Work Text:
baby, I’m a little bit hard to love // and I get the feeling that it’s not enough // and I’m afraid you’ll find a better love
Hard to Love – The Mowgli’s
As soon as he exited the elevator, his hunch was confirmed. The lights were off in the hallway but there was a dim glow from behind the glass doors of the executive suite despite the late hour. Not only was she here on a weekend, Kit was still here long after the second shift had started. Randolph craned his neck and opened the door, walking in to find her hunched over a spread of papers.
Boxes were still scattered about the new office, many of which were unpacked but now overflowing with paperwork that spilled over from the pile on the desk.
“You look like you could use a drink.”
“I’m busy, Randolph. Please go home.”
Resistance was expected, but Randolph had not anticipated this much. Her tone was short and she barely looked up to register his presence, and the air shifted away from the friendly offer of alcohol as he tried to assess what was bothering her. He took a few steps forward, tentatively sat on the arm of one of the chairs before the desk, and watched her breeze through the reports. Something was bothering her, and he doubted that it was the paperwork.
As if on cue, her phone began to ring. He did not mean to pry, but the single name on the screen was hard to miss. Mark. He did not know much about the guy, only that she had been seeing him for a few months and things seemed to be going well.
Kit pinched the bridge of her nose before silencing the call and turned the phone off.
Concern twisted his stomach again. The paperwork was not the root of the problem; it seemed to be more personal. “Everything alright?” He asked.
Kit rolled her eyes. The way his eyes had followed her phone was not lost on her. “I don’t appreciate you snooping around in my private life.”
“I’m not.” His voice was level and Randolph put his hands in his pockets. “I’m asking generally. Are you alright?”
Finally, she looked up, taking her glasses off and joining the conversation. Kit narrowed her eyes and tried to read his intentions, annoyed that his concern was genuine.
“I’m fine.”
He glanced towards the papers under her hands. “It’s nine thirty. Are you sure those can’t wait until Monday?”
Kit sighed. “You really aren’t going to leave, are you,” she muttered.
“No.”
Wheeling back from the desk, she crossed her arms and wordlessly reminded him of where she sat. It seemed to be effective, because his back stiffened and he took on the tone of the executive that she once knew.
“We don’t have to talk,” he started, “but I need a drink and I’d rather not drink alone. Based on how long this week has been and the height of that paperwork stack, I think you could use one, too.”
She powered down the computer once he promised to buy the first round, and did not bother to turn her phone back on.
The bar he chose was near her place, one she knew well. Secluded couches lined the outskirts of the patio and even on a warm weekend evening there were only a few other parties outside. Kit had pulled her legs under her and leaned an elbow onto the arm of the furniture while his legs stretched onto the table, making good on his promise not to talk through the first two glasses of wine.
Unfortunately, we don’t have to talk was often the best way to get her talking.
“I think I’m going to get dumped this weekend,” Kit said plainly.
“What makes you say that?”
“I deserve to be.”
At that, he turned his head. “Because you’re spending too much time at work?”
“No. Well, partly, as evidenced by this evening.” She took another sip of the wine and twirled the stem, avoiding the topic that she brought up. “I’ve been at this point of a relationship before and I know what happens next. A swift and peaceful ending, the result of having not met the needs of the other person.”
He knew the place and shrugged, offering as much apology as he could. “Do you like him?”
“Everything tells me that I should.”
“But do you?”
Her stare was distant, unable to meet his eyes when she nodded slowly. Mark was a decent man with a stable job and a divorce in his past and while there was potential there, her heart has always belonged to medicine. Now it had to balance medicine and leadership, and there just wasn’t enough space for romance, no matter how much she liked him.
Randolph debated challenging her to fight harder, to go after the things she wanted in a career and a relationship. But after taking in her expression of resigned defeat, he didn’t press. “It doesn’t have to end, then,” he offered.
“The longer I let this go on, the more it’s going to hurt when it does end.”
“Not everyone is going to hurt you,” he said. Kit rolled her eyes and he interrupted the rebuttal before she had a chance to voice it. “… And you’re not going to hurt everyone.” It was late and the wine had blended perfectly with the humid summer air and the fact that she was here tonight, phones off and forgotten in the car. It made him bold and perhaps a bit stupid, but he continued anyway. “You need to stop manufacturing a reason to end things before they’ve begun.”
“When did you become a relationship expert?” She said, barely toning down the malice that hid beneath the sarcasm.
Randolph shrugged. “What’s that saying… you only learn from failure? I’ve had a lifetime of that.” He blamed the alcohol for lowering his inhibitions this evening, though the truth was that it was the company. It was always the company. Even when admitting to a life of failed romance. “Honestly, it’s because I do the same thing and I always have. You create a way to end things, I create reasons for people to leave me first.”
The last thing she needed was any sort of romantic sympathy. She slumped against the back of the couch and rested her hand on her chin, a heavy sigh escaping with the truth in his words. “I’ve done that, too,” she admitted.
“I know.”
A silence fell over the patio again, this one heavier than the first. It afforded Kit time to consider the real reason she saw the relationship drawing to a close; not because of work or because of her prior history, but because she wanted it to end. She always felt the need to be ‘on’ around him when so often all that she wanted was a quiet night on a patio, truth and wine flowing easily. She did not want to be the version of herself that should exist, but the one that she was.
The workaholic with a fractured past, a hopeless romantic who had always been hopeless in romance, a surgeon who wanted to escape a mountain of paperwork and end the week with a glass of wine outside on a patio.
“Thank you for getting me out of the office tonight,” Kit said quietly, shifting the subject away from her soon-to-be-over relationship. “How did you know I would still be upstairs?”
He extended arm towards her and raised his eyebrows. “Randolph Bell, twice-divorced former CEO and Chief of Surgery, infamously married to my work,” he said, his hand waiting to be met with a handshake. “Have we met?”
She swatted his hand away with a smile that grew with his. “Stop it.”
“You’ve only been on the job a few months, Kit. If you keep burning the midnight oil like this you’ll run yourself into the ground before you have a chance to do any of the good that we both know you’re going to do from that office.”
“You are a regular self-help book tonight.”
He rested his arm against the back of the couch, fingers just inches away from the soft waves of hair that had held his attention all night. “A cautionary tale.”
The similarities between them were frightening sometimes, the echoes of the past coming back in the present, this time with the benefit and grief of hindsight. Frightening, and yet, refreshing.
And depressing, she thought. The only person she wanted to spend time with these days was someone just as hopeless as she was, spending a majority of his time alone for reasons identical to hers. He could be spending the evening with anyone and yet he was at the hospital at nine thirty, rescuing her from a mountain of paperwork and sharing a bottle of red, doling out advice she did not need but did need to hear.
Her hand traced a path over his forearm, just for a minute, and lingered as his eyes fell to follow the path over his sleeve. “In any case, thank you.”
Randolph twitched a soft smile and whispered, “Always.”