by Robin Hale
Gifted with an active imagination, it didn’t take long for my mind to fill in the blanks on that image. She’d be lying among my sheets — new ones, that would highlight the contrast between her body and the covers. Naked and unselfconscious about it, perhaps blindfolded? A rush of heat thrummed beneath my skin at the thought. Yes, blindfolded. She’d like that. It would make her feel less like I expected her to do something in particular. Might convince her that I wanted to touch her and that being allowed to do that was plenty.
I indulged in a single shiver, letting the waves of desire and anticipation roll down my spine before I snagged the jewelry box from the counter and headed toward the door. There was no reason to put it off. Very little had changed, really. And if Molly Fawn were worried about my loyalties, surely a gift wouldn’t go amiss.
IF IT WEREN’T for the fact that I knew my particular brand of fitness was unusual in the area — after all, Opal City didn’t have so much as a climbing gym for someone to gain my knack for scrambling up and down vertical surfaces — I would be worried about the ease with which I could swing my body up onto the fire escape outside Fawn’s apartment. As it was, finding that the window was unlatched put a dopey grin on my face, and the sensation of the window sliding smoothly in its track felt like an invitation. A welcome mat put out just for me.
Molly Fawn was sitting on her couch, tucked against the arm where I’d perched and tangled my fingers in her hair, flirting shamelessly as I’d brought her my victory stealing back the atomizer. I’d brought it to her and waited like a loyal dog for a pat on the head and a fond smile. I’d have felt ridiculous about it — pathetic, even — if it hadn’t felt so damn good to see her relax and know that I had taken care of her problem.
“Good evening, Dr. Fawn,” I drawled from the window sill, my chest going warm at the way Molly’s head jerked up from her book to look at me. Her smile was blindingly bright but after a moment it seemed to…tremble.
I shook it off. If she didn’t want me there she was more than capable of saying so.
“Trouble in Opal City, Lana?” She asked and draped her arms over the edge of the couch.
“Can’t think what it would be since I’m here.” I laughed and crossed the room to her side. My boots were silent on the hardwood floor and the coffee table didn’t so much as creak when I settled my weight on it in a careful perch. I pulled the box from my pocket. “I’ve got something for you, by the way.”
A rush of nervousness overwhelmed me, even though I knew it was ridiculous. What could possibly be the disastrous outcome I was worried about? I wasn’t proposing marriage. I’d just gotten the lab genius a gift. It shouldn’t be anything to me if she decided she didn’t like it. The lie sat heavy in the center of my mind, pushing out all other thoughts until it soured even the smile on Fawn’s face.
“A gift?” Her warm brown eyes went wide and a renewed grin plucked at the corner of her mouth. Her features couldn’t seem to settle on showing excitement or worry over not being prepared.
“Don’t worry. You didn’t miss our anniversary,” I said with a rakish wink. “It just made me think of you, and I thought you’d like it.” I shrugged with a casualness I didn’t feel, hoping that the disconcerting roil of emotion was hidden from my face. What a shitty time to lose my nerve.
Fawn’s careful fingers, trained for years in the intricacies of manipulating the human body, swept over the box like she was looking for a vulnerability. Was she afraid she might break it? Or was she worried that this was all a long con, and I was waiting until this moment to spring the pressure-loaded dart that would distribute poison into her system and allow all of my evil plans to come into fruition?
Hopefully it was the former.
I was so on edge that the sound of the hinged lid popping open nearly startled me off of my seat on the coffee table.
“Oh, Lana,” Molly whispered, and I felt those words like the stroke of fingertips down my spine. She lowered the box to rest on her lap and trailed a reverent touch along the edge of the pendant.
The silence grew in weight and importance as I let it stretch on, and it wasn’t long before I had to break it for my own sanity.
“I have a fondness for mined stones, myself,” I began, and the words poured out of my mouth like a leaky faucet, a spitting stream that I couldn’t stop. “But I thought, given your profession, you might appreciate the artistry and science behind hydrothermally grown sapphires. They mimic the conditions under which natural sapphire is formed. They’re chemically identical.” I shifted forward, eyes locked on Fawn’s face, which was tilted down at the box. She’d been staring at the pendant for eons. Surely she would say something soon? “I found an artist in Arizona, one who grows her own rough and facets the result, and she was able to develop this particular shade of padparadscha sapphire for me.” I hesitated, stumbling over the words spilling out of my mouth and fighting how thoroughly I was tipping my hand. “It’s exactly the color of your lips, you see. That lovely, dark rose gold.” My voice was whispery, soft, barely holding up under the weight of everything unsaid that pressed in around it.
“It’s beautiful,” Molly said at long last. Her finger traced the rose gold chain that suspended the pendant, the finely wrought golden basket that supported the precision-faceted gem. But there was something sad in her voice, something that didn’t quite match the appreciative statement.
“But…?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to. I kept the bitter edge from the word through sheer force of will.
“I just don’t think I can accept it.” The words were a swift blow to an unprotected gut. “I don’t know how I would explain where I got it.” That lovely face was painted with a deepening flush. Discomfort and worry quickly replaced the obvious pleasure Fawn had shown at the sight of her gift.
