Who: Wren and Chessie What: Meeting Where: Caesars (The Forum Shoppes) When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Nope
The Caesars was vast and it had the soft, expensive hum of a place people came to in order to be seen as much as they came to dine. The winter-pale sun was a golden wash against scattered tables, and the woman on the left, back to the restaurant’s inner-workings and facing front stood out, not just because of the lack of expensive paper bags at her feet. She was tall - tall enough to look it, even sat folded up in a spindly iron chair with a table to one side, she had the ranginess of sinew folded tightly over bone and all the warm cream-and-coffee skin couldn’t hide it, with one leg loosely bent and her foot propped up against the other chair, a relaxed attitude that hinted at spring coiled low inside.
She looked strangely out of place despite the butter-soft leather jacket that said ‘expensive’, and the boots, heeled and high and the same molten-chocolate color as the jacket. It was a little of the attitude, of one leg crossed over the other, of the elbow cocked on the back of the chair and the casual, unadulterated sprawl taking place in a perfectly good cafe’s chair. It was a scarf, all rich colors suited to desert and wide, vast skies and obviously hand-woven, knotted around her neck and the restlessness of someone unused to sitting overlong. Chessie did not idle easily, she tapped the fingers of her left hand against the table-top and she plinked her water glass against the cutlery until a passing wait-person gave her an almost-irritated look and then she ceased, but with that strained sense of needing to move sculling beneath the surface. She sat, at an address looped onto her own pad of paper in an unfamiliar, too-female hand and a scribbled note as to what would be done if she didn’t.
She sat and she watched the passers-by for ‘Blondie’, whoever she was and Christmas was far-off in a Vegas winter, softly warm on her shoulders.
Selina had never asked Wren to meet anyone before. Selina didn't really ask Wren for anything, and these days she was leaving fewer and fewer notes, and going through the door less and less. So, when the note popped up on Wren's cellphone calendar saying that she was supposed to meet "River's girl" for lunch, Wren jumped at the opportunity to find out what was going on. Weeks earlier, Selina had her look River Song up, so Wren knew the two were acquainted, but she didn't know much more than that.
As for Caesars, Wren had lived in one of the suites in the hotel for years, and Luke still worked there to this day. She stopped by to say hi to him beforehand, and she resisted the urge to linger too long, despite wanting to. They didn't see very much of each other these days, not with him in the academy and working full-time, but that would get better soon, she knew. So, visit done, she wandered into the Shoppes.
Wren knew the Forum Shoppes better than any other shopping establishment in Las Vegas. The designer clothing with the pricey tags was precisely what she'd worn while she worked at the hotel as a dominatrix that catered to their celebrities and high rollers. She'd spent plenty of afternoons shopping under the sky-domed ceiling of the Shoppes, and she still missed that life a little. She'd given up sleeping until noon and spending hours at her dressing table for a four-year-old's early morning bed attacks and pillow forts, but part of her still loved that life, the one with the pearls and the parties that went until the sun came up. But she didn't love it as much as she loved her family, and it was just fond memories as she wandered toward the cafe, unhurried.
Wren didn't know how she would recognize the woman she was looking for, so she hoped Selina had filled in some details for River to pass along, since she didn't even have a name to ask for. She walked up to the hostess stand in a slim white dress and a thin cream cardigan. The taupe heels she wore were Manolo Blahnik, and she was very, very blonde. "I'm meeting someone," she told the hostess, even as she glanced past her into the cafe seating area, looking for anyone who was unaccompanied.
A handful of women had passed on by, and Chessie had watched each one carefully, with the scalpel-careful interest of a scholar turned investigator. Some had self-eliminated, their hair dark or red, but one or two had been the caramel-rich blond of women who sat in salons and picked their hair-color from a selection of numbers. She had remembered the note, River’s handwriting all swooping verve, ‘supposed to be dependent, whatever that is’. There had been insouciance to these women, squared shoulders and a careless stride that didn’t make her think of anyone who needed others.
