Work Text:
here is a map with your name for a capital,
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,
and we’ve got nothing left to lose
i.
When Karolina is five years old, she learns that love is a scornful, angry beast. Her sister—a soft, gurgling thing with big eyes and tiny, pink fingers and toes, is sleeping in her cot, when a wretched sob booms out of her chest. Karolina lays her back flat against the wall and closes her eyes until she feels the skirt of her mother’s dress make waves of the air around her.
She starts excusing herself, swearing with clutched hands not to have touched the baby, when her mother’s sigh silences her. Picking up Katerina, her mother motions for Karolina to come closer.
“Look, dítě.” she points to her sister’s thigh. Out of thin air and pure flesh—a scar. No bigger than a caterpillar—but angry and red, and hungry nonetheless.
“But…she was sleeping.” Karolina frowns, eyes tracing her mother’s sharp features like they held the answer to every question in the Universe.
“Da, Lina.” she nods. “It’s her love. His soul is calling to her.”
Karolina watches her mother soothe her sister back to sleep, her hand rubbing gently at the scar until it fades away, leaving only a faint shadow behind. As she lays her sister back down, she points a delicate finger at the soft patch of milky-white skin on her sister’s thigh.
“See, it’s gone now.” she murmurs.
“Why did he hurt her?”
Her mother breathes a quiet laugh, though her eyes darken as her thumb draws soft circles over her sister’s brow.
“It’s his pain, Lina. She has to feel it, too.”
“Do you feel táta’s pain, too?”
Her mother sighs, straightening her back and dusting off her skirt, as if brushing off the conversation like lint.
“I do.” she nods. “And he, mine.”
The conversation ends there, her mother returning to the kitchen and leaving Karolina to stare at the hungry ghost-insect on her sister’s tiny leg. She runs her finger over it, her mind recreating the angry mark that had briefly torn her sister’s flesh, and silently prays her soul remains untethered, prays love never sinks its claws into her.
“Maybe he’s dead.”
Pavel doesn’t look up from the sand tower he’s building—or at least trying to keep from crumbling down. The iron bars rub painfully against the backs of her knees, and she huffs in annoyance every time her head gets heavy and she has to sit back up on the monkey bars.
“He’s not dead, stupid. I would have felt it.” she scoffs. Taking a big breath, she swings back down, watching Pavel’s small frame dangle in front of her eyes like a bauble.
“Maybe he was old, and he died before you were born. I bet he was ugly, like you.” he takes a handful of sand and throws it in her direction, but it gets picked up by the wind and thrown right back into his face.
Karolina feels her entire head throb as she laughs loudly, watching Pavel take off his heavy frames and wipe frantically at his eyes. When her vision starts blurring, she sits back up on the bars, already missing the way it felt to have the whole world swing around her—upside down and silly.
“D’you think yours is blind, like you?” she grins.
Pavel’s scrunched up face looks like a sad, mouldy tomato.
“Maybe.” he shrugs. “Or she’s weird, like you. She gave me this big one on my knee last week. I think she fell.”
He cradles his knee instinctively, and Karolina has to look away to keep her cheeks from flushing. She’d be lucky, her mother had said, to never have her heart burdened like that. To know that the only pain she’ll ever have to face would be her own. To never learn that the pain doesn’t stop even after you’ve found it. That the world is entirely indifferent to the souls inhabiting it—tethered or untethered.
“Well, I’m glad I don’t have one. Means my soul’s already whole.” she swings her legs over the edge of the monkey bars, catching herself by her hands. She watches the shadows of her feet sway in the hot sand like two sailboats pulled by the sea, melting into each other before separating again.
“Maybe you don’t have one.”
Pavel’s gotten up from the ground, and is resting his arms against the side of the monkey bars. His mousy brown hair is stuck to his forehead with sweat, and his cheeks look puffy and red as he tucks his chin between his skinny arms. He’d gotten some nasty cuts across them last summer, though they’d faded away in a couple of minutes. The last time Karolina had scraped her chin, it had taken weeks for the scars to fade away.
“I don’t, I already told you.”
“No, I mean—maybe you don’t have a soul.” Pavel frowns, blue eyes sparkling in the summer sun.
Karolina’s feet still their movement, and she doesn’t spare a glance in the boy’s direction as she swings herself back, then jumps down, landing precisely on top of the sandcastle Pavel had been building. The sand crackles under her feet like fresh snow. She stomps her feet for good measure, too.
“Maybe I don’t.”
It happens in church, on a hot Sunday in August. The skirt her mother had made her wear is scratchy, and her legs keep sticking to the dirty pew. Katerina is squirming besides her, though Karolina gets all of their mother’s shushing and pointed looks. She tries to catch Pavel’s eyes, but his grandmother keeps slapping the back of his head each time he turns towards her.
As the priest drones on, Karolina watches the people around her—some hanging off each word with trembling lips and tear-filled eyes, others desperately trying to keep themselves awake. Watching them, she wonders how many of them had found their tethered soul, and how many were like her. She looks at an old woman, back hunched by age and eyes buried in thin, wrinkly lines, and wonders if she’d spent her entire life feeling a stranger’s pain—if that’s the reason she’d been clutching her hands so tightly as the priest spoke. If she’d just finally decided to make God her soulmate. To give unto him the love she’d waited all of her life to share. Would be a shame to waste it…
The air inside the church is unbearably hot and stale. There’s dust suspended in the air, and each time someone coughs Karolina feels a fresh wave of hot, acrid mouth-air roll over her.
Her sister catches her grimace, and they share a brief giggle, before her mother’s elbow connects to Karolina’s arm and they both melt back into the pew, legs reddened by the sticky wood.
She resumes her investigative appraisal of each sweaty face, and determines them all boring, or sad—or, most devastatingly, both. Once she’s successfully completed her research, she leans back against the pew, and turns her head to the left, over her mother’s shoulder. There her father is, back straight like a ruler and shirt still perfectly ironed despite the sweltering heat. His face doesn’t reveal much, thick eyebrows furrowed in concentration and lips pulled into a thin line, barely visible under his dark moustache.
Then, like a flower blooming open, his eyes turn to watch her mother, and Karolina’s breath catches in her throat. She watches her father watch her mother—the eyes she’d inherited filled with so much warmth Karolina has to draw her gaze away from it all. When she turns back to look again, her father’s turned his attention back to the priest. In his lap, though, cradled in his big, rough hands, rests her mother’s left hand, both of their thumbs rubbing soothing circles across the other’s hand.
Karolina looks down at her own hands—palms roughened by playing outside, nails bitten into stumps and fingers always twitching awkwardly, and thinks that it’s really no surprise there isn’t another pair of hands out there made to fit these ugly, misshapen things.
“Lina!” her mother’s harsh whisper rings in her ears. Deep in her thoughts, she hadn’t noticed her hands begin to rise, until her mother’s sharp nails were digging into her wrist, trying to bring them back down to her lap.
She turns to her mother, apology ready on her tongue, before searing pain blooms across her right palm, and all that spills past her lips is a loud cry. She looks down at the hand still clutched in her mother’s grip, and sees the flesh turn bright red, angry welts bubbling across it like frothing milk.
When she looks up at her mother’s eyes, she finds them just as worried and darkened as they had been when she’d found Katerina’s scar. Around them, the entire church had turned back to look at the source of the commotion. A fresh wave of hot, rotten air washes over Karolina. Her legs feel like they’d been soldered to the pews, and her cheeks are burning. Inside of her chest, her heart feels like it’s being squeezed by a giant fist.
“Everything is alright. Just her soul—” her mother starts to explain, before Karolina rips her hand from her mother’s grasp and starts running. As the church doors swing open, she lets the sun swallow her whole, and runs until she has to lay down on the hot pavement, panting like a sick dog.
When she looks down at her hands again all she sees are the calluses she’d gotten from racing Pavel with her bicycle all summer and pale, sweaty flesh.
Things quiet down after that day, though not for long. It starts with scrapes and bruises, tiny flickers of pain that Karolina forgets about by the time she goes to bed.
As the years start piling up, though, they get worse. Smarting cheeks, the muscles on her arm straining under an imaginary grip. Things she thinks might fade away just as quickly on the other person’s body. Things that keep her up at night, tossing and turning in the grip of another’s torment.
Her mother had been right.
By the time she turns sixteen, Karolina doesn’t go a day without hissing in pain at some scratch, or doubling over from some imaginary kick to the stomach. Her father grips her shoulder, telling her he must have brothers. Just a little roughhousing. When she struggles to hold her knife steady during dinner, bite marks bursting like fireworks across her arm, Karolina’s mother shakes her head and looks away.
“You should bite him back.” her sister giggles.
Karolina’s foot connects with her sister’s shin, and she grins as Katerina yelps in pain.
Her mother’s sharp voice rings out. “Karolina!”
“What, I was just saying hi to my future brother-in-law.” she pouts, exchanging a smirk with her father across the dinner table.
Later that night, in the bathtub, staring at the pale length of her arm, she takes a steadying breath and bites down hard on her wrist. Unlike before, the bite marks don’t fade away in seconds, so she is left tracing each small indent as if it were braille, expecting them to spell out some secret message.
It last less than a second, but she feels it. A sharp pinch just on the inside of her elbow, the skin barely reddening where she’d felt it.
Hi.
They talk like that, for a while. Like some secret code they’d made up, Karolina waits for the pinch after every kick. One for sorry, didn’t mean to, two for sorry you had to feel that. She pinches back, and avoids her mother’s worried gaze at the dinner table.
When she meets Michelle, with her glossy blonde curls, and perfectly smooth, tan skin, Karolina thinks she might have finally found something she’d want to be tethered to.
Michelle is kind, and laughs lightly even when Karolina’s jokes land poorly. She teaches her how to play tennis at the country club in-between Karolina’s shifts and Michelle’s swimming lessons—and giggles each time Karolina gets frustrated and starts swearing in Czech They spend an entire summer vacation practically attached at the hip, and if Karolina looks down to see a bruise appear and disappear on her thigh, she assures herself it must just be a shadow. She’s clumsy, and doesn’t eat nearly as much fruit and vegetables as she should—sensitivity and bruising is normal for that kind of stuff. If she feels a pinch at the crook of her elbow, she reckons she must have caught her skin on a zipper or something.
When Michelle turns to her one day, face lit up, pointing to a small cut on the back of her calf, Karolina shakes her head and prays her cheeks don’t betray the fire eating her up from her core.
“Look, Kay! It’s him!” she beams, running a slender finger over the now faded cut. “Haven’t gotten one in ages—Heaven knows, I thought he might be in a coma or something!”
Michelle laughs, grinning as she lifts her head to look back at Karolina.
She doesn’t remember whether she’d laughed, or said yeah, but she remembers going back home and hitting herself in the chest to try and pry her heart free of the heavy grip holding it captive.
When she finally stops, she pinches herself twice.
She barely makes it past the beginning of the school year.
Michelle, in all her soft grace, doesn’t call her a freak to her face. Instead, she places a delicate hand on Karolina’s shoulder, calls her honey and tells her she’ll keep her in her Sunday prayer—that she’ll become whole once she meets him. That she’s scared it might take a while to find her soulmate, too, but she knows it’ll be worth it. Then, finally, she tells Karolina she’s sorry, before leaving her and all her marred skin to glimmer in the weak light of a roller rink bathroom.
Dominik is tall, and likes to pick her up and swing her around each time they meet up. In his arms, she feels like she’s a kid again, swinging from the monkey bars—like the whole world’s swaying and she’s the only still thing on it. He’s polite to her mother, and pets Katerina’s hair affectionately when she calls him a big oaf. His parents, hardworking polish immigrants, live just across town and give him fresh fish from their shop to bring to Karolina’s parents. Her father doesn’t smile at Dominik, but he grips his hand like he means business. Her mother starts looking at her again during dinner, and redirects her pointed looks towards her little sister.
She still thinks about Michelle, about the small gold cross hung delicately around her neck and the smell of her shampoo. They didn’t go to the same school, and Karolina’s job at the country club had only been a brief summer distraction, so Michelle’s image drifts away from her like dandelion fuzz. That’s all she’d been, anyway, she tells herself. A strange fever dream in the middle of a sweltering summer.
Dominik is real, though. He’s strong, and speaks gravely, and he makes the whole world spin around just for her. When he hits her for the first time, he holds her hand and cries. He says it hurts him just as much, and Karolina realizes she’s found it. Real love. If all she knew of her soulmate was their pain, then that is what love must be.
And Dominik gives her plenty of it.
She’d planned on going to a good school—one of the big ones, after high-school, but it all starts to slip away from her mind like a hot straightener thrown on the bed and forgotten about, though the feeling of wanting to turn back and check for something still chases her around. Life starts to feel like a tilt-a-whirl, and the only thing that makes her feel still is Dominik. And he’s smart, so she trusts him. He’s a good, honest, polish boy, so she reckons a good and honest life is something she should want—that those words can also mean whole. He wants to open up a mechanic shop, and take care of her.
He still cries, even after the thirtieth slap. Karolina cries with him, and they share the pain like communion wine. She trains herself out of the habit of reaching for the skin at the crook of her elbow, and if there’s ever any pinching there, she doesn’t feel it.
Karolina avoids her mother’s eyes during dinner, and wears long sleeves all the way into May.
By the end of the school year, she has to start stealing her sister’s concealer, and her father pretends he isn’t missing half a pack of cigarettes each morning.
“You know he hangs out with other girls at that shithole downtown, right?”
She turns around quickly, motioning for Katerina to close the door behind her as she starts waving her arm, directing the smoke outwards. Her father’s empty pack of cigarettes lays crumpled in the bathroom sink.
“You’re being stupid, kaka.”
Her sister grabs the cigarette, stealing a small puff before Karolina rips it from her fingers.
“I’m not a kid anymore, Kati.” she sighs. “When you meet them…it’s different. Things change.”
“God, Karolina, you think that’s him?” Katerina scoffs. Her cheeks are covered in glitter that had fallen off of her eyelids, and her pink lip-gloss shimmers in the light as she pulls her lips into a scowl. Karolina has to keep the corners of her mouth from turning up at the image of her little sister trying to discipline her.
“What, you think you’re gonna meet him and it’s all going to be rainbows and sunshine?” she smirks. “Look at mom and dad, Kati. Do they seem happy all the time?”
Katerina leans back against the edge of the bathtub she’s sat on, weighing her answer carefully. Finally, she looks down at her feet, knocking her knees together before looking back at Karolina.
“Táta’s never hit her.” she whispers. Her bright hazel eyes look too much like their mother’s, and Karolina has to look away. “Even when they’re going through stuff.”
Karolina keeps her gaze outside of the bathroom window, eyes chasing the trail of smoke rising up from her cigarette.
Her sister continues.
“Karolina, he’s supposed to take away the pain, not cause it. That’s love.”
“You don’t know shit about love.”
She throws the cigarette stub out the window, and climbs down from the toilet seat, leaving her sister to deal with the smoke.
When she shows up drunk and cradling a busted nose, her mother sits her down quietly at the kitchen table and wipes the blood away with a wet rag.
“Broken?” she asks. Her voice doesn’t hold any warmth, but the hand holding Karolina’s chin still is soft and she doesn’t dig her nails into her skin like she would whenever she’d scold Karolina. Back then, Karolina supposes, she might have thought it worthwhile to try and get her attention—to make her listen.
Her mother’s silence, she realizes, is much more frightening than all of her screaming had ever been.
“I don’t think so.”
Karolina can’t bear to look at her mother, so she lets her eyes trail her father’s heavy steps.
His tall frame stalks the length of the apartment as he swears loudly at anything he can think of. At Dominik for laying a hand on his daughter, at his daughter for taking it, at his wife for not paying more attention to Karolina, at this country and all the ways it had let them down—at his own hands for not being big enough to protect them all.
From the doorway, Katerina watches her family with hunched shoulders and red-rimmed eyes. Though she’d never remembered it, her hand still reaches absentmindedly to scratch lightly at the spot on her thigh where her first mark had appeared.
“I’m sorry, máma.”
Her mother looks down at her hands as she wrings out the rag in the bowl of warm water nestled on her lap.
“If the heart is weak...” she whispers, “the head must take control, Karolina.”
It’s ugly, the way she breaks down. Fresh blood starts pouring out of her nose, and that old grip on her heart tightens so much she thinks she might die. Her mother kisses her forehead once—and it isn’t a soft kiss, like the ones she’d pepper their cheeks with when they were young, but a strong, rough kiss—like the ones generals give to their fiercest soldiers before sending them into battle and to their deaths. A kiss to seal their fate.
She sleeps in Katerina’s bed that night, her sister’s bony arms wrapped tightly around her waist, arguing about whose feet were colder and promising to drool all over her pillow. After her sister’s begun to snore softly besides her, Karolina reaches a hand and pinches herself twice on her arm. She holds her breath, waiting for a response—a scratch, a kick, anything.
