Good and Gone.
Sep. 6th, 2008 12:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnNot only is this PWP, it's CWC for "characterization, what characterization?" Hivemind had a convo a while back, and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amonitrate wrote the good, totally awesome and great version whereas I. Yeah. Took the yarn ball of crack and ran for miles.
It's a hotel somewhere in Europe. Probably Italy? Near Milan, most likely, because it's not like she had money to leave. Pepper is, in fact, positive that it's Europe because at that point, she hadn't been back in the US in at least a year, and she also remembers that it happened while she was in an epic, epic struggle with her agency to get paid for all the work she'd done in Milan the month before and London before that. Fuckers.
Pepper can keep track of money and schedules, numbers even when she doesn't remember names. Or faces.
He sends over a flute of champagne. Pepper doesn't have anyplace to go, so she does her best slow walk over to him. She sits down. After a little talking, they go upstairs.
...
"How do you like the water?" he says.
"It's good," she says, and a moment after that, he comes into the bathroom, puts the seat down on the toilet, and sits. It's an American-style bathroom. He is an American, and Pepper finds more relieving than she really should. Everybody speaks English in Europe. Everybody. The photographers, the agents, the little ladies in pastry shops. The night before, Pepper had been rolling hard all night before and into the morning and afternoon, and that's why she's in the bathtub. There's glitter on her skin, and this guy --
The faucets in the bathroom aren't gold, but they're colored that way. At six o' clock, he's sitting down in the hotel lobby in a grey suit with a white shirt and a pink tie. Pepper thinks they're tailored, totally custom. No labels. Suspenders with brass fittings, and this isn't the best room in the hotel, but nice enough for him to be somebody.
"You want some more champagne?" he asks.
"I'm fine," she says. "Maybe later."
He's a tall guy, so he sits with his knees wide, wide apart and rests his elbows on them. Pepper washes her elbows and scrubs at her cheeks, then the bit of skin behind her shoulder blade. He doesn't say anything, and after getting all the places that she remembers putting glitter or being touched by somebody in glitter, she puts one foot up on either side of the temperature control knobs and licks her lower lip. She put some kind of foaming bath stuff in the water before running, so there's a layer of bubbles between her skin and him.
Pepper leans her head back against the edge of the tub and makes eye contact. He gets the message. He unbuttons his cuffs and pushes them up. Takes his watch off and comes to sit on the edge of the tub.
It's a nice bathroom. White marble shot through with gray, gold faucets and a white tile floor. He skims his hand over the bubbles and clears them out from between her knees before putting his right hand on her left knee.
...
"So what's your name?"
"Virginia."
"Don't tell me you're from Virginia. You don't sound like you're from Virginia."
"Rhode Island, actually."
"And what are you doing out here in Dusseldorf, Virginia-from-Rhode-Island?"
Dusseldorf? That's in Germany. Shit. Shit. Shit.
"You haven't told me your name, though."
...
He has big hands. They don't look particularly big on him because he's a broad-shouldered, big guy, but Pepper is at working weight, so his palm swallows up her knee. And the water is warm; she's had plenty to drink, and he's actually pretty good at it. He watches her face even if he can't see down there, so it's not hard to put on a good show. Her feet start out on opposite sides of the handles for hot and cold water, and as he works at her, she drops them further and further apart, until she has her knees against the side of the tub and turns her face into the side of the tub and moans when he works the tip of his finger into her. Not all the way. Not pressing up. Just there. Big enough to be felt.
Her hair is starting to come undone from the towel. The ends train in the water and stick to her neck. Steam from the water makes her cheeks red. He's pretty good, more than pretty good, and Pepper is determined to put on a good show, and she's just about ready to fake it when he bends down low and whispers, right in her ear, "Don't play with me, Virginia."
Pepper opens her eyes -- she'd been keeping them closed and her cheek pressed against the side of the tub, and she looks at him. He has two fingers each two inches inside her, and there's a smile in the left-hand corner of his mouth.
