a new skin made from old skin [game of thrones; robb/theon/jeyne]
a new skin made from old skin | a robb x theon x jeyne modern au; NC-17; ~5,000 words.
notes: ugh I have no notes really. This is for Stephie. I hope she stills loves me after reading it. OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE.
I shed my clothes,
I shed my flesh down to the bone
And burn the rest
This is the story of two people who tore each other apart.
And one who died.
Jeyne met Robb for the first time on a plane to Seattle. They sat beside each other for six hours, her in the aisle seat, him in the center, but they did not speak until they waited on the runway for their gate to clear. The ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was still on when he asked to borrow her cell phone. His was dead.
She didn’t mind. He hadn’t gone to the bathroom the entire ride, hadn’t asked her to get up, hadn’t ordered anything alcoholic when the beverage cart had come through. Jeyne handed him the phone. He said thank you and made a call.
For exactly three minutes and thirty-one seconds, she listened to him talk to someone. She didn’t count the time, but knew it later, when she went into her call history to look at the number he had dialed.
‘Yes. I know. I’m calling- Will you be quiet and listen for a moment? Yes. I’m calling to tell you that I landed safely. Absolutely not. The woman sitting next to me. Yes, it was very kind. Alright. I love you.’
He handed the phone back when he was done. He said thank you again, and unbuckled his seatbelt even though the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was still on. She never thought about why she noticed that. When she thought about it later, she wondered how the words she remembered could have filled three minutes and thirty-one seconds. She supposed that the person on the other line had spoken for a very long time.
‘Your girlfriend?’ she asked, even though it was none of her business.
He smiled a tight smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Something like that.’
Which didn’t stop her from calling the number he had dialed. It had been a week, and she said that she was looking for someone with auburn hair.
It surprised her when a man answered the phone. She held out a crisp ten-dollar bill to the barista who was handling her latte, and then tucked the phone more tightly between her shoulder and her ear. Then she introduced herself.
Her uncle is gay. For some reason, this makes Jeyne’s mother cry. Jeyne doesn’t understand, fully, since she’s only eight, and she’s only heard the word at school. It’s an insult, for reasons unknown.
But she does hug her mother, and apologize, and watch television with her for an hour until she’s certain that her mother’s eyes are no longer red and puffy. She hears her parents fighting, later, and she can guess what it’s about.
She hopes she isn’t gay.
That November, her uncle brings a man she doesn’t know with him to their Thanksgiving dinner. When her mother isn’t looking, he explains to Jeyne that she has two uncles, now. Jeyne likes the new uncle. And he knows how to juggle.
Though it had been their story for a long time before it was hers, Jeyne always considered this first phone conversation with Theon the beginning of everything.
It was through this conversation that she first found out that the man with the auburn hair who had borrowed her phone was named Robb, and that his ‘something like that’ turned out to be a man. A very nice man, who calmly informed her that Robb was out, and who didn’t act as though it was strange for her to be calling. He called her curiosity ‘endearing,’ and laughed at her jokes, and promised to tell Robb that she had called when he came home later.
She honestly hadn’t expected him to make good on his promise, and she was prepared to let it go. She’d taken a chance on a big fish, and felt no shame in coming up short.
It was nearly midnight when something tugged on the line. It was Robb, calling, because his boyfriend had told him to.
’Gay?’ Theon asks.
Robb replies, ‘Gay.’
They sit in silence for a moment, on Robb’s porch, beneath an unlit window that Theon has climbed through a thousand times before, until Robb clarifies. He says, ‘I think.’ Theon considers him.
‘You think?’ he asks. He isn’t skeptical, he just asks because he wants to hear it again.
‘I think,’ Robb repeats. They’re doing a lot of repeating.
‘But it’s OK,’ Robb hurries on. ‘There’s one thing I’m sure of.’
He reaches over and takes Theon’s hand.
‘Cool,’ Theon says quietly, inadequately. It’s perfect. He hasn’t felt this much like himself in his entire life.
The fact that she sat between them on the couch made Theon uncomfortable. She was not drawing Robb away, as she might have had Robb sat in the middle. She did not wedge them apart, either, as he had assumed would be the case the moment that she wedged herself into the meager space. What made him uncomfortable was the distinct lack of everything he expected. It was the way that she connected them.
The sole of her bare foot brushed against his knee. The fingers of her left hand played with the curls at the nape of Robb’s neck. She quoted Star Wars, aloud, in the middle of the movie. She seemed, strangely, to have no idea what she was doing.
And strangely enough, neither did Theon. He did not even know why.
It was probably because she wanted to. She was a woman who did what she wanted. He couldn’t find anything wrong with that.
When she said, jokingly, that Robb had taken her phone, and she had taken his heart, Theon laughed so hard that Coke came out of his nose. He didn’t know why he laughed, but he thought that the fact that Robb had only borrowed her phone was probably important.
Behind her back, Robb reached for Theon’s hand.
‘Luke. I am your father,’ Jeyne said. Her can of Coke left a ring on the table that never came out.
It’s 1994, and they’re standing beneath a sun-soaked awning in the middle of New York City. They’re nearly two hours late for a school day that they don’t plan on attending, their pockets full of crumpled bus tickets, and miss-match wads of money, and the maps that Robb had printed out that morning. The tattoo parlor is jut around the corner, and here, Robb hesitates.
Theon teases him, laughing, and tells him that he has an APUSH test that he’s missing for this, so Robb had better make good.
In the end, Robb doesn’t get the tattoo.
He’s grounded for skipping school, and wisely keeps his mouth shut about his intentions.
Theon climbs through the window that night and writes PROPERTY OF THEON GREYJOY on Robb’s lower back in permanent marker. The ‘tattoo’ includes an arrow pointing clearly at Robb’s ass.
Robb skips swim practice for an entire week.
What ensued was a crazy kind of friendship, one that, in the beginning, was not about the sex. Jeyne was a bank teller, who wore neat, carefully ironed slacks and pretty pastel tops to work, and drank coffee in the mornings, and sometimes even at night. She had a tattoo on the inside of her knee. Theon asked her once if it hurt when she got it. She told him, no, and didn’t often wear shorts, and he did not see it again for a very long time.
