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“Tom, I gotta tell you something,” Shiv started.
“I love you,” Tom interrupted her.
Shiv stared at the man at her feet. Tom Wambsgans.
Her husband.
The thought made her a bit queasy, if she was being honest, but that was how it was meant to be, right? Butterflies and all. Honeymoon spirits, she was basically entering a new phase in her life, right?
She took a deep breath.
“I’ve had a little- Number,” she said. “I just, we are all adults here, and-”
“I don’t really- Really need to know.”
“But I want to tell you,” she said.
And with terrifying sinking feeling she realized she did. She had, in some ways, been more vulnerable with Tom than anyone else. She had been a mess, two years ago, and he had seen her at her lowest point.
He does love me, she thought, somewhat bitterly.
And she wanted to tell him everything. Reveal it all, the thing that was broken in her.
He would be disgusted. A good Midwestern boy.
But he would never tell anyone. Would he?
Eventually, she said: “before the bachelor party. I hooked up with an ex.”
It was a lie and not a lie. How could you be exes when there had never been anything there, apart from a promise in blood, a belief that they belonged together?
“Ah,” Tom managed.
“I didn’t plan it.”
That was true.
“I was worried about him, that was all.”
It was only partly a lie. She had been worried about Kendall, but a part of her had wanted to see it. Witness him at his lowest point.
The man who had been all set to become the CEO of Waystar, before it all came crashing down, not once but twice.
It had been easy enough for Shiv to find him, at one of his parties.
“Well that sort of sounds like you were- doing the right thing, sort of?” Tom suggested.
“He was… Not all right at all. Very much- On drugs, drunk… Not the first time I had seen him like that…”
She swallowed, remembering the night. It had been concern, that had made her grasp Ken’s hand and pull him away from the group of people he had been hanging out with.
But there had been something in the way he had looked at her that had made her stomach twist in a pleasant way, and when she had pulled him into one of the bedrooms in the sterile penthouse of some tech millionaire she couldn’t remember the name of, it had been something else.
A certain kind of possessiveness, perhaps. Entitlement.
She was shaken out of the memory by Tom’s hand on her knee.
“Did he- Was he in some sort of a- a drug addled… Frenzy?”
With disgust, Shiv realized Tom was giving her a way out. He thought it’d be easy for her to claim it had been an assault on her.
“No. Well, yes, but he was- clear-”
This was a lie.
Kendall had been barely able to stand, and when Shiv had pulled him into a kiss he had not realized who it was he was trying to clumsily undress.
Maybe he had, on some level.
Shiv liked to think there had been some base instinct telling him who it was. Someone he shared his blood with.
Someone who fit against his body in a way no one else possibly could, someone who understood him in a way no one else could…
Shiv shook her head. “But nothing happened, apart from- Kissing. And- Yes.”
If Kendall had not blacked out, maybe it would have gone past kissing and awkward fondling.
But he had been barely coherent, and after Shiv had helped him on the bed he had fallen asleep almost immediately.
Shiv had stayed with him for a while, unsure why.
This had not been the first time or the last Kendall had blacked out at a party.
But it had felt like she owed something to him, maybe.
She had turned him on his side, in case he’d swallow his tongue or throw up.
And she had thought of going home, where Tom waited her.
Tom, who she was going to marry.
The things she had felt in that dark room, watching her brother sleep, had not made any sense then, and they made even less sense now, as she was looking her husband in the eye.
“It’s in the past,” she told Tom, stroking his cheek. “And it was never going to happen, anyway.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, there was a reason we broke up.”
There was a reason they never had crossed that line before. Shiv knew she could have gotten through Ken’s defenses, she had seen the way he looked at her.
And maybe there was something broken in Shiv, but the fact they were siblings had never once felt wrong to her.
But-
Her father’s words rang in her ears.
You’re scared to compete. You’re marrying a man fathoms beneath you because you don’t want to risk being betrayed.
She had been shaken by that, and when she had been sitting in their penthouse, eating dinner with Tom, she had felt trapped.
And she had ran into the night, to find Kendall-
For what?
She didn’t know.
She wished it was just about sex. That would have been simple.
“Was it Nate?” Tom asked.
Shiv looked at him. She wanted to laugh.
Instead, she nodded.
Afraid he might read her poker face, Shiv pulled Tom into a kiss.
She did, she thought, love Tom in a way.
He was nice to have around.
She wondered if she had imagined the jealous look on Kendall’s face as Tom and Shiv had said their wows.
She wondered if he had any idea, any memory, of that night…
She entertained the idea that this jealousy was what had made him try to fuck everything up, take over the company, at the day of her wedding...
Shiv could make this marriage work.
She’d rub her perfect marriage, her happiness, in Ken’s face.
Let him think she had figured it all out, while he on some level knew that what he needed, a true partner on his level, was out of reach.
She smiled into the kiss.