"I wasn't -- "
Before the rest of the sentence gets out of her mouth, he yanks her out of the water, one hand under each of her arms. Out of the water, out of the tub. He's still wearing his shirt; her skin sticks to the cloth for a second before going; he doesn't kiss her, but he pushes her against the sink. It hits at just below her hips; there's a rustling, almost crackling noise, where he opens the packaging on a condom. The floor is hot and slippery from the steam, and about half a second after that, Pepper is getting fucked so hard that she has to hang onto the taps, the wall, anything she can reach to stay upright. He's only interested in keeping one hand on each of her hips so that part of her stays still, and Pepper catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror: too much steam to see his face behind her, but she can see her own face.
In the mirror, she sees a streak of glitter on her cheek that she didn't quite catch. Pepper tilts her head back; the girl in the mirror tilts her head back. He puts his hand on the back of her neck and pushes her down so that she's really bent over the sink now, so that she can't see herself in the mirror, and he reaches those two fingers around right before he shoves into her so hard that it's going to leave bruises on her hips, on the space between her hips, let alone --
Pepper comes without an ounce of pretending.
...
"You still haven't told me your name," Pepper says. Her feet slide a little on the floor. The room is starting to cool, so the floor is really getting slippery now.
He's still wearing Italian leather lace-up shoes, though his shirt is wet across the front now, and the sleeves are, too. And he doesn't answer right away, so Pepper looks at him and angles her head, studying him a little. He's a businessman. Definitely a businessman. Not film, though. Or publishing. Or fashion. She's met enough of them, fucked enough of them, too, to be able to tell the breed. Some kind of -- some kind of. Pepper's mind fails her. The only businessmen she knows from home are ones that own car dealerships or fast food franchises. This guy doesn't sell Tauruses or burgers.
After she came, he'd turned her around, put her on the sink, and she put her legs around his waist while he fucked her until he came. That's what the wet places along his sides are from. She wrapped her legs around him and crossed her ankles in the small of his back.
"Howard," he says, after a moment, holding a bath robe out at her.
"I don't think that's your real name," Pepper says, after a pause of similar length. She takes the bathrobe, though, and when he grins and asks if she wants that champagne now, from the smirk on his face, she is fairly sure that was the right thing to say.
...
Pepper has champagne, and they're out on the balcony, looking out at Dusseldorf. At night, it's an unexpectedly pretty city. Pepper only really knows that it's where a lot of flights from New York fly into, but this guy tells her a little about it. World War II, he explains, and talks a little bit about the Treaty of Versailles. And times even older than that.
"You see the river down there? It used to be all marsh, and this is where the barbarians made their last stand against the Roman Empire. Hid out from them in land the Romans didn't even want and told themselves that was what liberty was. Poor stupid fucks."
She looks at him, still trying to figure it out. Most businessmen, they fell over themselves to tell Pepper what business they were in, how important their company was, how much they were doing. It wasn't like a twenty-one year old strung-out model, lying about being nineteen because twenty-one is old, was going to look them up at home and make trouble. While Pepper considered it, she stretched her legs out and rested them on the edge of the balcony. It wasn't particularly high, and the bathrobe fell away from her legs.
He admires them, and Pepper arches her back. One side of the bathrobe falls away up to her hip. He admires some more. Definitely a leg man, Pepper decides. And older. It's hard to tell exactly how old. The shaved head and the beard make him look older, maybe, and there's a little dinner between them. Room service. Pepper didn't really eat; he had a couple of fries and some of the chicken. Champagne came with it, and a couple cigars, too. He had one in his hands and was studying it in the light from the room behind them.
"I don't think Virginia is your real name," he says, after a little more time passes.
Pepper raises her eyebrows. "That's what my birth certificate says. My driver's license, too."
"From Rhode Island."
"From Rhode Island."
He leans back in his chair. "When I say it, you don't react like it's your name. I don't think it's what people at home call you."
"At home in Rhode Island."
