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Vanity brought him here.
Pride, and vanity, and genetic male pattern baldness, and DHT, and fucking idiocy all took turns playing xylophone on Roman Roy’s ribcage, until they dragged him to here, this day, and dumped him bleeding onto a toilet in the women’s restroom at Waystar-Royco.
He knew this. He should have just called it a wash, accepted that age was age and widow’s peaks were masculinizing.
And yet he still couldn’t stop checking his hairline in the goddamned selfie view.
Is it receding? Boo fucking hoo. It was absolutely still receding. No thanks to the finasteride. And he’d started menstruating for the first time in two decades, for his troubles.
He cursed himself, his father, and his siblings just for good measure. Then he turned his ire toward his endocrinologist, an octogenarian on the brink of retirement who had exactly one trans patient and apparently couldn’t be bothered to research the fucking side effects of his fucking balding prevention drugs.
And fuck his father, again, for refusing to install gender neutral restrooms or stock menstrual products in bathrooms regardless of gender. They’d made the proposal a few years ago—not Roman, he’d never be that stupid. Some C-suite faux do-gooder from across the political tracks who hadn’t lasted out the fiscal quarter.
Logan had laughed it down, even knowing that both could make life easier for, you know, a group of people that included his literal son. Cost saving measures, was the first explanation, followed by, it just sends the wrong idea, topped off with, you’ve brought enough of that fairy bullshit into this company already pointedly directed at Roman, who, again, wasn’t even backing the pitch.
Right.
At least the blood apparently didn’t make him dysphoric, all these years later. It was just damned inconvenient. He wasn’t about to become one of those sad-sack guys who carried menstrual products just in case someone’s in need.
So he’d noticed he was bleeding partway through a meeting, then left with properly domineering bombast so no one would notice anything amiss. With Waystar’s whole harassment assault woman-hating thing, he’d honestly been a little surprised that there were even menstrual products in the women’s restroom.
But he’d managed to clean up, more or less, and there weren’t any visible stains. The noncomplimentary pad, sanitary napkin, whatever-the-fuck cost twenty-five cents, from a shitty dispenser. Barbaric.
He’d gotten a little blood on his hands, sure—he was out of practice—but otherwise, it’d all been… fine. Not the life-ending disaster it would’ve felt like, had something similar happened in those first horrible years at the company, before people learned that he would sack them in an instant, if they said one wrong word.
Maybe he’d built some resilience, recently. Fuck yeah, he was well-adjusted now.
Except—
The bathroom door creaked on its hinges, and his breath stopped in his chest.
Heels clicked across the tile floor. Heavy heels—practical. A slow, measured walk.
Before he’d realized it, he’d drawn his feet up above the sightline under the stall. Maybe it wasn’t time to cancel therapy just yet.
A silhouette fell across the tile. Any normal person would keep walking to the obviously open last stall and do their business in peace. But Waystar brimmed with psychopaths and sycophants, now, didn’t it?
The shadow paused.
“I can hear you breathing in there,” came Gerri’s voice. Cool. Unimpressed.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Roman withstood the urge to dash his head against the back of the wall. Just barely. Of course it wouldn’t be a stranger.
“Yeah, well, I can look under the stalls and jerk off in here if I want,” Roman retorted. Not his best.
But, fuck, his hands were still covered in sticky, dark blood. He started rolling the toilet paper, to wipe off the blood. No good without water, though. Which was in the sink, past Gerri.
“You can’t, actually,” Gerri said. “That’s definitely harassment. Stick to your office.”
Roman wasn’t sure if she knew about the window masturbation, or if that was a lucky guess. He probably didn’t want to know.
“Are you, fucking—” He could feel his voice pitching higher, and pushed it back down. “Did you come in here looking for me? That meeting was a waste of breath.”
“I can think of nothing I’d want to find in here less.”
“Right,” he said. “Frankly, me neither. So if you’d, you know, kindly fuck off.”