It’s faint, but after a few minutes she feels it.
Two pinches, right above her heart.
She doesn’t see Dominik again after that night, and if the shop next to their apartment block is ever out of fresh fish, well then, they just don’t have fish—Good Friday or not.
Weeks later, when her mother calls her into the kitchen, there’s a strange woman sipping coffee out of their good cups. The woman has ink-black hair, and dark eyes sharpened into daggers by kohl. She reaches a slender hand and opens a pack of cigarettes—menthol slims, the fancy kind, and pulls one out with her nails. They’re probably the longest nails Karolina’s ever seen, painted a deep shade of red and almost curling in on themselves like claws. When Karolina sits down, she slides the pack towards her. Emboldened by the woman’s mesmerizing aura and musky perfume, Karolina takes a cigarette and lights it, pointedly avoiding her mother’s judgmental stare.
“Karolina, no?” the woman says. Her voice is deep and raspy, like she’d spent a lifetime laughing and smoking with Greta Garbo in dim-lit whiskey bars. Each time she flicked her cigarette into the ashtray, the big, gold bracelets dangling off of her wrists clicked against each other like wind chimes.
The woman waits for Karolina’s nod, before resting her cigarette in the ashtray and extending her hand.
“Magda.”
Karolina awkwardly grips the cigarette with her other hand, before grasping Magda’s hand. Her long nails scratch at Karolina’s wrist as she wraps her fingers around her hand. The veins running up her hand look like tree roots against her olive skin. Before letting her go, she turns Karolina’s hand, inspecting her palm. Whatever it is she finds there must be impressive, as she nods and throws Karolina a pointed brow.
“Your máma asked me to help you.”
Karolina looks over at her mother expectantly, but all she gets is a severe nod and a pair of lips pulled into a tight line.
“With what?” she asks.
Magda smiles at her, before slowly placing Karolina’s hand back on the table.
“With love, child.” She picks up her discarded cigarette and takes a deep inhale, blowing the smoke out elegantly, to her side. “Your mother says you’ve been having trouble with it.”
“She can break it, Karolina.” her mother finally joins the conversation. She places her hand on the table next to Karolina’s, though she does not try to reach for it. “You don’t have to feel it anymore.”
Karolina sighs. She busies herself with the cigarette, avoiding both women’s eyes.
“I’m okay now, máma.”
“You were okay before, Lina. But not anymore.” her mother murmurs. As she turns to watch Karolina, a faint red mark blooms then quickly fades away from her upper arm. Her mother’s eyes, pure hazel carved in stone, well up in tears as she traces her finger delicately over the now pale skin. “Not since this.”
Karolina had barely felt the slap, just the accompanying short pinch on her elbow.
Sorry!
She reaches for her mother’s hand, covering it as it rests against her arm.
“I have to feel it, right? That’s how it works.”
Her mother begins to protest, shaking her head. Karolina looks at her mother, really looks at her, and tries to tell her what she’d never been able to tell herself. That there is—has always been, something inside of her that she doesn’t know how to fight. That this is the only chance she has at ridding herself of it—that her heart is weak and her mind a tangled ball of yarn. That what lies within her can’t be cleansed with Sunday prayer, so by the universe’s hands she must let herself be lead.
“It’s the only way to be whole.” she whispers, embarrassed by the tremor in her voice. The desperation in it.
“That is not the same as being happy, Lina.” her mother sighs.
“Are you happy? With táta? With us?”
She lets go of her mother’s hands, and watches her press them firmly against her thighs.
“Not all the time.” she says. “Your father cannot take all of my pain away. And I cannot take his.”
“So—would you have done it?”
“No.” her mother shakes her head.
Her temples are framed by thin wisps of white that rest like snow on a tree branch amid her chestnut hair. In the dim kitchen light, she looks like a glowing statue. Like a tall, warm streetlight at the end of a scary, dark street. Like the little picture of The Virgin Mary she’d slipped inside her daughters’ pencil holders before the first day of school, to keep them safe.
She bites her lip—a habit she’d always admonished Karolina for.
“But I wish I would not have made it into a dream. Into something that cannot be.” she finally says, eyes downcast.
Their guest, entirely forgotten amid their tearful conversation, clears her throat. She puts out her cigarette, then rests a slender finger over her temple, fixing a sharp glare on Karolina.
“It won’t take it away, child.” she smiles, though her eyes look mournful. “Just…dull it, for a while.”
“For how long?”
“Until you meet.”
Karolina frowns. “And if we never meet?”
“Then you will never know pain like that again.”
Magda visits them two more times before Karolina leaves for college.
The first time she visits them, it is because of Katerina.
Her mother, terrified of having two defective daughters, calls her over the second Katerina starts breaking her curfew and wearing her skirts with the waistband tucked in.
There isn’t, it turns out, a charm to cure a young girl of the malady of being a teenager, so Magda gives their mother a calming balm to rub on her temples at night, and a recipe for a paste to help Katerina dry her pimples faster.
The second time she visits—it’s to check up on Karolina. She lets Karolina smoke her fancy cigarettes again, and asks her about her plans for the future while they sip coffee like two old friends. She gives her a couple of bags of dried herbs to take to college—a tea blend for concentration, and one to soothe her nerves before exams.
She tells Karolina stories about her own visits to New York—about lovers she’d left and rooftops she’d climbed. Tells her, in her deep, raspy drawl, that the very first step she’ll take in that city is crucial—that she needs to let the city know she’s arrived or else it’ll swallow her whole. But, she says, she’s a strong girl—she’ll grab that monster by its scruff and tell it to move out of her way.
Before she leaves, she takes Karolina’s empty coffee cup and inspects it just like she had done to her palm the first time they’d met.
“You stick to those plans, child.” she points a long crimson nail in Karolina’s direction. “I see a lot of success for you.”
“No boy trouble anymore, right?” Karolina laughs.
Magda raises an eyebrow, resting her chin against her hand. Under her gaze, Karolina’s smile drains from her face, and she swallows harshly.
“No, child.” Magda chuckles. Her dark eyes light up as her lips slip into a smirk. She shakes her head slowly. “No boy trouble.”
ii.
College comes and goes without much fanfare.
She lets the beast that is New York City swallow her whole and finds comfort in the shade of the beast’s belly.
She blacks out for the first time, and learns she likes control more than courage and tequila. She starts fucking girls and delights in the sad glint of their eyes when she tells them she’d severed her soul mark. She tells them she’s free in a way they’ll never understand and kisses them quickly, to swallow the silence.
She thinks about Michelle sometimes, even after all these years, and wonders whether her prayers had worked or not. Whether she was still praying for her.
Some nights she pinches herself and lays in bed, waiting for a response. When she feels nothing in return, she tells herself it’s relief that washes over her. That each time she steps into a room full of strangers it’s just a nervous habit of hers to reach for the inside of her elbow.
By the time she finishes her studies, she’s learnt nothing of much value except the value of being able to make anything out of nothing.
And so she does.
She lands herself a couple of internships, then finally settles on the only one she knows her father has heard of—Waystar Royco.
The comms team is sad and stale, like a boring sermon on a hot summer day, but Karolina makes the best of it. She positions herself within arm’s reach of every important person, and trains her face to betray nothing but whatever it is the other person needs to see. She buys a dictaphone and lowers the pitch at which she speaks, learns to roll her r’s slowly. Learns to tell a message so well it nestles into the other person’s brain and takes root, as if it had always been there.
She figures out which executives take best to mollifying, and which ones appreciate shows of strength. She becomes the balm that soothes every ailment and makes Waystar run like a well-oiled machine.
In her free time she still fucks around in dive bars and uses a different name depending on which shade of lipstick she’d picked out.
She calls her mother and they pick at the same three subjects—work, her father’s health, and whatever dish her mother had discovered recently. Her mother never asks her if she’s happy, just whether everything is going according to her plan, so she decides to make it mean the same thing.
Her sister, she tells her, doesn’t have her determination. She’s flighty, and won’t commit to a single thing. She wants to drop out of night school again and open up a nail salon. Or a hair salon. Or a vintage boutique—she’ll figure it out.
Her mother tells her she regrets not going through with it—severing Katerina’s soul mark.
Karolina swallows, and lets her mother take it as confirmation when she asks her if it hadn’t made her life easier, clearer.
She meets Logan Roy about fifteen times before the meeting becomes mutual. He says her name like a question and narrows his eyes when she tells him it’s czech. When she tells him the abridged version of the stories she’d heard her father tell when she was young he nods sharply, like he means business.
“Good. Nice to know this building isn’t just silver spoons and fucking panty sniffers.” he smirks, while the majority of the room pull on their ties or clear their throats.
She’s always been a quick learner, and Logan isn’t nearly as hard to read as he thinks he is, so it doesn’t take long for her to become indispensable in strategy meetings.
She cleans up shit and doesn’t bring it up except in passing, like she doesn’t require recognition for it—like loyalty comes naturally to her. Like Logan Roy is a man that inspires loyalty. When he yells at her, she nods before speaking, and never apologizes for screwing up—pulls up three different ways to fix the situation instead, and ends the conversation with an of course, Logan.
With big men like Logan Roy, it’s the little things that do them in.
Life becomes such a quick succession of rooms, faces and plans, that she can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happens.
What she knows is that on a cold December night she wakes up screaming. A raw, ugly thing. The pain is so searing it tears through her entire body, and by the time she can will her muscles to move, whatever mark had been there has already disappeared. She pours herself some whiskey—she’d taught herself to like it after Gerri had advised her to steer clear of fruity drinks at work receptions, and spends the rest of the night convincing herself it had all just been a nightmare.
By morning she is relieved to find a full inbox and several fires waiting to be put out. There’s a nasty video circulating from one of the parks—one of the food stands filled with burnt oil stains and semi-expired meat. A former employee suing for wrongful termination and emotional distress. Logan Roy’s daughter going on another bender and crashing her latest boyfriend’s car.
Just enough disasters to keep Karolina from focusing on her own. By the time she’s managed to deal with each one, she drops herself down on her couch, face melting into the soft cushions. There’s a satisfying ache running through her body, the kind of sweet exhaustion that slips into a deep, dreamless sleep. Like a straightener left on, though, the thought plants itself at the back of her mind and pulls her back each time she begins to doze off. Lifting herself up on her elbows, she pops open the button of her shirt sleeve, then pulls the fabric back until it reaches her elbow.
Taking a deep breath, she bring her fingers to the soft flesh and pinches it together. Then she waits.
What she gets in response isn’t a pinch, but a deep, painful scratch running all the way from the crook of her elbow to the top of her wrist.
Not exactly the happy reunion she’d envisioned.
When her father dies, it’s Katerina that breaks the news to her. They haven’t spoken in months—haven’t shared a secret since they used to sneak into their mother’s vanity and douse themselves in her Far Away before going out.
She tells her the funeral will be held on Friday, and that she’s scared. That she doesn’t know how to get their mother to sleep. Karolina tells her she’s sorry—she’s got two minutes to go before she’s supposed to be in a meeting, but she’ll be there as soon as possible.
She barely makes it in time for the funeral and avoids her mother’s gaze for most of it.
The entire affair is painfully unremarkable. Her work phone keeps buzzing silently against her thigh, and Katerina keeps looking at her like she’s holding back a punch.
“You couldn’t come earlier?”
They’re standing in the kitchen, both too numb to start making the coffee they’d said they’d put on. It took approximately thirty minutes for their father to become an absence in this world—an entire life shoved in a box and buried in less time than it takes to cue in line for a Brightstar ride. Not even one of Doderick’s rides.
“I’m sorry, Kati. I tried, but—”
Her sister, she realizes, is taller than her. She tries to remember when that had happened, but can’t come up with an answer. She tries to remember how to talk to these people—her people, and can’t come up with anything to say.
“It’s fucking táta, Karolina! You couldn’t take one more goddamn day off?”
Her work phone starts buzzing again in her pocket, and she pulls it out before realizing what she’s doing.
“Of course.” her sister scoffs. “Please, take it.”
“What do you want me to say, Katerina?” she shakes her head. “Technically, they’re paying for the whole fucking thing, so…”
She regrets the words before they leave her mouth. She watches Katerina’s eyes darken and her nostrils flare in anger, a spitting image of their mother. And Karolina just stands there, clutching her still buzzing phone, resisting the urge to answer it.
“Nice, Karolina.”
Looking at Katerina takes her back to that awful night—her sister’s scrawny frame standing in the doorway, barely casting a shadow. She remembers the way her shoulders had shaken, her tear-filled eyes and her small fingers, nails short and messily painted pink—scratching at her thigh, her other hand gripping the doorframe. The way she’d looked at Karolina, scared and lost, and how she’d squeezed the life out of her when they’d gone to bed. How, even in her sleep, she’d refused to let go of her, had dug her sharp elbows into Karolina’s ribs to keep her where she knew her to be safe.
“You know, he was right about you.” Katerina’s voice brings her back to the room where there isn’t any coffee and any of her father left.
“How?”
“After you left—after you stopped calling, him and mom started arguing about what she did to you. He said she took your soul away. I think he was right.”
Karolina swallows, her teeth straining under the pressure it takes to keep herself from screaming. She sets her phone on the kitchen table and walks to the cupboard the coffee is kept in. It’s not there anymore, so she begins rifling through each cupboard until she finds the old tin, the picture on it more faded than she remembers it. She avoids her sister’s gaze as she grabs the coffee pot resting on the stove-top and rinses out the morning’s remains from it. After she’s added the fresh coffee and filled the pot with water, she doesn’t bother looking for a matchbox, instead walking over to the coat rack and grabbing her own lighter—the pack of cigarettes along with it.
After the kettle’s been set on top of the burning eye and she’s confident she’s managed to swallow her scream, Karolina drags a chair from under the table and sits down.
“Maybe he was.” she says, still refusing to meet Katerina’s gaze. “So, you think it would’ve been better for me to keep going the way I was?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you do think that.”
She takes a cigarette out of the pack and lights it, eyes fixed on the kettle.
“I would’ve accepted it, Kati.” she whispers. “That kind of life—that kind of love. I would’ve gone my whole life thinking that was the best I could have.”
As she turns her head, she watches Katerina walk over to the windowsill on the opposite side of the room and return with an ashtray. The only one they’d ever kept in the house—a small, glass dish that turned amber when light settled in its belly. She throws it unceremoniously in front of Karolina, the intricate pattern carved into it painting flickers of light all across the kitchen table.
“You mean a life like ours, right?”
She finally turns to meet her sister’s eyes. From up close, she sees the thin tendrils of concealer gathered in the folds under her eyes, betraying the dark hollows underneath. The smudged eyeliner in the corners where she’d dabbed her tissue. The lines running along her mouth that no longer track a toothy grin, but an angry scowl.
She doesn’t answer the question, leaving her cigarette perched on the ashtray as she gets up to check on the coffee. The foam’s already gathered in a ring around the edge of the pot, and she catches it just before the coffee starts to boil. She’d never gotten the hang of it, always trying to give it just a little bit more time and always catching it just a bit too late, making everyone drink her shitty, bitter coffee.
“I got it back, anyway, so…”
Her back is turned to Katerina, so the only reaction she catches is her sister’s soft exhale, somewhere between gasping and choking. Katerina is silent for a moment, before she clears her throat.
“So you met him?”
Karolina throws her a tight smile, hands coming up to dig into her elbows.
“Katerina.” she says, trying to keep her voice steady. “Don’t.”
“Oh, come on, Karolina!” Katerina scoffs. “You’re not seriously saying you—”
“I am. Besides, I don’t even know who it is, it just started happening again.” she looks down at the steam rising from the coffee pot. She watches the steam shift and dance around her hand as she pours herself a cup, the heat of it kissing the skin on her palm. “Can we please not do this right now—of all fucking days?”
Still behind her, she hears Katerina scoff. “That’s the life you left us for? Doing some rich asshole’s dirty work and fucking—being a dyke?”
“Katerina!”
They both turn to find their mother standing at the kitchen entrance. Her eyes are red and puffy, and her slender hands are still shaking as she wraps them around herself. The black fabric washes her out, leaving behind nothing but a ghost with sharp, bright eyes and a trembling lip.
“No, it’s fine, mom.” Karolina sighs. “Get it all out, Kati.”
She grabs the cup and sits back down at the table, staring up at her sister as she picks up her discarded cigarette.
“Oh, you’re the fucking victim in all of this?” her sister shouts, finally releasing the anger she’d been holding back all day. “I was here, Karolina, with dad—right up until the end, when it got really ugly. And before that—I’ve been here all this time keeping this family together while you were having martinis with your girlfriends in Manhattan. You couldn’t even spare one fucking day to come to the wake, but sure, you’re the victim here.”
Katerina’s face has turned red, the brightest thing in this family—the only living thing left.
Karolina clears her throat. “Is that all?”
