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Deborah’s been— uneventful.
She follows the rules and actually listens. Sure, she complains to RH on the daily, but she doesn’t contradict Ava directly. It’s all rather tame, and Ava can feel it brewing in the underneaths. In the calm before the inevitable storm, she’s grown accustomed to dealing with Deborah the Deborah way.
Ever since that first bottle of Krug she’s gotten sloshed on, Ava’s been craving the feeling. The champagne drunk plays out a different scenario on her nervous system. The soft edge of the world gone, she gets it now: that incorrigible hardness of Deborah’s, the unwavering conviction that she deserves every single thing.
That’s how Ava’s been feeling these past few weeks, night after night. The first time earned her a head writer gig so she was hoping it would all go from there. Yet as days melt into each other on a loop, she keeps waking up the same. Gets nothing for her trouble, no tangible result, not a single one of her imploded relationships back.
And at some point, a woman is owed retribution.
She can’t call Deborah, so she calls Jimmy.
It’s one thirty in the morning, she notices on ring five, considers ending the call then and there, shooting up an email explaining the difference in time zones between their respective locations when. Jimmy answers, a sleepy “what the fuck” instead of a proper greeting. It’s honey to her ears. At last, some semblance of white-hot brutality.
“What the fuck to you too, Jimmy boy.”
He grunts on the other end of the call, and it sends a jolt down her spine. Not in reaction to him, god no, but at the unveiled animosity in his voice. The very thing Deborah would deny her.
“You know she complained to HR about my hair color?” Ava starts, and can’t stop herself. Every slight of the last fortnight pouring out of her, champagne into an empty glass. How Deborah has been setting the thermostat at a chilly 60°F or how she threw out Ava’s leftover truffle fries because they quote “stunk up the fridge like a dead coyote”. Or how she refused to use the words “Mae Martin the non-binary legend” so Ava had to rewrite the entire setup, or, or, or, the way she won’t—
“Ava, I’m exhausted,” Jimmy interrupts, rudely, unnecessarily. “Can I just ask you— to just get to the point?”
And that stings. He’d never allow himself this shit with Deborah.
“Oh well excusez-moi if I’m not making it worth your while, am I, Jimothy, is that it.”
She reacts instantly, hurt beyond measure. Pathetic. Ava tries to cover it up. “What, would you like me to just swallow it and move on?”
“What— swallow what—” Jimmy fumbles on the other end of it, audibly lost. When he finds his bearings, it’s not much better. “How do you mean?”
Ava doesn’t know if she imagines the spike of energy in his voice. The tilt of the vowels or something making her remember him saying just now how tired he was. How it doesn’t feel like that’s true now.
“Well, how do you mean?” she asks, suddenly tentative, unsure of all action previously taken. It’s the first time she’s invited someone to share and indulge in her champagne-drunk self. She’s got no baseline for what’s permitted or what just feels like it.
Jimmy’s silent, gives her nothing, leaves her alone— And that loneliness, the being left of it in particular, is simply unacceptable.
“Why Jimmy, don’t tell me you are the only person in these united states who hears the word swallow and doesn't immediately think ora—”
“Woah woah!” he positively screeches into the mic, making Ava pull the phone away from her ear. Put it on speaker. Put it down on the pillow next to her.
Jimmy’s voice’s getting to the pitches previously unheard of. Dangerously close to passing out, she thinks. What she does next is entirely altruistic on her part. Saving him from a certain death and such.
“Oh, come on, like you’ve never thought of it,” she says, entirely sure he hasn’t. Not that she has. It’s the blind leading the blind over here, making reckless strides, syllable after uncomfortable syllable.
“Uh, no, actually I prefer my women a little bit less—” he powers down, searching for an acceptable epithet. The silence bears all the markings of “you’re fired and I don’t know how to announce the demise of your burgeoning career”.
It usually takes him hours to figure it out, faking an emergency or another meeting, blaming it on Kayla, calling back in a few. She can’t wait that long.
“Less what?” she says, leaning her body into the pillow with the phone on it, like she might actually squeeze an answer out of him. “Less pathetic? Funny? Wordy? Deranged?” she offers, can’t seem to stop.
“No, just less—“ Perfect, she’s actually waiting for him to tell her how she is, “—vulnerable.”
It’s the way he says it, his voice all careful and pathetic in turn, that makes Ava think the conversation’s getting away from her, shifting to something she doesn’t care much to discuss.
“Oh, come on, be a man and just do something about it,” she tells him. Almost begs.
And Jimmy— the thing about Jimmy is, he’s always been kind to her.
He talks about how he’ll call HR and how he’ll make it all go away. How Ava’s getting her own fridge from now on and won’t have to change her hair. He does all that while ignoring the way her hips audibly hit the pillow, or how she unzips her jeans, or how she moans Deborah’s name by the end of his tirade, spent. Spent and utterly alone.
“Thanks,” she says in a small breathless voice. Can’t do anything about anything but can still thank a man when it’s expected.
“Any time,” he says and hangs up.