“Explain? Why should you have to explain it to anyone?” I leaned back on the coffee table, deliberately relaxing my posture. It was an old trick, practically a reflex whenever I felt threatened. Did I feel threatened? I could feel the tension gathering around my spine, the impulse to pounce, to leap to my feet and prowl. This wasn’t going at all how I had hoped. “Besides, if anyone asks, it was a gift from your lover.”
Fawn’s face was a wash of emotions, moving so quickly that I could barely interpret them before the mix changed. White teeth sank into the edge of her lower lip, and all at once, the turmoil stilled. “I just mean…if the Captain were to ask, or…or someone at the lab, I wouldn’t want to make anyone think that I should be helping them bring you in —”
It rang hollow in the air between us, and I felt the cold shift of a bladed word slipping between my ribs. Of course. The Captain. Of course she didn’t want to have to tell him that she had a lover, or that it was me. Why had I thought she might be happy to wear something I’d given her? Its value was mostly sentimental, mostly in the relationship that existed — or that I thought had existed — between Fawn and myself.
No one would have asked her. It was ludicrous to think that they might.
But I wouldn’t demand that she keep it. I hadn’t lost quite enough of my pride for that.
“Well if you don’t want it,” I began, coiling to my feet and sidling back toward the window as casually as I could pretend. “You can donate it someplace. Don’t worry,” the words were barbed, scathing, and I couldn’t stop myself. “I didn’t steal it. I had it made for you, and the artist was perfectly happy with the price.”
A frown twisted Fawn’s face but I couldn’t bring myself to feel too badly about it. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“No,” I agreed. “Of course not. You meant that you’d be embarrassed to be seen with it, and I suppose I shouldn’t object too strenuously. After all, I did go so very far out of my way to hide who I was from you when we met.” My shoulders were wracked with tension. If I were a cat my fur would be standing all on end. As it was, there was only the scowl on my face to warn Fawn off, no dangerously twitching tail to be seen.
Fawn’s face
went red, but not in the delightfully flushed, pleased and embarrassed way I’d come to relish. No, she looked frustrated. Angry. Her face was a mirror for the churn of emotions in my own chest, and I was glad of it. I didn’t want to be the only one going under, but even I knew that was a terrible impulse. She rose from the couch, filled with at least some of that terrible restlessness that I felt. I made my way toward the window.
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” she said angrily. “I didn’t — do you realize this is out of nowhere? I’ve had enough of being…of being jerked around by women who know what they’re doing, okay? If I didn’t react exactly the way you wanted, I’m sorry Lana, but what am I supposed to think when you show up out of the blue — from a dead silence — with a gift like this?”
“Clearly the only explanation is something nefarious. Clever of you to realize it, Dr. Fawn.” The title dropped from my lips dripping with bitter sarcasm. “It couldn’t be that I wanted to make you smile, where’s the score in that?”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was an idiot and I’d told myself all along that this was the way things would turn out. She wanted a hero, and I couldn’t even fault her for that. Not really. Not when I was calm and rational and not feeling like I’d taken one of Colossal’s fists to the solar plexus.
“I guess I’ve stopped being entertaining for you, then,” Fawn’s jaw was set, her voice as waspish as I’d ever heard it. It struck me, then, just how reserved Fawn’s demeanor usually was. She had kept her cool the night we first met, and at the bank. She’d not withered for an instant under my stare when she showed up on my door. But then — the pendant I’d brought for her forgotten in her clenched hand — we saw each other past our breaking points. “Not dancing the right tune, am I? Well, I’m sorry I’ve grown so dull, Lana. How can you expect that I would want the Captain to know about…about whatever this was, when I’m obviously just something you were amusing yourself with?” Her voice was soft, the sort of deadly quiet that usually precipitated sirens and violence, in my not inconsiderable experience.
The verbal blow found its mark and I reeled. My lungs were too tight, my mind swirling with too many half-formed ideas even as something inside me roared at the unjust accusation. How could she think that of me? “One of us is clearly ashamed of this association, darling,” I said quietly. “But it isn’t me.”
I tore my eyes away from Dr. Fawn. I didn’t want to look anymore, couldn’t stand to see her holding my idiotic gift in one hand and the shredded remains of my pride in the other. It was three strides to the window and then I lost myself in the bunching of my muscles as I pulled myself to the rooftops. I buried the chaos in my brain in adrenaline as I landed rolls and slides along narrow ledges, in the burning of my lungs as I ran and leapt faster, faster, fast enough that I could get away from the cloying ache that filled my chest and would sink me to the bottom of the lake if I let it catch up to me.
I’d been right all along.
23
MOLLY
There was nothing quite like the sting of impending tears. Nothing like the way a throat tightened, skin went heated and red, and lungs practically convulsed themselves out of the chest. I held my composure together for moments, scarce moments after Lana’s — no, the Silhouette’s leather-clad body slipped from my window into the night. And then I gave into the desperate need to sob.
The sounds were quiet, nearly silent, but they wracked my body like I was riding a wooden rollercoaster. What a mess it all was! I sucked in several lungfuls of air even as hot tears stung my cheeks. My glasses clattered across the coffee table where I flung them aside.
