, her luck is going to run out. She pushes it to the back of her mind, makes wedding plans and throws herself into her work and her friends and her fiancé instead. She’s marrying Jason in Texas, at the church she used to attend every weekend growing up, and they’re serving beef tenderloin and chicken, and she’ll be wearing Vera Wang, and that’s what she needs to focus on right now.
She hands in her notice over at Law & Order, asks the writers to give Abbie a fiery death - something really dramatic, so she can go out with a bang - but they decide to have the character transfer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. instead. She’s pretty sure they’re keeping the door ajar for her to come back someday, although she’s staying firm about wanting to focus on movie work and spend time with her new husband.
She’s partway through her last season when it occurs to her she might get away with it - that she and Steph may not have to come face-to-face, and she may have successfully dodged a bullet and managed to keep her past in the past.
Of course, a little while after that, she’s proved wrong.
--
Steph’s… filled out now. Her hips are wider and her hair’s a little different, but she wears it long and straight and down past her shoulders just like she used to. She’s still kind of butch, too - a word Angie didn’t know in that past life when they knew each other, and can only articulate now - but she mitigates it with fitted jeans, a girly V-neck, and some dangly earrings. They don’t seem true to her image, or at least the image Angie has in her head from high school: the free spirit with the golden blonde hair, a man’s shirt draped loosely over her lean frame. She wonders if Steph just grew out of that phase or whether there was a point in her life that she decided to change herself, looked in the mirror and didn’t like what stared back at her.
As much as she’d tried to put Steph out of her head for all those years, nothing could stop Angie’s memories returning from time to time. It was odd things that piqued her recollections, oddly specific ones, like photo booths in malls and the Cure song that was on the car radio the day they first kissed - you, strange as angels, dancing in the deepest oceans, just like a dream. She hadn’t spoken to Steph again after the night Mrs. March walked in on them, and it sounds terrible that she didn’t fight for her, didn’t even try to say goodbye, but the circumstances were something no-one could hope to understand unless they’d been in the same situation, terrified of an authority figure who could ruin their whole lives as they knew them. She’d catch herself thinking about it sometimes, wondering whether Mrs. March had been bluffing or her threat to expose the relationship had been a real one, and whether it even mattered now after such a long passage of time.
There’s so much left unsaid and Angie wishes they could properly talk about this, but they’re at an industry event and it’s so not the right time. Mariska’s here, everyone’s here, and she’s not sure how much anyone knows but she’s sure Steph wouldn’t have said much, if anything.
“Good to finally meet you,” Steph says smoothly. Her tone is friendly but professional, and Angie hasn’t seen any of her work but, jeez, based on this performance, Steph should be up for a damn Oscar. She didn’t know Steph was into acting - although, back when they knew each other, she didn’t know she’d be into acting either.
“Angie Harmon,” Angie responds, mimicking Steph’s brisk, polite tone as she goes along with the charade of this being their first encounter. “I think I saw you around Highland Park a few times. I, ah. I knew your brother.”
A brief shadow passes across Steph’s face, and it’s nothing anyone else would catch but, God, she remembers, she remembers the time Angie dropped all her school books just to have an excuse to talk to her, and Angie doesn’t know if that makes the whole situation better or worse.
“Wow, it’s such a small world, isn’t it?” Mariska gushes from beside her, oblivious to the extent of their shared past. “Mind if I steal Steph away from you for a minute?”
Her phrasing would almost be funny if it wasn’t so excruciatingly awkward. Mariska just has no idea about what went on between them back in Texas all those years ago, and Angie and Steph can barely look at each other.
“Go ahead,” Angie says in as carefree a manner as she can muster, and Mariska turns her attention to Steph and starts propelling her off toward one of the corners, telling her, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
They’re a little way away from Angie when Steph exclaims “Oh my God, the chef?! I think he’s so cute!” just a little too loud and adolescent to sound natural, leaving Angie to take another swig of champagne.
--
Steph ends up marrying the chef. Angie sees it on E! - her secret high school sweetheart clad all in white, hair and makeup perfect with a long veil cascading down her back - and ignores the small part of her that feels disappointed.
She never speaks to Steph again.
--
Angie’s marriage is a good one, and she feels terrible for ever doubting it would be, but her insecurities coupled with what she knows of the world had made her fear it would be otherwise. Her own parents divorced when she was ten, and a part of her had never quite got over it. She hates to be all Kelly Clarkson about it - because of them she never strays too far from the sidewalk - but it was the first in a series of disappointments that had steadily riven a crack in the perfect snow globe fantasy that Disney had filled her head with as a child. While she’d always believed fairytales could exist, she never dreamed she’d be privy to one.
For the longest time she holds her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Jason never wavers from his steadfast, comforting self, week after week, month after month. She lets herself relax a little through the years as she bears three of his children, builds a home, builds a life with him - and although she doesn’t always manage it completely, it’s a process and he’s patient with her, and she feels she owes him to try.
--
When Angie and her family moved out east from L.A., she was dead set on retiring. She was in a financially stable enough position to do so, and she wanted her children to grow up far away from the reach of Hollywood with its neon nights, electric lights and everything that makes little girls grow up too fast. She said it over and over to anyone who would listen - she was lucky enough to be able to stop working in her late thirties, so that was what she was going to do.
The only problem was, doing that made her stir-crazy.
--
She remembers the night she and Jason talked about it. Em was so young then, still waking up at all hours of the night, so when Jason touched her shoulder and asked if something was wrong, she’d almost lost it and snapped about not being able to get a full night’s sleep in God knows how long so what did he think was wrong, honestly? She knew that wasn’t what he was picking up on, though. As macho as Jason appears on the outside, he has a heart of gold and is every bit as intuitive as any woman Angie’s ever known, so it hadn’t surprised her that he’d sensed something was up.
“I miss working,” she’d confessed, and she remembers to this day the weight that lifted off her shoulders when she’d admitted it out loud. “But what kind of mother would I be not to be around for my kids all the time?”
He’d thought over what she’d said in his steady Jason way, then said, “If you’re not here physically, that doesn’t mean you’re not around.”
She’d made a face. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
“We’d make it work. There are these new things called planes nowadays, and Skype, and phones. I read about ‘em last week in the paper.”
Jason can always make her laugh, even during the moments she feels least like doing so. Her pregnancy with Em was a hard one; she’d thrown her back out and was basically bedridden, which forced Jason to wait on her hand and foot, but he never complained, just showed up in their bedroom doorway with a bedpan and a smile.
“You’d be okay with me looking into working again?” she’d asked, trying to keep the hope out of her voice. She loved her life in Charlotte, she did, just… she needed more. She adored being a wife and a mother but she needed to be Angie, too - as well as, more to the point, someone else. Someone created through the magic of a writer’s pen who only she could bring to life season upon season, a fusion of character and actress that no-one outside the industry could hope to understand.
“Babe,” Jason had said, holding her in those strong, reassuring arms of his. “It’s what we do.”
--
Truth be told, Angie was nervous. Just because she’d decided she wanted to act again, it didn’t mean the acting world would want her. She was pushing forty, hadn’t really done anything substantial since Em was born, so when a FedEx box containing a script from TNT showed up on her doorstep, you could’ve knocked her over with a feather.
--
Rizzoli & Isles shoots at Paramount Studios, and when she finds out Glee will be taping across the way, she screams. That may be the part she’s most excited about, with the exception of working with legends like Lorraine, Chazz and Bruce. She actually bonds with the crew over it - some are fans of the show, used to work on it, know people who do or all of the above. Nicki, their set production assistant, says she’ll take her to meet Kristin Chenoweth if Kristin ever comes back to shoot any more episodes, and she geeks out like she’s her high school friend Beth who’s just been told she gets to meet David Hasselhoff.
She always thinks it’s funny when celebrities get the opportunity to meet other celebrities and don’t freak out. Whenever she’s introduced to someone famous - literally, whenever, even if she isn’t a fan or doesn’t really know who they are - she gets this little electric thrill up her spine from looking at a face in real life that she’d only previously seen through media channels. There’s something gold about fame for Angie. Even though the individuals who attain it can devolve into being some of the most screwed-up people on the planet, fame itself has this perpetual, un-tarnishable sheen to it. It’s the gold standard of so many people’s hopes and dreams, and whenever Angie meets a celebrity, she’s meeting someone else who made it.