"Because you still think of that as home." He says it with an amused sound in his voice, like he doesn't believe her, and now, he actually looks over at her. There are lights in front of them -- Dusseldorf in all its night-time glory, the river, still and black, the yellow lights of the very expensive hotel room behind them. The moon is caught in the silver covers from room service.
"Yeah, it's home," Pepper says, stiffening her back a little.
"I don't think that's your real home," he says, still looking at her. "And I don't think Virginia is your real name."
She doesn't say anything and regrets stretching her legs out for him to look at, but after a moment, he gestures for her to come over. "C'mere," he says, and without quite knowing why Pepper goes over and stands in front of him, facing him. His eyes and mouth are in shadow, and he puts his hands on her waist and settles her in his lap. Pepper isn't exactly happy to be there; her legs are really too long to fit over the arm of the chair like that, and she squirms a little when he transfers the cigar to his left hand and slides his right up, from her sternum to the base of her throat, then around, to the the back of her neck again.
He really does have big fucking hands. And she doesn't know his name, but Pepper doesn't really want to move, for some reason. He holds her hard by the back of the neck, but kisses her surprisingly gently.
"What're you doing in Europe, Virginia?"
"Living in the marshes," she says. "But at least I'm not lying about my name. Do you even know somebody named Howard?"
He considers that answer for a while, then touches her throat, right where it meets her collarbones and chest. Pepper holds still; the bathrobe is slipping open, and he considers the loose knot that's sitting above her stomach. He considers loosening it; she knows he considers loosening it and pushing it off her shoulders, so that she'd be naked in his lap out here on the balcony, but Pepper keeps still under his hand.
"You smoke cigars?" he says, finally.
...
Pepper tries cigars, but doesn't like them that much. She makes a good faith effort, though, and learns, while sitting in his lap, some of the tricks of blowing smoke rings with cigars rather than cigarettes. To make it up to her, he calls up the bellboy, slips him a fold of bills, and twenty minutes later, there's a knock at the door. The bellboy again. Two little bags, a flash of plastic moving between hands. He tips the bellboy, then tosses them to Pepper. She catches them and, sitting on the floor by the glass-topped low table near the couch and armchair area, and gets a credit card out of her clutch to cut a set of four neat lines.
"Are you going to do some?"
He settles into the armchair and looks a little offended. "Do you know what they put in that?"
Pepper shrugs, does a line through what she thinks might be her last lira note, but then again, she thought she was near Milan, and here she is, near the border of Germany and France. Pepper unclenches her jaw, bites her lower lip and tilts her head back -- like in the bathtub, only there's no pretending, and she presses her knees together. To her left and above, he laughs, then reaches over and touches her hair.
"How is it?" he says.
"It's all right. Not that -- " Pepper closes her eyes, then opens them again. "I think you probably got ripped off."
This makes him laugh, which she doesn't quite understand, until she starts to turn to do a second one, but there's a hand on her shoulder. She looks up. He's still sitting in the armchair, leaned forward a little, and the room swims in yellow light. She's still in the bathrobe, though she tightened the knot when the bellboy came back and knocked on the door. Pepper doesn't understand, so she turns toward the table for another line; she'd made them too thin, and this time, the hand comes up and grips her under the jaw.
He has blue eyes.
She never noticed that before, and she blinks at him, and slowly, as if positioning a child, he leans forward far enough out of the chair to take her right elbow between thumb and forefinger and drop it so that her palm lands on the inside of her thigh, halfway up. He leans back in the chair.
"Earn it," he says.
The guy is a little hard, but he doesn't make a move to undo his fly or even shift forward so that she could blow him, so slowly, slowly, without taking her eyes from his face, she undoes the knot on her bathrobe. He nods, and Pepper licks her lips and puts her right hand on her knee and runs it up her leg.
...
Pepper doesn't remember a lot about this period in her life -- not faces, not names.
...
"Howard," he says, after a moment, holding a bath robe out at her.