She turned her head and the light caught on a woman stood at the desk -- young, and like a shard of the light itself, all white and cream and gold and blond. She looked, in some vague indeterminable way, like glass, as if you could shatter her with a breath and Chessie rose a little, all tangled curls and long-limbed height and she lifted a hand, casual and attention-drawing. The diners turned a little - partially because the light shifted around her and partially to express faint irritation at the source of so much noise and movement disturbing them once again. Chessie seemed blissfully unaware. She didn’t speak but she smiled, and she beckoned because even if it wasn’t ‘Blondie’, it was someone, and she’d find the other somehow.
Wren, like the other diners, looked toward the woman who had risen in her chair. The woman was beautiful, all tangled curls and long limbed, and Wren could appreciate that when she wasn't being jealous. Here, now, she had no reason for jealousy, and she gave the woman a smile that was careful, as reserved as her pale features and clothing were, a fragile and delicate thing. But then she noticed the other diners, the one around the woman, and their irritation, and that made her smile widen and blossom. For all that Wren had learned to move in the circles these people lived in, these wealthy members of society with their entitlement, she didn't like them very much, and she certainly wasn't one of them. She very much hoped the woman, with her lack of awareness that she was even causing a stir, was who she was there to meet, because she liked her a little already.
Giving the hostess a smile, one that was as intentionally entitled as anyone else in the establishment might employ, Wren breezed past her to the woman that had caused all the trouble. Everyone was looking down again, of course, hiding their curiosity in cups and glasses, quiet as church mice and listening ever so attentively. "I'm Wren. I'm meeting someone here, but I have no idea who, and since you began to stand up?" she asked, a hint of uncertainty showing itself beneath the facade of icy calm.
Wren wasn’t Blondie, but it was a quiet, diminutive of a name and it pinned itself to the spun-sugar woman as if it belonged there. Blondie was harder, brighter - this woman was snow in a warm place, shiny-bright and temporarily perfect. Chessie did not do anything the way people ought to do it, she reached with wide arms and she came in close and the scent of sandalwood and honey and something dark and warm and pleasant surrounded them both as she kissed both cheeks of Wren’s. The hug was strong, it was brief but it was strong and when she stood back, Chessie watched Wren with the lack of care that was either not knowing what was the done thing, or not caring.
“I’m Chessie,” she said cheerfully, and she began to fold herself down into the chair once more - it looked like a complicated process, deciding which part of herself would be comfortable and which would be cramped. “And you’re Blondie? You must be.” Her voice was low and had the faint huskiness usually associated with cigarettes and it was faintly accented with something that made the words lilt and tip together into a ripple something like water.
“I didn’t know River could do such a thing but she can.”
Wren froze for a moment, both not expecting the embrace and not being someone who knew what to do with affection from strangers. It was one of the good things about her icy pallor, about the face she showed the world, people generally kept a respectable distance. But not this woman, and Wren eventually lifted one arm for a softly awkward return of the hug. That reluctance probably told a much longer story than Wren wanted to tell on first meeting, but she couldn't do anything about it. It reminded her of the first time she'd met MK, of how MK had refused to be put off by that awkwardness, and how she'd barrelled on in her own way, going on to become her best friend... until recently.
"Chessie," Wren said once the embrace was done, a deep breath of relaxation after the name, which she tried again on her tongue a second later. "Chessie. That's pretty. Selina calls me Blondie," she admitted, because she'd never been able to get Selina to use her real name, but then Selina was adverse to real names in general, and there wasn't any changing that.
"You didn't know River could do what?" she asked, even as she motioned to the table Chessie had been sitting at, indicating they should both sit.
There was no visible acknowledgement of reluctance, of having briefly and abruptly torn away that very American need for physical separation and space and given in its place a hug of dust and far-open places, of intimacy handed out as casually as drinking tea. Chessie smiled and it was sundrenched and genuine, and her sitting was as awkward as the first time, as if something impossibly lanky were folding itself like a piece of paper into a box far too small for it.