--
They’ve just started shooting the second season when Nicki mentions the fact that Kristin will be shooting another episode of Glee on the lot. She says it casually, while handing out several cups of the caffeinated concoction Sasha’s dubbed a “Nicki-ccino” and often recommends - very seriously - that she go into business and sell one day after the sheen of showbiz has worn off. Nicki always jokes that it wore off when she was one week into it, after the first 7 a.m. call time after a 2 a.m. wrap, which probably has a degree of truth behind it, but Angie knows she’s not going anywhere. She’s seen the industry at its worst, worked on great shows that weren’t renewed for stupid reasons and watched actors get dropped through no fault of their own, but if she’s anything like Angie, the allure of television still shines bright through the fog of it all. It can feel like a mess, an arduous, ridiculous mess when they’re in the middle of filming and the time blurs together in a succession of day shoots and night shoots, but when the final product gets rolled out across the nation looking as sharp and pulled-together as any show they’ve ever seen, it makes everything suddenly seem worth it.
“Wait, Kristin Chenoweth?” Angie clarifies, and Nicki rolls her eyes.
“No, the other Kristin you’ve been bugging me to introduce you to since this time last year.”
Sasha snorts with laughter beside her, and she grins sheepishly. “Okay, point taken.”
“Let me see when she’s free.” Nicki pulls out her iPhone. “We’ll do dinner or something, yeah? The three of us?”
Angie nods excitedly, and Nicki cracks up.
“I love how you’re currently dependent on my connections, Ms. Discovered-by-David-Hasselhoff.”
Angie throws a packet of sugar at her.
--
It takes them a little while and a whole lot of patience, but finally there’s a day when Angie and Kristin are both in the same city and state and time zone - which, given their hectic lifestyles, is nothing short of miraculous.
Nicki arranges for them all to meet at this local place she knows, and when Kristin walks through the door - all 4’11” of her - it’s as if the room lights up. Kristin’s high-energy and adorable, with a smile that’s like sunshine, and Angie feels an instant kinship with her. They talk about lipstick and Los Angeles, new shoes and New York. Angie saw Kristin in Wicked one time on Broadway, and Kristin confesses to having been hopelessly addicted to Baywatch Nights back in the day, which makes Angie laugh and laugh.
“We have to do this again,” Kristin says as they hug each other goodbye, and her touch sparks a familiar but long-forgotten feeling that Angie can’t quite place.
--
Kristin mentions her on Twitter an hour or two after they part ways, and it makes Angie’s heart skip a beat.
I finally met u! Kristin writes, and Angie can hear every bit of her in-person exuberance coming through in her words. And I love u! You’re beautiful!
The message makes her feel like she does when she opens a Valentine’s Day card from Jason and reads how gorgeous he thinks she is, how glad he is to spend his life with her, and she frowns a little at the comparison before brushing it off and going on with her evening.
--
Angie doesn’t regret coming back to work, but, God, it’s been three weeks since she’s seen her girls and it feels like it’s killing her. During the day, she’s usually too busy to really dwell on it, but the nights, God, the nights. There’s nothing but silence at her L.A. place - no kids to tuck in, no bedtime stories, no one more drink of water for whoever doesn’t want to go to sleep yet, just her and her pillow and the white noise of the air conditioner. She watches TV sometimes, talks to Jason on the phone if the three-hour time difference hasn’t led to him nodding off on the couch by the time she gets back from what often amounts to a twelve- or thirteen-hour work day, but when she tries to go to sleep at night it’s her, all alone, and that might be the hardest part. There’s no warm, muscular presence beside her, no deep, rhythmic breaths of three little girls in the next rooms over.
Angie hasn’t consciously addressed what happened with Steph since they ran into each other, made a point of avoiding having to acknowledge what they were doing when they were in high school and what that might have made them. To be honest, she’d never really confronted it, but somehow that hadn’t mattered as much since Steph walked away from her and over to Bobby - symbolically as well as literally. On nights like these, though, dark and quiet, it’s hard to keep the thoughts of what they had together away.
She’s always written it off in much the same way as Steph’s mother had, years earlier - a youthful indiscretion, nothing serious, not something that had any bearing on who or what she’d be attracted to in later life. She thinks of her husband as proof of this. You can’t get more masculine than Jason. He’s muscular and tall and, hey, he used to play football for a living, and she loves him. She loves all of that. She’s attracted to him, every inch of him, and that’s all there is to say.
--
It’s not just that Kristin’s magnetic; she and Angie have a lot in common too. They grew up in the South (Kristin’s from Oklahoma) and they share a craft - which is, Angie thinks, an important thing to bond over in a friendship. Sure, her husband hates acting and she has no trouble connecting with people from every other facet of the entertainment world, from writers and directors to daytime television show hosts and a few NASCAR drivers to boot, but there’s a certain level on which she can only connect to other actors.
It’s probably the one thing Angie wishes Jason could understand - the one flaw, if she can even call it that, in her perfect white knight. Sure, Jason had bit parts in Third Watch and Women’s Murder Club and he’s frequently on TV as himself to talk about sports, but none of that’s the same. She tried explaining it to him a couple of times, how when the clapperboard snaps down and the cameras start rolling, she becomes a whole different person, taps into a whole other side of herself she’d never otherwise know existed, but it’s something nobody can really understand unless they’ve made a career out of it, which is why she truly appreciates that Kristin has.
--
They text a lot because texting doesn’t have the same immediacy as phone calls, and it seems one of them is always doing something when the other one’s free. Angie grows to look forward to it, checking her phone between takes and seeing New message from Kris pop up on the screen - a sure sign she’s either about to crack up or tilt her head and think about something in a different way. Kristin’s very insightful, sharp and smart and wickedly funny, and despite the miles, the two of them quickly grow close.
--
Angie’s girls are due to get out of school in June, and sometimes it seems as if she’s counting the days more fervently than they are. She has a gigantic posterboard version of their second got milk? ad propped up in her trailer, and every morning she walks in and sees it signifies one less day until they get to spend the summer together. Sure, she’ll still be working ninety hours a week, but on the days with late call times she can make them breakfast, and if filming goes fast there’s a chance she’ll be home in time to kiss them goodnight.
Kristin doesn’t have kids, but she’s one of the few people without them who doesn’t seem to tire of Angie’s near-constant references to hers. So many things jog her memory of them a hundred times a day, and she shares all of these instances with her husband, and an increasing number with Kristin.
--
Angie’s a night owl, which is somewhat unfortunate given the horrendously early call times she often has to base her schedule around, and on the evenings Kristin doesn’t take her Ambien, she is too. Some days when Jason’s phone goes straight to voicemail, Angie will call Kristin instead as some strange kind of surrogate, to shoot the breeze or just listen to the other woman’s cute little voice as she chatters away. One time, Angie says something that reminds Kristin of a song, so Kristin starts singing it and Angie’s blown away. She forgets sometimes that these famous friends of hers are famous for a reason, and she tells Kristin this, and they laugh.
--
Waiting for her kids to fly out for the summer is like waiting for Christmas, Angie decides, because the last few days are the worst. The final weekend is the very longest, and Angie almost wishes Rizzoli & Isles was shooting straight through, because she’s about at the end of her rope with this solitude thing. Sasha invites her over for a barbecue but she makes some excuse because it’d be weird, just her and Sasha’s family, and Lucia will ask where the girls are and she’s worried that might make her cry. It seems to get harder to be apart from them, not easier, which makes her wonder if she can do this again next year - and whether she can walk away from a hit show if she decides that she can’t.
She voices these fears to Kristin because she doesn’t want Jason to worry, and Kristin texts back Girl and then nothing else for a really long while, so she curls up on the couch and takes a nap while Law & Order reruns flash across her screen.
--
She wakes up to Popular because Wicked is her favorite and she gets a kick out of hearing a song from it every time Kristin calls her. She answers with a garbled murmur that she hopes is intelligible as some variant of “Hello?” and is answered with a “Hey, buzz me in already - it’s freezing out here, which is California code for a light drizzle.”
Angie almost drops the phone.
“You’re here?”
“Well, I don’t really have anything to do in New York until Monday and you kinda sounded like you were having some sort of crisis, so, yes, I’m here and I bought tequila.”
Angie can’t get to the door fast enough.
--
In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to drink when she was feeling so fragile. She’s old enough now to know her tolerance and pace herself so she doesn’t feel like death in the morning, but sometimes - like now - she just doesn’t care. She puts on a Best of the 80s CD and Kristin says she shouldn’t sing and drink but ends up belting out a few lines anyway.
