Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
She shook her head, and she smiled like sunrise when he said he should have some special answer about how he made choices that turned out right. "Non. I meant it simply. When things went well, how did you decide these things? Remember one thing that went well, oui? One small thing, and it doesn't need to be large enough to make the world turn on its axis." She had only recent decisions to draw from, and they were small branches on a tree she couldn't see. She couldn't even be sure if a past unseen guided her choices, and she would never know. She'd accepted this, but she was curious how it was for others. She was curious how it was for those not damned. When He didn't look down from Heaven and frown, then how was it? When no one awaited your soul in the burn and depravity underfoot, then how was it?
Her job here, it wasn't about piles and piles of coins. No one would become rich from this tent. Non, there was more money to be made in the bare sway of her hips, in the glitter-shine of her bare nipples, in her voice as she sang, and the audience looking everywhere but at her face. There was where the money lived, and it was debauchery offered safer than street corners or caravans of working girls. Here, people could claim they came only for a carnival, and not for the privileged of seeing another man's woman spread wide before them. This colorful tent, it was about keeping people here. It was about the people here spending more money at the games and on the baubles.
She was an attraction, oui? With clothing or without.
"The present becomes the past, cher. But first, it's the future. In truth, they're all the same. They overlap like sands on a beach, and they inform each other in ways that can't be tangled." Her smile was an unfocused thing glazed over, like she saw those sands converging before her. "Do not be aggressive, oui?" And perhaps that was a general caution, and men often were.