Her sister shakes her head, turning towards their mother. The image flashes behind Karolina’s eyes, stirring memories of her sister, barely taller than the table they’re gathered around, yelling at their mother because of something Karolina had done. She always used to turn back to Karolina and flash her a quick smirk or pull her tongue out. Silently, Karolina begs her to do it just once more.
She doesn’t, and when Katerina turns back all her face betrays is disdain.
“God, she’s—mom, look at her! You think just because these people let you clean up after them that, what, you’ve suddenly become one of them?” Katerina scowls, waving her hand in Karolina’s face.
A sliver of smoke gets in her eye, and her fingers start shaking from the tight grip she keeps on the cigarette. None of it gets through, though. Karolina wills herself to remain as smooth and untouchable as fresh snow.
Without meaning to, she looks around herself and thinks about Waystar—about how good even that shitty pod coffee tastes, how it’s always just shy of bitter. How those creaky chairs in the conference room stink of fake leather, but are soft enough to doze off in. How goddamn fresh those butter croissants from the corner place always taste. How much easier it is to recognize herself within those walls, compared to the pictures framed around this house.
“We’re not jealous of you, Karolina. We feel sorry for you.”
Her sister’s eyes burn with unshed tears, and her voice is sharp and shaky—has always been like that when she gets angry, but Karolina understands there is bravery in baring it all without restraint. It’s been too long since Karolina’s witnessed sincerity like that, and it makes her own cheeks burn with shame to watch it all. A part of her desperately wishes they were still young enough to fight it out—to throw clumsy fists and spit instead of pointed silence and ugly truths.
Instead, she stubs out her cigarette and takes a deep breath, letting the silence ring in her ears for a moment. The air rushes out of her like a dam breaking.
“Do you know that every single time I’ve spoken to mom on the phone, it’s either been about dad or about you?”
She speaks softly, rolling her r’s just like she’d taught herself. Her tongue feels heavy in her mouth, cheeks pulled taut like fresh hide. She runs it over her teeth slowly, testing each until she feels out the sharpest one and digs into it.
“You haven’t kept shit together, Kati. You can’t even keep down a goddamn job for more than two weeks.”
Her mother’s gasp rings through the static filling her ears.
“Karolina, přestaň!”
With dreadful clarity, Karolina rises from the kitchen table, taking in as much of the house as she can. She looks down at the old amber ashtray, the splintered wood framing the kitchen window, the lightened tracks across the living room that mark years of footprints, tiny and big, light and heavy, going in or forever going out. She steals as much as her eyes can capture, even though she knows she’ll leave it all behind once she steps out of this house.
Her sister and her mother, she saves for last.
“I left because I knew that the only thing in this world that I can rely on is myself. Not máma or táti, not some fucker whose pain I have no choice but to feel. Myself, Katerina.”
The few times she’d visited since moving to New York, Karolina had known this moment was coming. That the image her family had of her had begun to warp. Like a double exposed photo, the person before them was all shadows—dark outlines of the girl they’d known blurred by the bright flesh of the woman who’d come back. Neither quite fitting into each other. A life that she has outgrown—a memory that has outgrown her.
Looking at them, she realizes with shame that her own self-centeredness had blinded her to her family’s own shapeshifting. That they’d also changed, somewhere along the way—her mother’s hair, the lines around her sister’s eyes, her father’s hunched back.
Her mother’s quiet murmur, voice hoarse from crying, pulls her out of her thoughts. Her shoulders have never looked so small.
“It’s my fault.” she sighs. “You were in so much pain, Karolina—and so young. I wanted to take that away from you.”
Her hands grasp the sides of her dress, wringing the fabric like she had that godawful night—wringing out thins tendrils of blood out of a wet rag.
“Máma…”
For the first time in her life, Karolina watches her mother hold back her words, her face withdrawing as if lost through fog. Shaking her head clear of what she’d wanted to say, she takes the few steps separating her from her daughters, and reaches a pale hand to Karolina’s forearm.
“There is food in the fridge—the white bag. I made it for you to take.”
Karolina can only furrow her brows, her voice crushed somewhere deep within the aching flesh of her throat.
“Kati…” her mother then turns to her sister. “Petr is coming for the suits tonight. Will you iron them?”
Her mother smooths down the front of her dress, putting an end to the conversation.
Later that night, as she sits alone in her apartment, Karolina eats her mother’s food and puts on one of her father’s old records—the only things she’d taken with her when she’d left for college. She sips on some whiskey she’d gotten as a birthday gift from the girl whose promotion she’d stolen months ago. It’s not really top-shelf, but it numbs her throat well enough. Then, she crawls into bed and reaches for the crook of her elbow.
One pinch. Then silence.
Feeling her teeth crumble under the pressure of her shaking jaw, she lets her fingers grasp at the skin until her knuckles start aching. By the time she feels a pinch back, she’s already sobbing, knees pulled up to her chest like a wounded animal.
They don’t talk about that day again—though, in all fairness, the calls grow less and less frequent as the years pass anyway.
Her mother still tells her about every new recipe she finds. Katerina gives up on doing nails because all that dust can give you lung cancer—something she’d read on some doctor’s blog, and decides she wants to go to nursing school instead. That one actually seems to stick, though she and her mother silently agree to not hold too much hope out. Their father is still dead, but Karolina only thinks about him when her mother mentions all the weeds she’d had to pull from around his grave on her latest visit.
She knows it isn’t anything even closely resembling a healthy relationship—that the three of them are all pulling at weeds and pretending they’re freshly picked flowers, but compared to the family she’s gotten enmeshed into, Karolina reckons they’re doing just fine.
The years pass like a latent winter—slowly numbing away at her until she’s forgotten she’d ever been anything except cold, and she works through them all with no real end goal, just the feverish ache of getting somewhere. Some vague promise of spring.
The work, she comes to find, is more burdensome on the nerves than on the mind. Corporate America and all its shiny glass-paned walls reveals itself to be nothing but a little man behind a curtain. An old shepherd and his weathered crook—everyone else a bleating sheep.
Some late nights, Karolina allows herself to chase that train of thought—begins to imagine herself a black sheep, or a sneaky fox, crawling under the belly of that beast and nuzzling at its breast, before pulling out a sharp blade and sliding it neatly into its side.
But then she thinks about the beast’s breast, the warm shelter it provides—the apartment it’s given her, the wine she buys from provinces barely visible on a map. She thinks about the gleam in some twenty-three year old’s eyes when she tells her looking for RECNY outfits is such a fucking bore.
She never manages to get to the end of that thought, her belly full of wine and head too heavy to bother counting sheep before she blacks out.
Eventually, though, the shepherd’s crook catches up to her, too.
Some plucky reporter puts out an exposé in The New York Times, and Karolina almost gets thrown out of a goddamn window. The piece is no Watergate, but it hits Logan where it hurts—his family. The entire article essentially boils down to a collage of the Roy kids behaving exactly how every intellectually average citizen in this country would expect them to.
The stock market will shit it out in a week at most, Frank assures him, but that does nothing to quell Logan’s rage.
In a room full of men that most likely remember her ass better than her face, Logan yells at her—calls her incompetent, points a fat finger at her sweater and tells her to take her bows and get out of his fucking face. For the first time in her adult life, the only thing Karolina wants to do is call her mother.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she walks out of the conference room with her back held so tight she feels her spine ready to snap. She gives herself precisely two minutes to hyperventilate in the bathroom, then she shoves that stupid fucking sweater in the bin and walks silently back to her desk.
She can’t quite get her hands to stop shaking though, and the more they shake, the more it makes her eyes sting. Out of desperation, she brings her hand to the crook of her elbow and pinches herself. Not receiving an immediate response, and feeling her jaw start to crumble under the pressure of keeping it from trembling, Karolina starts grabbing at her skin frantically. In her agitation, she doesn’t realize she’s started getting a response. Unlike her own message, what she gets in return are slow and steady grips. They start at her elbow, then travel up and down her arms. The rhythm of it, the measured grasp—it almost feels soothing, and Karolina relaxes into the sensation as her breathing slowly starts to even out and some of the tensions melts away from her shoulders.
She doesn’t close her eyes, but if she tunes out the world for long enough, it almost feels as if there’s an actual person next to her, raking their nails up and down her arm, tugging at her skin to keep her from jumping out of it.
In a way, she supposes she’s always just thought of it as a kind of inner projection. Like a telephone call, the other person’s voice a mere recreation in her mind, and not something tangible—the curve of a lip that her eyes could trace, a soft exhale blooming goosebumps across her skin.
Now, though, Karolina feels something stir inside of her. Some emerging curiosity. A timid desire to envision the hand tugging at its own skin just to keep Karolina grounded. The furrowed brow, the silent understanding of what Karolina needs in that moment. The care with which this phantom pain blooms across Karolina’s skin—the desire to make it as painless as possible despite pain being the only tether to each other.
Karolina knows that pain is not love—had torn that belief out of herself with her bare teeth after Dominik. But it’s something—in this moment, in this room full of people who wouldn’t care enough to notice her chair being empty if she never turned up for work tomorrow. In this life where she can’t call her mother. It’s something.
On a dreary Tuesday afternoon someone is pinching themselves for Karolina, and she’s trying her goddamn best not to admit that it might be the most caring thing anyone has ever done for her.
She doesn’t regret severing it for so long—will never allow herself to wonder just where she might have ended up had she refused Magda that day. How carelessly she would have let love maim her.
But as she waits out the threat of a panic attack, counting each tug at her elbow like a heartbeat, Karolina can’t help but feel a little guilty.
She remembers that deep, painful scratch. How could she apologize for that, or at least offer an explanation worth years of isolation? Which part of her body could she scratch or tear at to spell out the fact that she can only feel still when she is running away?
Her sister had been right, she knows that, and part of her wishes she’d let Katerina finish what she’d wanted to say that day. That Karolina is a coward, and that ache she’s been nurturing, that feverish desire—it was never about getting somewhere, but about getting away.
If she’d let Katerina speak that day, Karolina would know now with certainty—would have the tangible proof—the curve of a lip, the angry spit, that what she’s been running from is herself. That her shadow is the only thing she’s ever wanted to escape.
What kind of shape could that bruise take?
She can’t convey any of that, not without digging a knife into her own chest, anyway.
So, she pinches herself twice—right above her heart.
And then Karolina gets back to work.
iii.
“Hey. Karolina, right?”
Siobhan Roy, of all people, finds her hiding outside the staff entrance.
The annual Waystar Christmas party has always been a dreadfully boring affair, but having to stand around in high-heels and a scratchy dress while still being looked at like a pariah by her entire department and the fucking CEO turns it into an actual nightmare. It’s barely half past nine and she’s already allowed herself three drinks out of desperation.
What she’s failed to consider, however, is the permanent state of nausea she’s been in since that goddamn article dropped creeping up on her. All the sleepless nights spent at her desk, crawling back to her apartment to change before running straight back—it’s failed to impress anyone, and all she’d gotten for her trouble so far had been a pointed brow from Gerri Kellman when she’d failed to react to a scalding cup of coffee being spilled on her hand.
By the time she finds the staff entrance, her hands slide clumsily off of the door handle, and she has to fiddle with the latch on her clutch to pluck her cigarettes out.
By the time the youngest Roy finds her, the gin has only strengthened its grip on her.
“Yes. Siobhan, hello.” she blinks, almost dropping her cigarette.
The picture they’d used for Siobhan’s segment in the article was an old one. Fresh into her role as a political consultant, and fresh out of some senator son’s party, they’d managed to catch her right as she’d tripped, the bright flash making her hair look like an exploding star as it whipped around her face. At least she’d been wearing underwear.
She’d let her hair grow out since then, Karolina notes, and the round softness in her cheeks had begun to smooth away—though Karolina supposes that might have more to do with Siobhan’s choice of party favours, and less with her bone structure maturing. Maybe she’d grown old, but Karolina really can’t imagine getting the urge to do coke in a place like DC.
It takes a moment for her to realize that Siobhan has started speaking again.
“Did we actually ever meet, like, formally?” the other woman frowns. “I know you’ve read every text or e-mail I’ve ever sent, but I don’t remember if we’ve even shaken hands.”
They’d had to raid all of the Roy kids’ devices after the article, which had been an equally mortifying ordeal for Karolina. However, she is just drunk enough to not give a shit about mollifying another Roy this evening.
“We haven’t. Nice to meet you.” she extends her hand, which Shiv grabs firmly. “I’m a big fan of your punctuation style and efficient use of abbreviation.”
Shiv’s hand is warm, but she grips Karolina’s like they’ve already said fuck you to each other. She laughs as their hands pull apart.
“Yeah, thanks.” she nods.
Shiv reaches into her purse, pulling out her own pack of cigarettes, glancing around like a teenager, as if someone might see and tell on her. She takes one and puts it into her mouth, before gesturing to Karolina for a light. Without thinking, Karolina reaches over and lights her cigarette, only realizing what she’s done when she catches Shiv’s eyes narrowing. Regardless, the other woman gives her a thankful nod.
“So, uh, how is it? Working for the GOP’s spank bank. ”
Karolina would arrive home later that night and ask herself just what the fuck had gone through her mind—what parasite had eaten at her brain to make her act like that. What type of lead they’d spiked her drinks with. In that moment, though, all she can think about is the fact that Siobhan is the first person in months who hasn’t looked at her like she’s a fucking idiot. That out of all the Roy kids, she’s the only one who had taken that hit piece in stride and kept her head down until the storm had been weathered.
That no picture had ever accurately portrayed just how striking Siobhan’s eyes were up close.
“Great.” she huffs out a shameless scoff. “I’m very grateful for the opportunity to work for one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world.”
She finishes it off with a million-watt smile that takes up half of her face and leaves her cheeks sore, before letting it drain from her face entirely. Next to her, Siobhan is beaming.
“And she didn’t stutter once!” she gasps. “How many tries did it take before you stopped gripping the sink while you were practicing that?”
Karolina throws her a pointed brow, biting her lip. She takes a drag out of her cigarette to cover her smirk.
“A couple.” she finally admits.
“It’s good. Bet even reich sounds good rolling off that tongue.” Shiv widens her eyes as she says it—and Karolina briefly wonders how much of the woman’s life is lived as if she is constantly on the verge of being caught.
“Dad knows how to pick ‘em.”
She almost doesn’t catch what Shiv’s said, but her smirk is enough for Karolina to figure out it hadn’t been anything nice.
“Your father didn’t pick me.”
If she wasn’t still being kept in the doghouse—working on internal memos and goddamn shareholder packets, it might have come out less hostile, but she has a feeling there is some room for silent understanding between the two of them.
“Right. As we all know, he just loves giving young talent a chance to grow. A staunch supporter of bridging the wage gap, too, my father.” Shiv nods mockingly, though her eyes betray some wounded familiarity.
They exchange a quiet laugh, before Karolina shakes her head.
This evening might not go to waste after all.
She flicks her cigarette, letting her eyes trail over Shiv’s body. Shiv clocks her, but says nothing as her eyes move to follow a thin wisp of smoke.
“And how is—DC? Is the weather as bad as they say?”
She suppresses a giggle as she watches Shiv’s lips fall into a grimace.
“I have an umbrella.” she shrugs. “Plus, being surrounded by former frat boys who can’t even spell the word legislature is already making me depressed, so I don’t really give a shit about some rain.”
“But the work is worth it?”
Shiv grins.
“Yeah, the work.” she nods before furrowing her brows, as if contemplating. “You know, if you think about it—I’m kind of your boss now.”
Karolina barely suppresses the urge to roll her eyes. Instead, she nods along, raising an eyebrow.
“Mm. How so?”
“Well, every time I pose for a picture next to anything blue, dad makes you put out a statement.” Shiv shrugs.
She’s not necessarily wrong, but Karolina hasn’t had enough time to properly lick her wounds, so the comment lands somewhat uncomfortably, despite the glint in Shiv’s eyes. Finishing off the rest of her cigarette, Karolina throws it on the ground and stomps it out—perhaps using a bit more force than necessary.
“I think technically that would make you your father’s boss.”
“Huh.” Shiv sighs, the corners of her lips rising. She stomps out her own cigarette, before locking eyes with Karolina.
They barely make it into the bathroom, sneaking past waiters and drunk guys from Accounting before they’re tearing at each other. As soon as the door clicks shut behind them, Shiv grabs her waist and pushes her until Karolina’s back slams against the sink.
“Fuck.”
She doesn’t know whether it’s from the alcohol, or from the thrill of fucking her boss’s daughter at his own party, not even twenty feet away from him—but her body feels as if it’s been set alight. Shiv’s fingers sink into her skin like molten lava. When her teeth graze her jaw, Karolina has to reach for the cool porcelain behind her for relief. Her head is spinning, so she assures herself it must be the alcohol. The nerves that have been building up inside of her for months, the anger she’s been swallowing back. She tries to catch Shiv’s gaze, to see if she’s got the same fire clawing at her core, but Shiv is moving like a hummingbird—flying out of Karolina’s hands just when she thinks she’s got her.