They get to the Depeche Mode song that was on that day with Steph in the pool, and Angie’s breath catches in her throat when she remembers. It’s a slow song, a powerful one, and Kristin takes one look at her and knows something’s wrong. Angie isn’t sure if it’s the alcohol or the company, but for the first time in so many years, she lets her inhibitions fall away and spills all the gory details to someone she knows will listen without judging her. Kristin’s so outspoken about her support of gay rights and gay marriage, and Angie’s absolutely positive the way her friend thinks of her won’t change at all with this new knowledge. She admits she’s never told anyone else, not even her husband, and Kristin’s expression is a mixture of surprised and flattered.
“Why me?” she asks, and there are so many reasons, and Angie feels giddy with the relief of finally getting her everything off her chest. She’ll blame this on the tequila in the morning - blame her hazy memory of it on the tequila too - but in all truthfulness, she has a moment of sparkling clarity in the instance before she leans in, says “You have a little salt right… here,” touches Kristin’s lip with her finger and kisses her.
--
Angie wakes up on the couch with a warm body beside her, and she intuitively thinks it’s Jason before common sense kicks in and she feels the swell of the other person’s chest, the delicacy of the skin pressed against hers.
She jerks away when the realization hits her and fragmented memories of the night before come flooding back - how Kristin’s lips felt against her fingertip, her mouth, and later, her tongue. She looks down at herself in terror, worried she’ll be naked and she’s cheated and she’s been unfaithful with a woman of all people, but she’s fully clothed in her outfit from the night before and so, upon closer inspection, is Kristin.
Her sigh of relief wakes Kristin up, and she watches the same disoriented confusion pass over Kristin’s face that must have crossed hers just moments before.
“What did…” Kristin shakes her head as if to clear the fog from it, but evidently that doesn’t work because she looks just as confused and a little dizzy on top of it. “I don’t remember anything after singing Madonna.”
“Which time?” Angie croaks. Her voice is even throatier than usual, something Jason’s gonna tease her about when he calls in a couple of hours and oh, God, Jason. “You really don’t remember anything?”
Kristin squints at her. “What’s to remember, aside from whatever drinking we did to achieve this splendid five-alarm headache?” She winces. “I am not looking forward to getting on a plane tonight.”
Learning that Kristin has no memory of what happened is a blessing and a curse all at once. Their kiss is Angie’s cross to bear, something that won’t affect their friendship or make anything awkward between them as long as Kristin doesn’t know about it, but at the same time it’s like Angie’s traded in one secret for another.
“I’ll make us some green tea,” Angie says decisively, hauling herself off the couch and heading for the kitchen.
--
Kristin heads off to catch her flight later that day, leaving Angie feeling a mix of loneliness and relief. She calls Jason just to hear his voice and he sounds the same as always, something she usually takes comfort in but today makes her stomach roil. He’s oblivious, so oblivious, and the amount of faith he has in her would be heartwarming if it wasn’t so misplaced. Jason’s a fantastic husband, a loving father, the best of the best, and he deserves more than a wife with a wandering eye and an unfaithful heart. Their whole family does. She can’t see Kristin anymore.
--
She checks in to see that Kristin got back to New York okay because that’s what friends do, but after that she keeps the contact to a minimum. It’s easy to do at first due to the fact that they’re both so busy, but as time goes on, she misses their regular texting more than she expected, wonders if Kristin’s noticed its absence as keenly. To compensate, she throws herself into her work, spends an inordinate amount of time tweeting fans whenever she’s not needed on set, and generally prepares for her family’s arrival.
The day they fly in, she’s working, although she’s distracted as all hell looking at her watch and wondering if the plane’s landed yet. Filming drags on and ends up behind schedule, so by the time she leaves for the night she’s practically tearing her hair out. She calls Jason and finds out that they got in, they’re home safe, that Em flaked out but the older two are doing their damnedest to wait up for her, and she cries right there on the phone in the parking lot of the Paramount before breaking the land speed record to get home to them.
--
Life is immeasurably easier for Angie now that her girls are around. There was a time when she didn’t think she wanted children, but looking back on it, she thinks she just didn’t know what she’d be missing out on. They’re honestly the light of her life, them and Jason. For the next few weeks, she doesn’t think about Kristin at all.
--
Throughout Angie’s focus on not communicating with Kristin, it never occurs to her to wonder why Kristin isn’t trying to communicate with her. Perhaps it crosses her mind subconsciously, but whatever the reason, it’s easier this way - at least until Nicki, unaware that anything’s amiss, sets up a girl’s night that neither she nor Kristin knows how to get out of. Angie tries - oh, God, she tries - but Nicki somehow doesn’t get the hint, so she finds herself waiting nervously on the front step of Nicki’s apartment, wanting to pray to God to deliver her through this but unwilling to acknowledge the events that led up to her nervousness even to Him.
Angie’s the first to arrive, which is simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing, but Nicki keeps her mind off things by being her usual bubbly, bouncy self - so much so that Angie’s almost forgotten about her nerves until she hears the sound of a car pulling up outside and her heart speeds up like a drum beat.
Kristin looks great in jeans and a dressy shirt, hugging Nicki bodily before giving Angie an awkward kiss on the cheek. Initially, Angie thinks she imagined it, that she’s projecting her own unease onto the situation, but as the evening goes on, it becomes obvious that something’s definitely up. Nicki notices too, overcompensates by being extra loud, and they all end up having a forced kind of good time together by focusing on Nicki and minimizing the interaction between themselves. That works until Nicki leaves to go get something from the kitchen, leaving the two of them sitting in her living room, staring uncomfortably at each other and smiling.
“That’s a great flower arrangement, isn’t it?” Angie says just to have something to say, but then Nicki comes back with another round of drinks complete with cocktail umbrellas, so Kristin never has to answer.
A short while after that, Kristin makes her excuses and says she really has to leave, a sentiment Angie promptly echoes because she knows as soon as she’s left alone with Nicki, the questions about what the hell is going on will start - and for good reason, but she’s just not up to dealing with the third degree right now, especially when she’s not really sure what the deal is herself. Kristin could be mad because Angie doesn’t text her, but, hey, it’s not like she’s exactly been reaching out either, so honestly, Angie really doesn’t know.
They say their goodbyes, effusive and cheery as they thank Nicki for a lovely night, but as soon as the door closes, silence descends. They glance at each other. Angie registers that in her Dior pumps, she’s a full foot taller than Kristin, which would be funny to both of them if they didn’t have other things on their minds. She waits for Kristin to say something, and when the other woman doesn’t, she feels stuck.
It’s a cool, clear night, and taking a breath of fresh air helps Angie calm down a bit. It would be so easy to brush Kristin off with a breezy “Good seeing you” before climbing into her car and driving off back to her family, but the way Kristin’s looking at her makes that not seem like an option, because there are clearly things that need to be said.
“C’mere,” Angie says, bringing Kristin over to sit in her car because it’s cold by L.A. standards and she gets the feeling the conversation might be a lengthy one. Kristin wordlessly complies, showing no trace of her usual vivaciousness, and in a strange way that’s the most disconcerting thing of all.
The silence is heavy as they sit down and settle themselves, and after they both slam their doors, Angie experiences the strange sensation of being trapped even though it was her idea to do this in the first place. She takes a deep breath and decides to get things over with.
“So, what’s going on with you?”
Kristin’s eyes are a pretty blue-gray that pops in contrast with her eye makeup, but Angie only gets to see them full-on for a second before their owner tears them away, staring solidly at the CD player built into the front console with a ferocious kind of concentration like she’s trying to figure out what’s in it. Angie has three CDs on rotation - Demi Lovato for Avery, Lady Antebellum for her and Kristin’s As I Am album, because she could never quite bring herself to take it out, although Kristin doesn’t need to know that.
“I remembered something,” Kristin says faintly, and the words are so quiet that it takes Angie a second to process them before her stomach turns to ice. “About the last time I saw you. That night.”
In a weird way, it feels like she’s been caught by Mrs. March all over again, which is stupid because Kristin already knows about her history and isn’t likely to start making threats about exposing her to the world anytime soon, but she feels that same sense of floor-falling-out-from-beneath-her kind of terror.
She takes another deep breath, and then it’s her turn not to be able to look Kristin in the eye. The collection of spare change she keeps by the emergency brake suddenly seems as fascinating as anything she’s ever seen in her life.
“What do you remember, exactly?” she manages, aiming for an aloofness that’s kind of ruined by the audible tremor in her voice.
