Eve Kelly (fearlessfelix) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-10-04 07:08:00 |
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Entry tags: | catwoman, roxanne |
Who: Wren Light and Eve Kelly
What: An olive-branch, more ruffled feathers and a business proposal.
Where: Eve's apartment in Hamartia.
When: Almost immediately after this
The television was a low, constant hum -- it flickered like it was in need of repair (or replacement) or it had bad signal, or either but it sat square in the corner and it made noise like companionship should and at night, it could be turned down low until the pictures lulled her to sleep, bedtime stories of late night bargain prices, or those born again when life got too heavy to bear under its weight, against the bad couch with the broken springs. That sat, too -- heavy and lumpen and the stuffing was coming out of the centre, but it was a couch that had a dip where her head had rested against its arms enough times to make that dip, and was just long enough to loop her legs over the end and rest her feet against the window ledge, laptop a pleasant warmth on her belly and that was a consistency that wasn’t getting thrown out or consigned to a dump. There was a comfort to consistency, even the kind that came from being alone in routines and ways and the odd way the tap had to be yanked and the pipe in the bathroom kicked before hot water spilled out -- all of the things in this apartment, from the couch and the television and the taped up fairy-lights on the wall with their cracked bulbs, and the buzz the refrigerator made when it was opened, were broken but they worked and that was all that mattered. (Right?) Change was breaking with well-trodden, well-established tradition, tradition kept you safe and safety was everything. The freezer belted out a puff of icy air against her face as Eve opened it: the vodka bottle rested cheek to cheek with a sorry looking sack of frozen peas used more for immediate first aid than cooking, two drawers over a pint of ice-cream with a now-iced-over note taped to the top of it, ‘break in case of emergency’. The bottle made a rattle and scraping sound as she yanked it free, coming loose with a wrench that spoke of days since she’d drunk in the confines of her own apartment. One shot-glass looped up with her fingertips from the drying rack -- one glass, one fork, a plate -- she had to set down the bottle and the glass to prop open a cupboard, go hunting for another in a bother of searching that was just another bother that was Wren. The door: bell taped up because it didn’t work (hadn’t, not for months) and the peephole hadn’t been seen through since the day she’d moved in. It didn’t matter. Whoever might be looking for easy pickings or a pretty girl behind it would see the bruises thick and rich that spread above the boxer-shorts’ waist and below as they mapped her thigh, above as a different wreath of them bloomed around her upper arm visible in the tank-top, see the still-healing split to her eyebrow and knock on the next door. Nothing worth stealing, here. She wrenched the handle, opened onto the hall beyond and the little woman-child who stood there with change snapping at her heels like a vicious dog that behaved only for its owner, and Eve turned her back and walked into the recesses of the apartment, her greeting the crack of the vodka bottle’s cap. Wren hadn’t bothered changing before knocking on Eve’s door, and she stood there in muslin pantaloons and a man’s shirt that reached her thighs and still smelled of musk and familiar, comforting cologne. To say Eve looked a mess would be an understatement, but Wren kept her own mind about it for the present. She followed the bruised woman into the apartment, which while larger than hers was nowhere near as opulently appointed, and she wondered who really needed saving in this friendship. She entered the kitchen on whisper-bare feet, and she looked at the bottles and then at Eve’s face. “Are we celebrating?” she asked openly, no criticism in the question. She didn’t take a seat, and she didn’t slide up on a counter. She stood, and she waited. The click and crack of the second bottle’s cap was loud in a quiet that didn’t know whether it was uncomfortable or not yet. Eve picked up a glass with the easy-handed grace of a sleight of hand or a trick or simply a movement made many times before, and poured a measure into it, handing it to the girl who wore men’s clothes like a lover’s leftovers. Hadn’t been many of them in this apartment; if they were there, they left or they were encouraged to leave in the cold white of early morning. They didn’t leave clothes, because leaving clothes meant coming back and those weren’t the kind of men invited. She spun the second glass between her fingers, a water-stain on the lip -- embarrassment? and then lifted bottle and glass and led the way back to the couch and the only place in the whole apartment that didn’t feel without an owner. “Didn’t die this week; celebration,” Eve’s voice was flat beneath the intended humor, and she drew bare legs up to her, tight, and swallowed at the liquid in the glass. Her toenails, as she curled her toes against the couch cushion were painted the color of wine -- chipped, and scarred and it had been badly done, but it was a little piece of what was Eve in the apartment that looked as though it wasn’t loved