Before they leave the bathroom, however, she steals a quick glance in the mirror and catches Shiv eyeing the back of her head curiously. Neither of them says anything, and the moment ceases to exist once they step out of that bathroom.
Lying in bed later that night, Karolina begins to reach for her elbow, before pulling back. They’d started doing it again, checking up every so often. Tonight, though, Karolina feels herself hesitating. It’s stupid, really, she knows that. Despite everything, she doesn’t owe anything to anyone. And really, there isn’t anyone there—the other side of her mattress just as firm as when she’d bought it.
Siobhan has rubbed off on her, she thinks, as she falls asleep still wondering what it was she’d been caught doing, and who had done the catching.
Another year passes before she ever thinks about Siobhan Roy again.
She’s earned her own office by then, and is infinitely grateful for it as her head explodes into a million pieces and she is left clutching her temples, desperately attempting to hide behind her desktop.
At first she thinks it must be an aneurysm, and begins to frantically type headache aneurms sympt into her browser’s search bar before realizing the pain had already vanished, and she was only still gasping out of panic. She waits for a pinch that doesn’t come, and decides to open the first link in the search results anyway.
Symptoms of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm include severe headache with rapid onset, neck pain and stiffness, increasing drowsiness, paralysis, seizures, impaired speech and visual problems.
She skims the article, picking up bits of sentences and discarding them as she struggles to keep her eyes focused on a single line of text. Still no sharp tug at her elbow.
“Hey, Karolina?”
She looks up to see Frank at her door, his usual worried frown plastered on his wrinkly forehead. She makes a mental note to also look up and memorize the warning signs of a heart attack. Just in case.
“There’s something—” he lets his sentence trail off, even though she hasn’t said anything yet. Taking her silence as an invitation—a common occurrence among the male portion of Waystar’s staff, he steps into her office fully, closing the door behind him.
“Yeah, Frank, what is it?”
Their jobs rarely intertwine, so whatever he needs her for, it must either be something only Logan knows about and something he wants to keep a tight lid on—or it’s something Logan can’t know about. Frank’s using his the walls have ears voice, so Karolina deduces it must be something personal, too. The last time she’d been involved in Roy family drama, she’d spent months taking shit and crawling through mud to get back into some semblance of good grace with Logan. Whatever’s happened this time, there is no other option for Karolina but to take care of it.
She blinks, urging him to continue.
“It’s Siobhan.”
Karolina can’t tell if the sharp pain that strikes the back of her skull like a lightning bolt is her own, or another mark. She clenches her fists to keep her hand from reaching for her elbow.
“There’s been an accident, though thankfully it just looks like a concussion.” Frank puts his hand up in assurance.
“What—how? Has it gotten out already?”
Karolina doesn’t allow her mind to conjure up an image of Siobhan—neither warm and hungry in a hotel bathroom, nor frozen and bleeding on a goddamn mountain. She can’t afford to get distracted, so she takes a steadying breath and focuses on the things she knows she can control. She’s already opened up a few e-mail drafts by the time Frank opens his mouth again.
“No, it just happened. Her boyfriend called Ken—ski patrol checked her out, but they’re still taking her to a hospital to be sure.”
Boyfriend?
“Does Logan know?”
“He’s the one who asked me to speak with you.”
From Frank’s tone, it’s clear that whatever knowledge Logan has of the incident, their duty is to keep it as far away from his ears as possible.
“I mean, is this something we need to get involved in?” she sighs, hand coming up to rub at the bridge of her nose. “As long as there aren’t any grave injuries, I—”
“Oh, it’s just about some, uh, due diligence.”
At her blank stare, he sighs, shaking his head.
“According to the boyfriend—there was some party last night that they might’ve attended.”
Karolina urges him on with as much patience as she can manage. Show me the boo-boo.
“In Ken’s words, she might have been hitting some different slopes before she put those skis on.”
“Right.” she clears her throat. “Ok, I’ll handle it.”
She pulls her phone out, scrolling through her contact list. Of all fucking places, she never thought she’d regret not having secured some friendly contacts in Gstaad. A couple of years back, she’d almost dated someone who’d worked at Tamedia for a chunk of time, so she sends her a quick text. They haven’t spoken in years, but they’d ended things amicably enough to where she doesn’t feel like a middle-aged man having an affair when she asks Donna to meet her for drinks.
In front of her, Frank clasps his hands together, frown already smoothed away after wiping his hands clean of another Roy kid’s mess. She supposes he deserves the break, after having to chase Kendall around Shanghai for an entire year.
“Thank you.” he says, almost pityingly. “You know, Logan really appreciates your work ethic—I mean, most people don’t survive getting yelled at, let alone end up getting their own office. And I hear George’s been looking at properties in Florida...”
Karolina narrows her eyes, holding back a grimace. She hasn’t interacted with Frank enough to know whether he’d always possessed this weird, psycho-paternal streak, or if it was the result of having to clean up after Logan’s children for so long.
She shudders at the thought of a similar fate befalling her, and makes a mental note to keep her resume updated.
“Thanks, Frank.” she smiles, cutting Frank off before he gets the chance to call her kid. “Leave it with me.”
Surprisingly, Donna agrees to meet without much prodding, which can either mean she’s bored—or Karolina’s about to lose her job.
They meet at a neutral place that Donna suggests, halfway between their respective offices. Donna beats her by a couple of minutes, so Karolina finds her already seated and cradling her drink.
“You know I’m happily married now, right?” she flashes a grin before Karolina’s even had time to sit down.
“I didn’t, but congratulations.” she smiles, straightening her back. “I promise—my interests are purely professional.”
Donna raises a brow, nodding in amusement. “Right. You’re here to ask for a favour.”
She drags the word out like she’s uncovered a tantalizing secret.
“Just a contact number.” Karolina smirks.
She knows how intimidating Donna can be and appreciates the apparent lack of change in her demeanour, in light of her new change in marital status. Still, the years of familiarity haven’t spared Karolina from cowering under the other woman’s sharp gaze, though she stops herself from gulping down her drink as soon as it arrives.
“I don’t know, Kay. I haven’t worked in PR for a while.” Donna sighs, swirling the amber liquid in her glass pensively. “And the people I worked for are not very fond of American media—especially the kind your guys push out.”
Karolina lets the dig roll off her back, though the use of her old nickname remains stuck somewhere under her breastbone.
“This doesn’t concern Waystar. It’s, um, a private matter.”
“Oh?”
Karolina sighs in defeat.
“Donna, I just need some kind eyes and ears in Gstaad. It’s nothing major, but it’s a thorn in my side I want taken care of.”
“And how deeply embedded in your side is Siobhan Roy exactly, Karolina?”
“I’m sorry?” Karolina frowns.
The warm lighting suddenly feels too harsh, making Karolina’s skin crawl. She’s always loved Donna’s incisiveness, but being on the receiving end of her pointed brow feels like staring up at the lip of a giant wave.
“You said you wanted my help because I’m tapped into the European market, so I called some friends before you got here.” she clasps her hands under her chin, regarding Karolina pensively. “And aside from this Swedish tech start-up people are buzzing about—which Logan Roy wouldn’t give a shit about because he’s a million years old and he hates Europeans like any red-blooded, self-hating American, all my contacts ran dry.”
Karolina rolls her eyes, urging her to get to the point. Donna’s always had a flair for the dramatic, always loved toying with her prey before sinking her teeth in.
“Except for my friend Evie who’s on holiday right now, and mentioned seeing Logan’s daughter checking in at the same resort as her. Same daughter who apparently had to be helicoptered off of the kiddie trail today.” she pauses, delighting in each uncomfortable rise and fall of Karolina’s chest. Once satisfied, she picks up her drink and shoots Karolina a sharp smile before taking a sip. “She’s taking care of it— there’s some whispering among the staff, but she promised to give me a call if anyone starts squealing.”
“I—thank you.” Karolina sighs.
“What’s your deal with that girl, anyway?”
“There is no deal.” she frowns. “I work for her father—he asked me to take care of it.”
“Which is why the normal course of action would be to release a quick statement, call it an unfortunate accident, but thankfully our princess is safe and sound now—and move on.”
Donna looks at her like she’s trying to check her for a fever, and Karolina suddenly wishes she’d let Frank deal with this mess in the first place—let him have a goddamn stroke over it.
“You’re also terrible at deflecting.”
“Fuck you.” Karolina shakes her head, barely suppressing a smile. “Believe me—if I could, I would go the rest of my life not having to think about Siobhan Roy ever again.”
“Mhm.”
Thankfully, Donna drops the interrogation, and they spend the next hour properly catching up. When she speaks about her soulmate, Donna is perfectly composed. She doesn’t describe it as magical, or miraculous—doesn’t get teary eyed like every other asshole on Good Morning America’s fluff segments. But watching her, Karolina knows she is different. She can see it in the way Donna’s lips curl into an easy smile, the way her shoulders relax into each breath she takes.
Karolina can’t tell if it’s happiness, or peace (or love) she sees light up Donna’s features like she’s made of gold, but it plants an ache in her chest that not even the whisky can soothe. She’s still trying to swallow it down when Donna’s voice cuts through her thoughts.
“How about you—you still…”
“Uh, no, actually.” Karolina blinks. She looks down at her hands, resisting the urge to reach for her elbow. “It came back.”
“Oh my god!” Donna’s eyes widen. “So you know who—”
“No.” Karolina shakes her head. The motion reminds her of this morning, the radio silence she’s tried to ignore all day. “No, I—must’ve happened at some event, or something. Didn’t even realize until, well...” she shrugs.
“Interesting.” Donna frowns.
“What?” she laughs nervously.
“Nothing.” Donna smiles, shaking her head. She looks as if she’s deciding whether the animal in front of her is friendly enough for her to extend her hand towards it. “I know how you always used to be so proud of yourself for cutting it off. But—this is a good thing, Karolina. You can let yourself want it.”
She squeezes Karolina’s hand, before motioning to the waiter for the bill.
“I’m helping you with Pippi Longstocking, so this one’s on you.” she shoots Karolina a playful wink, before getting up. “Take care, Kay. Think about what I said.”
Before Karolina has any time to react, Donna plants a quick kiss to her cheek, before grabbing her coat and leaving.
On the ride back to her apartment, Karolina’s thoughts drift to this morning, and the splitting pain she’d felt. The silence that came after it, which had yet to be broken. She shakes her head, willing her mind to focus on anything else. Donna’s newfound happiness and her parting words are equally treacherous trails of thought, so all she has left to think about is Siobhan Roy.
That girl and her two goddamn left feet.
She’s already cursed the entire Roy family, the Alps, the entire fucking travel industry—when she feels it. A short pinch, quickly followed by another.
Sorry.
Ultimately, Siobhan Roy’s reputation remains pristine without her even having to know it was ever at risk.
Donna calls her a couple of weeks later to cash in her reward for helping Karolina out. And Karolina thinks on it. She mulls it over for half of the work day, making herself sad and angry and happy while she remembers the history there. The way things ended.
She thinks about the way Donna had looked that night, the way she’d spoken about her soulmate, about the life that came after she’d found them. Nothing fundamental had changed about the woman, not her biting humour, not her short temper when it came to restaurant service or traffic, nothing that would have Karolina do a double-take. But there was a lightness there—some barely perceptible softness taking root at the core of her. When she’d described her life, Donna hadn’t called it a dream. She hadn’t even called it whole. She’d just called it good.
You can let yourself want it.
The problem with wanting things, Karolina realizes, is that it isn’t the same as wanting the absence of things. And she’s wanted things—sunny days and passing grades, to catch the morning cartoons and get enough money on her birthday for that one cute top from Macy’s. A summer job to keep the boredom at bay. A fever dream in the middle of a sweltering summer.
Sure, she’s wanted things.
But mostly she’s just wanted absences. The absence of the dark shadows that pooled under her father’s eyes. The absence of her sister after a particularly nasty fight. The absence of pain. The absence of things she’s been too scared to hold.
She’d grown around these wants, had whittled her life down to a stub—a perfectly smooth nothing. An apartment in the middle of the city that she haunts like a fucking ghost and a job that’s turning into a blood oath.
Instinctively, she pulls up the calendar on her computer and stares dumbly at it for a while, as if trying to remember why she’d opened it in the first place. What slot had she meant to check?
When is she going to fit in all that goddamn wanting?
She grabs her phone and texts Donna some half-assed excuse, then books herself a hair appointment.
She’s always wanted to go blonde, she decides.
The universe, Karolina realizes, must have put a hit out on her.
Logan Roy is lying on a hospital bed, lost to the world, the stock market shuddering with each rise and fall of his chest. His children are running up and down the halls, playing hot potato with the company’s future—all of them barely able to glance beyond the glass wall their father lies behind.
Karolina would feel sorry for them, if they weren’t making her job harder.
Perhaps she’d even have some soothing words to spare for the poor billionaire soon-to-be-orphans if she wasn’t busy lying on the dirty carpeted floor of a hospital administrator’s office, desperately trying to catch her breath.
The pain doesn’t last long, and Karolina’s already gotten back up by the time she feels the short pinch at her elbow.
She checks the time—3 a.m. Perfect hour to get kicked out of a bar.
Dread pools at the bottom of her stomach.
“Hey, you ok?”
Karolina looks up to see Gerri entering the room with the rest of their little emergency team.
“Yeah.” she nods, busying her hands by straightening some empty folders. “I’m just setting up.”
If Gerri can tell something is off, she doesn’t mention it.
Karolina tries to focus on the work she has to do, not letting herself think about the fact that she is drafting the press release to announce Logan’s death while the man is still fighting for his life one floor above them.
As much as she tries to push it down, anxiety creeps itself into her heart, squeezing the tender flesh until she finds herself gripping her pen too tightly, leaving splotches of ink all over her notebook. She tries taking deep, slow breaths to calm herself, but with each exhale she sees a shoulder being pushed against a wall. A fist-full of hair. Two shaking hands pleading to be let go of.
And it isn’t the pain that makes Karolina wonder, but the hands. The hands, she can’t stop picturing.
What had the hands been doing? Pleading or pushing?
Like any old bastard, Logan doesn’t die, and everyone around him gets to suffer for it.
He’s grown angrier since the stroke, constantly shaking his fists at shadows and mumbling under his breath. It’s hard, Karolina imagines, to crawl from under death’s cold grip and see the world hasn’t stopped. That, at the end of the day, every man—even a man like Logan Roy, is only as heavy as a bag of bones.
A heavy fucking bag, still—that they are now all forced to carry. All of her big plans and hard work reduced to dealing with the optics of an old man pissing himself at a charity gala.
She deals with it alright most days, though she knows there’s a reason she’s been avoiding her mother’s calls lately.
She hasn’t felt much since that day in the hospital, which at first is a relief. But as the marks grow fewer and further apart, Karolina finds her chest growing heavier—burdened. A growing absence.
One particularly aggravating day, as she tunes out Logan’s ranting, she imagines taking the letter opener perched on his desk and stabbing it into her leg. Not enough to hit bone, but enough for it to feel like it’s pulling the flesh apart. She wonders if it would keep them awake, staring up at the ceiling and mapping out in shadows each plausible explanation:
Dog attack. Construction site accident. Running away from a serial killer. Boredom?
She almost gets close to doing it when a trickle of spit flies straight out of Logan’s mouth and onto her pants. She doesn’t, ultimately just pressing her fingers into her leg to suppress a grimace. She catches Gerri’s eye, and they share a silent laugh.
All in a day’s work.
Karolina’s never been a fan of horror movies. Aside from making Katerina cry and be scared of her toys for three months after she’d made her watch Child’s Play, Karolina’s never gotten the appeal of that genre. She’s never understood the thrill of it—the voluntary anxiety.
However, she does faintly remember having watched one of the Saw movies, and finds herself contemplating the severity of the traps shown in that film. And the conclusion she comes to is that none of them hold a candle to being stuck in the New Mexico desert with a fractured Roy family.
Her perfectly manicured photo op goes about as well as she’s expected, and by the end of the day she’s nursing a tension headache while quietly discarding a napkin hiding a man’s molar.
The refuge she’d hoped to find by the abandoned pool doesn’t last long either.
“Hey.”
She turns to see Siobhan stepping out of the house, hands tucked in her back pockets.
“Shiv, hi.”
Out of habit more than anything, she pushes her laptop screen down.
“So, uh, how’d you enjoy the circus? And can I bum one of those?” she smirks, nodding towards the open pack of cigarettes next to Karolina’s phone.
“Oh, sure.” Karolina shakes her head in surprise. Shiv takes it as an invitation, and before Karolina has time to get a cigarette out for her, she’s already sat down in the chair opposite her and grabbed the pack herself.
“Thanks.” she puffs out a deep breath.
Karolina reaches for the haphazardly thrown pack, pulling out her own cigarette. She lights it, then turns to see Shiv watching her expectantly.
“So, did ‘ya have fun?” she smirks, dragging the last word out.