"I don't think that's your real name," Pepper says, after a pause of similar length, and somewhat later that night, she has a blurred memory of being in bed, arching her back because she was still a little sore from an earlier that she couldn't quite remember and somebody asking her if, she didn't think his name was Howard, what she thought his name was.
...
"What're you doing here?" she asks.
"What do you mean by here?" He studies her face for a moment. Her cheeks are flushed, Pepper knows, and her knees are wobbly even though she's sitting on the floor. The bathrobe is spread out around her, and the fingers of her left hand, the hand she hadn't been using, are tightened up into a fist. It's a little gratifying to know, though, that it's had an effect on him. She can hear how bad he wants to fuck her in his voice, and it's on his face, too.
"Business," he says.
"Did it go well?"
"You're here, aren't you?"
Pepper turns back to the glass-topped table because she has fucking earned it, and he is, in fact, nice enough to wait until she's done another line and a half before he grabs her wrists hard enough to make her cry out a little, then pushes her, face-down, onto the bed and uses the weight of his body to keep her there.
...
Pepper wakes alone in bed, but when her eyes re-focus, she realizes he is sitting at the end of the bed. He pulled the armchair up to the foot of the bed and has been watching her. She starts to turn over, but stops because her shoulder aches near where he had pushed down on it. Pepper looks at him. He's dressed, complete with jacket and cufflinks. An overnight kind of bag sits by the door.
"Do you still want to know my name?"
Pepper shakes her head, and he gets up and comes around to the side of the beg and kisses the top of her head, gently helps her roll onto her back. Her brain aches.
"Good girl," he says. "I'm in Europe for the company, but Dusseldorf for some side deals they don't know about."
"Did they go well?" she says.
He nods. There is a drop of blood on the pillowcase from her nose, and he hands her a Kleenex. Pepper brings it to her nose and finds that there's blood.
"The room is booked for two more days. It's all taken care of, so just charge whatever you need. And the concierge has a first class train ticket for you to Paris after that. You'll be in time for the spring bookings."
Pepper doesn't think she ever told him that she was a model, but she's still trying to get her nose to stop bleeding, and he takes the box from the bedside table and puts it next to her, puts a plastic bottle of water within easy reach, too, then smoothes her hair and goes.
She stays in bed for another four hours, then goes into the bathroom and has a bath.
...
"How was Europe?" Tony says. They're sitting in Obadiah's office in New York, and Tony has his feet up on on the glass-topped table.
"European," Obadiah says, without looking up from the paperwork in front of him. He turns the page and -- "Jesus," he says before he can stop himself.
"What?"
It's a hell of a bill to run to up in two days. Did she fucking start eating? Did she charge her coke habit to him? Did her entire agency charge its coke bill to him? Obadiah considers it for a moment, turning it over in his head, and he looks up and sees Tony with his feet up, tie a little askew, picking at the seam on the leather couch he's sitting on. Tony sees him looking, raises his eyebrows.
"So it went well?"
Obadiah looks at Tony. Tony has his feet up on the table, yes, and his tie is askew, and Tony's hair is curly down around his ears from where he got bored combing it in the morning. Obadiah looks back down at the paperwork, thinks about red-headed girls from Rhode Island, and circles the entry, then writes Pay this underneath, so that his secretary won't give the hotel any trouble about it. She was smart. Fun. He wouldn't have minded seeing her again, and even more than that -- well.
Some deals, Obadiah feels, are worth celebrating, and some years later, when the deals have become a business, Tony starts complaining about some bullshit from Accounting by some bullshit data jockey, and Obadiah stops. He asks Tony to repeat the name, and Tony has to look through the personnel file because he doesn't remember, but when he finds it and reads it again. He flashes Obadiah the photo that goes with the ID card, and Obadiah considers it, then smiles and tells Tony that he should, under no circumstance, even think about firing Virginia Potts, who cleaned up. Finished her education. Got certified.
Some deals, Obadiah knows, are worth a reminder.