on the surface and yet bits and pieces of it were very much so beneath it all nonchalantly, on display in the awkward way of not-saying that was all she managed. Guests in this place weren’t guests: if they were in the kitchen it was a drink of water and as few words exchanged as possible before they became people, rather than a way to let go and give it all up for a short while -- and that didn’t work. Eve turned the glass and the vodka lapped at the side obediently, and the bottle sat amid the very centre of the couch stuffing. Wren followed Eve into the living room, the glass of vodka in her hand. She sat, careful not to tip the bottle that teetered on the cushions like gravity willed it so, and she took a sip and let the burn slide down her throat. She only drank hard liquor in company, but you’d never know it, not with the way she held the glass and took another swallow. The shirt, which was all lover and nothing clientele, settled around her knees, incongruous with the muslin it covered. The apartment surprised her, because she knew Eve had some modicum of wealth. Wren liked expensive things, exquisite things that felt like Heaven against the skin and were equally heavenly to look upon, and she didn’t understand why Eve didn’t buy comfort with the money she had - at least in her choice of vodka. “Why did you invite me, Eve?” she asked softly. The conversation had felt like a dentist’s chair, even at a distance. The probing with fine-tuned intuition like silver instruments against painful points, pinned down at-your-pleasure and poked until it hurt more than tearing a muscle did, worse than a night after a night-not-out. The glass clinked in Eve’s hand as the bottom of it hit the table-top; clearly Wren wasn’t going to even give time for the do-it-yourself anaesthesia to kick in and so she pushed the glass aside, squeezing her feet into the gap in the couch between the cover of the cushions and the foam itself, burying her toes there. The glass almost-tipped; she’d set it down amid rubber-bands that bound up stacks of bills, receipts from the Chinese place from two blocks down that had a special sauce livid orange and she wasn’t going to fucking ask what they put in it, but it tasted unreal in the dim light of the early dawn, the wrapper from chopsticks, a stack of mail picked up from the last time she’d dropped by the Aubade, thick creamy envelopes with ‘Eve Kelly’ written on there as if it meant something, as if it were the home of a somebody and not her. The glass leaned itself against a forgotten tv-guide magazine lost amongst the other detritus and it stayed upright; amongst so much other shit, it stayed upright. This was home, in a way the Aubade apartment was never going to be, never could be and showing her seemed to be the only way to get it across when the words to say it wouldn’t dredge themselves up past the writhing disgust for any kind of talking about this at all. The tape on the edge of one of the posters -- an obscure rock-band that called itself ‘edgy’ and in reality was more about the drinking afterward than the music -- was cracking, peeling away from the wall and curling softly in upon itself. It was a broken, torn thing that made sense in a place full of them and that -- Christ, Wren was supposed to be good with non-verbal cues. But Wren sat, with the vodka bottle tipped toward her like a kid in a spin-the-bottle circle and asked and Eve’s mouth twisted and she turned her head away to look out one of the smeared windows, forehead resting against her palm until she scrubbed the heel of her hand across her face with an exhalation of breath that was either exhaustion or exasperation or something of both. “You wanted me to stop seeing you the way I did three years ago and it helps when you’re not under a streetlamp with a guy set on fucking you or fucking you up,” she said finally, with a look across at Wren and that twist of the mouth becoming something akin to a wry smile. Wren was growing accustomed to Eve’s version of stay away, far, far away. She knew it was a defensive mechanism, a way to protect herself; Eve’s version of a very thick, very slick coat. It was meant to keep you focused on the shine and texture at the surface, to keep you entirely unaware of anything beneath. “What I do out there matters to me, Eve,” Wren said with simple honesty. “What I do with the men that pay me, that doesn’t matter. What I do out there, it does. I’m willing to learn to defend myself more. I want to learn to defend myself more; it’s why I learned to use the knives in the first place. But I’m not willing to quit. If you don’t want me to try to make you into a vigilante, then don’t try to take it from me. We aren’t the same; we’re different. I need to do this; it’s important to me,” she said, the last four words carefully, slow and enunciated. “Why did you ask me here?” Wren repeated, looking toward the envelopes strewn across the table, envelopes that were incongruous with everything else in the apartment. The smile became more pronounced, and Eve laughed. It was light and amused and there was only a touch of the smoke to it that was usual for Eve’s laughter, the obviousness of mirth. This was surprised and real and for a moment, sat there against worn-in sofa cushions and bare-foot with her hair a twisted up knot and her face completely bare, Eve didn’t look like a thief or a polished