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Author's Chapter Notes:

A few things. First, this was a tough one for me. I've never written Kelly/Ryan before and so it was a challenge for me. The thing is that it's been bouncing around in my head since the finale, and I needed to finally let it all out.

Second, I hope my account of visiting someone in prison is accurate. I actually did some research online about visiting at Rikers Island and I think my husband was starting to worry that I was starting up a prison romance or something.

Finally, I'd like to thank Bailey08 for her help with this. She gave this a once over and helped me work through some things so a big 'ol THANK YOU for that.

Disclaimer: I do not own The Office, or Ryan and Kelly, or Rikers Island, for that matter. No copyright infringement is intended.

Kelly wakes up at 5am to get ready. This day is important. This is the day she will remind Ryan Bailey Howard of everything he lost. She’s on a mission.

Kelly Kapoor has done this before. One time, in high school – there was this guy Billy Thornbacker who totally screwed her over and started hooking up with that slut, Kathy Jackson, behind her back. So, when Billy got beat up by Kathy’s boyfriend, Kelly spent two hours getting ready to go and visit him in the hospital and rub it in his face. You bet your ass that he was crying when she left and it wasn’t because of his broken ribs and fractured leg. It was because he totally lost his chance and then she was moving on, leaving him to regret treating her like crap.

Yeah, she’s done this before.

It starts out with a mix. It’s her “girl power mix” – and it’s blaring from her hot pink ipod dock into her bedroom. Through the years the mix has changed to keep up with current trends (she is nothing if not current) but the theme is the same: scorned woman gets back at man by singing really nasty songs about him and trash talking him to anyone who will listen. She starts out with Pink’s “U + Ur Hand” while she puts the finishing touches on her hair and dances around in her bra and panties. Then the next song pops up – Kelly Clarkson’s “Never Again”, and Kelly puts on her makeup, complete with lip gloss – silver plum shimmer, of course. It makes her lips look all kissable like Angelina’s, and she’s totally going for that today. She won’t let him kiss her though, because she’s not easy like that. But he’ll want to kiss her, and that’s enough for her.

She lays out two outfits on her bed – a purple tracksuit, and a pink one. She looks awesome in both of them, and her ass looks fantastic in both of them, which is important, because she knows Ryan will be watching her walk away after she’s through with him. She’s conflicted for a while as she holds them both up in front of her in the mirror. She finally decides on purple. She figures the walls will be sort of grey because walls are all grey and dreary in prison, right? So her purple tracksuit will totally pop against the grey of the walls. She read on styledash.com that grey and purple are the hot new colors for fall, and even though it’s still only spring, its okay. Kelly is always a bit ahead of the trends anyway.

Yeah. He’s so going to regret breaking up with her.

A quick check of herself in the mirror and she’s on the road by 7am. It’s a solid two and a half hours to Riker’s Island, and she’ll probably hit traffic. She plans on stopping to get an Iced Caramel Macchiato on the way to keep her energy up. She’s going to need it.

********************

The day started out sunny but as she gets closer the sky seems to be getting cloudy and the wind is picking up. As she crosses the George Washington Bridge the weather man on the radio mentions that storms are on the way. Kelly remains undeterred, though. This will not spoil her day. Rain or shine, Ryan Howard will see her and realize what he threw away. She pops her Fergie CD in and sings along loudly. She feels strong and confident.

Processing visitors takes a long time. She checks in by 10:30 am. She shows them her ID and signs some paperwork and then she has to wait for like, forever, to be able to see Ryan. She sits in a dingy waiting room that smells funny, like a mixture of feet and old coffee. She crinkles her nose and sits in a chair in a corner. There are a ton of people here waiting with her. There are wives and girlfriends and mothers and fathers and women with crying babies and she’s starting to get a headache. There is a TV with a fuzzy screen mounted to the wall replaying an old episode of Jerry Springer. Of course it’s one she’s already seen – the one where cousins reveal that they are sleeping with the same women. So gross. Really? Who would ever sleep with those guys? The one guy doesn’t even have a full set of teeth. Ewww.

She reads some of her book, Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, and keeps checking the time on her cell phone. Eventually she pulls out her latest edition of Cosmo and reads a few articles. Finally, she takes a quiz – What Kind of Kisser Are You? (The end result is: Fun and Flirty, of course. Like she needed a quiz to tell her that.)

********************

Finally, after almost an hour and a half, someone calls her name. She stands up and is lead through a set of mechanical double doors into a small room. She has to hand over her cell phone and her purse is searched and they scan her with the metal detector thingy as the guard goes through a list of things she can’t do. And god there are so many things you can’t do. Prison is such a bummer, and she’s only visiting.

Kelly is led into a large room with cubbies lined up spanning the length of the room. Each cubby has a Plexiglas partition and there is a chair on each side of the partition. There is a phone attached to the wall of the cubby just like on Law and Order. Guards stand to the left and right of the doorway she came through, and they don’t even seem to notice her. They must be gay.

She starts to feel uneasy and like maybe this might be harder than she thought, but she shakes it off. Then she starts to feel pissed off because the walls aren’t grey like she thought they would be. They’re more like a light brown color and that totally sucks. She should have worn pink. Damn. The fluorescent lighting probably doesn’t do her any favors either.

Kelly sits at the cubby the guard leads her to, and he gruffly tells her “you got ten minutes”. She nods and smiles at him but he doesn’t smile back.

