Chapter Text
He’s spent his entire life waiting to take a seat at the table.
Granted, this is not the table he’d been aiming for. Instead of a dark oak panelled room with oil portraits on the walls and 50-year-old scotch on the side cabinets, he finds himself in a small, rundown café in Kentish Town, with his knees just about bumping the underside of the table.
It’s his lunch break, and the waitress has assumed he’s waiting for a date. She keeps shooting him sympathetic looks as she refills his water, ignoring him as he vaguely waves her off.
He is waiting for someone, but it isn’t a date. He was early, and she’s late—deliberately so, a reminder of where the power sits between them. She’d keep him waiting all day, he’s certain, if she didn’t need something too.
He’s about to cave and actually order something, try and show that the delay hasn’t bothered him, when she arrives. Sharp is the word most people use to describe her. He’s inclined to agree.
The seat across from him is free, but she doesn’t take it. Instead, she stands, forcing him to look up to meet her eyes, and withdraws an envelope from her purse. It isn’t sealed, so when she drops it on the table it disgorges its 8”x5” glossy contents without convincing.
His stomach drops.
He doesn’t invite men home often. It’s too messy, usually. Not the physicality—he’s careful, obviously, and makes sure they are too—but emotionally. Too often a night of solid satisfaction is marred by rejecting a plea to stay the night. But he’d made an exception, some six weeks ago now, after the other man had approached him at the bar, bold and brazen and just his type. They’d traded performative, sweet-talk flirtation, then settled the cheque and called a cab.
The photos aren’t the highest quality, but they’re clear enough to see the other man’s face—a face currently popping up on biweekly news broadcasts alongside a very impressive collection of treason charges—and to leave no doubt as to how their evening played out.
“Implicating me in the Pashkin robbery would have been your chance to leave the kiddies table, correct?” she says, gathering the photos back up.
He nods, still reeling. The pornographic pieces of the puzzle she’s built around him swim before his eyes.
“Well, I can’t stop you,” and she sounds resigned, almost tired. “But I actually thought you had potential. It would be a shame to lose you to misprision of treason. And it goes without saying that charges like that would put some serious holes in your credibility.”
Silence stretches. The centre pieces are starting to fit together, but he has no idea where the edges are, how much of this she orchestrated.
“So we have an agreement, then? You keep your mouth shut, I keep mine, and these photos never hit the front page.”
“Yes,” he says.
“Excellent.” She turns away, then back, like she’s forgotten something. “And, next time, do be a little more discreet. You’re lucky I’m the only one who got these.”
Lucky isn’t exactly the word he’d use, but he just nods, flushed and mute.
She leaves.
The waitress returns. “Are you actually going to order anything, or just sit here?”
He orders a tea—black, two sugars—and a croissant. His hands are still trembling when they arrive.
And his flush has deepened. And he’s smiling.
Because there would be no need to hold something over him if he wasn’t some kind of legitimate threat.
If they weren’t at the same table.
And that’s the funny thing about tables; they have a nasty habit of turning on you.