Written a long time back for the Hivemind and cleaned up.
ferricent, PAY THE FUCK UP.
amonitrate wrote the good, totally awesome and great version whereas I. Yeah. Took the yarn ball of crack and ran for miles. It's a hotel somewhere in Europe. Probably Italy? Near Milan, most likely, because it's not like she had money to leave. Pepper is, in fact, positive that it's Europe because at that point, she hadn't been back in the US in at least a year, and she also remembers that it happened while she was in an epic, epic struggle with her agency to get paid for all the work she'd done in Milan the month before and London before that. Fuckers.
Pepper can keep track of money and schedules, numbers even when she doesn't remember names. Or faces.
He sends over a flute of champagne. Pepper doesn't have anyplace to go, so she does her best slow walk over to him. She sits down. After a little talking, they go upstairs.
...
"How do you like the water?" he says.
"It's good," she says, and a moment after that, he comes into the bathroom, puts the seat down on the toilet, and sits. It's an American-style bathroom. He is an American, and Pepper finds more relieving than she really should. Everybody speaks English in Europe. Everybody. The photographers, the agents, the little ladies in pastry shops. The night before, Pepper had been rolling hard all night before and into the morning and afternoon, and that's why she's in the bathtub. There's glitter on her skin, and this guy --
The faucets in the bathroom aren't gold, but they're colored that way. At six o' clock, he's sitting down in the hotel lobby in a grey suit with a white shirt and a pink tie. Pepper thinks they're tailored, totally custom. No labels. Suspenders with brass fittings, and this isn't the best room in the hotel, but nice enough for him to be somebody.
"You want some more champagne?" he asks.
"I'm fine," she says. "Maybe later."
He's a tall guy, so he sits with his knees wide, wide apart and rests his elbows on them. Pepper washes her elbows and scrubs at her cheeks, then the bit of skin behind her shoulder blade. He doesn't say anything, and after getting all the places that she remembers putting glitter or being touched by somebody in glitter, she puts one foot up on either side of the temperature control knobs and licks her lower lip. She put some kind of foaming bath stuff in the water before running, so there's a layer of bubbles between her skin and him.
Pepper leans her head back against the edge of the tub and makes eye contact. He gets the message. He unbuttons his cuffs and pushes them up. Takes his watch off and comes to sit on the edge of the tub.
It's a nice bathroom. White marble shot through with gray, gold faucets and a white tile floor. He skims his hand over the bubbles and clears them out from between her knees before putting his right hand on her left knee.
...
"So what's your name?"
"Virginia."
"Don't tell me you're from Virginia. You don't sound like you're from Virginia."
"Rhode Island, actually."
"And what are you doing out here in Dusseldorf, Virginia-from-Rhode-Island?"
Dusseldorf? That's in Germany. Shit. Shit. Shit.
"You haven't told me your name, though."
...
He has big hands. They don't look particularly big on him because he's a broad-shouldered, big guy, but Pepper is at working weight, so his palm swallows up her knee. And the water is warm; she's had plenty to drink, and he's actually pretty good at it. He watches her face even if he can't see down there, so it's not hard to put on a good show. Her feet start out on opposite sides of the handles for hot and cold water, and as he works at her, she drops them further and further apart, until she has her knees against the side of the tub and turns her face into the side of the tub and moans when he works the tip of his finger into her. Not all the way. Not pressing up. Just there. Big enough to be felt.
Her hair is starting to come undone from the towel. The ends train in the water and stick to her neck. Steam from the water makes her cheeks red. He's pretty good, more than pretty good, and Pepper is determined to put on a good show, and she's just about ready to fake it when he bends down low and whispers, right in her ear, "Don't play with me, Virginia."
Pepper opens her eyes -- she'd been keeping them closed and her cheek pressed against the side of the tub, and she looks at him. He has two fingers each two inches inside her, and there's a smile in the left-hand corner of his mouth.