con-artist or someone who had every ounce of control in every minute. She picked up the glass, and tilted it toward Wren with a mocking sort of nod of the head and drank, still smiling. “You completely missed the point, pumpkin,” but it wasn’t snide, that little momentary use of the endearments that Eve dealt in, “I asked you here because it’s not the goddamn street. You’re not doing your thing and I’m not doing mine, and you just gave me a very earnest lecture instead.” And she broke into laughter again, and bit her lip as if to force herself to stop and her composure returned. The vigilante business was a line laid down between them, a line composed of three year old impressions and a night lit red in memory. It couldn’t be stepped across, but it could be avoided. She caught the look and with what was too-careless haste, gathered the envelopes up and shoved them down the side of the couch. They’d been sitting there accusatorily for days now. Wren was quiet for a moment, for two, for three. The mocking of what kept her going stung, but she didn’t show it. Instead, she folded her hands on her lap, and she looked toward where the envelopes had been pushed, considering them as if they were a particularly important puzzle she wanted to concentrate on. Eve was all brambles, and Wren bled easily and didn’t say anything when she did. “You missed my point, Eve,” she said. “I didn’t mean here as a physical location. I meant why did you want to see me at all? Did you need someone to laugh at just now?” It was asked quietly, without venom, and seemed all the louder in the room for the softness of the question. The color that came was very faint and very brief; there and gone but when it was, it was high against Eve’s cheekbones and she stood with an abruptness that had no grace at all to it. It had been a long time since she had felt like that, and she turned her back against the room and her arms folded tight against her chest until it was gone, until it was quiet, until the little girl sat on her couch as though a queen in a slum stopped making her feel like an ass -- and then she turned and Eve leaned with her shoulder-blades backed against the wall, rough plaster cool thorough the thin shirt. “It’s always why,” Eve spoke, low and she wasn’t looking at Wren but at the fairy-lights taped to the wall above Wren’s head. “If I had an answer, I’d have given it already.” She sounded tight, awkward, the words bitten off sharply quick as though parting with them was a wrench. Wren nodded in understanding. She liked to talk, she knew, though she tried not to pry. This was different, though. She was fairly certain Eve found her infuriating, and she didn’t know why the woman still wanted to talk to her. “I can’t change who I am,” she said softly, tone a little apologetic. “Neither can you.” It was a simple statement of simple truth. She looked toward where the letters had been tucked again, wanting to ask, but not voicing the question. “You live here?” Eve’s hand spread outward, in a gesture that took in the slowly dripping tap and the silent flicker of the television, like a magician displaying cards on a table in the street, the crowd politely ignoring the desperation and the greying sleeves of his white shirt. “It’s home,” she said quietly, thinking of a crushed dress in a bathroom that cost more than the apartment in total. “Your place doesn’t look like mine.” A guess, a question, but Wren sat there as a reminder of what reaching out felt like, of the way lines could have fallen -- it felt tangled, she felt tired and she tipped her head back against the wall and closed her eyes. “They’re delivered to the other address.” Wren tucked her feet up beside her, and she pulled the hem of the over-long shirt over her shins. “No, my place looks a tiny corner of the Taj Majal.” She smiled. “Or I like to pretend it does.” She looked around, a little more openly when Eve tipped her head back and closed her eyes, and then she looked back at the tired looking woman. “You have other addresses.” A statement and not a very surprised one. No surprise and that in turn wasn’t a surprise at all -- Wren’s wits were as sharp as the knife she kept on her. Whatever she said about learning, if it were mental acuity needed to keep her safe, the damn girl would be fine. Eve’s lips twitched; irritating when it was turned on her but giving up and giving in to curiosity was surprisingly easy. Especially when it came with just flat statements rather than questions she didn’t want to answer. “Not a hundred. Just one.” That hung like a millstone around her neck and so heavily it made running rooftops difficult at night. She looked toward the window; still too long before dusk to be truly uncomfortable. This was all human. “You said we couldn’t change. A fact I’m learning, sugarplum.” There, a fraction of Eve’s old lazy drawl, the ever-present sweetness layered over something much more caustic. “You want to change?” Wren asked, and that did surprise her. “Does it have something to do with the letters?” Eve wasn’t going to volunteer information, Wren realized, but the other woman had invited her for a reason, even if she couldn’t articulate it. The letters, hidden like dirty secrets and someone else’s earrings between the couch cushions, were the only thing out of place in this fake home that Eve thought fit her properly, and so Wren focused on them. If she