“It’s been a hard day for everyone.” Karolina sighs.
If she concentrates enough, she can still feel the shape of Parfit’s tooth between the pads of her fingers, the small indents along the top and the thin, sharp root.
“For you, too?” Shiv raises her brows, taking a drag out of her cigarette before resting her chin against her hand.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Relax.” she laughs. “How’ve you been?”
Her eyes are narrowed into slits, and her lips are curved up into the kind of smile that had dragged Karolina into that bathroom years ago. But there aren’t any tall buildings and swinging doors to hide behind, and out in the desert the night sky isn’t much of a shield—the moon’s harsh glare making Karolina feel much too exposed.
“Shiv…” she sighs, turning away to watch thin trails of smoke dance above them.
“What?”
“Is this an appropriate conversation?”
Shiv lets out a frustrated huff, slumping against her chair.
“I don’t remember you being a particularly appropriate person.” she mumbles under her breath
Karolina turns back, shooting her a pointed glare. As if remembering where they are, and who the people sleeping inside of this house are, Siobhan straightens back into her chair. Despite the dim light, Karolina can see Shiv’s eyes have grown glassy.
“Guess my memory’s off.” Shiv shakes her head.
She stubs out her cigarette with more force than necessary, before getting up and wandering out to the pool’s edge where she unceremoniously plops herself down, tucking her knees under her chin. As she finishes her own cigarette, Karolina watches the other woman’s back.
She’d heard everything tonight. And she’s heard everything on every night like this one—always just one wall away from it all. Just hidden enough to not call herself an accomplice.
Watching Shiv’s shoulders softly rise and fall, she thinks about the day of her father’s funeral. The anger wrapped around her sister’s tongue, the ugly pleasure she’d felt as Katerina’s words dug themselves right under her breastbone.
She will always love her sister, she knows that. And she will always miss the weight of her mother’s hand on her shoulder. But she’ll never know how to talk to them again. And watching Shiv rub her knuckles against her bottom lip, Karolina understands that they have more things in common than she’d thought.
Stubbing out her cigarette, she makes her way over to her and sits down carefully. Shiv regards her wearily. They’d had to drain the pool earlier that day to get rid of the blood, so they’re left to stare down at a small puddle of murky, therapist-bloody water.
“We get to leave tomorrow.” Karolina offers softly.
“Uh huh.” Shiv nods. They sit in silence for another moment, which isn’t as uncomfortable as she’d feared.
Finally, it’s Shiv who speaks again.
“Okay—like, appropriately then, how have you been?” she rolls her eyes.
Karolina smiles. “I’ve been alright.”
“Yeah?” Shiv smiles back, before her brows fall into a confused frown. “So, the blonde’s not a cry for help?”
Karolina bursts into laughter, the sound ringing out into the silent night sky.
“Fuck you!”
Without thinking, she knocks her elbow into Shiv’s side.
Her other hand shoots up to grab at her side.
“I’m kidding! Looks good.” Shiv laughs.
Karolina can hear Shiv talking next to her, but the sound is drowned out by the blood rushing in her ears. She swallows, lowering her hand to her lap. She thinks Shiv might be telling a story about a bad dye job she’d had, but the only thing Karolina can focus on are Shiv’s hands. The animated way she swings them around, punctuating every sentence. The sharp arch of her wrist. The hungry way her hands grasp at the air before them. Once she’s finished her story, she turns back to look at Karolina with a wry smile.
“I still liked the brunette better, though.” she reaches a hand up, the pads of her fingers barely touching the ends of Karolina’s hair.
Shiv doesn’t wait for a response, lifting herself up and leaving Karolina with a soft night. She watches as Shiv enters the house, stopping at the kitchen island to grab a glass of water. Her eyes still trailing Shiv’s silhouette, Karolina’s barely aware of her hands moving until she feels her fingers grip the skin on her elbow.
Even in the dark she can make out the fall of Shiv’s head as she looks down to inspect her arm. Karolina turns back just as the pinch comes.
In the far right corner of the pool, on the second step, she spots a small trail of blood. Three tiny specks, red as rubies. She sits there, eyes bouncing between each one until the night turns cold and she can’t feel her fingers anymore.
By the time the sun’s started to rise, Argestes is as big as those specks of blood in her rear-view mirror.
iv.
Shiv gets married and Karolina dies her hair back to brunette. The roots were a pain to keep up with, she tells herself.
Shiv cuts her hair, too. Soft curls give way to sleek angles, and Karolina wonders if Shiv’s hands grasp at the absence at the nape of her neck as she showers. If she feels it too—the ghost of a whisper as her hair grazes her chin.
On particularly dark nights, when she allows the pathetic wetness of her heart to spill out of her chest, Karolina runs her fingers through her hair and imagines it red. Imagines pulling at it, and the gasp that might follow.
She feels them sometimes—bumps on the backs of her knees, scratches along her spine. A bite on her earlobe. The occasional pinch, too, and plucks each one like a fragile petal, hoarding them like keepsakes.
Most days, though, Karolina just lies to herself. She lies to herself, and she does her best to avoid Tom Wamsbsgans placid fucking face.
Karolina plans it all to a tee: the speech, the seating arrangements, the livestream, the steely blue décor—the stupid fucking questions. It’s all been organized and rehearsed to fuck.
And all it takes is a pair of speakers to bring it all down.
She finds Shiv in the executive floor women’s bathroom, hunched over the sink—the metaphorical knife sticking straight out of her back. She doesn’t turn when the door opens, but Karolina sees her grip on the sink tightening.
“I’m sorry for that, Shiv.” she sighs. “I don’t know how he even got those speakers past security in the first place, but I’ll look into—”
Shiv cuts her off with a swift rise of her hand. The tips of her hair move like sharp blades as she straightens her back and turns to face Karolina.
“I need your help.” she says.
Her voice is steady, a stark difference to the stuttering gasps she’d been struggling through not even minutes before. Her eyes are red-rimmed, and there’s a tender trail of red flesh crawling up from underneath the collar of her shirt. Karolina’s hand almost reaches the crook of her elbow before she stops herself.
“I—yeah, of course.” she nods. “Anything you need.”
She catches the briefest rise of Shiv’s brow, before it’s covered by a determined nod.
“I’ll draft something, but I want you to look over it.”
Karolina swallows. She’s seen what Shiv’s unfiltered, blood-tinged words can lead to—knows the swift rise and fall of that pointed blade, albeit manned by a bigger, older hand.
“Oh—okay.” she swallows. “I think that’s a great idea.”
She owes this to Shiv, at least.
She can’t muster up an apology that would matter or a gesture that wouldn’t have Shiv flinching away. But this, twisting words into soft bullets—this Karolina can do.
“It can’t be too emotional, or so corporate people can’t understand what’s being said, right?”
Shiv’s voice betrays nothing of the erratic rise and fall of her chest. Had she not felt the scratching at the wrists, Karolina might be inclined to convince herself the other woman is fine.
Shiv clears her throat. Her eyes are narrowed, her hands no longer a flurry of movement in front of Karolina’s eyes but two still weapons tucked neatly by Shiv’s hips.
“And it needs to fucking hurt.”
“Alright.” Karolina nods again, this time with more conviction. “We’ll work on it together.”
They don’t shake, or kiss on it, but somehow this feels like the most solemn thing she’s shared with another woman.
You can fuck a girl in a fancy bathroom, but you only know it’s getting serious once you promise to help her kill her brother.
Shiv looks at the bathroom door, her chest still struggling to find a rhythm to cling onto. Like a skipping record, her brow furrows every time she feels that almost-breath fly away from her.
Karolina wonders briefly if Shiv’s ever had someone reach over and smooth down that soft patch of flesh. If any hand at all had trailed the small path of her brow bone.
She hopes for it and loathes the thought of it the same.
“It didn’t look like a prank, Shiv.” she says, trying to buy themselves more time before they have to leave the bathroom. “It looked like someone having a psychotic episode. This doesn’t reflect on you.”
“Sure.” Shiv scoffs. “Except every fucking search bar’s just gonna have Siobhan Roy and the word rape linked to it now.”
It’s not the intensity of it, but the sudden way it happens.
Shiv’s fist connects to the paper towel dispenser. In a flash, Karolina’s hand goes flying. She tries to cover the motion, and her hand ends up stuck midway in the air, fist clutched above her abdomen. Karolina clears her throat, dragging her breath out as she exhales.
Shiv looks down at Karolina’s hand, furrowing her brows. The light in this bathroom is harsher than the light they’d been bathed in that night, years ago, but it still illuminates a familiar glint in Shiv’s eyes.
But just as she had that night, Shiv doesn’t say anything. Instead, she steps around Karolina silently, leaving her to stare at her own reflection. There’s a smudged fingerprint on the glass, right over her left eye. They still hadn’t fixed the leaking faucet on the sink in the middle.
That night, as she watches her own words shape Shiv’s anger into daggers on national television, a sour trickle of pride pools in her belly.
The hilt of the knife, she finds, feels lighter when it’s Shiv’s hand guiding its aim.
Karolina looks down at her right palm, tracing her finger along each crooked line. That searing pain, the scorching heat creeping up her spine—if she closes her eyes, she can almost feel it. The splintering wood scratching her thigh, the putrid mouth-air. Her mother’s sharp eyes. The church bells splitting her head open as the gravel cracked under her feet.
It all started with her goddamn hands.
She takes her anger and lulls it around in her mind like a paper boat, tugs it along as her finger presses the soft flesh until it turns white, before relenting and allowing the blood to rush back in like spilled wine.
But then she thinks about another pair of hands. Clutched around a TV remote or a phone, twitching with excitement—with the same kind of sour satisfaction pulsing through Karolina, the same taste for blood. Wrapping themselves around soft, red hair and finding the soft knot at the nape of a neck, kneading the tender flesh until all of the tension melts away.
She doesn’t say it aloud, isn’t even sure the words would make it past her lips if she tried, anyway, but as she lays her head on the pillow that night, Karolina looks up at the ceiling, lets the grounding silence of the apartment flood her ears, and finally admits something to herself.
Those hands might be the death of her.
“That, I cannot do, child.” her deep voice rings out.
“Please, Magda.” Karolina pleads, clutching the phone to her ear. “You did it before, how is this any different?”
Even though Magda isn’t there to see her, Karolina reprimands herself for biting her nails and moves her hand to rub at her temples.
“Because fate has turned its eye on you, Karolina.” Magda sighs. Her voice, though strained by age, is just as rich and dark as she remembers it. Closing her eyes, Karolina pictures the long, crimson nails tapping on the table, menthol cigarette tucked between the pointer and middle finger.
“You cannot blind fate.” Magda continues. “You can trick her, but she always gets her way in the end.”
Karolina’s grip on the phone tightens as she tries to control her breathing. On the other end, Magda rasps a chorus of tsk tsk tsk’s.
“What happened, child?” she sighs. “Ugly?”
“No.” Karolina puffs out a humourless laugh. “But I have a life that I’ve built. And this—I can’t fit this into my life.”
Magda’s laugh rattles inside Karolina’s skull like a pair of castanets.
“Must not be a very happy life if you can’t fit love in it.” Magda struggles through fits of laughter and smoker’s cough.
“This isn’t about love, Magda.” Karolina scoffs. “I barely even know them.”
She rakes her hand through her hair, pulling it back forcefully when a strand gets caught in one of her rings. Magda’s laughter subsides, and Karolina can see her image perfectly clear in her mind—the tan skin, the gold bracelets shimmering in the light as she flicks her cigarette, the dark kohl framing her eyes, the right side just barely smudged from where she’d cradled her cheek in her hand.
Karolina’s never believed in guardian angels, had never knelt by her bed and whispered andělíčku, můj strážníčku every night like Katerina. Still, when she thinks about a kind light watching over her, she imagines its rays might be just about as warm as Magda’s voice.
“No, this isn’t about love, Karolina.”
Karolina knows the corners of Magda’s lips have begun to curl into a wicked smile before she even says it.
“It’s about fear.”
v.
From that moment on, Karolina makes a pact with herself. She doesn’t really have much soul to leverage, but she takes whatever’s left of it and places it on one plate. On the other one she puts the promise she’s made—to keep her head down and her mouth shut, and eviscerate the image of Siobhan Roy from whatever hole in Karolina’s heart she’d crawled into.
And between those plates, the fulcrum—happiness. Or rather, Karolina hopes, quietness. A nice, hefty ball of nothingness. Same old, same old.
For a while, it works. She does her job, she drinks her wine, she fucks pretty strangers and doesn’t waste her time feeling ashamed when she forgets their names. It’s a familiar kind of medicine that slides down her throat with bittersweet ease. It’s even fun, for a while. She watches Shiv run around Waystar like the doors aren’t being held open for her, then goes home and laughs into her glass about it. When she’s feeling particularly cruel, she lowers her hand under the conference table and digs her nails into the back of her leg, watching the other woman squirm in surprise.
She lets the women she beds bite her neck, tells them to sink their teeth in harder, to tug on her hair like they mean it. When it gets reciprocated, she welcomes it with a cackle, and scratches at the spot behind her ear until her skin’s red and sore. She avoids Tom’s gaze the next day, and keeps her lunch order to just plain, black coffee.
It’s a game, she tells herself, which logic dictates to mean there must be a winner and a loser. And Siobhan is tough, so she must be tougher.
Somewhere in the back of her mind Karolina knows that what she is doing is selfish, something akin to a child throwing a temper tantrum after being denied an expensive toy. And Siobhan doesn’t even know they’re playing, which makes the guilt weigh even heavier on her heart. But it’s a necessary evil, she reasons, and just what must be done until she gets it out of her system—until Siobhan Roy goes back to being a bruise, a mark that fades before Karolina’s even felt it. A small nothing.
And then Logan Roy dies.
Logan dies a plain, undignified death and Karolina gets a phone shoved into her hand. And with her hand gripping it, she makes plans. She strategized. With the corner of her eye she watches Logan’s still chest, and barely musters up a goddamn sorry.
She feels Shiv bite her thumb, dig her nails into her leg, scratch at the nape of her neck until the skin turns raw. She feels all of it, and all she can say is sorry.
Can we put a pin on that grief, and focus on what’s really important?
She barely gets a glimpse of Shiv before she disappears with Tom in a car.
That single glimpse—the back of Shiv’s head, the blurry outline of her furrowed brow hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, the shaking hands. The briefest glance is enough to make Karolina realize she’s lost. Whatever game they’d been playing, Karolina is completely and utterly fucked, because there is not a part of her that doesn’t scream out for Shiv.
Maybe part of it is the familiarity of grief—the memory of losing her own father and the enormity of the universe’s indifference to that fact. Maybe part of it is guilt, the year-long dirty secret she’d been keeping. Most of it, though, is pain. More than anything, it feels like a seam had ripped inside of her and all of Karolina had begun to unravel along it, her entire being flooded with Shiv, until all she can feel inside of herself is Shiv’s grief, Shiv’s pain, Shiv’s anger and fear—all of Karolina a phantom bruise under Shiv’s thumb.
She’s in the bathroom when it happens, and thanks whatever deity might still hold some mercy for her for this small grace. It’s one thing to have to hide from Shiv’s inquisitive eyes, but another to have to expose the beast of her soul to the entire executive floor, not to mention Siobhan’s entire family—her goddamn husband.
When she leaves the bathroom, the sitting room is still reverberating in its murmuring aftershock, which must mean Shiv has hidden away somewhere to lick her wounds, if she hasn’t left entirely. Karl is all too happy to recount the incident to her, though, all sucked-in cheeks and feigned coughs.
Before she gives herself a chance to think about it critically, Karolina begins to slink through each room like a house spider, darting from corner to corner, never straying too far from the shadows and only moving when no one’s watching. She finally comes upon Shiv sitting on the steps by the staff exit, still as a statue and nursing a bruised ankle.
Karolina lets her feet press fully onto the floor, the sound of her heels alerting Shiv to her presence. Shiv doesn’t say anything, only acknowledging her with a disinterested nod.
In that second, two paths open before Karolina.
One, in which she asks Shiv if she is alright, and Shiv tells her she is, after which they both limp back to their respective place in the world. A solid path, and the saner choice of the two. The one she’s been tracking all her life.
The other path isn’t really a path, she supposes, but a gulf—a steep fall into dark waters.
Around Karolina, the world is spinning—she’s seven and swinging on the monkey bars again. Except this time her grip is weakened, her palms sweaty and shaky.
That old dizziness, her seasickness with life returns to her like a childhood memory. Like the moment before a fall. That second of knowledge that one is about to fall—is falling, playing before them like a glimpse into the future, like an entire life unfurling slowly and sickly and terrifyingly unpreventable.
She takes a deep breath, attempting to quiet the flurry rising in her chest, under her ribs, crawling out from under her shirt and setting her nerves on fire. Shiv hasn’t moved, and Karolina struggles to make out even the timid rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes, though, seem to shift in the light like angry seas, emotion crashing to and fro, threatening to spill out in waves, only the thin line of her mouth keeping them at bay.