She went on a double date with them, one time, and carefully said all of the exactly right things. The man was a doctor. Like the tattoo, Theon never saw him again.
He did not even put her number in his phone, simply answered when she called, whether it be for him, or for Robb, when the latter was not answering his phone or had- on one occasion -dropped it into a drain pipe while on business in New York. It was far too late, by the time he realized that she was going to be permanent, and Theon had already memorized the number.
‘Hey, Jeynie,’ he said cutely, when she called.
‘Where’s the Stark?’ she would reply, and Theon would wonder where the hell she had come from.
It’s 1999, and they’re standing in the apartment that they purchased together a few weeks before. The place is still sparsely furnished, but it’s home. They’re making lists of all the names they have ever been called by the other.
Brother.
Lover.
Partner.
Friend.
And when Theon reads his way down to GOD, he smacks Robb over the head with the spiral bound notebook, which happens to say ‘Papermate’ in small letters on the blue plastic cover, and asks why he can’t take this seriously.
Robb holds Theon down and draws a handlebar mustache on his face in ballpoint pen.
Later, when Theon calls out during sex, OH GOD, YES, Robb laughs so hard that he falls off the bed.
Jeyne sat on the edge of the bed, sorting through paint samples. Theon was in the other room, reorganizing the refrigerator. It was full of Chinese food, and half empty soda cans. Robb could hear the rustle of the garbage bag. The bed sheets were cool against his bare feet.
Jeyne held up a paint chip, grey, and then set it down in the ‘maybe’ pile, to her right. It was followed by a blue, a yellow, and a muted red. After a few moments, she handed him the pile. Robb took them from her, ignoring the way that their thumbs brushed, and the fact that she was doing something that was hardly her job, since this was not her home, not her bedroom.
As he looked at the colors, he could feel Jeyne’s eyes on him, could hear Theon banging the fridge door open and closed. Outside, Seattle traffic roared through the streets below. A car horn blared. Robb wasn’t seeing the colors.
It was times like this when he wished that life came like an Internet survey. He could picture the questions now, scrawled across the skin of Jeyne’s bare feet where they rested, inches from his own.
The questions said:
Do you want to have sex with her?
Does she want to have sex with you?
If you answered ‘yes’ to the above questions, why aren’t you having sex with her?
In the space provided below that last, Robb would have written a single five letter word.
‘I like this one,’ he said, after he had sorted through the colors, twice. He held out the grey. Jeyne took it and read off the name of the color.
‘Grey Wind,’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
It’s New Years Eve, and they’re standing in the middle of a crowded room. It’s been a long time since Theon has stood in the living room of Robb’s childhood home, since he’s hugged Mrs. Stark, and smelled her cookies baking. It’s been a long time since he needed to pretend that he and Robb were merely friends.
It was not annoyance that makes him uncomfortable, but the absent weight of Robb’s hand in his. He cannot empathize with Robb’s concerns, estranged as he is from his own father and siblings. But he does sympathize, knowing the Starks all his life, understanding their high expectations, aware that, though their disapproval might be far from certain, should Robb receive it, the blow would be crippling.
So he smiles, and thanks Mrs. Stark for inviting him into her home, and chases Sansa around all night like a lecherous bachelor should. It makes Robb angry, but he doesn’t find out until later, when they’re tucked up in Robb’s old room. His mother has fixed Theon a bed on the floor, which he lies in, forlorn, and frowns.
Sometime towards midnight, Robb seems to sense that he’s awake. His hand, dangling from the edge of the bed, finds Theon’s.
They had sex for the first time like old people. Jeyne lay on her back beneath him, hands roaming across his back, knees curved up, toes pointed inches above the bed sheets. Robb grunted. She moaned. Theon watched from the chair in the corner and tried to figure out why he was so aroused.
There was nothing attractive about it, though Jeyne was clearly trying. The point of her toe elongated her calves, but he didn’t care about that, or the marks her fingernails left on Robb’s skin. He didn’t care about the way Robb’s buttocks flexed each time he thrust forward. It was over quickly. Neither of them even broke a sweat.
Jeyne did not stay. In the darkness, as she dressed, her eyes like two dinner plates found Theon’s. She didn’t smile. Her purse was black. And then she was gone.
Robb paced back and forth, naked, for one minute and fifteen seconds. Theon knew because that was how long he could hold his breath, and when he let it go, Robb turned to face him. They made love, though Theon barely felt a thing, and never came. He was too busy thinking about Jeyne, and how her eyes made her look like a lemur, and how he still couldn’t figure out her because.
Robb didn’t say anything when he came. His hair was sweaty, and the condom made a disgusting noise when he pulled it off.
Maybe this is what love means, Theon thought as Robb padded to the bathroom and back in the darkness. Lying beneath someone who has grown a bit too fat, or too bald, or too different without warning you first, and picturing them how they used to be. And maybe, eventually, your memory starts to go, and you thank god that sex will always be sex, and the person who you picture is a figment of your imagination- it’s a combination of the person you think you’re supposed to remember, and Harrison Ford from the Han Solo years, and a pair of bright, curious lemur eyes that laugh at you in the darkness.
She starts doing track and field when she’s a freshman in high school. There’s another girl on the team who Jeyne can’t help but notice. By all accounts, she’s a lesbian, which means that she has weirdly short hair, and that Rick Frey, who is a senior, and a jock, and an asshole, tried to feel her up behind the school one day. She said no. That’s why she’s a lesbian.
Jeyne watches her one afternoon, tying her shoe before they run. Her hair has fallen down into her eyes. Jeyne thinks her name is Ann. Then she thinks of her mother, crying.
‘Hey,’ she says quietly. Because she doesn’t care if Ann is a lesbian or not. It’s more likely that Rick is a liar, and a dumbass, but it’s most likely that it doesn’t matter, either way.
In the graduation photos, three years later, Ann and Jeyne hug each other, smiling.
On a rainy day in November, Robb came down with the flu. He lay in bed, moaning, until Theon finally called Jeyne in the middle of the night.