was wrong, she’d find something else to concentrate on; she had time and an air of infuriating patience about her. Want to change. A barrage of grey-suited men and women with sober faces, they wanted her to change. The investment manager, whose Adam’s apple had leapt when he reviewed her portfolio and it had had nothing to do with the butter-soft leather pants nor the scarlet lipstick and everything to do with dear old Uncle Stephen’s business acumen -- he wanted her to change. But she, herself -- Eve shook her head, and she passed a handful of the things and dropped them into Wren’s lap like confetti. Hard-edged cards with gold lettering in some, invitations to galleries and opera seats and all the plaudits and demands of someone with money enough to sign checks and make things happen -- sent to someone who found opera boring and hadn’t the patience to sit through it even with Uncle Stephen’s enthusiasm as a soothing counter to all that damn wailing. Sent to someone who didn’t know how and damn well didn’t need to. “I don’t want to. I didn’t sign up for it,” just to be absolutely damn clear, “How do you even begin...?” a little helplessly. She sat back down again, crushing an invitation to an exclusive event solely for those in possession of an account in a certain bank, and dug out the rest of them, threw them down on the table. It had taken years, of scrabbling around and working things out, to get comfortable. To get a rhythm, a pace to things and even if rent was never paid on time and sometimes a bigger job was needed when a smaller one was more comfortable, this had broken the rhythm altogether and no one had even goddamn asked. Uncle Stephen had a lot to be sorry for. Wren watched memories and thoughts flutter behind Eve’s eyes, and she uncurled her legs from the seat cushion and sat up, sat forward. “What are we discussing exactly, Eve? Fitting in? Place settings and waltzes or board rooms and charities?” She was attentive, though she did not seem surprised; she remembered Eve at the auction, all anger in a designer dress, and she smiled a little. “Someone had the audacity to leave you money.” Again, a statement. Eve’s head turned sharply at that, but the surprise was brief and it dimmed quickly. If it had been Wren in a suit and in that goddamn board-room, with a bank of lawyers baying for her defeat, she’d have won anyway and made them believe it was their choice to begin with. But it hadn’t been, and the memory of that occasion burned a little more of her ease away, left her pricklier. “It’s not me,” she said quietly, and the words were very soft and very true as Eve settled back in the corner of her couch and fiddled with the edge of one of those envelopes. It could have been -- once -- but it wasn’t now and she couldn’t play it, the way she could play a room or work a bar or a scheme. “You don’t have to lose yourself to anything, Eve,” Wren said, and she said it with the certainty that came of holding onto yourself, even when the universe tried to take that away. “You can learn, and you can function and fit, but you can still be the person you are now.” She paused, adding quietly. “Or you can be happier, better, less scared.” Eve tapped the envelope against her knuckles, not knowing the contents, but well able to guess. Another function, when to be able to do what she wanted with that money, to be able to screw the lawyers and find what she needed, she’d need the ability to go and to play by the rules of their games, ones you didn’t see the rules of unless you knew. And she looked at Wren. “How’d you learn all of it?” Every time she’d seen Wren, it had been in street garb, in the obvious and the whore-like. Something that drunk men in alleys could want and appreciate and yet that wasn’t Wren at all. She’d stood in the auction-house as if it were easy, as if it didn’t all press in on her and the shoes weren’t uncomfortable and the dresses weren’t ridiculous and she knew it, in the same way the rest of them seemed to. Another look, this time more thoughtful. “What is it you charge, Wren?” Wren tipped her head, and she was silent for a full 30 seconds, expression disbelieving. “I owe you, remember? We’ll call it even. You’re going to have to tell me what you’re going for, though. Who you want to be, or who you want them to think you are. Waltzes or board meetings?” Eve shook her head; the street going rate, she knew, but not the kind of currency that paid for Wren’s time. “It’s not that expensive a jacket,” she said, “And I need it all.” Need, not want, because to have things work, it was a necessary evil. “I want,” the words were halting, because it was a very small, very private dream that had already taken significant hits, “To make a haven. A place for runaways, girls who need somewhere to go. It’ll take my money,” my, for the first time, “But it’ll need more than that and it needs investors and people who can talk bullshit about accounting and legal and that sort of thing.” A smile, but a defiant one, daring a challenge. “Open to everyone?” Wren asked, almost before Eve can finish talking. The interest was evident, and she was fairly sitting on the edge of the cushions now. “How are you going to let the girls know?” she asked, because all of the other things, the legal things, those were easy enough in Wren’s opinion. “I want to help.” The statement was immediate and heartfelt, the most