Unlike Karolina, Siobhan doesn’t seem to be standing at a fork in the road, but at the end of one. Where Karolina is staring down at a terrifying unknown depth, inching towards it ever so slowly, Shiv is clutching the solid rock she is sitting on, begging for it to be the bottom. To look up and not see the sky drawing further and further away.
Shiv looks up at her and if she just focuses on her, on the blue eyes pinning her down, the furrowed brow, the pouted lip—for a moment, if she just keeps looking at Shiv, the world feels stiller. Slower. For a moment that lasts so little, but stretches out like the precipice of a fall, Karolina peers down at those dark waters and sees not a reflection of her own face, but the faint, rippling shadow of a hand reaching up.
“Hey.”
Karolina blinks. Shiv is still staring up at her, her expression tinged with concern now.
Taking a deep breath, Karolina kneels in front of Shiv, her hands reaching out to touch the swollen flesh. Her skin is tender and hot to the touch. As the touches the flushest part of it that’s already starting to bruise, she feels Shiv inhale sharply just as a dull throb shoots down her own foot.
“I think it’s just a sprain.” she murmurs.
“What—you a doctor?” Shiv scoffs.
“No.” She takes a deep breath, before meeting Shiv’s eyes again. “Just felt like a sprain.”
“Uh huh.” Shiv exhales, her mouth falling slightly agape. “So…”
Karolina nods, feeling her own eyes glaze over.
“Yeah, I think so.” she whispers.
“Huh. Okay.” Shiv frowns, biting the inside of her cheek. “Well, that’s—great.”
She grabs the railing, attempting to pull herself up, before another shock of pain leaves them both gasping.
“Fuck!”
“Shiv—”
Karolina tries to find Shiv’s eyes again through the dizzying flurry rushing back over her, but can’t seem to grasp the other woman long enough. They sit like that for a while, like two magnets of the same pole, pulling each other close before forcefully pushing away, until a shrill voice rings out into the hallway.
“You okay, sis? Heard your ass almost broke dad’s floor.”
As he reaches the stairs, Roman doesn’t even acknowledge Karolina’s presence, which she finds herself being grateful for.
“I’m fine, Rome.” Shiv replies in a clipped ton.
Suddenly feeling her knee crumbling against the hard floor, Karolina gets up, mumbling a quick excuse about getting some ice before leaving.
She texts Gerri some other excuse, and doesn’t stop walking until the entire building disappears behind her.
“I mean, I told that bitch it was her turn to change Mrs. Grant. I wasn’t going to give up my lunch break just because Julie’s husband can’t keep it in his pants, you know? She can cry on her own damn break!”
Katerina’s voice feels like soft silk to Karolina’s ears. She listens to her sister rant for the better part of an hour, laughing and interjecting with a shrill “Kati!” here and there. It’s almost easy, and certainly the longest conversation they’ve had in years.
They talk about their mother, how she’s started sleeping and eating less, Katerina urging Karolina to call and berate her about it. She’ll listen if you use your boss-lady corporate voice. They talk about old high-school classmates and whatever fresh gossip Katerina had heard—who’s cheating, who’s balding, who’s in an MLM.
Who’s found their soulmate.
“Heard Gina Ruiz found hers, and he’s some fancy lawyer upstate. I think his name’s on the building or something.” Katerina huffs out an annoyed breath. “Bet she was glad to ditch her boyfriend for him.”
Karolina grows quiet. Sensing the shift in mood, Katerina stops herself in the middle of her sentence.
“You wanna tell me why you actually called, ségra?”
Katerina’s pulled out her gentle encouragement voice, the one she’d trained herself to use on her patients after finally deciding to stick it out with nursing school. Karolina sighs, rolling her eyes at her phone as she reaches for the bottle to pour herself another glass of wine.
“I just wanted to talk to my little sister.” she shrugs.
“When do you ever wanna talk to me? I didn’t even get a call on my birthday, asshole!”
They’d let a lot of wounds scar over after the day of their father’s funeral. She knows Katerina is only teasing, that they have learnt to take the love and let everything else turn into background noise. Still, she’s right, and that old scar still smarts.
“I still texted, didn’t I?” Karolina mumbles.
“You did.” Katerina sighs. “And that fancy jam was actually really fucking good. Mom liked it, too.”
“Not too sweet!” they say at the same time, imitating their mother’s sharp voice before breaking into a fit of giggles.
As their laughter subsides, settling into a pressing silence, Katerina returns to her earlier question.
“You okay, Lina?”
“I fucked up, Kati.” Karolina releases a shaky breath. “I know who it is. And I told them.”
“What?!” Katerina gasps. “Who is it?”
“Someone I have no fucking business being around.”
Karolina resists the urge to bite down on the inside of her cheek. Instead, she grips her wine glass tighter.
“I mean, yeah, you have no business being around any of those evil people.” her sister scoffs. “What makes this one worse?”
“Well, she’s married, for one.”
“So what? Plenty of people get divorced. I wanna have at least three ex-husbands before I find my soulmate.”
Katerina’s natural ability to soothe her nerves works like a charm, and Karolina finds herself smiling despite the tears threatening to spill.
“What else?”
Karolina takes a large swig from the glass, letting the wine soothe some of her nerves.
“She’s, um…” she hesitates, steeling herself for her sister’s reaction. “She’s one of them, Kati.”
“One of wh—what, one of them? She’s a Roy?”
Katerina spits out the name like it’s venom on her tongue.
“Mhm.” Karolina nods into her almost empty glass of wine. She listens to her sister’s breathing, afraid to make another sound.
“Please tell me they’ve got some other ones hidden around.”
“’Fraid not.” Karolina chuckles, raising her glass to her lips and finishing it off in one swift gulp.
“The redhead, right? That stuck-up bitch is your soulmate, Karolina?”
Karolina winces at the ease with which Katerina throws that word around. In stark contrast to her, Katerina had always approached her soulmate mark with much more nonchalance—like a phone charm she’d sometimes toy with. Not an integral part of her, but an extension.
Out of every person she has met throughout her life—politicians, brilliant businessmen, intellectuals and renowned artists, Karolina has only ever been jealous of her sister.
“It would seem so.” she murmurs, already reaching for the bottle again.
“Jeez, you really are fucked.” Katerina’s voice rings out of the phone speaker. “And you said you told her?”
Karolina nods, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I did.”
“Well, what’d she say?”
“Nothing, Kati.” she groans. “She looked at me like I was a fucking freak, and she said nothing.”
Karolina holds her breath as her sister mulls the information over.
“Well, you’re still alive, so she couldn’t have taken it that badly.”
Karolina doesn’t laugh this time, though she appreciates Katerina’s attempt to lighten the mood.
“They’re not actually cartoon villains, Kati.”
“Yeah, right.” Katerina scoffs. “So, what are you gonna do?”
Reaching inside of her mind for that honed sense of planning, Karolina comes up empty-handed. Each time she’s tried to figure out an action plan, to strategize it to fuck and beyond, she’s ended up running into walls again and again. In the end, what she comes to time and time again is Shiv sitting on that staircase. And through the blur of her memory, Shiv’s face and that frown. The clenched jaw. The way she’d flinched when Karolina had tried to steady her.
Suddenly, Karolina is sixteen again and crying on the floor of a dirty roller rink bathroom, staring up at a shiny gold cross.
Sighing, she takes another sip of wine before addressing her sister.
“I have no fucking idea.” she swallows a shaky breath. “She can have me fired.”
“But she hasn’t.” her sister replies quickly.
“Not yet.”
Katerina sighs, and Karolina can hear her scratching her head, the bangles she’s refused to take off since her twenties clanging together loudly.
“Well, maybe she’s just in shock. She’s got a husband, so maybe she didn’t even know she’s into chicks.”
Karolina doesn’t reply, taking another sip of wine to keep her mind from wandering back to that first night with Shiv and that damned bathroom that had started it all.
“What?” Katerina scolds her impatiently.
“We’ve, um—” she pauses, clearing her throat. “…there’s some…history. Between us.”
Katerina stays quiet for a moment, her silence so similar to their mother’s that it instantly makes Karolina anxious, like she’s fourteen again and waiting to be grounded.
Finally, after what feels like ages, Katerina replies.
“And neither of you knew?”
“Not really, no.”
She hears Katerina take another deep breath, her bracelets clanging together again as she begins to drum her nails on the table.
“Are all lesbians this fucking messy with their shit? Goddamn.”
“Katerina!” Karolina yells, letting out an incredulous laugh.
“What do you want me to say, Karolina?!” her sister laughs. “I think you guys need to talk it out.”
“Her father’s just died, Kati, the last thing she probably wants to do right now is talk to me.”
“Right. Why did you tell her now?”
“I don’t know.” she shakes her head.
If she could go back, Karolina would cut them off—her big mouth and her greedy fucking hands. She’d rid herself of them altogether, if only to make everything normal again. To not stain Shiv with any of it.
“Well, you can’t take it back.” Katerina says harshly, before softening her tone. “Just—let her take the lead, right? Talk it over when she’s ready.”
“And if that never happens? If she actually does have me fired?”
“Oh, fuck that job, Karolina! Are you listening to yourself?” Katerina scoffs impatiently. “You lose the job, you get another one. God knows, you’ve got enough money to fucking retire if you wanted to.”
Katerina cuts herself off, letting her ire melt off of her shoulders before addressing Karolina again.
“You’re not gonna find another soulmate.”
Karolina sits alone in her kitchen, twisting her rings anxiously. She can’t bring herself to glance around her, to take in all that empty space. All that nothing. Instead, she watches her phone screen, Katerina’s picture smiling up at her. Her little sister, who seems to know so much more about the world than her. Who’s faced life with nothing but open arms, yet still finds the strength to smile up at her, even in a blurry picture. To talk to Karolina about life and love and happiness like it’s all so easy, like she’s not sick with it, plagued by life like some disease—like something that is to be enjoyed, not treated.
She wants to ask Katerina how she’s done it, how she’s tasted life and still found the sweetness worth seeking despite the bitterness. How it hasn’t embittered her completely like it has Karolina, turning her into a thing that is only ever searching for dark corners to hide in.
“What if it turns out like last time?” she finally says, voice barely above a whisper.
“Karolina…” her sister sighs, each decibel breaking Karolina’s heart. “You were a kid, and that wasn’t love.”
“I thought it was, at the time. What if I’m wrong again?”
She blinks, letting the tears burning in her eyes finally fall, before wiping them messily with her sleeve.
“What if you’re not?” Katerina asks, like it’s the plainest question in the world. The theorem that will solve all of Karolina’s problems. The square root of it all.
“You said you have history with this girl, right?” Katerina continues. “Did it feel like last time?”
Her stomach turns at the prospect of comparing Shiv to Dominik, and Karolina shakes away that thought before she can entertain it.
“No, it didn’t.” she answers, clearing her throat. “But that was just a—it was just a moment.”
“Why did you tell her, Lina?” Katerina cuts her off gently. “If you had even the faintest feeling that it might be like last time, why tell her? Why not just walk away, if you didn’t want it?”
“I don’t know, Kati.” Karolina spits out, barely swallowing down a sob. “I don’t fucking know.”
“I think you do, Lina.” as she says it, Katerina’s voice almost sounds like their mother’s—gentle yet firm, a steady hand on Karolina’s shoulder. “I think you’re just afraid to admit it.”
Karolina’s taken a lot of shit from Logan Roy over the years. She’s been yelled at, humiliated, fired and rehired multiple times within a single hour—everything that would have a less masochistic individual search for a new career path and a very ambitious therapist.
But one thing she’s never had to endure at Logan’s behest was to freeze her ass off in a Swedish forest whilst looking for goddamn mushrooms.
She humours Matsson’s posse for thirty minutes running solely on anger fuelled by Ebba’s sharp gaze and nimble fucking feet before she trips on a rock, almost bashing her fucking skull in. So, with mud running all the way up her legs and leaves sticking out of her hair, she gives Hugo a hard pat on the shoulder and fucks right off.
Before she even gets the chance to wipe some of the mud off of her face, she runs straight into Shiv.
“Hey.”
Karolina looks up, startled. “Shiv, hi.”
They haven’t spoken.
“You, uh, enjoying the activities?” Shiv asks, giving her a once-over. “Mushroom foraging kind of kicked your ass.” she frowns, a faint smirk lifting up the corners of her mouth.
Shiv’s mood, it seems, had changed drastically since Karolina had last seen her. Still smirking, she reaches a hand to remove a stray leaf from Karolina’s hair.
“Oh, yeah.” Karolina releases a shaky breath. “Sorry about that.”
She shakes her head, looking down at the leaf she’d plucked from Karolina’s hair, before crumbling it and throwing it on the floor, leaving them both to stare at it.
“So, should we talk about it?” Shiv clears her throat. “Clear things up—maybe make some sort of plan?”
Karolina blinks. A plan.
“Sure, okay.” she nods softly, covering a frown.
Shiv motions towards the area they’re in, indicating for a more private space to have the conversation in. Karolina’s cold and muddy and still recovering from having to be helped up off the ground by some Swedish asshole with a goatee, so she decides to take her sister’s advice and let Shiv take the lead in this conversation. Let her make the plan.
Maybe something will actually come out of this one.
She follows Shiv to what she presumes must be her cabin, letting her lead the way as she attempts to wipe most of the mud off of her legs. Neither of them speak until they reach Shiv’s cabin, though she catches Shiv sneaking a few sidelong glances at her.
“This okay?” Shiv says once they’ve finally arrived.
She unlocks the door, motioning for Karolina to enter first. Her mother’s sharp voice rings in the back of Karolina’s ear, so she stops right at the threshold, looking down at her muddy boots. When she looks back up, she sees Shiv attempting to stifle a grin, before she nods her along. It’s unclear from Shiv’s expression if she’s more amused by the state of Karolina’s appearance, or by the implication that she would be the one having to clean up any of that mud.
Shiv’s cabin opens into a big living area, the entire room dark as the sun’s already set. Karolina only takes a couple of steps into the room, still conscious of the muddy tracks she’s leaving behind. Shiv comes up behind her, nodding towards a whiskey bottle that had been left out on the coffee table. Karolina nods, and watches Shiv as she moves through the room to find a tumbler, hers already sitting on the table, nearly empty.
“So, uh, how long have you known?” she breaks the silence. She doesn’t meet Karolina’s gaze, busying herself with pouring their drinks.
“A while, I think. Not—I wasn’t certain of it, but maybe a couple of years.”
She tries to keep her voice steady, tries to treat this just as Shiv had proposed—a succinct meeting to draft a plan, but still, she finds her voice wavering at the end of every sentence. Finds a knot tightening in her throat, a fire being lit at her core.
“Right.” Shiv finally looks back at her, narrowing her eyes. “When exactly?”
She doesn’t invite Karolina to sit on the couch next to the coffee table, choosing instead to cross the distance separating them and hand Karolina the whiskey glass. This leaves Karolina stuck between a concrete pillar and Shiv, her feet cemented in mud, her only lifeline the glass she is holding.
“I don’t remember exactly, but I think the first real time was that night at Connor’s place—in New Mexico.” she says, fixing her gaze to the bridge of Shiv’s nose. “That’s when I thought it might be real.”
She’s had her fair share of embarrassment for one day, so Karolina waits until her glass is halfway to her mouth to silently release the breath she’d been holding in since Shiv had broken the distance between them.
“Uh huh.” Shiv nods, raising her own glass to take a small sip.
Her brow quirks as the alcohol makes its way down her throat, before it’s replaced by a frown.
“But it stopped, right?” she asks, pinning Karolina with a sharp stare. “For a really long time, it went away.”
“Yeah, it did.” Karolina says, her voice trailing off into a whisper again.
“That was you?”
She nods, her jaw set as her heart thrashes inside of her ribcage like a scared bird.
“Why?” Shiv frowns.
“Because it was too much. I couldn’t deal with it all.”
As the world starts rushing inside of her ears again, the only thing Karolina can hold onto is the bridge of Shiv’s nose—the soft skin, the faint freckle hidden under the arch of her brow, the small wrinkles framing her frown. Again, Karolina resists the urge to press her fingers gently across that patch of flesh and smooth away those fine lines.
Angry tears start gathering in the corners of Shiv’s eyes.
“What, my pain was too much for you?” she puff out a humourless chuckle. “I was a fucking kid.”
“No, Shiv.” Karolina sighs, barely even attempting to cover the tremor in her voice “Mine was.”
They each busy themselves with their drink, pretending the other can’t see the open wound of their chest. Once again, it’s Shiv who breaks the silence.
“Right.” she nods, clearing her throat. “Listen—honestly, I feel like this is just…an unnecessary complication.” she shakes her head, raising her hand in a dismissive wave. “I was thinking—maybe we should just let it go.”