Robb never even knew that she was there. She was gone by morning. But she and Theon sat on the sofa, late into the night, rewatching the same old movies for the thousandth time. She quoted, quietly, under her breath, and they ate those long, colorful tubes of ice without putting them in the freezer.
She sang the opening lines of ‘Mr. Sandman’ as she drew herself out the door just before dawn.
It’s mid-afternoon and the sunshine smells like potato chips. Theon and Robb stand inside their favorite record store for two hours. It’s going out of business.
They don’t buy anything, but Theon kisses him in the middle of the street beneath the sun that day, and Robb remembers it, vividly, for the rest of his life.
It was only after he hurt her that Theon realized that he didn’t hate her.
All he could think about, when Robb sat down in the chair, was his butt, tense, and her goddamn pointed toes. She’d done that for him, not for Robb, and she didn’t even know if he liked women.
He wanted to tell her that he didn’t like pussy. But that was a damn lie. So he fucked her up against the wall instead. Her head banged against the drywall so hard that he thought that she would leave a dent. There were bruises on her hips in the morning, which Theon didn’t see because she didn’t stay the night. And she, always giving as good as she got, left a bite mark on the side of his neck.
Robb sucked him off after she was gone, because Theon begged him. After he finished, Robb stood and tried to kiss him on the mouth. Theon turned away.
Robb brushed his teeth in silence. It was 3:31AM.
It’s 2001. Theon puts nails purposely through the wall in their second apartment because the landlord rubbed him the wrong way. He hangs some ugly paintings that he and Robb bought, laughing.
He leaves the nails there when they move out, a year later.
Her great big lemur eyes were staring at him. Theon was suddenly terrified. He stood in the middle of the hallway and stared back at her without a word.
She asked him if he felt bad for her.
Theon did not answer for a long time. He did not believe that she had asked the question. But the answer was ‘no,’ anyway. He could not feel bad for something that he did not understand.
‘I love him,’ she said finally. Her purse was black. ‘And I have every right to.’
‘I’m his partner,’ Theon said. The beer in his hand was starting to make his fingers numb. He remembered the pleasant hum of the refrigerator, but he was ashamed, suddenly, of the weakness of the word. Robb could marry Jeyne, if he wanted to.
‘But you won’t tell me to go,’ she said. She was walking, now, toward him, past him. Her knuckles brushed the doorknob. ‘And you’re a part of him, Theon. I won’t tell you to go, either.’
Even after she was gone, he could not consider her his enemy. He could not blame her- nor did he want to -for staking a claim on what was his. He had never even asked her not to.
When he crawled back into bed with Robb, he wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled him close. ‘I loved you,’ he said, ‘even when we were kids.’ Robb smiled and kissed his forearm where it crossed his chest and said that he knew.
Theon’s desire to believe this statement was almost strong enough for him not to notice that Jeyne had left a book on his bedside table.
The bookmark was red, and dog-eared. She chewed on it while she read the next time she came over, and when she complained that her feet were cold, Robb pulled the sheets up over her while Theon went to adjust the thermostat.
She had sex with Robb a total of three more times. She never had sex with Theon again.
It was never about that, anyway.
She owns a pet bat for a period of three weeks, when it flies into her apartment unbidden and refuses to leave. She squirts honey all over the counter in the mornings, and the bat eats it, and this makes her laugh and laugh until her stomach cramps. For some reason.
It’s 2001.
The bat dies. Jeyne doesn’t cry for it.
She bought him ice cream cake on his birthday. It was his favorite flavor, and the frosting was yellow and black, and the hug she gave him was honest and warm. When she pulled away, Theon caught Robb looking at them.
He looked hungry. He didn’t have a piece of cake.
Theon felt such strong affection in that moment that he went up to her, afterward, and lifted her off her feet and thanked her, again. He didn’t kiss her, or try to make it sexual. He was simply happy to know her.
Then he set her down, and she studied him carefully before asking why he thought Robb hadn’t wanted a slice.
That was the same night that she realized Theon did not have her number in his phone. It was the night she realized a lot of things. She was carding through his cell phone, bored, while he washed dishes and cleared the table now that all the guests had gone.
‘Who is this?’ she asked suddenly, brandishing the phone in his direction. His hands were covered in water and dish soap, so he didn’t take it from her. She had been going through his pictures, and the one she showed him then was of Robb and Asha, with him at the beach. Asha had a particularly angry expression on her face. He smiled.
‘That’s my sister,’ he said. She didn’t ask another question.
The next morning, he found Jeyne phone number plugged into his phone.
the most FABULOUS Jeyne Westerling it said. Theon didn’t laugh. And then he did.
It’s 2001. Theon and Jeyne pass each other in a Crate & Barrel in a shopping mall a few days before Christmas. They barely spare the other a passing glance.
Years later, though neither knows it, it’s this moment that answers the question:
If it had been Theon sitting next to her on that plane, would she have spared him a second thought?
Robb died peacefully in the morning on a spring day in 2010. He was in the bath.
It was mother’s day, and Theon was already dressed. He was making breakfast, and he called into the other room to tell Robb that they ought to call his mother, and then Jeyne, and maybe then go out for a bite.
‘Mom?’ Robb called back. ‘Jeyne?’ Theon thought he heard him begin to get up.
‘Yeah,’ Theon called back. When Robb never got out of the bath, Theon went to check on him.
The Grey Wind paint had been peeling in small spots around the doorway for weeks.
The restaurant is new, but it’s just up the street, and it delivers This is what prompts Robb to bring the menu home in the first place, but they end up going out to eat there, anyway. Theon has sweet potato soup, and Robb has some kind of sandwich. Neither of them can ever remember what it is, afterwards.
It’s Theon who ends up with the nasty case of food poisoning, vomiting into the toilet for nearly twenty-four hours. Robb sits on the edge of the bathtub and reads from an issue of Cosmo magazine that got delivered to them by mistake.
Theon throws a bar of soap at him, and never apologizes.
They don’t think about the issue of Cosmo again until Theon is cleaning out Robb’s bedside table, years later. He manages to stop himself from crying, but when he offers it to Jeyne, she laughs and says she never reads those things.
Against his better judgment, Theon keeps it.