certain thing she’d said in the entire conversation. Eve’s face had an uncertain pleasure to it, and the questions came to which she did know the answers to, not the ones involving papers or hiring people or buildings or legality. The questions she’d answered before she began thinking about it. A place where girls could go and not have to fight to stay alive -- but it wasn’t Wren she was thinking of, when the idea had been conceived. “Open to everyone who needs it,” she pulled a knee up, rested her elbows against it and began to look truly relaxed for the first time since Wren had entered the apartment. “I know people.” It was vague; old connections sometimes drifted, others held fast. Seattle had been a place she’d drifted through and back to again and again, long enough to keep some. There were bars where trading in things ‘found’ happened out in the open, where the cops didn’t come because it was the fastest way to becoming an officer memorial, and where the girls lined up outside, eyes hazy with what was necessary to keep on staying alive. “What I want it to be -- it could mean a difference.” A change, something good. A reason for good old Uncle Stephen to have screwed her over royally. “And you can. There’ll be ways. But if you even mention what the hell it means to me, whether I’m changing my selfish little ways or not, I’ll hand you your ass, pumpkin and you’ll find out there’s just bunches of ways you don’t yet know to protect yourself.” It came with a smile, what was almost affectionate. It explained the bruising, to a very large extent. “You don’t scare me, Eve,” Wren said without aggression. Eve didn’t; compared to some of the men Wren had come up against, Eve’s biting wit and cold sarcasm was a walk in the park; the bruises didn’t exactly make her intimidating either, not when she looked like a human punching bag. “I don’t need you to know people to get the word out; I’m out there with them every night. I want to know what your plan is. How are you going to keep them safe, and if you’re going to turn away girls who don’t have parents or who have abusive boyfriends and pimps? Is it only runaways?” The questions were fast, a rapid succession of need to know and want to know. Eve sat back and listened to a torrent of questions, almost too fast to be answered. Thomas Brandon, in his too-sleek suit and boardroom full of demands had been the first to truly listen to what it was she wanted to create -- but Wren, in amidst the wreckage of the cushions and the envelopes, the meeting between Eve (who needed no last name because they weren’t used) and ‘Miss Kelly’, cared almost as much as she did and almost as quickly. “Open to everyone, not just runaways -- a place girls can go and be safe. There’ll be rules, curfews but ways to make a buck that don’t involve alleyways and stealing. I don’t want anyone turned away for those kinds of reasons.” There were ways, there would be ways to make it happen -- money, Eve was learning, could buy just about everything. “Security would be a concern.” She sat back, frowning but it was one of thoughts moving too quickly to be anything other than difficult to concentrate on any which one. “The plan is to offer an alternative. A place to go -- not just to sleep, but where girls can get hooked up with schools, and jobs after school, college if they want it, places to move onto if they don’t. Drugs an absolute ban on the premises and drying out mandatory.” That was flatly delivered; too many glassy-eyed children out there. “But I need to find people to deal with the boring parts first. Get it squared and legal -- I want the underaged to be able to come too, but that requires other stuff, Brandon said as much,” Eve tapped her chin with that invite, thinking. “You’re running it as a legal charity then? Aboveboard?” Wren asked, because rules and laws didn’t appeal to the type of girls Eve wanted to target. She knew that from experience. Sixteen had found her on the streets, and an orphanage wasn’t anywhere she was going. A legal alternative, the kind Eve was proposing, would scare most working girls. “You’re not going to get the ones that need it, not with all that paperwork and by-the-book thinking.” Eve rubbed at her forehead, familiar headache beginning already. Tugged between the need and what could fill it -- “The point is to make it an amnesty. No need for names and parents and where-do-you-come-from. If it’s not legal, not above-board then it means dealing with the police,” she sounded like she was speaking from the fringes of the board meetings already sat in on; in truth, half-quoting the one person whose advice she was following. “And if the cops are around, the girls who need the help aren’t going to come by anyway. A sanctuary. Walk through the doors and the doors shut and keep whatever you’re running from out.” At thirteen, scared and running and with six months of sleeping rough behind her, it would have been a dream. “I want to cut the paperwork as much as possible, but there’s paperwork to do that.” And she wasn’t the kind to know the ins and outs of that. “Got any better ideas?” Genuine. “I think you need to decide how you’re going to make underage runaways trust that you aren’t going to send them home, and I think you’re going to run into legal issues that require you to do just that,” Wren said, and her voice went sad and soft with the reality of things. “Once