Chapter Text
Lardo’s least-favorite thing about her summer job is the fact that she’s expected to wear skirts and heels to work every day.
Her second least-favorite thing is the rush-hour commute from Quincy Center to Park Street in the morning, and then Park Street back to Quincy Center in the evening where she has to call her kid brother to pick her up in the family car. She stands in the crowded subway cars with her headphones on, her iced coffee in one hand, and fantasizes about using those heels on the instep of every dudebro businessman who walks into her like she’s not only short but actually insubstantial. The glare mostly works.
The gallery where Lardo is working is high-end, at the bottom of Newbury Street, nestled between a boutique tailor and a place that sells designer leathergoods. The gallery owner’s taste trends toward the conventional but she’s been in the business for nearly thirty years and Lardo’s there to learn how to sell art not find inspiration as an artist. She’s keenly aware that it was Alicia Zimmermann’s introduction, more than her own resume, that had gotten her an interview -- although she’s proud of the way she’d pitched her experience as team manager for Samwell Men’s Hockey as applicable to the job. Now that she’s in the door, this job will be on her resume and hopefully mean no more summers working morning shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts for a few quarters above minimum wage.
So Lardo’s holding her tongue, wearing the heels, soaking in every last detail of Ms. Claiborne’s negotiations with her artists and admiring her smooth-as-silk cultivation of budding and experienced art collectors alike.
They might have taste in their feet, some of them, but they also have an alarming amount of money to spare -- and occasionally someone walks through the door who doesn’t look like they’re about to ask if Lardo understands English. In her first full week she’d even had a surprisingly enthusiastic exchange with a young man who worked for Microsoft about religious iconography in modern Ethiopian art.
What she isn’t expecting, on her second Monday on the job, is for Shitty to walk through the door.
She sees the movement out of the corner of her eye, the shadow that means someone’s about to push open the gallery door, and glances up guiltily from where she’s been surreptitiously scrolling checking her phone beneath the counter. (It’s Jack’s first day with the Falconers and even though he’s been quiet in the group chat that hasn’t stopped the team from chirping him in his absence.) Ms. Claiborne is closeted away with an artist to discuss the terms of their gallery contract and the gallery has few drop-ins before noon. Lardo’s main tasks for the morning involve signing for deliveries, answering the phone, and doing any clerical tasks Ms. Claiborne requires her assistance on.
Shitty knows all of this, of course, because she texts him during downtime.
“Lards!” He says, grinning from behind the douchebag designer sunglasses he’s wearing despite the overcast day. (When did Shitty acquire douchebag designer sunglasses? Lardo wonders. They make him look like a B-list Italian porn star from the Seventies.)
“Shh.” She hisses at him, glancing toward the closed office door. The gallery space echoes and she doesn’t think Ms. Claiborne will take kindly to friends dropping in for a visit, lowering the real estate values just by being there. Although -- she gives Shitty a once-over and realizes that the douchebag sunglasses are part of a whole … look he’s got going. Polo t-shirt, tailored pants, designer sandals.
“Dude. What the fuck?” She arches what she hopes is an obviously skeptical (yet graceful, maybe a little sexy?) eyebrow.
“I was, you know,” Shitty gestures expansively with the coffee cup he’s carrying. “In the area. Shopping. Like the man of leisure that I am, the gad-about-town, the social parasite, the --” her eyebrow must have risen higher because he winks. “Ahem, well. My brother and his fiancee are in town and she’s got some…” he makes a complicatedly dismissive gesture with his free hand, “...beauty thing? Consultation? Fitting? I can’t keep all the heteronormative wedding bullshit straight. I’ve been seconded into being Dave’s best man -- he fucking begged me, Lards, there might have been crying involved. I mean. I’d given him some of my best shit but -- still. There was weeping. It was touching. I was weak. I said yes. So now there’s a tux with my name on it three doors down but that appointment’s not until eleven so--”
Lardo’s still got her finger poised above the touchscreen of her phone, momentarily thrown by the fact that Shitty had just been pretending to be Jack at his first presser in the group text and now he was standing in front of her. They haven’t seen each other, what with one thing and another, since graduation. She’d gone to dinner with him and his folks as a safety measure (his family’s safety, he’d insisted, since he was likely to do someone bodily harm if she wasn’t there to keep him in check) and then there had been an awkward and sweet and utterly painful goodbye-not-goodbye when he walked her to the T stop at Hynes so she could catch the train home.
They’ve talked a lot since, but not about the things Lardo wants to muster up the courage to ask. They’ve just done a lot of bullshitting about her job and his family and hung out virtually with various constellations of the team. She hadn’t forgotten he was spending the summer in Hyannis, obviously, but she’d willed herself to deny it. Not to suggest they hang out too soon out of the fear that she’ll come across as clingy.
But now here he is, leaning on the desk in his best impression of smarmy rich asshole, and sliding his coffee cup over to her: “Au Lait with a dusting of cinnamon, just like you like it,” he says, pushing his sunglasses up into his (mournfully short) hair. “So, Lards, come rescue me? You get a lunch break?”