At the funeral, Theon almost put his arm around Catelyn Stark. Bran got there first, luckily, since it was not Theon’s place. Maybe if he had been a woman, and he and Robb had gotten married, he would have been welcome to touch. Theon had not even attended her husband’s funeral, however many godforsaken years ago.
When she saw Jeyne, dressed in black, tears streaming down her cheeks, Mrs. Stark asked if she was Robb’s girlfriend. Jeyne turned and caught Theon’s eye. He stood quietly beside the casket. They looked at each other for one long, heavy moment.
‘No,’ Jeyne said finally, firmly. She reached out and took Theon’s hand. Mrs. Stark apologized, and, soon after, walked away.
Jeyne came home with him that night, on the airplane, in the taxi, through the familiar door into the apartment that he had shared for so many years with Robb. Her looked at her. Her purse was red. Theon hid it underneath the bed, so that when she tried to leave, she couldn’t.
For the first time, Jeyne stayed for the entire night. They held each other, but they didn’t cry.
Her delicate black dress was wrinkled in the morning, and the pillow smelled like her hair. It was this that made him cry, at last.
But the sound of her showering drowned out every sob.
Jeyne’s father dies when she is still in college. Her mother flies her home, and cries like Jeyne hasn’t seen her for a very long time. Try as she might, Jeyne cannot bring herself to comfort her. Every time she wraps her arm around her mother’s shoulders, she thinks of her uncle, and his husband, and Asha Greyjoy who turned out not to be gay. She pulls back her arm.
After the funeral, Jeyne leaves. She skips the reception and goes straight to the airport, where the books the first flight back to school.
Her roommate is sleeping, when she gets in, and lucky she never asks why Jeyne comes back so early.
They continued to see each other, after that, but they never had sex. Theon never saw the tattoo on the inside of her knee, even though they slept in the same bed, and he held her at night, and she decided to take charge of her diet, just becomes.
In the years that followed, he thought a lot about what she had said, that one night. And you’re a part of him, Theon, she had said to him. That statement, he thought, was not the beginning. It had been the lifting of the veil. It had been the moment when he realized that what she was saying was true.
After the funeral, it became clearer. Mrs. Stark never called the apartment anymore. Without Robb, Theon was nothing. He tried to keep him alive, to make his actions reek of Robb. But it was like an arm trying to run a marathon for a man who’s lost his legs. Theon tried, hard, and shook like a dying fish on the shores of all the vibrancy of who Robb used to be. Jeyne even watched him do it.
He didn’t think that she had ever loved him, just the idea she had put together of him as just another piece of Robb. It had been Robb, all along. If Theon had borrowed her phone that day, on that plane, she would have cleared her call history in a month, or two, and met a banker, and gotten married and had babies and had sex with someone who was suddenly too fat but looked like Harrison Ford when she closed her eyes and remembered hard enough.
He was like that to her even now, he thought, as she twisted the heavy shackle of her wedding ring round and round her finger. She was reading a book that he had never read. She had told him the title yesterday. He had already forgotten it, and he did not even duck his head to look.
He was a token, now, a lost tooth that a mother keeps in a little bag to remind her of her child’s youth. He was something dead and useless, made bright and promising by the meaning projected upon it. Her eyes were on him, then, and he concentrated on being a part of Robb.
He took Jeyne out for dinner and dancing, where they resolutely held hands above the table while they waited for their foot. Their skin touched with grim determination.
Jeyne laughed every time he stepped on her toes, dancing.
Yes, he thought. Good. They looked normal. They looked happy. His eyes darted around behind her back, and caught another man’s eye. He was dining alone, eating an expensive steak. Theon knew that it was expensive because he purposely hadn’t ordered it. Jeyne didn’t work anymore. But the man nodded, a half inclination of his head, a polite response from someone caught looking.
See, Theon thought. We are perfect.
Normal people didn’t go out on dates for the sole purpose of proving it.
Jeyne likes a good New York bialy. She likes babies who wear onesies, and the Captain America boxer briefs that she stole from one of her college boyfriends and wears as pajamas. She likes Jane Austen, and canned peas, and she considers putting canned mushrooms on pizza a cardinal sin.
Her hair is dark and her eyes make her look like a lemur in the darkness. Love, for her, is about pretending to be with someone for the purpose of pretending to be with someone else. She doesn’t know this last bit, yet.
She meets a man named Robb Stark on a plane to Seattle. It’s 2009.
He asks to borrow her cell phone.
For a very long time, she lived with Theon.
When they are eight, Robb locks Theon in the big trunk in Robb’s bedroom. They are playing a game that mandates it, and it never even occurs to either of them that this might not make it the right thing to do.
‘Now struggle,’ he calls through the wood. ‘Like you’re trying to get out.’ Theon laughs, and pushes up on the lid. Robb sits on it, smiling.
That is how Catelyn Stark catches them. She is livid when she pulls Robb off by the collar of his t-shirt and unlocks the trunk. She sends Theon home.
When he’s gone, she tells Robb that if he ever does anything like that again, he and Theon won’t be able to be friends.
Robb cries, but there is too much coming for them, and that is not the end.
For some reason, they didn’t find out about the Will until years later. A load of pointless possessions found their way to the little house in the suburbs, where Theon greeted the moving men at the door, and carried everything up to the attic on his own. 331, the number on the front door says.
Years ago, he would not have broken a sweat lifting all these things. Now, the unsightly stains appeared beneath his arms and on his back. He wondered if he was getting old. Part of him thought that he would never really know.
The last item was not the heaviest, but it took the longest to carry up one flight of stairs and a ladder. Theon almost left it for the next day, but decided it was best to get it over with.
It was a table. He remembered it best covered in Chinese food, and napkins, and cans of soda left out too long. He remembered it best with Robb’s feet supported by it. He remembered it best, cleared, finally, after a birthday party he had thrown. He wondered why Robb had left him all the useless junk.
There was a ring on the table. Left by a Coke can. Placed by a person.
‘Hey, hon?’ Jeyne called up.
‘Coming,’ he said, turning to the ladder that led back down to the hallway where his wife was waiting. If she was the ring, then he was the table. You couldn’t have one without the other, anymore.