Her hands are a flurry of motion as she speaks, which only makes Karolina even dizzier.
“Let it go?” she raises her brows.
“Yeah, just—not a make a thing out of it.” Shiv shrugs. “We can, you know, acknowledge it and move on with our lives.”
Despite the easiness of her tone, her eyes and hands seem to weave another story. But still, this is the plan. And Karolina knows it’s a good plan. A sensible one. The plan that gets her safely back to her apartment, and her bland, expensive art that vaguely reminds her of a dog shitting in a park; back to the job that’s beginning to chip away at her health and the life she’d told herself she would live that had gotten lost somewhere between her college apartment and some dive bar’s grimy bathroom.
Well, it’s the only plan they have.
“You’re right.” she says, nodding in approval. “There’s no reason to let it complicate our lives.”
“Exactly, no!”
Shiv relaxes visibly, releasing a deep breath. Karolina takes hers into her glass again.
“I mean, if you really think about it,” Shiv continues “what is it—just a bunch of bruises and scratches? Why should that decide how your life’s supposed to go? It’s all just—fucking bullshit.
“It is.”
For fear of saying something she might regret, Karolina just keeps nodding along, taking in everything Shiv is saying like gospel.
Satisfied with their meeting, all her ducks in perfectly compartmentalized rows, Shiv finally releases Karolina from the invisible corner she’d been keeping her trapped in, moving to place her now empty glass on the coffee table.
“So—we’re good?”
“We’re good.”
“Great.” she takes a few steps closer to Karolina, though not as close as she’d been before. “Guess I’ll see you around?”
Karolina nods. A part of her is impressed by Shiv’s ability to go from barely abstaining from crying minutes before to looking at Karolina like a clingy hooker who doesn’t know when to see herself out. Her hand almost reaches her elbow when she realizes what she’s about to do and quickly pulls it back. Instead, she leaves her glass on the nearest thing she can find, a shelf, and bids Shiv a quiet goodbye before making her way out.
“Hey, Karolina.” Shiv calls out.
With her hand hovering above the door handle, Karolina takes a deep breath before turning to Shiv.
“Yes?”
She finds Shiv rocking on her heels, her hands stuck in her back pockets.
“Careful on the steps outside.” she nods to Karolina boots. “The ice is really slippery”
Karolina sighs. “You too, Shiv.”
She’s got no dog in this fight, she tells herself—has been telling herself for years. But then she feels the scratching at the wrists. The bitten thumbs. Her sister’s voice haunting the back of her mind.
The fight had been bad, she knows, the wound deep enough for the both of them to not care about being watched like an Abramović piece.
She spends fifteen minutes burning holes in the back of Shiv’s head, before finally stepping out on the balcony.
Shiv turns around to glare at the intruder, her expression only darkening as she realizes it’s her.
“You don’t have to do this.” she puts up her hand, stopping Karolina in her tracks.
“Do what?”
Shiv scoffs, shaking her head. “Fucking—being nice, or caring, or whatever. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I didn’t think I did.” Karolina frowns.
“Right.” Shiv narrows her eyes. “So what do you want?”
Karolina takes another step forward, clasping her hands together. She can practically see the waves of anger rolling off of Shiv’s shoulders.
“That looked…intense.” she tries, keeping her tone somewhat neutral.
Shiv puffs out a humourless laugh. “Yeah.”
Karolina can tell she’d been crying, her voice still thick with it all.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine.” Shiv cuts her off.
She fixes Karolina with a sharp glare, as if daring her to contradict her. Then, sensing she hasn’t shaken her off, she reaches for the crook of her elbow, tugging harshly at the porcelain skin. “Yeah? I’m great, so you can fuck off now.”
Karolina purses her lips, reaching a hand to rub at the spot where the mark had formed. She doesn’t say anything—can’t think of anything to say. She watches the rapid rise and fall of Shiv’s chest, her heart skipping a beat each time Shiv’s own breath catches, chest shaking from the force of it.
She tries to think of something to say, anything to make herself useful to Shiv. She thinks about offering to send everyone home, or taking Shiv somewhere else to lick her wound in private, or getting her a drink to numb some of the ache. But all of those things, Karolina finds, would entail declaring to that entire room of people who she is to Shiv. Or, rather, that she is something to Shiv. And Karolina can’t—won’t, doesn’t even have to right to do that. Not when they can barely admit it to themselves.
So, she just stands there. She stands there and stares at Shiv, hoping to find some sort of answer in Shiv’s furrowed brow.
“What!?” Shiv finally snaps. “Are you having a stroke? Can you not move?”
Karolina looks down at her hands, twisting the rings on her fingers aimlessly.
“Shiv.” she sighs. “Not every hand’s got a knife in it.”
“Oh, especially yours, right?” Shiv laughs drily, turning around briefly before facing Karolina again with a scowl. “No, disappearing is more your style.”
There it is. She’s got to hand it to her, despite their brief, erratic dalliances, Shiv had managed to pin her down like a butterfly in a glass case, prying her wings open for all the world to see. There’s a fire at her feet urging Karolina to run away, to retreat back to the comfort of some shadow, some crack in the wall. To run back to her empty apartment and convince a glass of whiskey or wine that she’d tried, and maybe it was always meant to end up this way.
With enough alcohol, she might even end up convincing herself.
But Shiv would know the truth. They would never see each other again, and a part of Karolina, the deep dark truth of her, would go on existing somewhere out in the world, somewhere outside of herself. And the thought angers her, not because of vanity, or pride, but because Shiv knows, but she doesn’t know.
She might know the truth of Karolina, but not what it had been built upon. And if she’s managed to dislodge it, that rotten thing buried underneath her ribcage, then she must know it had not been like that to begin with. That something had planted itself in there, rotting it away. That, Karolina thinks pitifully, there might even be something to salvage under all that rot still.
She takes a deep breath, straightening her shoulders and steeling herself before meeting Shiv’s gaze.
“I’ll tell you what happened—why I did it, if you really want to know.”
Shiv shakes her head, narrowing her eyes. “No, what I want is for you to fuck off.”
“Okay.”
Shiv’s words cut through her like a paring knife, swift and precise and slicing her up, ready to be served. Her chest feels empty as she turns around and wills her legs to not falter as she walks away, to carry her just past that living room, just past that front door, just long enough to reach the cold pavement below and slink away into the gutter.
“Karolina.” Shiv calls out just as her hand touches the door handle.
“Yes?”
She answers in a clipped tone, her jaw clenched and tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, muffling a sob. She turns around to find Shiv wringing her hands.
“Later.” she clears her throat. “Party’s gonna clear out in a couple of hours. You can come back then and tell me.”
Again, Shiv narrows her eyes, daring Karolina to refuse, to do what she does best and walk away. Instead, Karolina nods.
“Okay. I will.” she says quietly, before opening the door and slipping back into the party.
Once inside, the lights feel too harsh on her skin, every person’s eyes too intrusive. She feels like an exposed nerve, so she makes her way out of the apartment as discreetly as possible. The drive home would take too long, and she’d only have enough time to stare blankly at the wall and maybe down a glass of wine before having to call a car again, so she decides to spare the journey.
Instead, she finds a bar not too close to here, but still within walking distance, and decides to wait there. She allows herself one drink, briefly contemplating ordering a shot of tequila before coming to her senses and ordering a plain black coffee.
The hours pass painstakingly slow, and she fills them up by squinting down at her phone and attempting to check some briefs she’d been putting off since Logan’s death. The stress migraine and the coffee mix like a Molotov cocktail in her system, and when her phone starts buzzing in her hands, Karolina damn near throws it across the bar.
A single text, from Shiv. Party’s over.
She stretches out the walk back to Shiv’s, carefully measuring each footstep. She pulls on the collar of her jacket, opening the top button, hoping the cool air would soothe some of her nerves.
She’s tried therapy before, sure. She’d done the whole thing—used whatever buzzwords were trending at the time, sniffled into tissues, stared at stupid mindfulness quotes on a wall to avoid eye-contact. She’d fucking aced therapy.
But Shiv was a real person, not some detached figure with a gentle voice and a hard-on for list-making. More importantly, Karolina realizes, Shiv had been there, in some capacity. Because of Karolina, Shiv had felt it all, had been forced to taste each bite of the poison Karolina had decided to call love. And then Karolina left—ditched her like a bad date and left her to foot the bill.
Shiv had been wrong, earlier. Karolina did owe her something.
The walk up to Shiv’s apartment feels almost shameful, the doorman ushering her up like a mistress, all hushed voice and knowing looks. In other circumstances, it might have given her a thrill.
Once she arrives at the door she doesn’t get to knock before the door swings open, revealing Shiv. She’s changed clothes, swapping the black suit for a pair of cream loose pants and simple tan top.
“Hi.”
“Hey.” Shiv nods. “Come in.”
She pulls the door open, allowing Karolina to pass through, before gently pushing it closed behind her.
Karolina nods, giving her a small smile. “Thanks.”
They make their way through the massive apartment, Shiv taking the lead once more. Her staff had already cleaned up, leaving the place bare, an endless sea of creams and whites barely flickering to life in the warm light of some odd lamp here and there.
They get to the living room when Karolina realizes she’d left her coat on. She takes it off, motioning to Shiv for a place to put it away, receiving only a shrug in response. The back of a chair it is.
Making great work of placing it as neatly as possible on a nearby chair, Karolina doesn’t even notice Shiv’s gone away until she comes back brandishing a bottle of wine. She raises it toward Karolina, who nods in approval. Satisfied with the answer, she disappears once more, returning with two glasses.
“Is Tom…” Karolina asks tentatively, once they’d settled on the couch.
“He’s not here.” Shiv purses her lips, running a hand through her hair. “He, uh, yeah—he went to a hotel for the night. Pretty big day tomorrow, so he needed a quiet place to sleep.”
“Oh, of course!” Karolina nods. With everything, she’d completely forgotten about the very real looming threat of the election. “You worried about tomorrow?”
Shiv looks down at her glass, before taking a big sip. “Yeah, I feel like my fucking head’s gonna burst if I think about it too much, so…” she sighs, running her hand through her hair again.
Karolina follows suit, raising her glass in a mock toast before taking a sip.
Uncomfortable silence begins to settle between them, before Shiv clears her throat, turning away from Karolina to place her glass on the coffee table in front of them.
“So, you said you were gonna tell me.”
“Right.” Karolina sighs.
She takes a few deep breaths, trying to figure out how to start. Every single version of this conversation she’d prepared earlier has slipped from her mind, as Karolina struggles to come up with a first fucking word. In the soft cream nothingness surrounding them, the only thing she can focus on is Shiv, her furrowed brow and pursed lip. The curious glint in her eye and the fact that she doesn’t realize she’s been scratching at her wrist since they’d sat down.
Karolina begins a sentence three times, stopping each time with a painful, stilted breath. She tries again. And again. She takes a sip of her wine, then another. She tries again. And again. Each time, she manages to get one or two words out, before all the air rushes out of her and she feels her chest fill with lead.
She barely gets sentences words out, before Shiv interrupts her. She’d been quiet so far, and far kinder than Karolina thinks she deserves, allowing her the grace of looking away each time Karolina’s had to stop to control her breathing.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. I get it, you know—painful shit.”
She gives Karolina a small smile, picking up her glass and raising it in a mock toast of her own, before drinking from it.
“Mhm.” Karolina puffs out an embarrassed laugh, her cheeks burning. “But it wasn’t fair to you. We were there for each other, as much as we could, and then I just…disappeared. That wasn’t fair to you.”
“Uh huh. I thought you’d died.” Shiv throws her a pointed look. “Roman kept telling me I’d dodged a bullet `cause you were probably like a million years old. Or you’d died of hunger in some third-world country.”
Though she feels the tip of the knife just barely pressing against her skin, Karolina joins Shiv in her quiet laugh.
“Can I ask…” she waits for Shiv to nod before continuing. “The first one—what happened?”
She looks down at her right palm before turning to see Shiv doing the same thing.
“The hand burning?” Shiv smirks. “Our housekeeper left the iron on while she went to answer the phone. Roman let me put my hand on it.”
“Oh, god.” Karolina gasps, mortified.
Pavel had briefly convinced her it had been a bomb, and she’d have to get her hand amputated too, in sympathy. Karolina had then reasoned she would have punch Pavel as much as possible while she still had her hand, after which they agreed to discard that particular theory.
“Yeah, he has always been like that, in case you were wondering.” Shiv laughs, delighting in Karolina’s squirming. “Hey, what about the one on the shoulder?” she asks, pointing to her left shoulder. “Felt like a fucking tiger claw.”
Karolina frowns, biting her lip as she tries to remember the mark Shiv is talking about. She’d always had a spotty memory when it came to her own wounds.
“What, this one?” she undoes one of the buttons on her shirt, pulling it down slightly to show Shiv the slightly jagged scar on her shoulder-blade. “My sister pushed me against a wall and there was a nail stuck in it.”
Shiv inspects the scar, the freckles on her nose peeking through her make-up as she scrunches up her nose.
They begin talking about them—their marks. Bump and bruises and bite marks, they pass the time running through each mark they’d remembered. Shiv teaches her about bitey and various other games she’d played with her brothers, taking great delight in each scandalized grimace she receives. Karolina tries her best to describe the smell of rivanol and berates Shiv for never getting a tetanus booster shot. It feels easy, Karolina thinks. At some point, they both look down at their empty glasses, then at the empty bottle on the table, each silently trying to remember when time had snuck by them so quickly.
They’re a third of their second bottle down when Shiv, arm resting lazily across the back of the couch, reaches over to nudge her shoulder.
“You know, you never said you were sorry for ditching my ass.”
The wine had loosed her words and her smile, and she looks at Karolina not with a judgemental glare, but with a teasing grin.
“I’m not.” Karolina swallows. She turns her face away, staring off into the emptiness of the apartment. “I can’t be.”
When she turns back to look at Shiv, the glint in her eyes is gone, replaced by something much softer, though Karolina can’t quite place it.
“It was a man, right?” Shiv asks softly, pointing towards Karolina’s nose.
Karolina nods.
“Your dad?”
“No.” Karolina laughs. “No, this one I picked.”
She shakes her head, raising her glass to her lips.
“It made sense, at the time—I thought the whole point of it was to feel pain, so…”
She grips the glass too tightly as she drinks, thin rivulets of wine spilling down her chin. She doesn’t bother trying to spare her shirt, only raising a hand to wipe messily at her chin. She turns to see Shiv watching her intently.
“Yeah, no, I get that.” Shiv nods, clearing her throat. “Thought that for a while, too.”
Karolina sighs. “I know it’s not the same thing, but I am sorry you had to be alone, Shiv.”
“Nah, you really lucked out.” she shakes her head, smiling. “I think you went away right around the time the divorce happened.”
Her smile slowly settles into a frown, heavy shadows falling across her eyes as she begins to drift away. Karolina can picture her, thirteen and angry, small hands grasping for something—anything that won’t leave. For someone to decide to stay.
Karolina nudges her foot softly.
“You were a kid, Shiv.”
“I was a fucking monster.” Shiv laughs, red-rimmed eyes shimmering in the warm light enveloping them.
“Same thing.”
Still imagining those small, grasping hands, Karolina raises her own hand, waiting for Shiv’s gentle nod before touching her. She does so slowly, only letting the pads of her fingers touch the side of Shiv face, Shiv’s eyelids fluttering as her warm skin welcomes the coolness of Karolina’s fingers. It’s Shiv who finally leans her head into Karolina’s hand, closing her eyes as Karolina’s thumb begins to smooth down the soft skin above her brow bone.
When Shiv’s eyes flutter open again, they are the bluest Karolina’s ever seen them. And as she leans forward, closing the space between them, Karolina looks into her eyes and sees a great, beautiful wave pulling her in.
Perhaps she’d been wrong, to think Shiv’s hands would be the death of her.
Karolina briefly thinks about the plan they’d made, the unnecessary complication of it all. She thinks about the fight she’d witnessed tonight. She thinks about the alcohol they’d had. About Tom, snoring loudly in some too-cold hotel room, tossing and turning in over-starched sheets. She thinks about the election, and the danger looming over the entire country.
But really, truthfully, Karolina doesn’t think about any of those things—because her hands have melted into Shiv’s skin and Shiv’s bitten-pink lips are the liveliest things she’s ever seen, the bridge of her nose, faint freckled and reddened by the wine an anchor her eyes have kept going back to all night.
As she kisses Shiv, Karolina’s mind is quiet, peacefully still in a way she hasn’t felt since childhood—since hanging upside down from the monkey bars, the world dancing before her eyes, everything light and silly and beautiful.
The trick to never falling, she remembers, was to just keep gripping the bars as hard as she could.
And as she grips the back of Shiv head, running her fingers through the soft hair, Karolina sighs, wondering how she’s ever going to command her hands to let go.