“I’m not pissing while you’re here.”
“There are so many other bathrooms in this building. Go find one of those. Jesus fuck. Women, these days. So entitled to the women’s room.” There were… layers of fucked up, there, given the entire state of U.S. legislature and the bathroom bills. Technically, what was happening now was—legal? Consistent with the Republican party’s bills and agenda? The Raisin, putting men like Roman Roy in women’s bathrooms everywhere. He didn’t have energy to appreciate the irony or the tragedy or the whatever-the-fuck.
Gerri just tapped her foot impatiently.
Hot humiliation started to burn in him. It was stupid—this was stupid. He could just go out there and wash his hands.
Gerri knew; everyone knew. He lived and worked in a place where every single fucking person remembered his deadname. They chose to politely ignore that he’d ever been born something else—not because they liked or respected him, but because the alternative meant acknowledging the unspoken rot that explained all his failures. His dad could call him slurs and his siblings could make dick jokes and that was that. Everyone just—looked away. Forgot.
And that was fine.
But right now it was fucking inconvenient, because he wasn't in the mood to explain himself.
He breathed. This was Gerri. It was just a bit of blood. “Just watch the door for me, for a sec.” Once he started saying it, he couldn’t stop the ball from rolling.
“Do what?”
“Watch the door, so no other hapless women wander in here and get molested by lil old me,” Roman deadpanned.
He stretched up on his tiptoes and wiggled his bloody fingers above the stall top.
“Oh,” she said.
Something about that seemed to put Gerri on the same page as him. She turned the deadbolt in the door.
“Yeah, fucking oh. You think I ever wanted to fucking—see the inside of a women's restroom again?” Roman fumbled with the latch of his stall, trying not to smear blood on the door, then figured, fuck it, everyone in here’s used to blood, and just went for it.
“I do hear it's cleaner,” Gerri offered.
“Yeah, we men piss all over the floor and don't wash our hands or close the lid before flushing.”
The banter felt better now, less like she was actually creeped out by him, more like they were doing a bit. But she still stood a bit awkwardly by the door, shoulders tense, as Roman rinsed his hands.
Probably having some sort of weird, quiet transphobic freakout—although Gerri had always seemed to just genuinely not give a fuck. The idea that she might be genuinely uncomfortable stung, a bit.
The red streamed down the drain, leaving thin streaks of pink on the porcelain. Gerri's eyes watched him very carefully. Not him—his hands.
Hm. That was kindof gay, actually. In a straight way, but. Gay.
Someone tapped on the door behind them, then gave up. At least his paranoia wasn’t unfounded.
He toweled off slowly. Then he moved toward the door, but she didn’t move.
“Are you planning on keeping me locked in here forever, for my society-breaching misdeeds, or—” He raised an eyebrow at the door.
“Oh.” She cleared her throat with one of those pissy, prim little coughs. “Yes.”
Was that a blush on her cheeks?
The deadbolt clicked open.
“Better not keep me too long in here,” Roman said, testing the waters, “or someone will think we’re getting up to something.”
“I don’t think anyone here is delusional enough for that to even occur to them,” Gerri sniped, shaking her head as if clearing it. The corner of her mouth quirked into something like a smile. “They probably think I had to pull your head out of the toilet.”
“Right, yes, that’s me. Mid-day swirlies,” Roman muttered. They did the awkward I-go-left-no-you-go-left-oops sidle thing, then sorted it out. “Anyway. I’ll let you… get to it.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets, puffed up his chest, and strolled out of the bathroom as if he’d had every reason to be in there.
This entire venture had gotten so bizarre that he couldn’t even dwell on the vague embarrassment and discomfort of menstruation, anymore. If he’d gotten some half-formed, inconclusive hint into Gerri’s inner life, maybe he could call it a wash.
What the hell, Roman thought, thinking again of her gaze on his knuckles. Maybe Gerri Kellman had some secrets, too.
He was still going to get his endo fired, though.