Friday, she leaves work late. Again. Painfully late, she’s champing at the metaphorical bit, more than ready to leave. Things have gone poorly this week for her employers. That means opportunity for her, though, a likely chance to move up within the organisation, and this is the primary impetus behind the late, late nights she pulls for a week. Any meeting she can edge in on, she does. Any report she can help file, she does. The more she knows, the more dangerous she is.
It’s smutty, y’all. Proceed with caution and also knowledge that you’re going to read some impolite words.
**
Spire wonders if he ever thinks about it. There are moments, over breakfast, when Malcolm pours coffee into her mug and she murmurs a thank you, and their eyes meet for a heartbeat too long; she thinks, maybe, he does.
She hated him a little, today. She hated him in the morning when the message pinged her phone and instead of him it was her, Emma, blonde and beautiful, bare beneath a luxurious bathrobe, mocking her: Hello from Diego’s phone, Ms Steele. The poor guy is all tuckered out. She hated him for the fact that jealousy raced icy and cold through her chest, wrapped its filthy tendrils about her lungs; he was not supposed to mean a goddamned thing to her, and, yet. She thought of him languid and unguarded in that woman’s house, sprawled in her bed, as Emma thumbed through their messages to one another, and her nails cut crescents in her palm.
We all have secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes, our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream
Friday, August 2nd
Lust too often leaves her feeling like this, tumbling out of control, filthy and mewling and needy; it isn’t her way, to want and not to have, to feel as if her body is winning out over her mind. She is reminded of a quote about seven secret lives, and for herself, she could add this as an eighth: baring herself to someone, no space between them, she spreads herself wide and if sex is going to satisfy her, if sex is going to satiate her, she has to let them breach the walls she has built.
Séverine does not trust vapid people. Or, rather, she doesn’t trust that such people are, indeed, as vacuous as they seem to be; a curious mind and an analytical one are close cousins, and it takes only the right questions, the wrong turn of phrase, for either to seize onto something and worry it into nothingness.
That is to say, as she sits across the table from Harmony, Séverine is entirely aware that the woman before her could be, must be treated as, sharper than she seems. It is in Séverine’s nature to be reticent, and, fortunately, that works to her advantage in nearly every situation, but, still – a razor can hide beneath any babbling tongue.
And, at the very least, Harmony’s offers a tempting tidbit.
She’s drunk enough that her guard is down and when he offers to walk her home, she thinks about letting him in. Her fingers flex against his arm and that faint supernatural coolness of his skin feels like a challenge, like something she could conquer by sheer force of lust; she could make him sweat. You prefer subordinates to partners, then, he’d said, and sometimes – at this very moment, in fact – she did.
It is 5am and Séverine hasn’t slept, not really; there have been stretches where she’s gazed at the artifact before her for so long, eyes so blurred and sight so faded, that she might as well have been asleep for all she was aware of her surroundings. Despite what she’d tweeted, she’d known it wasn’t inert – not with the way lightning flickered around it, how static tickled just under her skin when she held it – but it hadn’t been responsive to anything, and she figured it was just another of those Rikti mysteries she’d never quite be able to unlock.
They’re anchored a couple hundred yards off the coast because it’s dangerous nearer the shore – some bullshit about adventurers and explosives and misunderstandings that make safe harbour extremely questionable – and the crew is starting to get restless. They’re doing that thing where they pretend to be busy, so the captain doesn’t saddle them with some super shit once-a-year maintenance task, but it’s all pretend. Spire holds a net in her lap, one that’s fully repaired by now, but she keeps tracing the ragged lengths and sturdy corners. There’s something entirely peaceful about this, the downtime; they don’t get a lot of it on-board, and when they’re working, they don’t get a lot of it on-shore. They’re in the in-between, now.
He sits in the tavern, the man, laughing and laughing, grasping the barmaid’s forearm in his beefy hand so tightly that his knuckles are as white as her face. She’s still smiling, but it’s a tense, fragile thing - a butterfly on the brink of flitting away, a mouse frozen beneath a tomcat’s luminous stare. Spire quickens her step towards them, slipping around patrons and between chairs. The comforting, smooth weight of her marlinspike rests against her palm, and she fingers the tip, some part of her already knowing how this ends.
Something tugs at her soul. She is aware of it in the quiet, dark moments of the night, when it is only herself and the snores of sailors and the slap of waves against the Tiderunner. She lies in her hammock, she looks at the wood grain above her head, and she tries – gods, but she tries – to remember.
