Ivan Press

[Ivan] She's barely at her car when her phone rings.

If she picks up, she gets this in voice. Otherwise, the message comes through as a text:

"Lied about what?"

[Hilary] She picks up. Her hand is throbbing as she cradles the cell to her ear, offering a mild: "Yes?"

About what, he wants to know. She opens her car door, unlocked from afar with the press of a button. She pushes the driver's seat forward. "There's no book release. It's Labor Day weekend, you dolt."

[Ivan] A short, sharp silence. "Keep insulting me," he says. "See if my attitude doesn't improve."

[Hilary] "Tit for tat, Ivan," she offers, and climbs into the Maserati, closing the door and folding her long, lean body into what little there is of a back seat, putting her forehead on her knees.

[Ivan] A longer silence this time. Then, "Why did you tell me there was somewhere you needed to be? So you'd have an excuse to leave when you were bored?"

[Hilary] He ignores what she says and moves on -- moves back -- to what he wants to know anyway, the reason he called her moments after she left his penthouse, all those dozens of stories up in the air. Nevermind the implication that he insulted her equally, or moreso, or something. Whatever it is.

"Sure," she says, with a slight sigh. "If you like."

[Ivan] "Why?" he presses.

[Hilary] "Stop."

And this is a bit ragged, a bit like a plea more than a command. She sounds threadbare, as though she's as bruised as her hand. "Please, just stop."

[Ivan] So he stops. So there's dead airspace, and both their phones are so fucking high-quality there's no hissing. It may as well have gone dead.

He speaks again:

"Come back up. If you don't have anywhere else to be, come back up." A pause. "We won't talk about this anymore."

[Hilary] "God damn you."

This is almost instant, and more like a reply than a defeated, gasping sound. As though that communicates something other than bile. "I will and then you'll try to open me up again. Ask me questions and make up your own answers in the same breath, pry at me like a crowbar til I split open and spill everything out so you can look at all the blood and call it tomato soup. Why can't you just let be?"

[Ivan] "I don't know," he replies, and it's immediate as hers was, and sharp. A pause, and then quieter: "I don't know. If I could just fuck you and let everything else be, I would. Believe me, I would.

"I can at least promise you this. I won't ask any more today. Okay?"

[Hilary] She talks so blandly about things like being split open, being pried at like a physical thing

like physical pain

and opened up, spilled, and mistaken and misunderstood further. He makes her regret the way she's let herself weep, the way she's trembled and moaned for him. He makes her wish she had said nothing, and wish she had just sucked his cock and told him what he wanted so she could keep coming back and not be pushed so violently all the time. Over and over.

And still misunderstood, spoken to with the arrogance of youth, as though if he breaks her he knows her. If she answers his questions then he knows her, owns her. While all the while he so fucking blithely tells her what she is, what she's capable of,

as though she is also incapable of pride. Or having it wounded.

Or just being wounded.

"You're sick," she tells him, so quietly.

[Ivan] This time she can hear a hiss -- not the phone, but his breath drawn in between his teeth. She can't see him close his eyes to keep his temper.

"Do you really think," he says quietly, "insulting me over and over is going to help?"

[Hilary] "I wasn't."

[Ivan] So much for keeping his temper. "What the hell," he snaps, "makes you think you have any right to call someone else sick?"

[Hilary] This conversation has been one of long silences and sharp answers, losses of temper, snaps of reaction. It's easy enough to say neither of them are truly any more noble or sweethearted than they appear to be. He never makes promises to his starved swans or foolish little girls because he knows quite well he would not, could not keep them. He can't even promise to stop scraping Hilary raw for more than the rest of the day.

This is one of the long silences. He can hear her breathing, shallow because of the way she's positioned, but just as he doesn't know she unleashed her own temper inside the elevator, he doesn't know she's curled up in the backseat of her car in his garage, hiding, tucked away as small as she can get, as though to hold herself in.

So: that long quiet, and her breathing, so he knows exactly when the call is ended because her breathing grows distant from the microphone and because there is the feeling of severance, the stairstep from one sort of silence to the other.