“I didn’t know she could talk to me,” Chessie said agreeably. When she spoke, it was a mellow sound, pleasant to hear and it was the almost-clipped English of someone who has inevitably learned it as a secondary language, the words kept like a hand of cards to be dealt out. She sounded as if she’d known Wren for years - strangers, in Chessie’s world, simply did not exist. “But she can. Or she can leave notes. She never has before.”
She sat back and the chair almost swallowed her and she watched Wren with the faintly-assessing look of someone used to making snap decisions - and then she smiled and it broke the water-tension stillness that had lasted only a second. “Wren. I’ve been calling you Blondie in my head for half a day.”
Wren sat in one of the empty chairs around the table, and she smoothed the skirt of her dress in an old, habitual way. "Selina can't talk to me, but she leaves me notes on the phone that we share, and I leave her notes the same way. We don't see each other, or experience any of the same things the way most people do. Everyone always thinks that's weird. She didn't tell me much of anything at all, not even a nickname to find you by, so I'm glad you had Blondie, at least," she said truthfully.
Wren didn't precisely stare back while Chessie gave her that long, assessing look. She tipped her head like a curious little bird, all wide grey eyes and long lashes that were decidedly cinnamon in color. The smile that broke that silence was met by a smile in return, one that signified a tentative acceptance. Wren wasn't the type to go skipping through the fields with someone right away, as evidenced by the fact that her female friend count totalled two, and she'd known both women for over half a decade. But it was a beginning, perhaps.
"She asked me to look your River up for her. So I already knew they'd met. She's really interesting, River, I mean," Wren explained, looking up at the newly-arrived waitress a moment later and ordering hot jasmine tea with lemon.
River was a handful of memories that sifted free of grasp like water out of clenched fingers; Chessie had only the briefest brush of conscious with her alter and had no inclination at all to look her up. River was laughter, throaty and warm and dark and the faint fan of wrinkles at the corner of too-sharp eyes. She was bloody-bright violence, hot and thick in her throat and dreams of sand and dirt and sifting through the world to leave a mark, rather than to find others’ marks. Chessie curled a hand, long fingers and blunt fingernails, around her water-glass and she drummed absently on the slope of it, a metallic tap-tap-tap that doubtless had irritated half the people seated round her. She hadn’t thought to look up who Selina was - had only the vaguest outline of an impression and the cool, delicate blonde woman painted in the colors of an outline that was utterly wrong in its entirety.
“She’s River,” Chessie said with an arch of her shoulder as if that explained everything, all careless, warm dismissal of an alter who crammed herself into her spare time. “She’s not difficult. I think some of them are difficult. But I don’t know many of us, not yet.” She smiled as if the caveat was that it was not due to lack of interest, and she tugged a battered leather satchel closer towards her, tucking it beneath her chair as she folded one leg up, and sat, stalk-like with it tucked beneath her thigh. Chessie had the air of a college student folded into an adult woman, someone with ink lines but a vagueness that allowed assumptions to be made.
She looked at the jasmine tea steaming away in Wren’s hands, and she tilted her head and gave it serious consideration. “I’d ask for chai but I don’t know they have the spices,” she said, by way of explanation.
"Some of them are," Wren agreed about some of the door people being more challenging than others. "Some are villains, bad, the kind of things you don't ever want to see. We had one in our door that caused a lot of trouble out here," she said, barely managing to keep her voice even as she spoke of Crane and Alexander. "Selina is difficult. She gets in a lot of trouble, but then I do too, so I guess it's even," she admitted, her smile going just a little warmer. "You haven't been here long?" she asked, drawing the conclusion from Chessie's admission that she didn't know many people like them yet. She couldn't even remember what it was like now, being new to all this. Selina (and, thanks to Luke, Bruce) seemed like a permanent thing. It was as if they'd been there forever, as if they'd continue to be there forever. "They start meddling after awhile," she warned, but without anger or ire; she had grown accustomed to that too.