"I wasn't -- "
Before the rest of the sentence gets out of her mouth, he yanks her out of the water, one hand under each of her arms. Out of the water, out of the tub. He's still wearing his shirt; her skin sticks to the cloth for a second before going; he doesn't kiss her, but he pushes her against the sink. It hits at just below her hips; there's a rustling, almost crackling noise, where he opens the packaging on a condom. The floor is hot and slippery from the steam, and about half a second after that, Pepper is getting fucked so hard that she has to hang onto the taps, the wall, anything she can reach to stay upright. He's only interested in keeping one hand on each of her hips so that part of her stays still, and Pepper catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror: too much steam to see his face behind her, but she can see her own face.
In the mirror, she sees a streak of glitter on her cheek that she didn't quite catch. Pepper tilts her head back; the girl in the mirror tilts her head back. He puts his hand on the back of her neck and pushes her down so that she's really bent over the sink now, so that she can't see herself in the mirror, and he reaches those two fingers around right before he shoves into her so hard that it's going to leave bruises on her hips, on the space between her hips, let alone --
Pepper comes without an ounce of pretending.
...
"You still haven't told me your name," Pepper says. Her feet slide a little on the floor. The room is starting to cool, so the floor is really getting slippery now.
He's still wearing Italian leather lace-up shoes, though his shirt is wet across the front now, and the sleeves are, too. And he doesn't answer right away, so Pepper looks at him and angles her head, studying him a little. He's a businessman. Definitely a businessman. Not film, though. Or publishing. Or fashion. She's met enough of them, fucked enough of them, too, to be able to tell the breed. Some kind of -- some kind of. Pepper's mind fails her. The only businessmen she knows from home are ones that own car dealerships or fast food franchises. This guy doesn't sell Tauruses or burgers.
After she came, he'd turned her around, put her on the sink, and she put her legs around his waist while he fucked her until he came. That's what the wet places along his sides are from. She wrapped her legs around him and crossed her ankles in the small of his back.
"Howard," he says, after a moment, holding a bath robe out at her.
"I don't think that's your real name," Pepper says, after a pause of similar length. She takes the bathrobe, though, and when he grins and asks if she wants that champagne now, from the smirk on his face, she is fairly sure that was the right thing to say.
...
Pepper has champagne, and they're out on the balcony, looking out at Dusseldorf. At night, it's an unexpectedly pretty city. Pepper only really knows that it's where a lot of flights from New York fly into, but this guy tells her a little about it. World War II, he explains, and talks a little bit about the Treaty of Versailles. And times even older than that.
"You see the river down there? It used to be all marsh, and this is where the barbarians made their last stand against the Roman Empire. Hid out from them in land the Romans didn't even want and told themselves that was what liberty was. Poor stupid fucks."
She looks at him, still trying to figure it out. Most businessmen, they fell over themselves to tell Pepper what business they were in, how important their company was, how much they were doing. It wasn't like a twenty-one year old strung-out model, lying about being nineteen because twenty-one is old, was going to look them up at home and make trouble. While Pepper considered it, she stretched her legs out and rested them on the edge of the balcony. It wasn't particularly high, and the bathrobe fell away from her legs.
He admires them, and Pepper arches her back. One side of the bathrobe falls away up to her hip. He admires some more. Definitely a leg man, Pepper decides. And older. It's hard to tell exactly how old. The shaved head and the beard make him look older, maybe, and there's a little dinner between them. Room service. Pepper didn't really eat; he had a couple of fries and some of the chicken. Champagne came with it, and a couple cigars, too. He had one in his hands and was studying it in the light from the room behind them.
"I don't think Virginia is your real name," he says, after a little more time passes.
Pepper raises her eyebrows. "That's what my birth certificate says. My driver's license, too."
"From Rhode Island."
"From Rhode Island."
He leans back in his chair. "When I say it, you don't react like it's your name. I don't think it's what people at home call you."
"At home in Rhode Island."