********************

A minute goes by and she sees Ryan being led in and he’s handcuffed. He looks horrible. First, he’s wearing orange and that is so not his color. He looks way better in understated earth tones. Second, his hair is a mess and he looks like he’s lost weight. Too much weight. He has facial hair that is bordering dangerously between five o’clock shadow and beard, and when he finally takes his seat across from her she can see that his eyes are red. The guard takes off his handcuffs and she sees him say something to Ryan, but she can’t hear because of the barrier in between them. Ryan nods slightly and he watches the guard walk away. When he finally turns his eyes back to Kelly she feels a lump form in her throat. Shit.

No, she will not cry. No, Ryan Bailey Howard will not get the luxury of seeing her cry. Plus, she can’t have her mascara running down her cheeks. Yeah, it said waterproof on the label but she never really put it to the test and she can’t start now. She opens her mouth to speak and she sees Ryan tip his head toward the phone hanging to her right on the wall of the cubby. She picks up the phone and he does the same. It’s quiet for a minute.

Ryan nods sheepishly before speaking, “Kelly.”

“Hi Ryan.”

“How are you? You look….good.”

Suddenly she doesn’t feel so strong. He looks so different and so tired that it throws her off for a minute, but she takes a breath and regroups and her reply is a terse “Hell yeah, I do.”

Ryan’s eyebrows shoot up and he nods slowly. She knows that now he gets it. He’s no stranger to the Kelly Kapoor revenge visit. This is his first time actually experiencing it first hand, but she’d warned him about it before. That if he ever hurt her…she’d take the first opportunity she could to make him regret it.

“So Kelly. Why are you here? To rub it in my face? To tell me what an asshole I am?”

Kelly opens her mouth to fight back but Ryan keeps going, “You know what? It’s been a rough week so if it’s all the same to you I’d rather not do this.”

He starts to hang up the phone but she yells back at him, “Ryan Bailey Howard don’t you dare hang up that phone on me. I drove three hours to get here and I’m looking amazing today and you better sit back in that chair and talk to me. We’ve still got seven minutes left.”

He almost smiles – almost. He sighs heavily before bringing the receiver back to his ear, and he scrubs a hand over his face before speaking. “Okay, so what do you want to talk about?”

Kelly thinks, and then she says, “So, what’s it like here? Have you made any friends or anything?”

Ryan laughs, but it sounds weird, “Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s been nice – you know, in those few minutes a day I get to socialize. The guy in the cell to the right of mine is in for murder charges and the guy to the left of me is suspected of running a porn ring with underage girls as prostitutes. So yeah, it’s been fun.”

“Ryan, that’s…wow. I’m sorry. Really I am.” She’s genuinely concerned, “did your parents come to see you yet?”

“Yeah, my dad. He’s angry, and embarrassed. I don’t blame him. He and my mom are trying to get some money together for bail but it’s…tough.” Silence hangs between them for a minute before he continues, “So how are things with you?”

Kelly brightens up – Ryan never really asked about her before. But it doesn’t slip by her that he’s probably just trying to change the subject.

“Things are good. Sex and the City comes out in a few weeks so I am so totally excited for that, and oh my god I got the cutest bathing suit on sale the other day at Forever 21. Oh, and Darryl is planning on taking me away somewhere this summer, but we haven’t decided where yet. Probably somewhere romantic.”

She couldn’t resist that last part. Hey, that’s what she came here for, after all. She had to dig that knife in a little bit.

She continues to babble on for a minute about Angelina’s upcoming twins and the fact that there is a new season of The Real World starting soon, and for a minute he looks like maybe he’s actually interested. For a minute she thinks she sees a flash of something in his eyes. Like, maybe he misses her, and not just because she looks smokin’ in her track suit. It doesn’t matter though because the look on his face has shifted back to annoyed and suddenly he’s cutting her off.

“Well, Kel. Thanks for coming. It’s been great catching up with you but our time is almost up so….”

“Wait, what?” She's angry now, “You can’t be the one to end this visit, Ryan. I came up here because I had some things I needed to say to you and then you don’t even appreciate what I went through to see you today.”

“I didn’t ask you to visit.”

“Yeah. You didn’t. And why is that, Ryan? Huh? What are you, like, too proud to admit that you were wrong?”

He’s getting angry, “No, I…”

But she keeps going, “aw, poor poor Ryan. Can’t man up and admit that he made a mistake. Can’t be a man and tell me that he misses me and needed me to come and see him. It’s pathetic, Ryan, really. You are so emotionally stunted that you can’t reach out to people when you need them.”

She moves to hang up but then she hears him say, “Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t want you to see me like this? That I don’t deserve your help after everything I did to you? No, no of course not. ‘Cause I’m an asshole like that and so it would never cross your mind that maybe I didn’t reach out to you because I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

He’s looking her right in the eyes and for the first time in her life, Kelly Kapoor is stunned silent. Later, when she looks back on this moment, she’ll recognize it as the first time he was totally honest with her.

They hold eye contact for a brief minute before a guard comes and tells Ryan his time is just about up. He nods and starts to hang the phone up but before he does he brings it back to his ear and says quietly into the phone, “Thanks for coming, Kel, really. It was good to see you.”

And just like that, he hangs up.

She stands up and smiles at him sadly. She wants to touch the glass in between them but she remembers seeing it in a movie once and it was so cheesy, so she doesn’t. She turns and walks away, and as she does she can feel his eyes on her. She smiles to herself and thinks that maybe she’ll visit him again next week, and if she does she’ll wear the pink outfit.

 

 

Chapter End Notes:
Thanks for reading :)


kells8995 is the author of 17 other stories.



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