“You kissing me,” Kristin says quietly, as matter-of-factly as if she were reciting her shopping list, but maybe she’s just better at keeping her voice steady because Angie’s quick glance upward confirms that the casualness doesn’t reach her eyes. “Me kissing back.”
Angie closes her eyes for a second, lets the words hang in the air as she figures out how the hell she’s going to respond to them.
“I’m sorry,” she says resolutely before breaking into a laundry list of excuses. “I was drunk, I was lonely, I barely remember that night either, I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want it to come between us but it obviously already ha -”
Kristin interrupts her in a small voice. “It only has because it made me realize something.”
That stops Angie dead in her tracks.
“Wh… what do you mean?”
Kristin looks like she wants to crawl out of her own skin, like she can’t even deal with being inside her own body, and Angie reflexively reaches out to put a hand on her arm.
“I realized I wanted to do that for a while,” Kristin tells her flatly, and it’s weird to see her like this, devoid of the effusiveness Angie thought was so ingrained in her it was impossible to get out. Before today, she would’ve taken bets that if you cut Kristin in half there’d be unicorns and butterflies and various different kinds of sparkles stamped right through her like rock candy, right to her very core.
She’s so distracted by the image that she barely absorbs what Kristin says initially, and the other woman is quiet as she waits for it to sink in.
“What do you mean?” she repeats, barely audible, and Kristin shakes her head like she’s disappointed in Angie or in herself.
“I realized after I remembered...” she says, and Angie waits silently for her to elaborate, “that I was sorry I couldn’t recall it better and I wanted to do it again.”
“That’s why you stopped contacting me?” Angie whispers, side-stepping the issue a little but it’s a legitimate tangent to take.
Kristin meets her eyes miserably, and the expression on her face tells Angie all she needs to know.
“Well, Kris, listen, we can… we can work through it. I mean…” She smoothes her fingertips along the fine hairs of Kristin’s arm, and Kristin shudders.
“Stop,” she says like it’s hurting her, and Angie pulls back, concerned. She lets out a halting breath and explains, “I just really want to kiss you again, and you’re not… you’re not helping.”
Angie feels like she did in the Highland Park woods way, way back in her history, when she made Steph break out in goosebumps on a ninety-degree day. She honestly couldn’t be more shocked by this turn of events if she tried, and she might be more thrown for a loop now than she was in New York City all those years ago, when her friend Claudine told her of the feelings she’d been harboring inside.
She opens her mouth to say something but nothing comes out, and she senses Kristin waiting nervously for her reaction and knows she needs to process this in some kind of vaguely timely manner, but her brain just doesn’t seem to be functioning and there’s nothing she can do to fix it.
“I have Jason,” is what she says first off, then, “I want to kiss you again too.”
--
They stare at each other for a second, and Angie’s not sure who’s more surprised that she just said that.
“I mean…” she begins hastily, but it’s too late for damage control and they both know that, so she lets the sentence trail off unfinished.
“You have a family,” Kristin says in the same instance as Angie admits, “I do really like you,” and then they both stop, then start speaking again, and this couldn’t be any more awkward if they tried.
“I can’t,” Angie says finally, and there’s a hint of desperation in her voice because if Kristin doesn’t respect that boundary, there’s a chance she may not be able to sustain it either. “Please, I... that’s why I stopped texting you; I didn’t want to end up -”
“I thought so,” Kristin cuts her off. “That’s actually what made me start thinking about it - wondering where you were, why you weren’t around.”
Angie leans her head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat. “God, I’m sorry.”
“It just -” Kristin cuts herself off this time, clenches her jaw like she’s trying to stop herself from saying something, then shakes her head slightly like that part of her just lost the battle. “It sucks that the one time I got to kiss you, I don’t even really remember it.”
For an initial, absurd second, Angie has the ridiculous desire to laugh because she’s never heard Kristin say something sucks before, but then the gravity of the rest of the sentence sinks in and a knot tightens in her stomach.
“Maybe… maybe it’s better that way,” she says carefully, and she’s trying so hard to hold everything together right now, not to let anyone down.
“Maybe it is,” Kristin echoes, but for an Emmy-winning actress, her sincerity seems pretty lacking right now.
Angie doesn’t know what to say after that, so she elects not to say anything.
“Well.” Kristin grabs her pocketbook, affects a tone in her voice that makes it sound like she’s drawing a line underneath the conversation. “I should be going.”
Angie’s hand shoots out automatically before she even knows what she’s doing, shackling itself around Kristin’s wrist, and Kristin glances at her with this look in her eyes that Angie couldn’t even begin to describe if she had two dictionaries and a thesaurus on hand to assist her.
“I don’t want to break up your marriage,” Kristin says quietly, and her voice is rough like she’d forgotten to swallow in a while. “I don’t want to be that person.”
It’s like a punch to the gut, bringing up Angie’s husband, but they both know it needed to be done.
“I don’t want you to be either - you’re better than that,” Angie whispers and, God, how did it come down to this? How did they even get to this point?
They’re both quiet for a second, and then Kristin breaks the silence.
“It’s not fair of me to ask,” she starts, and it isn’t, they both know it isn’t, “but just one time, Ang, one more time?”
She hangs her head after she says it, looks like part of her wants to take it back but not enough to say so. It’d be fascinating to watch her internal struggle if this wasn’t so goddamn personal, if it wasn’t happening to one of Angie’s best friends.
“God, Kris, you know it took both of us to do it, right?”
It’s probably not the best time to be making these kinds of assurances, but Kristin just looks so damn sad about the whole thing when it really wasn’t even her fault.
“I kissed you first, remember?”
Kristin laughs, and it’s a hollow sound, derisive. “I think it’d be easier for both of us if I could forget.”
Angie reaches out to trace her fingertips along Kristin’s left cheekbone because at this point she can’t not, and Kristin looks up at her with eyes so full of hope, it makes her heart clench.
Angie wishes so many things. She doesn’t regret meeting Jason or having a family, but she wonders how different things would’ve been if Mrs. March had stayed longer at the country club that afternoon, if she hadn’t grown up in the Texas heartland, if things had worked out with Steph or she and Kristin had met before she got married.
“One more time,” she whispers, and she’s not sure she wants to keep to that but she knows she has to.
Their lips press together and she feels the best and the worst she ever has, all at once.
---<---<---@
Author: that_1_incident
Fandom: Misc. actress RPF
Art: HERE, by karneol_vision
Rating: R
Warnings: Het, sexual themes
Pairing: Angie Harmon/Stephanie March, Angie Harmon/Kristin Chenoweth, (Angie Harmon/Jason Sehorn)
Word Count: ~15,000
Summary/Disclaimer/Author's Notes: See Part One.
Part One.
---<---<---@
Jason tells her later that his mom had turned back to talk to her against his will - not that he hadn’t been interested, but he’d just gone through a divorce and wanted to stay clear of women for a while.
Despite that, they soon found themselves at dinner and a movie that was mediocre at best but would change both of their lives forever.
--
Jason makes Angie feels like no-one ever has before. She remembers tinges of these kinds of emotions with Steph, but their relationship was so long ago and got derailed so quickly, and she doesn’t like to think about it because it brings back memories of her dripping pool water all over Mrs. March’s kitchen floor.
She and Jason talk about buying a house together and having children, and she wants to pinch herself because nothing in her past had made her think she was special enough for this strong, supportive man who wants to make a life with her - with her. She gets the absurd urge from time to time to ask if he’s confused her with someone else, someone more worthy of him, because she’s just… she’s not that good.
--
It’s Jay Leno of all people who asks her if she wants to marry Jason. They’re backstage at his show, which she’s been invited to appear on for no reason she can fathom. Sure, she acts on Law & Order, but it’s an ensemble cast and all the other members are a lot more interesting than she is. The other guest on the show tonight is Elton John, and just… really?
“I hear you’re pretty serious with this guy,” Jay says, sitting in a spare chair in her dressing room with one leg crossed over the other, exposing a black sock. She watches his show on occasion, thinks he’s funny and nice and doesn’t mean any harm, but she’s already told him she doesn’t like to talk about her personal life in public and requests again that he avoid the topic during the interview.
“Sure, sure, I understand,” Jay says in that enigmatic Leno way of his, an earnestness in his eyes that she hopes is sincere. “But do you think you guys are going to get married?”
She feels the heat prickling up her neck, all the way to her cheekbones. “Definitely,” she murmurs.