Wren glanced down at her tea pensively, as if really considering it for the first time. "I don't even think about it anymore. When I was younger, I needed loose leaves and a cast iron pot, but these days I'll drink whatever they put in my cup." She said it sadly, just realizing she'd lost one of her maman's favorite rituals along the way. But perhaps that was just growing up. "I think it comes with motherhood maybe. I spend more time on macaroni and cheese than on tea these days," she admitted, her voice going rich and fond when she spoke of her son, even without giving his name. Her fingers curled around the cup, pale and long. "What do you do here, Chessie? If you don't mind my asking? I don't mean to be nosy, but I can't help it at times."
Tea was the first of many rituals, across land and ocean and familial borders. Chessie had sat or squatted beside women she couldn’t speak to, but she had smiled and she had watched as boiling water and tea were mixed and sat with a cup curled in her palms and drank tradition down with the tanins. She saw Wren’s face as she listened, and she glanced into the pale yellow liquid in Wren’s cup as if it were ocean-line and future all in one, and the lines of her body composed themselves into something like embarrassment, or perhaps dismay at causing anything like remiss. She took up Wren’s question gratefully, and her words were a tumble of syllables, knotted together in haste.
“I teach. I mostly teach, it is - I don’t know the proper word, it sounds terribly grand but it isn’t at all - research. I miss the sky and the dirt but I wanted somewhere different, so I came.” Chessie smiled, an expansive thing of shoulders and upturned hands and a confiding vastness of ‘and so it goes’, shared with Wren and everyone as if they were already friends. “I think there are other questions nosier. You could look me up on the college website, I’m told.” Her nose wrinkled; it was evident what Chessie thought of that.
“What do you do?” her smile was small, it was persuasive. Chessie was used to talking to people who didn’t want to talk, to coaxing stories from those who wanted to bury them. There was an air of something like reticence about Wren, not unwilling to speak but an air of something just beneath the surface that was not to be disturbed without asking first. “And now I want tea also,” she said, and she flagged down a waitress cheerfully.
"What do you teach?" Wren asked with genuine curiosity, because she always wondered what a normal life was like, and teaching seemed as normal as anything could be. It felt domestic, safe, and maybe that was because she'd never finished high school herself, and she'd missed so much elementary school that CPS was constantly threatening to take her away. She remembered school as a warm place, where sunlight filtered through the windows and everything smelled bleach-clean, nothing like home with strange sounds and the smell of sex on the air. She smiled at the obvious disapproval of being looked up on websites. "Nothing is private these days," she said, remembering back to Seattle, when Luke had promised to take her to classes with him; a dream which had never come to fruition.
And then the question came; the question Wren hated. "I'm a professional dominatrix," she said, her voice going cool and distant when she said it. There wasn't shame there, precisely, but there was a defensiveness that said she'd pull away, pull back if Chessie reacted poorly. It reminded her of lunch with Spencer, of his reactions to things, and she sipped her tea before continuing, calmness in a cup before going on. "I'll make you real tea one day. French leaves, loose, not from a bag and in a good teapot. I don't get to do it very much these days. Little boys don't have much use for tea, and men don't seem inclined to wait for the perfect temperature or the perfect steeping time." Luke would humor her, of course, if she asked him to, but that wasn't the same.
It was a strange world, America, where jobs made you as much who you were as who you had been as a very little child, and what your family and your village made of you and what values you kept clutched to your heart. Chessie listened and she thought of something stiff and glass-delicate and feminine like the woman in front of her, and she smiled, broad and generous and she laughed, all throat and low and deep.
“America and sex,” she said with satisfaction and obvious interest, “This country wants it but does not want to want it, they wish to scrub it out but they pay professionals for it,” a gesture toward Wren that was a sweep of the hand and an invitation into a conversation that was more obviously drawing interest from the surrounding diners. “Do you enjoy it?” It was an honest question, bluntly-shaped and Chessie’s eyes were clear and wide and intrigued. “I am in anthropology, I teach the history of civilizations,” she said, by way of explanation, an inelegant sweep of the other hand to discard it, pah, as irrelevant for the moment.