And, after all, it all belonged to Robb.
notes: ugh I have no notes really. This is for Stephie. I hope she stills loves me after reading it. OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE.
I shed my clothes,
I shed my flesh down to the bone
And burn the rest
This is the story of two people who tore each other apart.
And one who died.
Jeyne met Robb for the first time on a plane to Seattle. They sat beside each other for six hours, her in the aisle seat, him in the center, but they did not speak until they waited on the runway for their gate to clear. The ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was still on when he asked to borrow her cell phone. His was dead.
She didn’t mind. He hadn’t gone to the bathroom the entire ride, hadn’t asked her to get up, hadn’t ordered anything alcoholic when the beverage cart had come through. Jeyne handed him the phone. He said thank you and made a call.
For exactly three minutes and thirty-one seconds, she listened to him talk to someone. She didn’t count the time, but knew it later, when she went into her call history to look at the number he had dialed.
‘Yes. I know. I’m calling- Will you be quiet and listen for a moment? Yes. I’m calling to tell you that I landed safely. Absolutely not. The woman sitting next to me. Yes, it was very kind. Alright. I love you.’
He handed the phone back when he was done. He said thank you again, and unbuckled his seatbelt even though the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign was still on. She never thought about why she noticed that. When she thought about it later, she wondered how the words she remembered could have filled three minutes and thirty-one seconds. She supposed that the person on the other line had spoken for a very long time.
‘Your girlfriend?’ she asked, even though it was none of her business.
He smiled a tight smile. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Something like that.’
Which didn’t stop her from calling the number he had dialed. It had been a week, and she said that she was looking for someone with auburn hair.
It surprised her when a man answered the phone. She held out a crisp ten-dollar bill to the barista who was handling her latte, and then tucked the phone more tightly between her shoulder and her ear. Then she introduced herself.
Her uncle is gay. For some reason, this makes Jeyne’s mother cry. Jeyne doesn’t understand, fully, since she’s only eight, and she’s only heard the word at school. It’s an insult, for reasons unknown.
But she does hug her mother, and apologize, and watch television with her for an hour until she’s certain that her mother’s eyes are no longer red and puffy. She hears her parents fighting, later, and she can guess what it’s about.
She hopes she isn’t gay.
That November, her uncle brings a man she doesn’t know with him to their Thanksgiving dinner. When her mother isn’t looking, he explains to Jeyne that she has two uncles, now. Jeyne likes the new uncle. And he knows how to juggle.
Though it had been their story for a long time before it was hers, Jeyne always considered this first phone conversation with Theon the beginning of everything.
It was through this conversation that she first found out that the man with the auburn hair who had borrowed her phone was named Robb, and that his ‘something like that’ turned out to be a man. A very nice man, who calmly informed her that Robb was out, and who didn’t act as though it was strange for her to be calling. He called her curiosity ‘endearing,’ and laughed at her jokes, and promised to tell Robb that she had called when he came home later.
She honestly hadn’t expected him to make good on his promise, and she was prepared to let it go. She’d taken a chance on a big fish, and felt no shame in coming up short.
It was nearly midnight when something tugged on the line. It was Robb, calling, because his boyfriend had told him to.
’Gay?’ Theon asks.
Robb replies, ‘Gay.’
They sit in silence for a moment, on Robb’s porch, beneath an unlit window that Theon has climbed through a thousand times before, until Robb clarifies. He says, ‘I think.’ Theon considers him.
‘You think?’ he asks. He isn’t skeptical, he just asks because he wants to hear it again.
‘I think,’ Robb repeats. They’re doing a lot of repeating.
‘But it’s OK,’ Robb hurries on. ‘There’s one thing I’m sure of.’
He reaches over and takes Theon’s hand.
‘Cool,’ Theon says quietly, inadequately. It’s perfect. He hasn’t felt this much like himself in his entire life.
The fact that she sat between them on the couch made Theon uncomfortable. She was not drawing Robb away, as she might have had Robb sat in the middle. She did not wedge them apart, either, as he had assumed would be the case the moment that she wedged herself into the meager space. What made him uncomfortable was the distinct lack of everything he expected. It was the way that she connected them.
The sole of her bare foot brushed against his knee. The fingers of her left hand played with the curls at the nape of Robb’s neck. She quoted Star Wars, aloud, in the middle of the movie. She seemed, strangely, to have no idea what she was doing.
And strangely enough, neither did Theon. He did not even know why.
It was probably because she wanted to. She was a woman who did what she wanted. He couldn’t find anything wrong with that.
When she said, jokingly, that Robb had taken her phone, and she had taken his heart, Theon laughed so hard that Coke came out of his nose. He didn’t know why he laughed, but he thought that the fact that Robb had only borrowed her phone was probably important.
Behind her back, Robb reached for Theon’s hand.
‘Luke. I am your father,’ Jeyne said. Her can of Coke left a ring on the table that never came out.
It’s 1994, and they’re standing beneath a sun-soaked awning in the middle of New York City. They’re nearly two hours late for a school day that they don’t plan on attending, their pockets full of crumpled bus tickets, and miss-match wads of money, and the maps that Robb had printed out that morning. The tattoo parlor is jut around the corner, and here, Robb hesitates.
Theon teases him, laughing, and tells him that he has an APUSH test that he’s missing for this, so Robb had better make good.
In the end, Robb doesn’t get the tattoo.
He’s grounded for skipping school, and wisely keeps his mouth shut about his intentions.
Theon climbs through the window that night and writes PROPERTY OF THEON GREYJOY on Robb’s lower back in permanent marker. The ‘tattoo’ includes an arrow pointing clearly at Robb’s ass.
Robb skips swim practice for an entire week.
What ensued was a crazy kind of friendship, one that, in the beginning, was not about the sex. Jeyne was a bank teller, who wore neat, carefully ironed slacks and pretty pastel tops to work, and drank coffee in the mornings, and sometimes even at night. She had a tattoo on the inside of her knee. Theon asked her once if it hurt when she got it. She told him, no, and didn’t often wear shorts, and he did not see it again for a very long time.