The next few days pass in a flurry. She leaves Shiv’s apartment before the sun’s risen with a kiss on her shoulder and the silent agreement to meet again after things have settled down.
She doesn’t speak to Shiv during the funeral.
There is very little to say, very little that would bring Shiv any kind of solace, anyway.
It’s a very eerie thing, to bury one’s father. To watch the person you’d thought could pick up the whole world in his bare hands, being carried away in a box.
Karolina thinks about her father’s funeral. It had felt like the end of the world. It had felt like the most mundane thing in the world.
Her father was lying in a box, and just outside the church doors someone was yelling at another person in traffic. Someone had just tripped on a crack in the pavement and was looking around, hoping no one had noticed.
And Karolina only had two things running through her mind: she had lived every memory she would ever have with her father, and she would have a lot of work waiting for her the next morning.
In-between those two thoughts—her mother’s face, the hollows under her eyes, the silent tears, her hands laying limply in her lap, one thumb caressing the pale skin of the other.
She watches them go up, one by one, and bleed themselves dry at that pulpit.
Shiv is the last one to make her way up those stairs, her face as pale as she’d seen, it hidden behind a pair of sunglasses, the day Logan died. Her eyes are narrowed, red-rimmed and filled with tears that she refuses to let spill. Her voice shakes as she speaks, but Karolina knows it isn’t sadness coating the back of her throat like thick honey, but anger. If she had a sword, she knows Shiv would strike them all down—like something out of a renaissance painting. All three of them would.
Instead, they strike each other.
Even this anger, Karolina knows, can only be trusted in the hands of a brother.
As she speaks about the weightlessness of women in Logan’s mind, Shiv locks eyes with Karolina. The muted terror she sees reflected in Shiv’s eyes grips Karolina like a vice. She had lived every moment she will ever live with Logan—and he will never see her.
A whole woman.
It’s a small, insignificant gesture to the weight of the world, the warmth of the light she would never feel again, but Karolina, still holding Shiv’s gaze, reaches for the crook of her elbow and grips the soft flesh as softly and steadily as she can. It’s a small act of comfort, one that would never encompass everything she wants to tell Shiv—that she is seen. That she is whole.
That outside of this church there are people silently hoping no one had seen them trip, and even more people stuck in traffic—even more people dying and being forgotten about.
Mostly, she wants to tell Shiv that the light might never feel as warm, but it will still kiss her skin if she lets it.
A flicker of recognition flashes across Shiv’s face, before she gives Karolina a small nod.
“You could’ve told me.”
Karolina curses herself for sending that fucking draft. She’d known what it would lead to, what it would do to Shiv.
“I’m not involved in this, Shiv.” she crosses her arms, looking down at her feet.
“But you knew. And you could’ve fucking told me.”
Of course she’d known. They’d all fucking known. Shiv had known too, deep down, from the moment she’d ever stepped foot in the same room as Matsson.
Because none of this is really about them—Shiv or Matsson, even Karolina. All of them are just placeholders in a game that will always end the same way. Years from now, some other fuckers would be having the same argument. And none of it will matter.
Except it does matter. It matters because they’ve outgrown their mould—they’ve stepped out of their allocated square on the game board and now everything’s gotten muddled together, and it matters.
It matters because Shiv’s chin is trembling and there are shadows under eyes. It matters because Karolina knows she’s been biting her thumb into shreds. Of course it fucking matters.
“What good would that have done?” she sighs, her eyes searching Shiv’s. “What would it have changed?”
“I would’ve fucking known!” Shiv yells, her hand flying to rub at the bridge of her nose as she turns away from Karolina.
It feels dirty, what she knows she’s trying to do. Trying to draw a line they’d been perfectly content dancing over all this time. To talk about their job, the company, like they’ve ever existed outside of it, like it isn’t the reason they met in the first place. Like it isn’t the centre of the entire fucking universe, the thing that keeps them all going round and round and round.
She clears her throat, clutching her phone tighter.
“Look, Shiv, I’m just doing my—”
“Bullshit, Karolina!” Shiv finally turns back to face her. “You were covering your own ass, as usual.”
She raises a pointed brow, the corners of her mouth lifting into a mocking smile as she rakes her eyes over Karolina.
“As usual?” Karolina narrows her eyes.
“You know exactly what I mean.” she rolls her eyes. “You can’t give someone a stick of fucking gum without worrying about yourself first.”
Shiv’s hands remain still by her side, though each sentence feels like a blow to Karolina’s chest.
“Oh, what about my pain, what about my job, my fucking stick of gum!” Shiv finishes her impression with furrowed brows and a mocking pout.
Karolina nods numbly, clenching her jaw to keep her voice from shaking.
“You wanna make this about that, Siobhan?” she says quietly, restraining her growing anger.
Shiv takes a step closer, her smirk sharpening.
“It is about that, babe—because it’s about you, and your inability to think about anyone else but yourself.” she says softly, as if explaining something to a child. “Either that, or you’re just a fucking coward, which is even sadder.”
Karolina blinks. She bites her lip, bites down the scream threatening to pour out of her throat. She meets Shiv’s gaze with the same level of fake disdain, and digs her fingers into her arm with the same level of anger.
“Be honest with yourself, Siobhan.” she finally says, her voice now barely concealing her anger. “Would you have done anything different if the roles were reversed?”
“I never would’ve severed it.” Shiv spits each word out like a sharpened arrow. “Never.”
There it was.
The reason none of it matters. And the reason all of it matters.
Because it isn’t about the company, or Matsson’s decision, or a goddamn piece of paper. It’s about them—the crackling static as she’d told Shiv about the draft, the baited breath as she’d met her gaze in that church, the thin trails of smoke that had danced above their head in the middle of the desert.
Everything before that—the scraped knees, the bite marks, each tiny scratch that has connected them throughout their lives.
“We’re taking about a press statement.” she says, despite the shame flushing her skin and crawling up her neck.
It takes all of Karolina’s strength to meet Shiv’s burning gaze.
“What the fuck does it matter—a piece of paper, a fucking pinch.” Shiv shrugs, lifting up her sleeve and gripping the skin on her elbow with so much force it leaves Karolina gasping, clutching at her own arm. “It’s all bullshit, anyway.”
They stand in silence for a while, their staggering breaths the only sound.
It reminds Karolina of a western—the standoff at the end. All of the dust suspended mid-air as if too scared to move, lest it disturb the two fierce opponents. The wind howling around them, the smell of gunpowder in the air. The sweaty palms and blinding sun.
If this is a western, she thinks, then someone must shoot first. And someone must fall.
She takes a deep breath.
“Shiv…”
Shiv shakes her head, biting her cheek as her eyes fill with tears.
“Fucking bullshit.”
She doesn’t spare Karolina another glance as she breezes past her, their shoulders almost colliding.
The sound of the door clicking shut behind her rings like a gunshot in Karolina’s head.
After it’s all over, the great Roy legacy sold like an old vase at a yard sale, Karolina makes her way towards her office, hoping there would be no more fires to put out today—that she can have one night to drink herself into oblivion and pray to wake up and realize all of this past year has been a bad dream. That Logan was in his office, pissed off and yelling about something she’d already taken care of. That Shiv was somewhere in DC, a phantom pain Karolina could still learn to live with.
Her right palm is still burning after shaking Tom’s hand, and she briefly considers stopping by the bathroom on her way to her office. No amount of watered down soap could wash away shame, she reasons, before deciding to focus on just making it out of the building as fast as possible.
Lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t notice there is someone in her office until a flash of red jumps up from behind her desktop, startling her.
Shiv.
She looks even angrier than she had during their fight, and Karolina briefly contemplates handing her a letter opener and letting Shiv have at her.
Shiv doesn’t acknowledge her as she begins to rummage through her desk drawers, mumbling to herself. Still watching her, Karolina doesn’t say anything as she takes is the mess Shiv has created across her desk, every item knocked over or turned upside down.
“Do you need help with that?”
She crosses her arms, looking down as Shiv busies herself with recreating the same mess inside of her drawers.
After a few more moments of aimless searching, Shiv releases a defeated sigh, looking up to meet her gaze as she slams one of the drawers shut.
“Do you still smoke?”
Karolina sighs, uncrossing her arms. Without saying a word, she makes her way to the couch where she’d left her bag, rummaging in it for a bit before pulling out the pack of menthols and raising it up for Shiv to see.
Neither of them attempts to fill the silence as they make their way up to the top of the building. Once they step out into the cold air, Shiv wastes no time in ripping the pack and lighter from Karolina’s hands and lighting herself a cigarette, before throwing the pack back at Karolina chest, almost sending the pack flying across the rooftop.
Silence wraps around them like thick vines. Each time she thinks Shiv might say something, their eyes meet and all she sees is anger. Shiv’s jaw shaking from the weight of it. And then she turns her head and asks for another cigarette, and Karolina opens the pack for her.
The first time Shiv’s phone goes off, it startles the both of them, and they share a quiet shit. The second time, she sees Shiv’s frown deepen, her throat constrict from the tension she’s trying to swallow down. Karolina hands her another cigarette.
When it starts ringing for the third time, Karolina wraps her arms around herself before stepping in front of Shiv, forcing her to meet her eyes.
“Shiv…” she sighs. “We can’t stay here forever.”
“Depends—how many cigarettes you got left?” Shiv nods towards the pack clutched in her hand.
They share a brief laugh, before Shiv’s phone goes off again.
This time, Karolina can’t ignore the name staring up at her from Shiv’s screen. Tom
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Shiv scoffs, shaking her head.
Karolina watches her clutch the phone in her hand and almost throw it to the ground before changing her mind, bringing her hand up to her temples instead.
“You don’t have to do this.” Karolina blinks. “Just tell him to fuck off.”
“And then what do I do?” Shiv frowns. “Where the fuck do I go, Karolina?”
Tears have gathered in her eyes, and the wind has picked up, reddening the tip of her nose. She frowns as her eyes dart frantically across Karolina’s face, as if searching for an answer to her question.
“Wherever you want.” Karolina murmurs, feeling her own eyes sting.
“So come with me.”
“What?”
Karolina frowns, her mind refusing to wrap around what Shiv has said. There is a howling noise rushing inside of her ears and she tries desperately to cling to the sound of Shiv’s quiet breathing and tether herself to it, trailing each soft inhale.
Shiv’s gaze had wandered off somewhere behind Karolina’s head, beyond the glass panels and the city skyline.
“I—”
Shiv’s face crumbles. She starts to turn around, before Karolina grabs her wrist, slowly pulling her in.
“Shiv.”
She waits for Shiv to meet her gaze before wrapping her arms around her, hands coming up to cradle the back of her head. And it breaks Karolina’s heart, how well it fits between her palms. How much it seems her arms had always just been meant to wrap around Shiv.
How fucking easy it would all be, if everything wasn’t so fucked.
“Okay.” she whispers into Shiv’s hair. “Okay.”
Shiv pulls back, her eyes shining as she shakes her head, smiling at Karolina despite the tears marking her laugh lines.
As if brought upon by an angered god, their phones begin to ring simultaneously.
“We should go.” Shiv says, finally breaking their embrace.
“No.” Karolina shakes her head.
Her ears are ringing, the sound of her phone barely perceptible over the thrum of her own blood. She looks down at the device shaking in her hand.
Shiv lays a soft hand on her arm. “Karolina, you should pick up.”
“No.”
Each time she tries to open her mouth, it’s the only thing she can seem to get out.
Losing her patience, Shiv scoffs, taking a step back.
“Oh, what, you really wanna Thelma & Louise it out of here. Come on…”
Karolina wills her feet to move, her mouth to say anything—to tell Shiv’s she’s right, that they should get out of here before security finds them. That they’ve both had a rough day and this isn’t the time and certainly not the place to talk. Anything but what she really wants to say.
Her phone starts ringing again.
“Goddammit!”
Without thinking, she clutches the phone in her hand and throws it as far as she can. The device flies into the air, before hitting the glass panel and falling to the ground. As she struggles to catch her breath, Karolina is vaguely aware of Shiv shouting something behind her.
Her phone starts ringing again.
A cold wave of anger washes over her, and Karolina finds herself dropping on all fours, grabbing the phone and smashing it against the gravel over and over. The ringing carries on, even as she sees the screen first turn off, then crack, and finally begin to crumble into shards.
At some point, she becomes aware of her knuckles bleeding, the heel of her palm covered in tiny bits of gravel. She keeps smashing the phone—over and over and over, as her chest caves in on itself and she finally allows the tears to pour out in a wretched sob.
She can feel Shiv’s hand gripping her shoulder, can hear her yelling at her, but she finds her hands unable to stop.
The more pain, she finds, the easier it is to breathe.
“Karolina, stop! Stop it—it’s dead.” Shiv finally manages to grab her wrist. “It’s fucking dead, stop.”
She pulls Karolina forward until she has nowhere else to look but into Shiv’s eyes.
“It stopped. It’s not ringing anymore.” she raises her free hand to cradle Karolina’s cheek,
Her hand is warm, and soft against her face, and Karolina focuses on that warmth as she attempts to get her breathing under control. Each breath feels like it’s setting her chest on fire.
Shiv looks at her with a worried frown, her grip tightening with each stilted breath that rattles out of Karolina’s chest.
With her ears still ringing, she doesn’t realize Shiv’s phone has started ringing until the hand holding her cheek withdraws and she finds herself almost crying out at the sudden lack of warmth.
Shiv’s eyes remain glued to her as she reaches into her pocket and brings the phone to her ear.
“I’m not coming.” she nods at Karolina. One hand is still gripping her wrist. “I mean I’m fucking done, Tom. Fuck off.”
She ends the call with a swift click, before throwing the phone carelessly next to what’s been left of Karolina’s. Still holding a firm grip on her wrist, she pulls Karolina with her until they are both sitting down, their backs against the glass panels surrounding the roof.
“Okay.” she whispers to herself once, then a few more times.
Then, she picks up Karolina’s wrist, bringing it to her chest as she inspects the torn up flesh on her. “That was pretty fucking dumb.”
“Yeah.” Karolina grimaces. “Hurts like a bitch.”
“I know.” Shiv chuckles, shooting her a dirty look. She takes a deep breath, her grip tightening around Karolina’s wrist. “You really wanna do this?”
Karolina swallows.
You can let yourself want it.
She’d imagined this moment before, not necessarily with her and Shiv, but a moment like this—with people like them. She’d imagined having this kind of choice, this kind of power.
Except, she finds, it isn’t much of a choice at all. Because none of this feels like something she can want. Something she can point to and say yes, I’ll have that one.
Instead, what it feels like is the first gulp of air after a dive. The millisecond before breaking surface. The choice, if there is any, seems as if one between life and death. A mouthful of water or a gasping breath.
A lifetime of absences or something that fits perfectly between her palms.
“I need to.”
Shiv sighs, laying her palm carefully under Karolina’s. “You barely know me, Karolina.”
Karolina frowns, leaning her head back against the glass. “I’ve known you my whole life.”
Next to her, Shiv just nods softly. She’s still holding Karolina’s hand, gently toying with her fingers and carefully brushing away as much of the dirt and gravel as she can. She hisses after each speck of dirt comes off, even though she’s being too gentle for any of it to hurt.
“I just—” Karolina starts, before cutting herself off with a sigh. “I keep telling myself it’s coming, you know? And then I look at it, and it’s already fading, so I convince myself that wasn’t it, and I just have to keep looking, and it never stops. I’m always just on the verge of it,” she pauses, shaking her head before puffing out another frustrated sigh “like I can’t get myself off.”
“Off of what?” Shiv laughs, her eyes widening as she turns to fully look at Karolina.
“I don’t know, life? Happiness?” she pauses. “Love?”
Shiv remains silent for a moment, taking in what she’d said. Then, as if having finished contemplating, she nods once, before speaking. “So what you’re saying is, I can get you off?”
She punctuates the sentence with a toothy grin.
“That, too.” Karolina knocks their knees together, joining in Shiv’s chuckle. “What I mean is, with you I’m not looking around for the next part so I can tell myself ‘this is it, I am happy, this is the life I want to live’. I’m just with you.”
Shiv is quiet again for a moment, before she picks up Karolina’s hand again and loosely threads their fingers together.
“Yeah, I get that. I understand that.” she clears her throat, stealing quick glances at Karolina as she speaks. “Feels like we’re cheating, though, doesn’t it? Like it shouldn’t be this easy.”
Karolina tugs on the hand wrapped around hers, bringing Shiv’s attention back to her. “I think we just convinced ourselves it shouldn’t.”
“Mm.” Shiv hums.
They sit together for a few more moments, watching a few lonely birds dance across the skyline.
Then, without saying a word, Shiv brings their joined hands to her lips and kisses the back of Karolina’s hand softly, her lipstick mixing with the dirt and dried blood.
Raising to her feet, she throws a quick glance across the empty roof, before extending a hand out towards Karolina.
“Come on.” she smiles, motioning for Karolina to grab her hand. “Let’s not get caught.”