Chapter Text
She was having a strange dream. Somebody was knocking on her door and she couldn’t figure out how to open it. But then, Therese snapped her eyes open, realizing that this was no dream. There was a pounding on the door, much like the frightened beating of her heart. While she threw the covers off and quietly slipped out of the bed, she briefly wondered if it could be Carol. That thought quickly faded when she heard a soft voice coming from the other side of the door.
“Therese? It’s Gen. Please let me in.”
Therese felt frozen. She had stopped mid-stride, only a few steps away from the door. Knowing that she probably only had seconds to figure out what to do, she rapidly tried to dissect her options. Could she jump out the window? No, much too high. If she opened the door, would that be a death sentence? Genevieve seemed to read her mind.
“Therese, I know you’re in there. Please, you have to let me in. I need to talk to you.” She paused and Therese heard a small sigh of defeat as she slowly closed the gap between where she had been standing and the door. “I know that you know that something is going on. I need you to let me in so that I can talk to you about it.”
Therese could feel her breath getting shallow, her hands shaking, anxiety right on the cusp of overtaking her. She did her best to take deep breaths, to think of Carol holding her safely.
“How … How do I know you won’t kill me?” Therese spoke so softly that Genevieve had to press her ear to the small crack between the door and the doorframe to hear her.
“I don’t have any weapons on me, Therese. I know you don’t believe me, but look through the peephole and I can show you.”
Reluctantly, Therese lifted her chin so that she could press one eye to the peephole. Through it, she could see Genevieve taking her hoodie off and laying it on the ground. She lifted her t-shirt to reveal pale skin, no gun in sight. She lowered her shirt, and then lowered her sweatpants enough to show Therese that there was no gun tucked beneath the waistband. Then, she lifted each of her pant legs, followed by turning her pockets inside out.
“There’s nothing on me, Therese. I’ll leave my sweatshirt out here in front of the door. It just has my phone in it.”
Therese looked over to the nightstand, where her cellphone is laying face down. “How do you know I won’t call the police?” She looked back up the peephole to see Genevieve chewing her lip.
“I don’t know that. You can if you want to, but I promise you, it will be in your best interest to let me tell you what’s going on before you do. After that, you can call whoever you want to. But please,” Therese sees her close her eyes and take a few deep breaths, “Please, let me in, Therese.”
So with shaky hands, she opens the door.
***************
In her bedroom, Carol is unable to sleep. She keeps picking her phone up and checking the time, only to see that mere minutes have passed. She decides to call Abby, knowing that she’ll be awake at this time of night because, well, she’s Abby. Her fingers drum on the bed as she waits for the call to be answered.
“Carol? What are you doing calling me this late? Don’t you know it’s my bedtime?”
“God, you’re an idiot,” Carol says smiling. “Since when do you go to bed before the sun comes up?”
“Oh please, I’m in bed plenty before the sun comes up.”
“And you’re sleeping at these times?”
“Hell no, you know me better than that. Who said anything about sleeping?”
They both laughed and continued to chat about light topics for a while before Abby asked, “How’s Therese?”
“Fine, I guess. This whole situation is so unsettling. I feel useless, like there’s nothing I can do to help or figure things out.” Carol had previously filled Abby in on the situation that Therese was in. Abby had done all kinds of speculating, her most bizarre theories including the mob or the Russian government. Carol had laughed her off, debunking her crazy ideas. But when Abby had asked her if she thought Harge was involved in any of this, Carol couldn’t seem to get the idea out of her head.
“I know you were only joking, but do you really think Harge has any involvement with this thing?
“I mean, maybe. But that would be a lot, Carol. I don’t understand how this Richard guy could be connected to Harge. Plus, he’s out of his gourd these days.”
Carol agreed, it was far-fetched, but sometimes she had a good sense of intuition about things. Maybe she was just being paranoid, but the idea had stuck with her. However, she let it go, feeling that it wouldn’t help her get any sleep to keep talking about it with Abby. She made a mental note to contemplate it more later.
“Why don’t you tell me one of your stories about your latest red-headed conquest to put me to sleep?”
Abby laughed, “Jesus, you’re such a dick. I thought you were actually listening to these stories. People would pay good money to hear such filth. But speaking of dick, why don’t we start calling Richard that? Isn’t that a nickname for Richard anyway?” Carol chuckled and Abby launched into a story that did, in fact, put Carol to sleep eventually.
***************
After she opened the door, Therese moved to the lush sitting area, sitting on an armchair instead of the couch so that Genevieve couldn’t sit next to her.
Genevieve sat on the couch and spoke softly. “Look … Therese, I-”, she stumbled her way through, “I know that you’re scared and confused and I just … I want to tell you what’s going on.”