--
She figures Jay just asked her those things backstage as a way of blowing off steam, satisfying his curiosity while not making the rest of the country privy to the information, so when he brings up Jason during the interview, she can barely believe it. No-one warned her he was like this, that he directly disobeyed people’s wishes live on the air, and she thinks she’ll definitely be more famous than Dick Wolf if she goes to jail for killing Jay Leno.
--
When Jay calls Jason onto the stage in front of Elton John, the studio audience, and a good portion of the American public, she wants to sink into the ground. She’s about to get up and hug Jason and murmur into his ear that she is never doing The Tonight Show again as long as she lives when he drops to one knee in front of her, and it feels like she’s sucking all the air out of the room with her gasp.
--
A couple of months after they get engaged, Angie hears through the grapevine that the powers that be hired a long-term Assistant District Attorney for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit following the success of season one - a relief for her, because Abbie had to do double duty for homicide and sex crimes for a while there, and thus, so too had Angie.
The person she gets the information from doesn’t have a lot more details - the actress isn’t well known, basically just has a bit part in Early Edition and some theater work to her name, along with a surname that’s also a month, which makes her sound like a calendar girl. Angie snickers when she hears this. Knowing Dick Wolf and co.’s penchant for a pretty face, it isn’t too hard to believe.
She doesn’t find out the new girl’s actual name for a while after that, and when she hears it’s Stephanie March, she just about falls over.
--
She never told Jason about Steph - nor anybody else, for that matter - and when he picks up on the fact that something’s going on with her, she considers changing that state of affairs but ultimately decides against it because she can’t bear the thought of him looking at her differently. If she tells him, who’s to know that he won’t kiss her lips and think of how they were once pressed to another girl’s forever afterwards? His whole perception of her might change, and she figures she’s better off keeping it her dirty little secret, something no-one would ever think of associating with all-American Angie from the Texas heartland.
--
She avoids having to face Steph for as long as possible, but inevitably there’ll be an industry event or a Law & Order crossover cameo that will make their paths cross, and sooner or later, her luck is going to run out. She pushes it to the back of her mind, makes wedding plans and throws herself into her work and her friends and her fiancé instead. She’s marrying Jason in Texas, at the church she used to attend every weekend growing up, and they’re serving beef tenderloin and chicken, and she’ll be wearing Vera Wang, and that’s what she needs to focus on right now.
She hands in her notice over at Law & Order, asks the writers to give Abbie a fiery death - something really dramatic, so she can go out with a bang - but they decide to have the character transfer to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. instead. She’s pretty sure they’re keeping the door ajar for her to come back someday, although she’s staying firm about wanting to focus on movie work and spend time with her new husband.
She’s partway through her last season when it occurs to her she might get away with it - that she and Steph may not have to come face-to-face, and she may have successfully dodged a bullet and managed to keep her past in the past.
Of course, a little while after that, she’s proved wrong.
--
Steph’s… filled out now. Her hips are wider and her hair’s a little different, but she wears it long and straight and down past her shoulders just like she used to. She’s still kind of butch, too - a word Angie didn’t know in that past life when they knew each other, and can only articulate now - but she mitigates it with fitted jeans, a girly V-neck, and some dangly earrings. They don’t seem true to her image, or at least the image Angie has in her head from high school: the free spirit with the golden blonde hair, a man’s shirt draped loosely over her lean frame. She wonders if Steph just grew out of that phase or whether there was a point in her life that she decided to change herself, looked in the mirror and didn’t like what stared back at her.
As much as she’d tried to put Steph out of her head for all those years, nothing could stop Angie’s memories returning from time to time. It was odd things that piqued her recollections, oddly specific ones, like photo booths in malls and the Cure song that was on the car radio the day they first kissed - you, strange as angels, dancing in the deepest oceans, just like a dream. She hadn’t spoken to Steph again after the night Mrs. March walked in on them, and it sounds terrible that she didn’t fight for her, didn’t even try to say goodbye, but the circumstances were something no-one could hope to understand unless they’d been in the same situation, terrified of an authority figure who could ruin their whole lives as they knew them. She’d catch herself thinking about it sometimes, wondering whether Mrs. March had been bluffing or her threat to expose the relationship had been a real one, and whether it even mattered now after such a long passage of time.
There’s so much left unsaid and Angie wishes they could properly talk about this, but they’re at an industry event and it’s so not the right time. Mariska’s here, everyone’s here, and she’s not sure how much anyone knows but she’s sure Steph wouldn’t have said much, if anything.
“Good to finally meet you,” Steph says smoothly. Her tone is friendly but professional, and Angie hasn’t seen any of her work but, jeez, based on this performance, Steph should be up for a damn Oscar. She didn’t know Steph was into acting - although, back when they knew each other, she didn’t know she’d be into acting either.
“Angie Harmon,” Angie responds, mimicking Steph’s brisk, polite tone as she goes along with the charade of this being their first encounter. “I think I saw you around Highland Park a few times. I, ah. I knew your brother.”
A brief shadow passes across Steph’s face, and it’s nothing anyone else would catch but, God, she remembers, she remembers the time Angie dropped all her school books just to have an excuse to talk to her, and Angie doesn’t know if that makes the whole situation better or worse.
“Wow, it’s such a small world, isn’t it?” Mariska gushes from beside her, oblivious to the extent of their shared past. “Mind if I steal Steph away from you for a minute?”
Her phrasing would almost be funny if it wasn’t so excruciatingly awkward. Mariska just has no idea about what went on between them back in Texas all those years ago, and Angie and Steph can barely look at each other.
“Go ahead,” Angie says in as carefree a manner as she can muster, and Mariska turns her attention to Steph and starts propelling her off toward one of the corners, telling her, “There’s someone I want you to meet.”
They’re a little way away from Angie when Steph exclaims “Oh my God, the chef?! I think he’s so cute!” just a little too loud and adolescent to sound natural, leaving Angie to take another swig of champagne.
--
Steph ends up marrying the chef. Angie sees it on E! - her secret high school sweetheart clad all in white, hair and makeup perfect with a long veil cascading down her back - and ignores the small part of her that feels disappointed.
She never speaks to Steph again.
--
Angie’s marriage is a good one, and she feels terrible for ever doubting it would be, but her insecurities coupled with what she knows of the world had made her fear it would be otherwise. Her own parents divorced when she was ten, and a part of her had never quite got over it. She hates to be all Kelly Clarkson about it - because of them she never strays too far from the sidewalk - but it was the first in a series of disappointments that had steadily riven a crack in the perfect snow globe fantasy that Disney had filled her head with as a child. While she’d always believed fairytales could exist, she never dreamed she’d be privy to one.
For the longest time she holds her breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but Jason never wavers from his steadfast, comforting self, week after week, month after month. She lets herself relax a little through the years as she bears three of his children, builds a home, builds a life with him - and although she doesn’t always manage it completely, it’s a process and he’s patient with her, and she feels she owes him to try.
--
When Angie and her family moved out east from L.A., she was dead set on retiring. She was in a financially stable enough position to do so, and she wanted her children to grow up far away from the reach of Hollywood with its neon nights, electric lights and everything that makes little girls grow up too fast. She said it over and over to anyone who would listen - she was lucky enough to be able to stop working in her late thirties, so that was what she was going to do.
The only problem was, doing that made her stir-crazy.
--
She remembers the night she and Jason talked about it. Em was so young then, still waking up at all hours of the night, so when Jason touched her shoulder and asked if something was wrong, she’d almost lost it and snapped about not being able to get a full night’s sleep in God knows how long so what did he think was wrong, honestly? She knew that wasn’t what he was picking up on, though. As macho as Jason appears on the outside, he has a heart of gold and is every bit as intuitive as any woman Angie’s ever known, so it hadn’t surprised her that he’d sensed something was up.
“I miss working,” she’d confessed, and she remembers to this day the weight that lifted off her shoulders when she’d admitted it out loud. “But what kind of mother would I be not to be around for my kids all the time?”
He’d thought over what she’d said in his steady Jason way, then said, “If you’re not here physically, that doesn’t mean you’re not around.”
She’d made a face. “It wouldn’t be the same.”
“We’d make it work. There are these new things called planes nowadays, and Skype, and phones. I read about ‘em last week in the paper.”
Jason can always make her laugh, even during the moments she feels least like doing so. Her pregnancy with Em was a hard one; she’d thrown her back out and was basically bedridden, which forced Jason to wait on her hand and foot, but he never complained, just showed up in their bedroom doorway with a bedpan and a smile.