they’re eighteen, it’s too late, Eve.” She sounded reluctant, sorry to say what she’d said, but quietly certain of the truth of it. “If you’re going with legal age, then domestic violence or addiction is your best road. Prostitutes are going to fear arrest, even if you’re legitimate.” She paused thoughtfully. “What do you want me to do?” “By the time they’re legal age,” Eve said with the certainty of her decisions, her choices by eighteen, “They’re gone. I want to get there before that. And if they’re already on the streets, then they’ve already begun getting gone.” She leaned her head against her arms, spine bowed. If she couldn’t do it legally, what was the point in going the legal way at all? “Law says runaways have to be reported within seventy-two hours. Doesn’t mean you can’t give them the address of someplace else to go. It’ll just take...” A whole world of planning and execution, of setting up somewhere that wasn’t legal (but what could be, and be safe?) beneath another, above-board and squeaky clean scheme. Work. A lot of work, and people who could be paid to keep things right. “A lot,” Eve concluded, but she looked at Wren and shook her head. “I’ll figure a way. The important part is a place for those girls out there to get to. What I want from you is to learn how to get the others to reach into their pockets. And if they won’t, I’ll take it anyway.” A statement of purpose, of some-sorts. “How to operate. Can’t do it my way.” A smile, half-wry. “You want me to get you money from the men I service?” Wren asked plainly, the concept not bothering her in the slightest. “You’re going to have to do this off the books, Eve, if you want to do what you want. You can run a halfway house for girls leaving CPS, or you can run a home for victims of domestic violence, but if you want young girls - girls like we were,” she uses the we very intentionally, “then you’re going to have to use a front.” ‘We’ didn’t bother Eve: it was too easy to see the connection that kept her bound to girls like that, girls like them, snapping taut with each pull away from the past. She sat on the couch looking very much like one of those girls herself, and she shook her head. “Not your money and not theirs. It’s too easy to track back and find it. I want your lessons -- which I’ll pay for,” Eve’s voice was crisply-cut, “The advisers have wanted me to take something for a while and you... You’re good at what you do.” Whilst the girl sat beside her in an over-big shirt looked young and small and unremarkable, she had been a wreck in an ER and she was a polished professional who fit in seamlessly to a society that could recognize an outsider more quickly than they could one of their own. It was a statement of fact, and it was matter-of-fact respect that colored the words. “We’ll set up lessons. And maybe you can make the Aubade place look less like a goddamn tomb.” And then the rest, it was implied. Small steps toward a project that meant a great deal for both of them. Wren considered the offer. It was tempting, so, so tempting. Eve was prickly; a cactus intent on protecting everything beneath the bristles, and Wren wasn’t accustomed to fights and sarcasm. She knew working with this woman would be hard; she knew, too, that the money would be good, and it would give her time to do what she needed to in the evenings. She considered the offer, and she tugged at the end of the over-large shirt with carelessly graceful fingers. “For this to work, Eve,” she finally said, “you have to stop fighting me.” It was candid and open, as Wren always was, but it was also the truth. Eve’s jaw set, the way of marble and the way of people with a great deal to lose by risking a way of working that had done what was necessary for a long time. Her eyes, cool and green and hooded, turned away from Wren and toward the scattered paraphernalia of a life lived that could be picked up and put down again, run out on if the worst happened. Wren’s body movements were easy enough to read, but Wren was easy enough to read. All softness and delicacy, a delicacy not so much learned as part of her. Too easily broken, too easily bruised -- a different path taken in life from a similar situation no doubt, but there had never been a question of them going the same way. Working with Wren would be a constant battle: to be allowed the comfort of distance and of privacy, of some things kept closed off and apart because that was how they should be. Wren didn’t close things off at all, it was there, easily found behind non-existent security systems. Anyone could slip in and steal from her, no need for skill. She turned back, and the expression in the green eyes was inscrutable. “I’m not you, Wren. I fight. You persuade people it’s their idea and you make them like you, and I’d guess you’ve been doing that as long as you’ve been alive. That’s,” she sketched a hand in the hair, almost helpless. Alien? Street gangs pounced on weakness, worried away at them until you were nothing, bottom of the pecking order. The first meeting was a fight, a trading of blows and if you could get up and keep going, you were worth something. The men Eve knew did not touch women with soft hands and worshipping eyes, there was no poetry to it. She’d never wanted it. She’d scorned it. She looked at Wren with bright-hard eyes and she lifted her chin, all angles and defiance and said, “I’ll play