Therese nodded her head, staying silent.
“Okay. Before I get into all of that, you need to know who I am. I umm … I manage a network of people who kill other people. Hitmen, or assassins, or what have you. That’s my job. I know it’s fucked up and-”
Therese cut her off. “Fucked up? You think that’s fucked up? It’s fucked up when somebody cheats on their partner. It’s fucked up that good people die young. What you do isn’t fucked up. It’s evil. It’s lunacy. It’s … I don’t even know … it’s,” her hands had begun to shake again as she trailed off. Genevieve could see her knuckles turning white from gripping the arms of the chair so tightly.
“I know, Therese, I know. Everything you’re saying is true, just please let me get through this. I have to tell you what’s going on.”
Therese leaned back in her chair and did her best to relax her hands.
“There are two men that have put a hit out on you. They’ve arranged it with me to have somebody come and-”
“Kill me,” Therese said tersely. “You’re going to have these people kill me.”
“No please, Therese, you have to listen to me. Look, that was the plan at first,” she can see tears rolling down Therese’s cheeks, “but I can’t go through with it.”
Therese shoots to her feet, her face panic stricken. “So fucking undo it Genevieve, un-fucking-do it!” She is screaming and a vein is visibly popping in her neck.
Genevieve does her best to stay seated on the couch and not reach out to comfort her, she knows that it would likely have the opposite effect.
“Therese, that’s not how it works. You don’t call on somebody to kill someone else, then not to do it. That’s not how any of this works. But look, look at me please.” She can see the debate all over Therese’s face- should she look at her, this person who has made the decision to help someone else prematurely end her life? But she does, she does slowly meet her eyes and Genevieve can see so many emotions in them that it makes her sick that she has put her in this position. “I’m not going to let this happen. I’m going to tell you what you need to do to make all of this go away. But you have to listen to me, and you have to do exactly what I’m telling you. Do you hear me? If you do what I tell you, the people that are trying to hurt you will go to jail, you’ll be safe.”
Therese tries to think of her options, tries to quickly evaluate what it means to listen to Genevieve, if she should just stop this right now and call the police, if she could run out of the door and down the hallway calling for help. But she doesn’t have time to figure it out, so she reluctantly agrees. “Okay. Okay, I’ll do it. But I’m warning you, Genevieve. If you get me killed, there’s a woman that will hunt you down and torture you until the end,” and she’s thinking of Carol and praying to the universe or God or whoever is out there to please help her see this thing to its end.
***************
Therese had found a travel bottle of Tequila at the mini bar in her suite that she promptly downed. She grabbed a notepad and a pen from the desk in her room to take down the particulars of what she would need to do, according to Genevieve. Sitting back in the armchair, she decides that they might as well get on with it.
“Okay. Go on, then.” The authority in her voice jolts through Genevieve.
“I know all of this is fucked up, Therese. Really, I do.” She pauses, and Therese thinks that she can see Genevieve trying to blink back tears. “I’m so sorry that I’ve put you in this situation,” Genevieve says, even though she knows that no amount of apologizing will amount to anything for Therese. “I’ll be out of here as soon as I tell you what you need to know and you’ll never have to see me again.”
Therese doesn’t speak at first, and instead lets Genevieve’s words work through her mind.“Gen, I don’t even know what to say to you. First, I don’t even know if any of this is real, if any of what you’re telling me is true or if what you’re about to say will help me get out of whatever fucked up thing this is. Yeah, you’re here trying to help me get out of it, but you’re also responsible for putting me in this situation. I just don’t get it. If this is what you do for a living, why are you here? It doesn’t make sense to me that you do this all the time and now, suddenly, you can’t.”
“Because it’s you, Therese,” and there is something in her voice, along with a slight blush creeping up her cheeks, that makes Therese want to believe it. “Once I started working with you and seeing everything that you do at the shelter and how much of yourself you give, I knew I couldn’t let this happen. Most of the time, I’m setting up hits on rapists or child molesters, people that actually deserve to die. But you don’t. I’m not looking for forgiveness, I know this is so far beyond that point. I just want to shut this whole godforsaken thing down.”
Therese looks up at the ceiling and sighs deeply. “So how do we do this? How do I do this?”
“Before I leave, I’m going to submit an anonymous tip to the police about a hit that’s being placed on you. I’m going to tell them who paid for the hit and who was contracted to carry it out. I’ll give them all the specifics, the when and where. I’m going to tell them about the people in this network, their connection to other murders, and why those murders happened. It has to be me who does it. If you do it, you'll have a lot of people coming after you.”