“You’d be okay with me looking into working again?” she’d asked, trying to keep the hope out of her voice. She loved her life in Charlotte, she did, just… she needed more. She adored being a wife and a mother but she needed to be Angie, too - as well as, more to the point, someone else. Someone created through the magic of a writer’s pen who only she could bring to life season upon season, a fusion of character and actress that no-one outside the industry could hope to understand.
“Babe,” Jason had said, holding her in those strong, reassuring arms of his. “It’s what we do.”
--
Truth be told, Angie was nervous. Just because she’d decided she wanted to act again, it didn’t mean the acting world would want her. She was pushing forty, hadn’t really done anything substantial since Em was born, so when a FedEx box containing a script from TNT showed up on her doorstep, you could’ve knocked her over with a feather.
--
Rizzoli & Isles shoots at Paramount Studios, and when she finds out Glee will be taping across the way, she screams. That may be the part she’s most excited about, with the exception of working with legends like Lorraine, Chazz and Bruce. She actually bonds with the crew over it - some are fans of the show, used to work on it, know people who do or all of the above. Nicki, their set production assistant, says she’ll take her to meet Kristin Chenoweth if Kristin ever comes back to shoot any more episodes, and she geeks out like she’s her high school friend Beth who’s just been told she gets to meet David Hasselhoff.
She always thinks it’s funny when celebrities get the opportunity to meet other celebrities and don’t freak out. Whenever she’s introduced to someone famous - literally, whenever, even if she isn’t a fan or doesn’t really know who they are - she gets this little electric thrill up her spine from looking at a face in real life that she’d only previously seen through media channels. There’s something gold about fame for Angie. Even though the individuals who attain it can devolve into being some of the most screwed-up people on the planet, fame itself has this perpetual, un-tarnishable sheen to it. It’s the gold standard of so many people’s hopes and dreams, and whenever Angie meets a celebrity, she’s meeting someone else who made it.
--
They’ve just started shooting the second season when Nicki mentions the fact that Kristin will be shooting another episode of Glee on the lot. She says it casually, while handing out several cups of the caffeinated concoction Sasha’s dubbed a “Nicki-ccino” and often recommends - very seriously - that she go into business and sell one day after the sheen of showbiz has worn off. Nicki always jokes that it wore off when she was one week into it, after the first 7 a.m. call time after a 2 a.m. wrap, which probably has a degree of truth behind it, but Angie knows she’s not going anywhere. She’s seen the industry at its worst, worked on great shows that weren’t renewed for stupid reasons and watched actors get dropped through no fault of their own, but if she’s anything like Angie, the allure of television still shines bright through the fog of it all. It can feel like a mess, an arduous, ridiculous mess when they’re in the middle of filming and the time blurs together in a succession of day shoots and night shoots, but when the final product gets rolled out across the nation looking as sharp and pulled-together as any show they’ve ever seen, it makes everything suddenly seem worth it.
“Wait, Kristin Chenoweth?” Angie clarifies, and Nicki rolls her eyes.
“No, the other Kristin you’ve been bugging me to introduce you to since this time last year.”
Sasha snorts with laughter beside her, and she grins sheepishly. “Okay, point taken.”
“Let me see when she’s free.” Nicki pulls out her iPhone. “We’ll do dinner or something, yeah? The three of us?”
Angie nods excitedly, and Nicki cracks up.
“I love how you’re currently dependent on my connections, Ms. Discovered-by-David-Hasselhoff.”
Angie throws a packet of sugar at her.
--
It takes them a little while and a whole lot of patience, but finally there’s a day when Angie and Kristin are both in the same city and state and time zone - which, given their hectic lifestyles, is nothing short of miraculous.
Nicki arranges for them all to meet at this local place she knows, and when Kristin walks through the door - all 4’11” of her - it’s as if the room lights up. Kristin’s high-energy and adorable, with a smile that’s like sunshine, and Angie feels an instant kinship with her. They talk about lipstick and Los Angeles, new shoes and New York. Angie saw Kristin in Wicked one time on Broadway, and Kristin confesses to having been hopelessly addicted to Baywatch Nights back in the day, which makes Angie laugh and laugh.
“We have to do this again,” Kristin says as they hug each other goodbye, and her touch sparks a familiar but long-forgotten feeling that Angie can’t quite place.
--
Kristin mentions her on Twitter an hour or two after they part ways, and it makes Angie’s heart skip a beat.
I finally met u! Kristin writes, and Angie can hear every bit of her in-person exuberance coming through in her words. And I love u! You’re beautiful!
The message makes her feel like she does when she opens a Valentine’s Day card from Jason and reads how gorgeous he thinks she is, how glad he is to spend his life with her, and she frowns a little at the comparison before brushing it off and going on with her evening.
--
Angie doesn’t regret coming back to work, but, God, it’s been three weeks since she’s seen her girls and it feels like it’s killing her. During the day, she’s usually too busy to really dwell on it, but the nights, God, the nights. There’s nothing but silence at her L.A. place - no kids to tuck in, no bedtime stories, no one more drink of water for whoever doesn’t want to go to sleep yet, just her and her pillow and the white noise of the air conditioner. She watches TV sometimes, talks to Jason on the phone if the three-hour time difference hasn’t led to him nodding off on the couch by the time she gets back from what often amounts to a twelve- or thirteen-hour work day, but when she tries to go to sleep at night it’s her, all alone, and that might be the hardest part. There’s no warm, muscular presence beside her, no deep, rhythmic breaths of three little girls in the next rooms over.
Angie hasn’t consciously addressed what happened with Steph since they ran into each other, made a point of avoiding having to acknowledge what they were doing when they were in high school and what that might have made them. To be honest, she’d never really confronted it, but somehow that hadn’t mattered as much since Steph walked away from her and over to Bobby - symbolically as well as literally. On nights like these, though, dark and quiet, it’s hard to keep the thoughts of what they had together away.
She’s always written it off in much the same way as Steph’s mother had, years earlier - a youthful indiscretion, nothing serious, not something that had any bearing on who or what she’d be attracted to in later life. She thinks of her husband as proof of this. You can’t get more masculine than Jason. He’s muscular and tall and, hey, he used to play football for a living, and she loves him. She loves all of that. She’s attracted to him, every inch of him, and that’s all there is to say.
--
It’s not just that Kristin’s magnetic; she and Angie have a lot in common too. They grew up in the South (Kristin’s from Oklahoma) and they share a craft - which is, Angie thinks, an important thing to bond over in a friendship. Sure, her husband hates acting and she has no trouble connecting with people from every other facet of the entertainment world, from writers and directors to daytime television show hosts and a few NASCAR drivers to boot, but there’s a certain level on which she can only connect to other actors.
It’s probably the one thing Angie wishes Jason could understand - the one flaw, if she can even call it that, in her perfect white knight. Sure, Jason had bit parts in Third Watch and Women’s Murder Club and he’s frequently on TV as himself to talk about sports, but none of that’s the same. She tried explaining it to him a couple of times, how when the clapperboard snaps down and the cameras start rolling, she becomes a whole different person, taps into a whole other side of herself she’d never otherwise know existed, but it’s something nobody can really understand unless they’ve made a career out of it, which is why she truly appreciates that Kristin has.
--
They text a lot because texting doesn’t have the same immediacy as phone calls, and it seems one of them is always doing something when the other one’s free. Angie grows to look forward to it, checking her phone between takes and seeing New message from Kris pop up on the screen - a sure sign she’s either about to crack up or tilt her head and think about something in a different way. Kristin’s very insightful, sharp and smart and wickedly funny, and despite the miles, the two of them quickly grow close.
--
Angie’s girls are due to get out of school in June, and sometimes it seems as if she’s counting the days more fervently than they are. She has a gigantic posterboard version of their second got milk? ad propped up in her trailer, and every morning she walks in and sees it signifies one less day until they get to spend the summer together. Sure, she’ll still be working ninety hours a week, but on the days with late call times she can make them breakfast, and if filming goes fast there’s a chance she’ll be home in time to kiss them goodnight.
Kristin doesn’t have kids, but she’s one of the few people without them who doesn’t seem to tire of Angie’s near-constant references to hers. So many things jog her memory of them a hundred times a day, and she shares all of these instances with her husband, and an increasing number with Kristin.