nicely.” It was insolent and pert, with an undercurrent there of being all she could manage, all Eve knew how to be, too raw and too skinned of defenses to do anything but want some back. It was a promise, and Eve kept those. Wren watched what was happening behind Eve’s eyes. She knew this was going to be difficult, a challenge, something near impossible. But if it worked, it was worth it, and Wren was accustomed to doing hard things to accomplish things that mattered. It was, after all, what she did every night of her life. She nodded. She didn’t ask how much Eve was going to pay, and she didn’t haggle price. “I’ll help you figure it out, but you have to let me help you reel them in. At least at first.” She didn’t add that she was better at it, that she could win an old, rich man over with a smile and a kiss to his cheek; she didn’t have to. No, they both knew that. Wren coaxed and persuaded and the money was in her hands easily. Eve battled and the proceeds were hard won and a victory, a triumph over something. Eve laid down the invitations, the envelopes addressed almost to the wrong woman, and looked at Wren, all matter-of-fact and business. “You have an hourly rate or a flat fee? You have a place,” one like the Taj Mahal for a tiny rani and Eve could picture it. There was probably one or two things worth the taking in amongst the fripperies but Wren could make herself look like a jewel and likely other things in need of polishing look worth more. “But if I’m taking up time then those are clients you miss and if there’s added expenses you usually have paid, you’ll need those covered.” The conversation was caught -- between helping and between business and it slyly hovered between the two. “And you’ll be out in the evenings, of course.” Without any emotion whatsoever, but an acknowledgment. Wren’s business wasn’t changing and Eve wasn’t questioning it. Wren acknowledged the tiptoed line, and she was quiet as she considered it, as she considered challenging it, considered staying quiet. It was work, not a handout. Honest work, and she’d ensure she did eight hours of it a day, a real job for a change, something useful. She looked down at her hands, watched her fingers pluck at fabric and memories, and then she looked up at Eve’s face. “You’re wilier than I thought,” she said simply, with a little bit of respect in the statement. She didn’t give Eve a chance to answer. Instead, she nodded slowly. “Do you have a plan in place?” she asked, because she spent enough time on the arms of businessmen to know that Eve needed one, “or do we want to win someone over to handle that for us as our first job?” She looked around the apartment, crinkling her nose a little. “Does the one in Aubade look like this?” she asked, no criticism in it; just curiosity about how much work was to be done. “I need someone to handle it,” Eve agreed, and she picked up the vodka glass now, and poured another measure, but she swirled the liquid in the glass rather than drinking it quickly. It dulled the onset of the night’s demand just a little, enough to eek out a few more hours. “First job.” The smile that came with the remark was small but satisfied; her ways of doing things and Wren’s might be different, but there were some odd similarities down the line. People weren’t Eve’s forte but they unlocked with a little patience. She just didn’t have much to spare. And then the smile curved a little wider, and she watched Wren’s expression and downed the glass, half-laughing. “No. It looks like a seventy year old gay man died in it,” she said honestly. The Aubade home was full of fripperies and china, statues and artwork that presumably had value but were nothing more than clutter. If it had been more masculine, more stripped back, perhaps she’d have contemplated living in it. As it was -- “The bedroom has cherubs.” Eve managed to register abject disgust at this. Wren watched the liquid swirl in Eve’s glass for a full minute, quiet and thoughtful. “Let’s try a week, and we’ll see how many times you fire me between now and then,” she said finally. “If it sticks, we can talk salary.” She sounded grown up, mature, and it was very much how she handled her pricier clients. Once Wren worked for you, things changed, she changed. But Eve would learn that as they went (assuming she could slip into that role with the woman across from her). “What do you want to begin with?” she asked. “The apartment, etiquette or the business plan? Or a few hours of each per day?” Her hands were crossed on her lap, and she was attentive. “The apartment is a place to deliver mail,” Eve was dismissive. As far as homes went, this one, with all its collective rubbish and mess was hers. It suited her, in a way the opulence and formality of the Aubade didn’t. Even if the floorspace were greater, it felt more like a cage than Hamartia ever could -- too close to being part of the roughness that made up humanity than the Aubade ever let its residents feel. “It’s a hunk of real estate I’m not able to pass on. Un-- Stephen,” she corrected, because the connection was too difficult to explain, properly, “Liked to play God.” Stringing out dreams of something bigger, better and then letting go of them as soon as the going got rough. “I want to turn the thing over to you to fix up -- see if I can actually spend more than half an hour in there without wanting to throw things.” More than