She went on a double date with them, one time, and carefully said all of the exactly right things. The man was a doctor. Like the tattoo, Theon never saw him again.
He did not even put her number in his phone, simply answered when she called, whether it be for him, or for Robb, when the latter was not answering his phone or had- on one occasion -dropped it into a drain pipe while on business in New York. It was far too late, by the time he realized that she was going to be permanent, and Theon had already memorized the number.
‘Hey, Jeynie,’ he said cutely, when she called.
‘Where’s the Stark?’ she would reply, and Theon would wonder where the hell she had come from.
It’s 1999, and they’re standing in the apartment that they purchased together a few weeks before. The place is still sparsely furnished, but it’s home. They’re making lists of all the names they have ever been called by the other.
Brother.
Lover.
Partner.
Friend.
And when Theon reads his way down to GOD, he smacks Robb over the head with the spiral bound notebook, which happens to say ‘Papermate’ in small letters on the blue plastic cover, and asks why he can’t take this seriously.
Robb holds Theon down and draws a handlebar mustache on his face in ballpoint pen.
Later, when Theon calls out during sex, OH GOD, YES, Robb laughs so hard that he falls off the bed.
Jeyne sat on the edge of the bed, sorting through paint samples. Theon was in the other room, reorganizing the refrigerator. It was full of Chinese food, and half empty soda cans. Robb could hear the rustle of the garbage bag. The bed sheets were cool against his bare feet.
Jeyne held up a paint chip, grey, and then set it down in the ‘maybe’ pile, to her right. It was followed by a blue, a yellow, and a muted red. After a few moments, she handed him the pile. Robb took them from her, ignoring the way that their thumbs brushed, and the fact that she was doing something that was hardly her job, since this was not her home, not her bedroom.
As he looked at the colors, he could feel Jeyne’s eyes on him, could hear Theon banging the fridge door open and closed. Outside, Seattle traffic roared through the streets below. A car horn blared. Robb wasn’t seeing the colors.
It was times like this when he wished that life came like an Internet survey. He could picture the questions now, scrawled across the skin of Jeyne’s bare feet where they rested, inches from his own.
The questions said:
Do you want to have sex with her?
Does she want to have sex with you?
If you answered ‘yes’ to the above questions, why aren’t you having sex with her?
In the space provided below that last, Robb would have written a single five letter word.
‘I like this one,’ he said, after he had sorted through the colors, twice. He held out the grey. Jeyne took it and read off the name of the color.
‘Grey Wind,’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
It’s New Years Eve, and they’re standing in the middle of a crowded room. It’s been a long time since Theon has stood in the living room of Robb’s childhood home, since he’s hugged Mrs. Stark, and smelled her cookies baking. It’s been a long time since he needed to pretend that he and Robb were merely friends.
It was not annoyance that makes him uncomfortable, but the absent weight of Robb’s hand in his. He cannot empathize with Robb’s concerns, estranged as he is from his own father and siblings. But he does sympathize, knowing the Starks all his life, understanding their high expectations, aware that, though their disapproval might be far from certain, should Robb receive it, the blow would be crippling.
So he smiles, and thanks Mrs. Stark for inviting him into her home, and chases Sansa around all night like a lecherous bachelor should. It makes Robb angry, but he doesn’t find out until later, when they’re tucked up in Robb’s old room. His mother has fixed Theon a bed on the floor, which he lies in, forlorn, and frowns.
Sometime towards midnight, Robb seems to sense that he’s awake. His hand, dangling from the edge of the bed, finds Theon’s.
They had sex for the first time like old people. Jeyne lay on her back beneath him, hands roaming across his back, knees curved up, toes pointed inches above the bed sheets. Robb grunted. She moaned. Theon watched from the chair in the corner and tried to figure out why he was so aroused.
There was nothing attractive about it, though Jeyne was clearly trying. The point of her toe elongated her calves, but he didn’t care about that, or the marks her fingernails left on Robb’s skin. He didn’t care about the way Robb’s buttocks flexed each time he thrust forward. It was over quickly. Neither of them even broke a sweat.
Jeyne did not stay. In the darkness, as she dressed, her eyes like two dinner plates found Theon’s. She didn’t smile. Her purse was black. And then she was gone.
Robb paced back and forth, naked, for one minute and fifteen seconds. Theon knew because that was how long he could hold his breath, and when he let it go, Robb turned to face him. They made love, though Theon barely felt a thing, and never came. He was too busy thinking about Jeyne, and how her eyes made her look like a lemur, and how he still couldn’t figure out her because.
Robb didn’t say anything when he came. His hair was sweaty, and the condom made a disgusting noise when he pulled it off.
Maybe this is what love means, Theon thought as Robb padded to the bathroom and back in the darkness. Lying beneath someone who has grown a bit too fat, or too bald, or too different without warning you first, and picturing them how they used to be. And maybe, eventually, your memory starts to go, and you thank god that sex will always be sex, and the person who you picture is a figment of your imagination- it’s a combination of the person you think you’re supposed to remember, and Harrison Ford from the Han Solo years, and a pair of bright, curious lemur eyes that laugh at you in the darkness.
She starts doing track and field when she’s a freshman in high school. There’s another girl on the team who Jeyne can’t help but notice. By all accounts, she’s a lesbian, which means that she has weirdly short hair, and that Rick Frey, who is a senior, and a jock, and an asshole, tried to feel her up behind the school one day. She said no. That’s why she’s a lesbian.
Jeyne watches her one afternoon, tying her shoe before they run. Her hair has fallen down into her eyes. Jeyne thinks her name is Ann. Then she thinks of her mother, crying.
‘Hey,’ she says quietly. Because she doesn’t care if Ann is a lesbian or not. It’s more likely that Rick is a liar, and a dumbass, but it’s most likely that it doesn’t matter, either way.
In the graduation photos, three years later, Ann and Jeyne hug each other, smiling.
On a rainy day in November, Robb came down with the flu. He lay in bed, moaning, until Theon finally called Jeyne in the middle of the night.
Robb never even knew that she was there. She was gone by morning. But she and Theon sat on the sofa, late into the night, rewatching the same old movies for the thousandth time. She quoted, quietly, under her breath, and they ate those long, colorful tubes of ice without putting them in the freezer.