"Because you still think of that as home." He says it with an amused sound in his voice, like he doesn't believe her, and now, he actually looks over at her. There are lights in front of them -- Dusseldorf in all its night-time glory, the river, still and black, the yellow lights of the very expensive hotel room behind them. The moon is caught in the silver covers from room service.
"Yeah, it's home," Pepper says, stiffening her back a little.
"I don't think that's your real home," he says, still looking at her. "And I don't think Virginia is your real name."
She doesn't say anything and regrets stretching her legs out for him to look at, but after a moment, he gestures for her to come over. "C'mere," he says, and without quite knowing why Pepper goes over and stands in front of him, facing him. His eyes and mouth are in shadow, and he puts his hands on her waist and settles her in his lap. Pepper isn't exactly happy to be there; her legs are really too long to fit over the arm of the chair like that, and she squirms a little when he transfers the cigar to his left hand and slides his right up, from her sternum to the base of her throat, then around, to the the back of her neck again.
He really does have big fucking hands. And she doesn't know his name, but Pepper doesn't really want to move, for some reason. He holds her hard by the back of the neck, but kisses her surprisingly gently.
"What're you doing in Europe, Virginia?"
"Living in the marshes," she says. "But at least I'm not lying about my name. Do you even know somebody named Howard?"
He considers that answer for a while, then touches her throat, right where it meets her collarbones and chest. Pepper holds still; the bathrobe is slipping open, and he considers the loose knot that's sitting above her stomach. He considers loosening it; she knows he considers loosening it and pushing it off her shoulders, so that she'd be naked in his lap out here on the balcony, but Pepper keeps still under his hand.
"You smoke cigars?" he says, finally.
...
Pepper tries cigars, but doesn't like them that much. She makes a good faith effort, though, and learns, while sitting in his lap, some of the tricks of blowing smoke rings with cigars rather than cigarettes. To make it up to her, he calls up the bellboy, slips him a fold of bills, and twenty minutes later, there's a knock at the door. The bellboy again. Two little bags, a flash of plastic moving between hands. He tips the bellboy, then tosses them to Pepper. She catches them and, sitting on the floor by the glass-topped low table near the couch and armchair area, and gets a credit card out of her clutch to cut a set of four neat lines.
"Are you going to do some?"
He settles into the armchair and looks a little offended. "Do you know what they put in that?"
Pepper shrugs, does a line through what she thinks might be her last lira note, but then again, she thought she was near Milan, and here she is, near the border of Germany and France. Pepper unclenches her jaw, bites her lower lip and tilts her head back -- like in the bathtub, only there's no pretending, and she presses her knees together. To her left and above, he laughs, then reaches over and touches her hair.
"How is it?" he says.
"It's all right. Not that -- " Pepper closes her eyes, then opens them again. "I think you probably got ripped off."
This makes him laugh, which she doesn't quite understand, until she starts to turn to do a second one, but there's a hand on her shoulder. She looks up. He's still sitting in the armchair, leaned forward a little, and the room swims in yellow light. She's still in the bathrobe, though she tightened the knot when the bellboy came back and knocked on the door. Pepper doesn't understand, so she turns toward the table for another line; she'd made them too thin, and this time, the hand comes up and grips her under the jaw.
He has blue eyes.
She never noticed that before, and she blinks at him, and slowly, as if positioning a child, he leans forward far enough out of the chair to take her right elbow between thumb and forefinger and drop it so that her palm lands on the inside of her thigh, halfway up. He leans back in the chair.
"Earn it," he says.
The guy is a little hard, but he doesn't make a move to undo his fly or even shift forward so that she could blow him, so slowly, slowly, without taking her eyes from his face, she undoes the knot on her bathrobe. He nods, and Pepper licks her lips and puts her right hand on her knee and runs it up her leg.
...
Pepper doesn't remember a lot about this period in her life -- not faces, not names.
...
"Howard," he says, after a moment, holding a bath robe out at her.