--
Angie’s a night owl, which is somewhat unfortunate given the horrendously early call times she often has to base her schedule around, and on the evenings Kristin doesn’t take her Ambien, she is too. Some days when Jason’s phone goes straight to voicemail, Angie will call Kristin instead as some strange kind of surrogate, to shoot the breeze or just listen to the other woman’s cute little voice as she chatters away. One time, Angie says something that reminds Kristin of a song, so Kristin starts singing it and Angie’s blown away. She forgets sometimes that these famous friends of hers are famous for a reason, and she tells Kristin this, and they laugh.
--
Waiting for her kids to fly out for the summer is like waiting for Christmas, Angie decides, because the last few days are the worst. The final weekend is the very longest, and Angie almost wishes Rizzoli & Isles was shooting straight through, because she’s about at the end of her rope with this solitude thing. Sasha invites her over for a barbecue but she makes some excuse because it’d be weird, just her and Sasha’s family, and Lucia will ask where the girls are and she’s worried that might make her cry. It seems to get harder to be apart from them, not easier, which makes her wonder if she can do this again next year - and whether she can walk away from a hit show if she decides that she can’t.
She voices these fears to Kristin because she doesn’t want Jason to worry, and Kristin texts back Girl and then nothing else for a really long while, so she curls up on the couch and takes a nap while Law & Order reruns flash across her screen.
--
She wakes up to Popular because Wicked is her favorite and she gets a kick out of hearing a song from it every time Kristin calls her. She answers with a garbled murmur that she hopes is intelligible as some variant of “Hello?” and is answered with a “Hey, buzz me in already - it’s freezing out here, which is California code for a light drizzle.”
Angie almost drops the phone.
“You’re here?”
“Well, I don’t really have anything to do in New York until Monday and you kinda sounded like you were having some sort of crisis, so, yes, I’m here and I bought tequila.”
Angie can’t get to the door fast enough.
--
In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to drink when she was feeling so fragile. She’s old enough now to know her tolerance and pace herself so she doesn’t feel like death in the morning, but sometimes - like now - she just doesn’t care. She puts on a Best of the 80s CD and Kristin says she shouldn’t sing and drink but ends up belting out a few lines anyway.
They get to the Depeche Mode song that was on that day with Steph in the pool, and Angie’s breath catches in her throat when she remembers. It’s a slow song, a powerful one, and Kristin takes one look at her and knows something’s wrong. Angie isn’t sure if it’s the alcohol or the company, but for the first time in so many years, she lets her inhibitions fall away and spills all the gory details to someone she knows will listen without judging her. Kristin’s so outspoken about her support of gay rights and gay marriage, and Angie’s absolutely positive the way her friend thinks of her won’t change at all with this new knowledge. She admits she’s never told anyone else, not even her husband, and Kristin’s expression is a mixture of surprised and flattered.
“Why me?” she asks, and there are so many reasons, and Angie feels giddy with the relief of finally getting her everything off her chest. She’ll blame this on the tequila in the morning - blame her hazy memory of it on the tequila too - but in all truthfulness, she has a moment of sparkling clarity in the instance before she leans in, says “You have a little salt right… here,” touches Kristin’s lip with her finger and kisses her.
--
Angie wakes up on the couch with a warm body beside her, and she intuitively thinks it’s Jason before common sense kicks in and she feels the swell of the other person’s chest, the delicacy of the skin pressed against hers.
She jerks away when the realization hits her and fragmented memories of the night before come flooding back - how Kristin’s lips felt against her fingertip, her mouth, and later, her tongue. She looks down at herself in terror, worried she’ll be naked and she’s cheated and she’s been unfaithful with a woman of all people, but she’s fully clothed in her outfit from the night before and so, upon closer inspection, is Kristin.
Her sigh of relief wakes Kristin up, and she watches the same disoriented confusion pass over Kristin’s face that must have crossed hers just moments before.
“What did…” Kristin shakes her head as if to clear the fog from it, but evidently that doesn’t work because she looks just as confused and a little dizzy on top of it. “I don’t remember anything after singing Madonna.”
“Which time?” Angie croaks. Her voice is even throatier than usual, something Jason’s gonna tease her about when he calls in a couple of hours and oh, God, Jason. “You really don’t remember anything?”
Kristin squints at her. “What’s to remember, aside from whatever drinking we did to achieve this splendid five-alarm headache?” She winces. “I am not looking forward to getting on a plane tonight.”
Learning that Kristin has no memory of what happened is a blessing and a curse all at once. Their kiss is Angie’s cross to bear, something that won’t affect their friendship or make anything awkward between them as long as Kristin doesn’t know about it, but at the same time it’s like Angie’s traded in one secret for another.
“I’ll make us some green tea,” Angie says decisively, hauling herself off the couch and heading for the kitchen.
--
Kristin heads off to catch her flight later that day, leaving Angie feeling a mix of loneliness and relief. She calls Jason just to hear his voice and he sounds the same as always, something she usually takes comfort in but today makes her stomach roil. He’s oblivious, so oblivious, and the amount of faith he has in her would be heartwarming if it wasn’t so misplaced. Jason’s a fantastic husband, a loving father, the best of the best, and he deserves more than a wife with a wandering eye and an unfaithful heart. Their whole family does. She can’t see Kristin anymore.
--
She checks in to see that Kristin got back to New York okay because that’s what friends do, but after that she keeps the contact to a minimum. It’s easy to do at first due to the fact that they’re both so busy, but as time goes on, she misses their regular texting more than she expected, wonders if Kristin’s noticed its absence as keenly. To compensate, she throws herself into her work, spends an inordinate amount of time tweeting fans whenever she’s not needed on set, and generally prepares for her family’s arrival.
The day they fly in, she’s working, although she’s distracted as all hell looking at her watch and wondering if the plane’s landed yet. Filming drags on and ends up behind schedule, so by the time she leaves for the night she’s practically tearing her hair out. She calls Jason and finds out that they got in, they’re home safe, that Em flaked out but the older two are doing their damnedest to wait up for her, and she cries right there on the phone in the parking lot of the Paramount before breaking the land speed record to get home to them.
--
Life is immeasurably easier for Angie now that her girls are around. There was a time when she didn’t think she wanted children, but looking back on it, she thinks she just didn’t know what she’d be missing out on. They’re honestly the light of her life, them and Jason. For the next few weeks, she doesn’t think about Kristin at all.
--
Throughout Angie’s focus on not communicating with Kristin, it never occurs to her to wonder why Kristin isn’t trying to communicate with her. Perhaps it crosses her mind subconsciously, but whatever the reason, it’s easier this way - at least until Nicki, unaware that anything’s amiss, sets up a girl’s night that neither she nor Kristin knows how to get out of. Angie tries - oh, God, she tries - but Nicki somehow doesn’t get the hint, so she finds herself waiting nervously on the front step of Nicki’s apartment, wanting to pray to God to deliver her through this but unwilling to acknowledge the events that led up to her nervousness even to Him.
Angie’s the first to arrive, which is simultaneously a good thing and a bad thing, but Nicki keeps her mind off things by being her usual bubbly, bouncy self - so much so that Angie’s almost forgotten about her nerves until she hears the sound of a car pulling up outside and her heart speeds up like a drum beat.
Kristin looks great in jeans and a dressy shirt, hugging Nicki bodily before giving Angie an awkward kiss on the cheek. Initially, Angie thinks she imagined it, that she’s projecting her own unease onto the situation, but as the evening goes on, it becomes obvious that something’s definitely up. Nicki notices too, overcompensates by being extra loud, and they all end up having a forced kind of good time together by focusing on Nicki and minimizing the interaction between themselves. That works until Nicki leaves to go get something from the kitchen, leaving the two of them sitting in her living room, staring uncomfortably at each other and smiling.
“That’s a great flower arrangement, isn’t it?” Angie says just to have something to say, but then Nicki comes back with another round of drinks complete with cocktail umbrellas, so Kristin never has to answer.
A short while after that, Kristin makes her excuses and says she really has to leave, a sentiment Angie promptly echoes because she knows as soon as she’s left alone with Nicki, the questions about what the hell is going on will start - and for good reason, but she’s just not up to dealing with the third degree right now, especially when she’s not really sure what the deal is herself. Kristin could be mad because Angie doesn’t text her, but, hey, it’s not like she’s exactly been reaching out either, so honestly, Angie really doesn’t know.