Before she can answer, the office door opens and Ms. Claiborne is ushering the artist out, shaking hands, wishing them a good flight back to Austin in the morning.
Ms. Claiborne glances sharply at their tableau -- Shitty has straightened so that his posture is less playboy but the coffee is still sitting on the glass countertop between them and Lardo can feel her own expression is trending towards pissed at being interrupted.
Maris Claiborne is nothing but a saleswoman, though, so after seeing her artist out to the front steps, she returns with a smile and an extended hand.
“Maris Claiborne,” she introduces herself, “Welcome. I trust Larissa, here, has offered you tea? Coffee?”
“Brooks Knight,” Shitty puts out his hand, and Lardo gapes because it’s the first time she’s ever heard him willingly refer to himself by his given name. “We’ve met before -- my father is Devon Knight? He and his wife Lisa were at the opening of Keris Williams show last November. I was home for Thanksgiving and tagged along.” He shrugs. “I was in town with my brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law and thought I’d drop in and see what other artists you’re working with.”
Lardo watches, fascinated, as Shitty -- playing some alternate version of himself as Brooks the Harvard Law man -- draws her boss away from the counter and into the depths of the gallery. He’s talking composition, texture, and volume like a champ and she’s proud and a little embarrassed to hear her own phrases tumbling out of his mouth. He actually listened while I was drawing him, she thinks. He’s spinning out a story about needing a wedding gift for a couple whose wedding he’ll be attending that weekend on Martha’s Vineyard and what do you get for the couple with absolutely everything? You buy them original art, of course.
He sweet-talks his way out of the gallery (and diverts Ms. Claiborne's attention from their possible fraternization) without actually making a purchase, nodding cordially to Lardo on his way out as if he’s just one of those guys who’s compulsively polite to everyone.
She smothers a grin.
Then she can’t help the genuine smile that spreads across her face when a text alert pops up as soon as Shitty’s out of sight of the plate glass windows.
They meet up for lunch when Ms. Claiborne emerges from her office at noon to give Lardo her break. They only have thirty minutes but Shitty’s waiting with grilled cheese sandwiches from the Roxy’s truck parked on Clarendon Street. They cross Arlington to the Public Garden where they sit by the pond, despite the fact that it’s cold and drizzling slightly, to watch the duck boats circle under grey skies and feed their crusts to the ducks.
“You heard anything from Jack?” Lardo asks, letting herself huddle against Shitty beneath the umbrella he’s holding above both of them. He’s letting her get away with pretending she isn’t huddling.
“Talked to him last night,” Shitty says. “Brah seems good. Lonely. You wanna road trip it down to Providence with me and surprise him some weekend? I told him we’d go visit.”
“You want me to come?” Lardo tries to cover her surprise with, “Hell’s yeah, let’s do it. Dude needs his bros.”
Shitty nods, solemnly, chewing on the second half of his grilled cheese sandwich. He’s gotten cheese on his ‘stache and Lardo resists the urge to reach up with her thumb and wipe at his upper lip.
She sighs, internally.
“What about Bitty?” She asks, to distract herself. “You heard much from him since he went back to Madison?” Something’s seemed a little off about Bitty’s presence in the group chat lately. He’s been quieter than usual, Lardo thinks. Or maybe it’s just that so much of Bitty’s presence is about the smells and sounds of him baking in the kitchen.
Except his Twitter’s gone pretty silent too.
Shitty thinks for a moment before answering. Lardo likes this about him. He’s loud and theatrical when he wants to be, but he also knows not to answer her serious questions in haste. And the two of them are used to tag-teaming the welfare of their teammates.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Shitty elbows Lardo gently in the side. “I haven’t talked to him outside of the group chat. Maybe it’s just Madison. Little brah isn’t out down there, remember? All that conformativity’s gotta wear on a guy.”
“Mmm. Yeah. Maybe.” Lardo agrees that Bitty hasn’t been unlike himself via chat. He’s just less at the center of things than she’d grown accustomed to during his sophomore year. “Hey, did you see Jack named his elephant Monsieur Éléphant? Do you think dude’s chirping Bitty?”
“Or flirting with him.”
“Oh, god,” Lardo groans. “Do not remind me. Boy’s going to be hopeless next fall.” She kicks Shitty’s ankle lightly with the sharp edge of her open-toed heels.
“I still hold what those two need is some pot brownies. A little feel-good weed to loosen ‘em up and they’ll sort it out.”
Lardo glares up at him. “They spent how many months in the Haus kitchen together without sorting their shit? You wouldn’t be so blasé if you were the one living across the hall from Bitty 'I listen to Beyoncé at top volume when I’m being emo' Bittle.”
Shitty snorts, brushing the crumbs of his now-eaten sandwich off his lap and pulling Lardo to her feet. “Have a little faith, Lards,” he says. “And, if faith doesn’t work, we got their backs.”