“I love real tea,” and Chessie’s sigh was as real as everything else, a sinking in to imagined enjoyment as expressive as any child. “I have had true French tea, and in India. Real tea takes time.” She seemed to care very little for the thoughts of the diners around, be it their attraction to their subject matter or the butterfly-way she flitted from one topic to another with the same enthusiasm.
The question surprised Wren, and her features made that very clear. It wasn't what she expected, for someone to blatantly asked her if she liked what she did, and her own appreciation of the woman across from her grew in that moment. "My maman said that men always wanted what they didn't have, and mistresses gave that to them. It was the oldest profession, and it would persist long after everything else had gone," she said, a strange fondness in her voice when she spoke of her maman, and no couching what the woman had done for a living. "I needed it once, I think," she said, strangely candid for her, but the question had opened a path for the honesty. "I was angry, and it gave me power and control that I'd never had. Now, though," she added thoughtfully, "I don't think I need it anymore." And, despite Chessie's immediate handwave at her own profession, Wren wanted to know more. "No, tell me more? I love old things. It's a guilty pleasure. I comb through antique shops and read up on everything I find."
Wren looked down at her tea a moment later; tea which wasn't real at all. "You've been to India?" she asked, because she'd still never managed to leave the country. She'd always wanted to travel, but she didn't think it would ever happen now. It was an old dream, one that had faded in adulthood.
“Yes,” Chessie’s voice went soft, it curled around the word like a child’s fingers twined around its mother’s hand, loving. She smiled and it was warm, dreamy-lost somewhere in sunshine and a busy metropolis, primary-colored spices on display. “Yes, I’ve been to India.” The first time a long, rambling trip that took in the beaches well beyond the tourist footprint, the second pinpointed to Delhi and Mumbai, a museum that took care of India’s history cradled in the centre of India’s future. Traveling was a fond thing, not fully packed up and put away. The boxes in Chessie’s apartment were still scattered, still held day-to-day treasures as if she were too used to suitcases and living out of them to fully unpack.
“Why do you do your job if you don’t need it any more?” A frank question, thrown down amid tea-cups (the waitress bent, fresh and fragrant tea steaming in the new cup, Chessie looked at her directly, said a cheerful thanks that broke into conversation and left it again). She seemed genuinely curious, her body tilted toward Wren, chin cradled in her palm. “I like mine. I teach about Egypt and Greece and the university pays for me to read and research and write new things about the latest finds. And then I pack up and go. Turkey, Italy, Romania,” her eyes gleamed like old coins.
Wren wanted to ask more about India, about what it was like. She wondered if she could ever go, the vision of red and gold dancing around in her mind. It was, she knew, probably not very real, and not very true, but she liked to think it was. Despite the harshness of her life, she still romanticized nearly everything, wrapping notions around her fingers like strings tied off in tiny bows. But she considered the question about her job first, the easier of the two. "My boyfriend's at the police academy. He's working less, and we have a little boy to support. It's good money, and not very many hours." It was an easy response, and a true one. Once Luke was on the force, then maybe things would change, but for now it was how it needed to be.
Ah, but then there was India. All the places Chessie mentioned that the university sent her to sounded interesting, but it was India she wanted to hear more of. She took the cup of cooling tea in her hands, and she cradled it, letting what warmth was left seep through to her fingers. "Tell me more about India?" she asked, a curious thing, almost like a student in a class somewhere, front seat and wide grey eyes.
It was a lullaby, the stories Chessie told; they were real things taken out of their wrappings and held out in hands to share. The other diners abandoned listening, they returned to shopping and their ambling trajectory around the nearby stores and discarded tea-cups sat cooling beside Wren and Chessie both as India sweltered like a ribbon, winding around two women who had nothing in common beyond two other women. By the time they separated, India was a cinnamon tang on the back of Chessie’s tongue, a low-down longing to be somewhere far away from Vegas heat and the too-clean, too-new apartment with its wide open windows onto all Sin City could conjure up.