She sang the opening lines of ‘Mr. Sandman’ as she drew herself out the door just before dawn.
It’s mid-afternoon and the sunshine smells like potato chips. Theon and Robb stand inside their favorite record store for two hours. It’s going out of business.
They don’t buy anything, but Theon kisses him in the middle of the street beneath the sun that day, and Robb remembers it, vividly, for the rest of his life.
It was only after he hurt her that Theon realized that he didn’t hate her.
All he could think about, when Robb sat down in the chair, was his butt, tense, and her goddamn pointed toes. She’d done that for him, not for Robb, and she didn’t even know if he liked women.
He wanted to tell her that he didn’t like pussy. But that was a damn lie. So he fucked her up against the wall instead. Her head banged against the drywall so hard that he thought that she would leave a dent. There were bruises on her hips in the morning, which Theon didn’t see because she didn’t stay the night. And she, always giving as good as she got, left a bite mark on the side of his neck.
Robb sucked him off after she was gone, because Theon begged him. After he finished, Robb stood and tried to kiss him on the mouth. Theon turned away.
Robb brushed his teeth in silence. It was 3:31AM.
It’s 2001. Theon puts nails purposely through the wall in their second apartment because the landlord rubbed him the wrong way. He hangs some ugly paintings that he and Robb bought, laughing.
He leaves the nails there when they move out, a year later.
Her great big lemur eyes were staring at him. Theon was suddenly terrified. He stood in the middle of the hallway and stared back at her without a word.
She asked him if he felt bad for her.
Theon did not answer for a long time. He did not believe that she had asked the question. But the answer was ‘no,’ anyway. He could not feel bad for something that he did not understand.
‘I love him,’ she said finally. Her purse was black. ‘And I have every right to.’
‘I’m his partner,’ Theon said. The beer in his hand was starting to make his fingers numb. He remembered the pleasant hum of the refrigerator, but he was ashamed, suddenly, of the weakness of the word. Robb could marry Jeyne, if he wanted to.
‘But you won’t tell me to go,’ she said. She was walking, now, toward him, past him. Her knuckles brushed the doorknob. ‘And you’re a part of him, Theon. I won’t tell you to go, either.’
Even after she was gone, he could not consider her his enemy. He could not blame her- nor did he want to -for staking a claim on what was his. He had never even asked her not to.
When he crawled back into bed with Robb, he wrapped his arms around his waist and pulled him close. ‘I loved you,’ he said, ‘even when we were kids.’ Robb smiled and kissed his forearm where it crossed his chest and said that he knew.
Theon’s desire to believe this statement was almost strong enough for him not to notice that Jeyne had left a book on his bedside table.
The bookmark was red, and dog-eared. She chewed on it while she read the next time she came over, and when she complained that her feet were cold, Robb pulled the sheets up over her while Theon went to adjust the thermostat.
She had sex with Robb a total of three more times. She never had sex with Theon again.
It was never about that, anyway.
She owns a pet bat for a period of three weeks, when it flies into her apartment unbidden and refuses to leave. She squirts honey all over the counter in the mornings, and the bat eats it, and this makes her laugh and laugh until her stomach cramps. For some reason.
It’s 2001.
The bat dies. Jeyne doesn’t cry for it.
She bought him ice cream cake on his birthday. It was his favorite flavor, and the frosting was yellow and black, and the hug she gave him was honest and warm. When she pulled away, Theon caught Robb looking at them.
He looked hungry. He didn’t have a piece of cake.
Theon felt such strong affection in that moment that he went up to her, afterward, and lifted her off her feet and thanked her, again. He didn’t kiss her, or try to make it sexual. He was simply happy to know her.
Then he set her down, and she studied him carefully before asking why he thought Robb hadn’t wanted a slice.
That was the same night that she realized Theon did not have her number in his phone. It was the night she realized a lot of things. She was carding through his cell phone, bored, while he washed dishes and cleared the table now that all the guests had gone.
‘Who is this?’ she asked suddenly, brandishing the phone in his direction. His hands were covered in water and dish soap, so he didn’t take it from her. She had been going through his pictures, and the one she showed him then was of Robb and Asha, with him at the beach. Asha had a particularly angry expression on her face. He smiled.
‘That’s my sister,’ he said. She didn’t ask another question.
The next morning, he found Jeyne phone number plugged into his phone.
the most FABULOUS Jeyne Westerling it said. Theon didn’t laugh. And then he did.
It’s 2001. Theon and Jeyne pass each other in a Crate & Barrel in a shopping mall a few days before Christmas. They barely spare the other a passing glance.
Years later, though neither knows it, it’s this moment that answers the question:
If it had been Theon sitting next to her on that plane, would she have spared him a second thought?
Robb died peacefully in the morning on a spring day in 2010. He was in the bath.
It was mother’s day, and Theon was already dressed. He was making breakfast, and he called into the other room to tell Robb that they ought to call his mother, and then Jeyne, and maybe then go out for a bite.
‘Mom?’ Robb called back. ‘Jeyne?’ Theon thought he heard him begin to get up.
‘Yeah,’ Theon called back. When Robb never got out of the bath, Theon went to check on him.
The Grey Wind paint had been peeling in small spots around the doorway for weeks.
The restaurant is new, but it’s just up the street, and it delivers This is what prompts Robb to bring the menu home in the first place, but they end up going out to eat there, anyway. Theon has sweet potato soup, and Robb has some kind of sandwich. Neither of them can ever remember what it is, afterwards.
It’s Theon who ends up with the nasty case of food poisoning, vomiting into the toilet for nearly twenty-four hours. Robb sits on the edge of the bathtub and reads from an issue of Cosmo magazine that got delivered to them by mistake.
Theon throws a bar of soap at him, and never apologizes.
They don’t think about the issue of Cosmo again until Theon is cleaning out Robb’s bedside table, years later. He manages to stop himself from crying, but when he offers it to Jeyne, she laughs and says she never reads those things.
Against his better judgment, Theon keeps it.