one or two of Stephen’s objects had been smashed in a temper-tantrum. “So a few hours of learning and then you can deal with that mausoleum. No Taj Mahal, though.” Eve was not a would-be rani, and she certainly didn’t look like it. “It needs to be more than a place to deliver mail,” Wren said, her voice non-confrontational, very intentionally so. “You have to be yourself in the space, Eve, if you want it to work.” She looked around the apartment, which was as hard and cobbled together as the barriers of the woman across from her. “But, yes, we’ll do a few hours of etiquette in the morning - not here, other places. Do you have a key to the Aubade apartment? And a credit account you’d like me to use?” Soft, polite, submissive. She smiled; maybe she could do this. Eve looked at her, and it felt almost as though she could see the kid-gloves being drawn on. She uncurled, the empty glass left on the table-top and from a drawer in the kitchen, (amid various pieces of kitchen equipment and more than a few pieces of weaponry for jobs that were a little harder) produced a key. It was on a more ornate key-ring than most, heavy and embossed and clearly both expensive and personalized -- it was an ‘E’, but woven into a design that made it less obtrusively so. That, and a wad of cash, dropped into Wren’s lap. “No credit account until I can get it sorted, but I’m assuming the ordinary kind of money is just fine?” A careless question, but one made so, rather than without thought. Eve hadn’t held a bank account until the last month or two and now she had five. “You’ll need someone to manage your finances,” Wren said simply, and she took the money and the key and stood. “I’ll see you tomorrow at 11?” she asked, she didn’t tell, deferring to Eve’s desires. She looked at Eve’s clothes with an open sort of perusal. “Can I look at your closet?” she asked, because she wanted to know if Eve had suitable clothing for the place she was thinking of taking her. “I have someone. Multiple someones. I just don’t know much about it beyond the paperwork yet.” Eve’s words burned on the edge of frustration, a mountain of work to understand what had taken her pseudo-uncle a lifetime to build up, and had been a passion. “Bank accounts god knows where, investments -- but they’re assholes about it.” By which she meant, they looked at her like a piece of dog-crap carried in on the bottom of a very expensive shoe; surprised, displeased but to remark on it would be to call attention to the wearer of the shoe, so they refrained. The looks were enough. “You won’t find much.” The bedroom of the apartment was a smaller room; mattress with rumpled sheets on the floor, and a book folded in amongst the muddle of well-beaten-up pillows and white cotton. It looked used, and it looked as though transient had become something more well-established and then Eve (who had led the way) opened the chest of drawers further and let Wren look, hanging back. It was a little like seeing what made up Eve herself: a lot of well-worn tee-shirts and tanks, a leather jacket with the sleeves half-shredded but hung up against the back of the door (there was no closet) with the kind of care given an expensive dress. A couple of pairs of leather pants, tighter than paint, and a lot of very simple underwear, nothing frivolous or expensive. It was pared down, the kind of ongoing wardrobe that made sense for a thief and someone who had very little money. Pairs of jeans entangled on the floor with a shirt or two and then hung against the back of a kitchen chair, the dress Wren had seen at the auction and a business shirt and tight pencil skirt and stockings draped across the top, a pair of red-soled shoes kicked off below. Wren ‘s fingers flipped through the clothes as if they were pages in a book that defined her new employer, and then she looked around the room a moment, stepping back and using it as something to learn by. She did that with johns, she looked. Then she walked back out to the main room, the key and the money in her hand. “Tomorrow needs to be about clothing,” she told Eve, and then she reached and ran her fingers through Eve’s dark hair, no permission asked for, the touch gentle and delicate. “The salon too.” She nodded, as if she’d just made a very important decision, and then she smiled warmly. “Permission to be excused for the evening?” Eve moved back, instinctive and quick -- out of range, but she didn’t react to the touch so much as the words. Taking on someone else, whether it be as something to watch out for or as an employee, was a new thing and an onerous one. She looked at Wren, all deliberate softness now and folded her arms, stood there barefooted in amongst what was so very much her space and just looked back, sharp eyes and frown. She liked her hair. “I don’t give permission. You show up when you show up and you leave when you like. I’ve never asked permission in my life and I sure as shit am not going to start commanding you around.” Blunt, in the way of things, but the same almost brutal honesty that had made up much of the conversation. “If you want to go, go.” But for all its angles, it wasn’t cold, nor dismissive. It just was. Wren looked at her, but she did not argue. A week, they’d see how they did. She nodded, and then she ducked out the door and into the hall, a feeling of exhaustion coursing through her at the upcoming battle. A week. |