They say their goodbyes, effusive and cheery as they thank Nicki for a lovely night, but as soon as the door closes, silence descends. They glance at each other. Angie registers that in her Dior pumps, she’s a full foot taller than Kristin, which would be funny to both of them if they didn’t have other things on their minds. She waits for Kristin to say something, and when the other woman doesn’t, she feels stuck.
It’s a cool, clear night, and taking a breath of fresh air helps Angie calm down a bit. It would be so easy to brush Kristin off with a breezy “Good seeing you” before climbing into her car and driving off back to her family, but the way Kristin’s looking at her makes that not seem like an option, because there are clearly things that need to be said.
“C’mere,” Angie says, bringing Kristin over to sit in her car because it’s cold by L.A. standards and she gets the feeling the conversation might be a lengthy one. Kristin wordlessly complies, showing no trace of her usual vivaciousness, and in a strange way that’s the most disconcerting thing of all.
The silence is heavy as they sit down and settle themselves, and after they both slam their doors, Angie experiences the strange sensation of being trapped even though it was her idea to do this in the first place. She takes a deep breath and decides to get things over with.
“So, what’s going on with you?”
Kristin’s eyes are a pretty blue-gray that pops in contrast with her eye makeup, but Angie only gets to see them full-on for a second before their owner tears them away, staring solidly at the CD player built into the front console with a ferocious kind of concentration like she’s trying to figure out what’s in it. Angie has three CDs on rotation - Demi Lovato for Avery, Lady Antebellum for her and Kristin’s As I Am album, because she could never quite bring herself to take it out, although Kristin doesn’t need to know that.
“I remembered something,” Kristin says faintly, and the words are so quiet that it takes Angie a second to process them before her stomach turns to ice. “About the last time I saw you. That night.”
In a weird way, it feels like she’s been caught by Mrs. March all over again, which is stupid because Kristin already knows about her history and isn’t likely to start making threats about exposing her to the world anytime soon, but she feels that same sense of floor-falling-out-from-beneath-her kind of terror.
She takes another deep breath, and then it’s her turn not to be able to look Kristin in the eye. The collection of spare change she keeps by the emergency brake suddenly seems as fascinating as anything she’s ever seen in her life.
“What do you remember, exactly?” she manages, aiming for an aloofness that’s kind of ruined by the audible tremor in her voice.
“You kissing me,” Kristin says quietly, as matter-of-factly as if she were reciting her shopping list, but maybe she’s just better at keeping her voice steady because Angie’s quick glance upward confirms that the casualness doesn’t reach her eyes. “Me kissing back.”
Angie closes her eyes for a second, lets the words hang in the air as she figures out how the hell she’s going to respond to them.
“I’m sorry,” she says resolutely before breaking into a laundry list of excuses. “I was drunk, I was lonely, I barely remember that night either, I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want it to come between us but it obviously already ha -”
Kristin interrupts her in a small voice. “It only has because it made me realize something.”
That stops Angie dead in her tracks.
“Wh… what do you mean?”
Kristin looks like she wants to crawl out of her own skin, like she can’t even deal with being inside her own body, and Angie reflexively reaches out to put a hand on her arm.
“I realized I wanted to do that for a while,” Kristin tells her flatly, and it’s weird to see her like this, devoid of the effusiveness Angie thought was so ingrained in her it was impossible to get out. Before today, she would’ve taken bets that if you cut Kristin in half there’d be unicorns and butterflies and various different kinds of sparkles stamped right through her like rock candy, right to her very core.
She’s so distracted by the image that she barely absorbs what Kristin says initially, and the other woman is quiet as she waits for it to sink in.
“What do you mean?” she repeats, barely audible, and Kristin shakes her head like she’s disappointed in Angie or in herself.
“I realized after I remembered...” she says, and Angie waits silently for her to elaborate, “that I was sorry I couldn’t recall it better and I wanted to do it again.”
“That’s why you stopped contacting me?” Angie whispers, side-stepping the issue a little but it’s a legitimate tangent to take.
Kristin meets her eyes miserably, and the expression on her face tells Angie all she needs to know.
“Well, Kris, listen, we can… we can work through it. I mean…” She smoothes her fingertips along the fine hairs of Kristin’s arm, and Kristin shudders.
“Stop,” she says like it’s hurting her, and Angie pulls back, concerned. She lets out a halting breath and explains, “I just really want to kiss you again, and you’re not… you’re not helping.”
Angie feels like she did in the Highland Park woods way, way back in her history, when she made Steph break out in goosebumps on a ninety-degree day. She honestly couldn’t be more shocked by this turn of events if she tried, and she might be more thrown for a loop now than she was in New York City all those years ago, when her friend Claudine told her of the feelings she’d been harboring inside.
She opens her mouth to say something but nothing comes out, and she senses Kristin waiting nervously for her reaction and knows she needs to process this in some kind of vaguely timely manner, but her brain just doesn’t seem to be functioning and there’s nothing she can do to fix it.
“I have Jason,” is what she says first off, then, “I want to kiss you again too.”
--
They stare at each other for a second, and Angie’s not sure who’s more surprised that she just said that.
“I mean…” she begins hastily, but it’s too late for damage control and they both know that, so she lets the sentence trail off unfinished.
“You have a family,” Kristin says in the same instance as Angie admits, “I do really like you,” and then they both stop, then start speaking again, and this couldn’t be any more awkward if they tried.
“I can’t,” Angie says finally, and there’s a hint of desperation in her voice because if Kristin doesn’t respect that boundary, there’s a chance she may not be able to sustain it either. “Please, I... that’s why I stopped texting you; I didn’t want to end up -”
“I thought so,” Kristin cuts her off. “That’s actually what made me start thinking about it - wondering where you were, why you weren’t around.”
Angie leans her head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat. “God, I’m sorry.”
“It just -” Kristin cuts herself off this time, clenches her jaw like she’s trying to stop herself from saying something, then shakes her head slightly like that part of her just lost the battle. “It sucks that the one time I got to kiss you, I don’t even really remember it.”
For an initial, absurd second, Angie has the ridiculous desire to laugh because she’s never heard Kristin say something sucks before, but then the gravity of the rest of the sentence sinks in and a knot tightens in her stomach.
“Maybe… maybe it’s better that way,” she says carefully, and she’s trying so hard to hold everything together right now, not to let anyone down.
“Maybe it is,” Kristin echoes, but for an Emmy-winning actress, her sincerity seems pretty lacking right now.
Angie doesn’t know what to say after that, so she elects not to say anything.
“Well.” Kristin grabs her pocketbook, affects a tone in her voice that makes it sound like she’s drawing a line underneath the conversation. “I should be going.”
Angie’s hand shoots out automatically before she even knows what she’s doing, shackling itself around Kristin’s wrist, and Kristin glances at her with this look in her eyes that Angie couldn’t even begin to describe if she had two dictionaries and a thesaurus on hand to assist her.
“I don’t want to break up your marriage,” Kristin says quietly, and her voice is rough like she’d forgotten to swallow in a while. “I don’t want to be that person.”
It’s like a punch to the gut, bringing up Angie’s husband, but they both know it needed to be done.
“I don’t want you to be either - you’re better than that,” Angie whispers and, God, how did it come down to this? How did they even get to this point?
They’re both quiet for a second, and then Kristin breaks the silence.
“It’s not fair of me to ask,” she starts, and it isn’t, they both know it isn’t, “but just one time, Ang, one more time?”
She hangs her head after she says it, looks like part of her wants to take it back but not enough to say so. It’d be fascinating to watch her internal struggle if this wasn’t so goddamn personal, if it wasn’t happening to one of Angie’s best friends.
“God, Kris, you know it took both of us to do it, right?”
It’s probably not the best time to be making these kinds of assurances, but Kristin just looks so damn sad about the whole thing when it really wasn’t even her fault.
“I kissed you first, remember?”
Kristin laughs, and it’s a hollow sound, derisive. “I think it’d be easier for both of us if I could forget.”
Angie reaches out to trace her fingertips along Kristin’s left cheekbone because at this point she can’t not, and Kristin looks up at her with eyes so full of hope, it makes her heart clench.
Angie wishes so many things. She doesn’t regret meeting Jason or having a family, but she wonders how different things would’ve been if Mrs. March had stayed longer at the country club that afternoon, if she hadn’t grown up in the Texas heartland, if things had worked out with Steph or she and Kristin had met before she got married.
“One more time,” she whispers, and she’s not sure she wants to keep to that but she knows she has to.
Their lips press together and she feels the best and the worst she ever has, all at once.
---<---<---@