At the funeral, Theon almost put his arm around Catelyn Stark. Bran got there first, luckily, since it was not Theon’s place. Maybe if he had been a woman, and he and Robb had gotten married, he would have been welcome to touch. Theon had not even attended her husband’s funeral, however many godforsaken years ago.
When she saw Jeyne, dressed in black, tears streaming down her cheeks, Mrs. Stark asked if she was Robb’s girlfriend. Jeyne turned and caught Theon’s eye. He stood quietly beside the casket. They looked at each other for one long, heavy moment.
‘No,’ Jeyne said finally, firmly. She reached out and took Theon’s hand. Mrs. Stark apologized, and, soon after, walked away.
Jeyne came home with him that night, on the airplane, in the taxi, through the familiar door into the apartment that he had shared for so many years with Robb. Her looked at her. Her purse was red. Theon hid it underneath the bed, so that when she tried to leave, she couldn’t.
For the first time, Jeyne stayed for the entire night. They held each other, but they didn’t cry.
Her delicate black dress was wrinkled in the morning, and the pillow smelled like her hair. It was this that made him cry, at last.
But the sound of her showering drowned out every sob.
Jeyne’s father dies when she is still in college. Her mother flies her home, and cries like Jeyne hasn’t seen her for a very long time. Try as she might, Jeyne cannot bring herself to comfort her. Every time she wraps her arm around her mother’s shoulders, she thinks of her uncle, and his husband, and Asha Greyjoy who turned out not to be gay. She pulls back her arm.
After the funeral, Jeyne leaves. She skips the reception and goes straight to the airport, where the books the first flight back to school.
Her roommate is sleeping, when she gets in, and lucky she never asks why Jeyne comes back so early.
They continued to see each other, after that, but they never had sex. Theon never saw the tattoo on the inside of her knee, even though they slept in the same bed, and he held her at night, and she decided to take charge of her diet, just becomes.
In the years that followed, he thought a lot about what she had said, that one night. And you’re a part of him, Theon, she had said to him. That statement, he thought, was not the beginning. It had been the lifting of the veil. It had been the moment when he realized that what she was saying was true.
After the funeral, it became clearer. Mrs. Stark never called the apartment anymore. Without Robb, Theon was nothing. He tried to keep him alive, to make his actions reek of Robb. But it was like an arm trying to run a marathon for a man who’s lost his legs. Theon tried, hard, and shook like a dying fish on the shores of all the vibrancy of who Robb used to be. Jeyne even watched him do it.
He didn’t think that she had ever loved him, just the idea she had put together of him as just another piece of Robb. It had been Robb, all along. If Theon had borrowed her phone that day, on that plane, she would have cleared her call history in a month, or two, and met a banker, and gotten married and had babies and had sex with someone who was suddenly too fat but looked like Harrison Ford when she closed her eyes and remembered hard enough.
He was like that to her even now, he thought, as she twisted the heavy shackle of her wedding ring round and round her finger. She was reading a book that he had never read. She had told him the title yesterday. He had already forgotten it, and he did not even duck his head to look.
He was a token, now, a lost tooth that a mother keeps in a little bag to remind her of her child’s youth. He was something dead and useless, made bright and promising by the meaning projected upon it. Her eyes were on him, then, and he concentrated on being a part of Robb.
He took Jeyne out for dinner and dancing, where they resolutely held hands above the table while they waited for their foot. Their skin touched with grim determination.
Jeyne laughed every time he stepped on her toes, dancing.
Yes, he thought. Good. They looked normal. They looked happy. His eyes darted around behind her back, and caught another man’s eye. He was dining alone, eating an expensive steak. Theon knew that it was expensive because he purposely hadn’t ordered it. Jeyne didn’t work anymore. But the man nodded, a half inclination of his head, a polite response from someone caught looking.
See, Theon thought. We are perfect.
Normal people didn’t go out on dates for the sole purpose of proving it.
Jeyne likes a good New York bialy. She likes babies who wear onesies, and the Captain America boxer briefs that she stole from one of her college boyfriends and wears as pajamas. She likes Jane Austen, and canned peas, and she considers putting canned mushrooms on pizza a cardinal sin.
Her hair is dark and her eyes make her look like a lemur in the darkness. Love, for her, is about pretending to be with someone for the purpose of pretending to be with someone else. She doesn’t know this last bit, yet.
She meets a man named Robb Stark on a plane to Seattle. It’s 2009.
He asks to borrow her cell phone.
For a very long time, she lived with Theon.
When they are eight, Robb locks Theon in the big trunk in Robb’s bedroom. They are playing a game that mandates it, and it never even occurs to either of them that this might not make it the right thing to do.
‘Now struggle,’ he calls through the wood. ‘Like you’re trying to get out.’ Theon laughs, and pushes up on the lid. Robb sits on it, smiling.
That is how Catelyn Stark catches them. She is livid when she pulls Robb off by the collar of his t-shirt and unlocks the trunk. She sends Theon home.
When he’s gone, she tells Robb that if he ever does anything like that again, he and Theon won’t be able to be friends.
Robb cries, but there is too much coming for them, and that is not the end.
For some reason, they didn’t find out about the Will until years later. A load of pointless possessions found their way to the little house in the suburbs, where Theon greeted the moving men at the door, and carried everything up to the attic on his own. 331, the number on the front door says.
Years ago, he would not have broken a sweat lifting all these things. Now, the unsightly stains appeared beneath his arms and on his back. He wondered if he was getting old. Part of him thought that he would never really know.
The last item was not the heaviest, but it took the longest to carry up one flight of stairs and a ladder. Theon almost left it for the next day, but decided it was best to get it over with.
It was a table. He remembered it best covered in Chinese food, and napkins, and cans of soda left out too long. He remembered it best with Robb’s feet supported by it. He remembered it best, cleared, finally, after a birthday party he had thrown. He wondered why Robb had left him all the useless junk.
There was a ring on the table. Left by a Coke can. Placed by a person.
‘Hey, hon?’ Jeyne called up.
‘Coming,’ he said, turning to the ladder that led back down to the hallway where his wife was waiting. If she was the ring, then he was the table. You couldn’t have one without the other, anymore.
And, after all, it all belonged to Robb.