"I don't think that's your real name," Pepper says, after a pause of similar length, and somewhat later that night, she has a blurred memory of being in bed, arching her back because she was still a little sore from an earlier that she couldn't quite remember and somebody asking her if, she didn't think his name was Howard, what she thought his name was.
...
"What're you doing here?" she asks.
"What do you mean by here?" He studies her face for a moment. Her cheeks are flushed, Pepper knows, and her knees are wobbly even though she's sitting on the floor. The bathrobe is spread out around her, and the fingers of her left hand, the hand she hadn't been using, are tightened up into a fist. It's a little gratifying to know, though, that it's had an effect on him. She can hear how bad he wants to fuck her in his voice, and it's on his face, too.
"Business," he says.
"Did it go well?"
"You're here, aren't you?"
Pepper turns back to the glass-topped table because she has fucking earned it, and he is, in fact, nice enough to wait until she's done another line and a half before he grabs her wrists hard enough to make her cry out a little, then pushes her, face-down, onto the bed and uses the weight of his body to keep her there.
...
Pepper wakes alone in bed, but when her eyes re-focus, she realizes he is sitting at the end of the bed. He pulled the armchair up to the foot of the bed and has been watching her. She starts to turn over, but stops because her shoulder aches near where he had pushed down on it. Pepper looks at him. He's dressed, complete with jacket and cufflinks. An overnight kind of bag sits by the door.
"Do you still want to know my name?"
Pepper shakes her head, and he gets up and comes around to the side of the beg and kisses the top of her head, gently helps her roll onto her back. Her brain aches.
"Good girl," he says. "I'm in Europe for the company, but Dusseldorf for some side deals they don't know about."
"Did they go well?" she says.
He nods. There is a drop of blood on the pillowcase from her nose, and he hands her a Kleenex. Pepper brings it to her nose and finds that there's blood.
"The room is booked for two more days. It's all taken care of, so just charge whatever you need. And the concierge has a first class train ticket for you to Paris after that. You'll be in time for the spring bookings."
Pepper doesn't think she ever told him that she was a model, but she's still trying to get her nose to stop bleeding, and he takes the box from the bedside table and puts it next to her, puts a plastic bottle of water within easy reach, too, then smoothes her hair and goes.
She stays in bed for another four hours, then goes into the bathroom and has a bath.
...
"How was Europe?" Tony says. They're sitting in Obadiah's office in New York, and Tony has his feet up on on the glass-topped table.
"European," Obadiah says, without looking up from the paperwork in front of him. He turns the page and -- "Jesus," he says before he can stop himself.
"What?"
It's a hell of a bill to run to up in two days. Did she fucking start eating? Did she charge her coke habit to him? Did her entire agency charge its coke bill to him? Obadiah considers it for a moment, turning it over in his head, and he looks up and sees Tony with his feet up, tie a little askew, picking at the seam on the leather couch he's sitting on. Tony sees him looking, raises his eyebrows.
"So it went well?"
Obadiah looks at Tony. Tony has his feet up on the table, yes, and his tie is askew, and Tony's hair is curly down around his ears from where he got bored combing it in the morning. Obadiah looks back down at the paperwork, thinks about red-headed girls from Rhode Island, and circles the entry, then writes Pay this underneath, so that his secretary won't give the hotel any trouble about it. She was smart. Fun. He wouldn't have minded seeing her again, and even more than that -- well.
Some deals, Obadiah feels, are worth celebrating, and some years later, when the deals have become a business, Tony starts complaining about some bullshit from Accounting by some bullshit data jockey, and Obadiah stops. He asks Tony to repeat the name, and Tony has to look through the personnel file because he doesn't remember, but when he finds it and reads it again. He flashes Obadiah the photo that goes with the ID card, and Obadiah considers it, then smiles and tells Tony that he should, under no circumstance, even think about firing Virginia Potts, who cleaned up. Finished her education. Got certified.
Some deals, Obadiah knows, are worth a reminder.
Written a long time back for the Hivemind and cleaned up.
ferricent, PAY THE FUCK UP.