Therese closed her eyes, breathing out shakily, then looked at Genevieve incredulously. “That’s really your plan? You think an anonymous tip is going to save me?” She puts her head in her hands, her shoulders shaking in an obvious signal that she’s crying. “I’m going to die. I’m going to fucking die,” she looks up at Genevieve, her lashes wet and her cheeks flushed, “aren’t I?”
“No, no, Therese, listen. You’re not going anywhere. You’re not.” Therese would admit that her voice at least had conviction, even if she didn’t believe it. “The police have been trying to uncover this thing for a long time. They've got cold cases open that I have answers to.” Therese lifts her eyebrows and Genevieve knows she has no faith in anything that she’s saying. “I have a source, I promise you that they’ll latch on to this tip like their jobs depend on it. They probably do.”
“You have a source? Genevieve … this is too much. You’re forcing me to literally put my life in your hands. Jesus Christ.” She breathes in deeply, then back out. “So you give this tip, then what?” With her question, Therese can see, for the first time since she stepped foot into the suite, that Genevieve is nervous.
“You … you have to stay here,” Genevieve says, timidly.
“Excuse me?”
“Therese, they’re going to start tracking you. They’ll know if you’re not here. You can’t leave. It’s risky for me to even be here right now. If you leave, they’ll be watching you, and they’ll kill you.”
“I can’t believe you’ve done this to me. You don’t even know me.”
The desperation in her voice is enough to make Genevieve crack and she cannot stop herself from crying. The tone of her voice is heightened and she sounds desperate when she says, “I’m just so sorry. Really, I am. But Therese, please,” and she is looking right at her, Therese can see the pleading in her eyes, “please, do not leave this room.”
The emotions that Therese is feeling are overwhelming. How dare she, this stranger, this person that has no meaning in her life, make a decision about how Therese will live or die. She wishes for Carol, wishes for this all to be a bad dream, wishes to be anywhere but where she finds herself at the moment. But what are her options? She stays and potentially dies, she leaves and potentially dies. And right now, the only seemingly credible information that she has seems to point to her best chances of survival being to stay put. Of course she knows she isn’t thinking rationally, she fully understands that she is choosing to believe the same person who has put her life in such danger. Maybe she will regret this entirely, but maybe, by some miracle, she won’t.
“When is this supposed to happen? How much time do I have?” lips trembling as she speaks, Therese can’t even believe these are questions she is having to ask right now.
Wiping away tears, Genevieve answers her. “You have three days before they're supposed to come here for you.”
***************
It’s been two hours since Genevieve left. In the first hour, she had realized that she hadn't asked a critical question: who put the hit out on her. She was sure that Richard was involved, but Genevieve has said there were two people. Who the hell was the other person? In the second hour, the wee hours of the morning started to fog Therese's brain. She found more alcohol to drink and guzzled it down, figuring she would never get a wink of sleep unless she was drunk enough to pass out.
Genevieve had laid everything out: she would call in a tip to the police, she had mailed documentation with overwhelming evidence to support her tip (said documentation would be arriving to officials tomorrow), and now, she was leaving. Where she was going, she couldn’t tell Therese, but she was “disappearing”. Therese wondered if she would eventually see her face plastered on the news. But right now, fuck it. Fuck all of this. If she only has days to live, then she only needs what matters - Carol. Carol is all that matters. Carol is all that has ever mattered. She misses her smile and her voice and her hands, God, her hands.
And suddenly, there is a familiar pull in her stomach, a familiar yearning. She asks herself, “Am I really going to do this right now? I could essentially be dying and this is what I’m going to do?”. But if she only has days left, is it really such a bad idea after all? She can chalk it up to her alcohol induced, sleep deprived haze tomorrow. But for tonight, she wants Carol.
So, she grabs her phone off of her nightstand and snaps a picture.
***************
Carol wakes with a start, her phone vibrating on the bed beside her. She must have dropped it when she fell asleep while Abby was droning on about something that was too personal for her to even be saying out loud, let alone to Carol. She sees that the text is from Therese and she smiles. Then, when she opens it, her jaw drops and a heat flushes up her chest. In the image, Carol can see the bottom half of Therese’s face, her teeth biting her lip. She can see her shirt pulled up, revealing the porcelain skin of her belly. And the most striking sight of all, she can see that Therese has one hand down her pajama shorts, touching herself in the place that Carol has been hungry for since the last time they were together. She sees three dots on the bottom of the screen and her heart races, knowing that there’s more to come. Then the text comes through:
Therese: God, I wish you were here right now.
She can practically hear Therese’s voice saying it, and even though she has only woken up seconds ago, she would rather never sleep again than miss this.