It wasn’t until I felt the edge of the velvet-lined, leather-wrapped jewelry box pressing a sharp corner against my cheek that I realized I still clutched the Silhouette’s gift in my hand. I stared down at the box, almost not comprehending. Had everything really gone so wrong over…over that? Over the course of just a few minutes?
I sagged onto the couch, falling back against the cushions and swallowing to try and keep the tears from flowing. I hated how easily I cried. Anger, happiness, sadness, it didn’t seem to matter. A particularly moving commercial, an impassioned debate, actual grief…as long as the feeling was intense, I would find myself struggling to contain my tears. It was deeply frustrating. It tended to make people take me less seriously, as though I were a child or too emotional to be rational.
It was little comfort that I had contained my tears until after the Silhouette had left.
The jewelry box met the top of the coffee table with a quiet thud, the weight of the box demonstrating just how high end a jeweler the Silhouette had found for her gift. Looking at it wrenched my chest in multiple directions. As far as I could recall — and my recall for those things was pretty good — Jenna had never given me a gift. We’d managed to be ‘off again’ around the time of my birthday, we’d dodged holidays like dogs running through traffic. And Jenna was not the sort of person who would have picked up a gift because she felt like it, or because the object made her think of me.
And then there was the Silhouette. The sapphire glinted in the lamplight of my living room like sunlight along a stream, twinkling and coaxing colors from within the stone. It was gorgeous. Marvelous. And made in a lab? The care she’d taken to connect her gift to what she believed would impress me specifically, would connect to my appreciation of the world specifically…it was staggering.
Fuck.
I pressed the heels of my hands hard against my eyes.
The first niggling of guilt slipped through the pain tightening my throat. There’d been nothing. Only my sad attempt at getting in touch with Lana. But otherwise? Complete silence. It was hard not to feel that I had been under punishment for the way I’d jumped outside Core Labs, despite my apology. And then a gift? One unignorable, one completely devastating in both planning and impact…and it wasn’t like I wore much jewelry. My friends, my coworkers…they’d know.
I shifted in my seat and bit my lower lip. All right, so they might not know who had given it to me. I wasn’t quite so paranoid as to think that it would take a single glance at that necklace for someone to realize that I’d spent sufficient time in the Silhouette’s bed to want to live there.
But it was unusual enough that they’d ask. They’d be polite about it, genuinely curious the way people are with the ones they care about. ‘Oh,’ they’d say. ‘How lovely! Where did you get that?’ And I’d have found myself scrambling for an explanation that wasn’t ‘Despite my years of service for Captain Colossal, I’m madly in love with the city’s most notorious thief.’
The thought slammed into my chest with all the force of a freight train, no super-strength to slow it down.
Oh god. Oh no.
‘In love’
I was in love. The trepidation I’d felt at Lana pulling away, the desperate desire I had to wear that necklace, to sleep in it, to shower in it, to constantly wear the mark of Lana’s affection for me, the way I was afraid she’d grow bored of me in time — how could I have thought it meant anything else? And the way I feared for her safety, the way I’d chosen her over the Captain when he’d asked for my help…it was all suddenly, terribly clear.
I was in love with the Silhouette.
The tears that had abated sprang once again to my eyes. My skin went hot, my throat tight, and a hysterical trill of laughter bubbled up in my chest to erupt horribly from my mouth. When had I lost control of my feelings for her? When had it all gotten so terribly out of hand?
It wasn’t difficult to pinpoint, not really.
I should have realized when Lana retrieved the atomizer. It was obvious when I couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering alone. It was in every aborted statement, every half-formed phrase I’d wanted to utter about how Lana would feel about something I was seeing, or what Lana would have thought of a particular problem in my lab. It was in the way my thoughts ran to her first, no matter what had happened.
Lana’s words echoed in my head. ‘One
of us is ashamed of this association, and it isn’t me.’
Were they true? Was I ashamed of her?
I probably should’ve been. I should’ve been, but I wasn’t. I was blown away by her. I was floored by her grace, her smile, her quick wit and her sharp tongue. I was helpless against the way she noticed things about me, the quiet way she would make sure that things were just the way I’d like them. How could I not love her for the way she’d relieved me of my anxiety, even in her bed? The way she’d touched me like pleasing me pleased her? And how had I gone so long without knowing that was something that I could find in the world?
And I knew, I knew that I was supposed to weigh all of that against the fact that she was a thief and find that her lawlessness mattered more. But it didn’t. How could it? She stole well-insured luxury items from the wealthiest people in Opal City — barring that one, temporary theft of a publicly owned fire opal, of course. How could I bring myself to consider that more important than the way she looked at me like I was exactly the person she wanted to see?
A heaving sob built in my chest, and as it grew, I felt the horrible certainty that if I let it out, it would tear me to pieces.
I couldn’t call Jade, couldn’t curl up on my couch with a pint of ice cream and let out my frustrations to my best friend the way I had after Jenna and I broke up. How could I, when I’d been using Jenna as a shield to defend myself against ever being vulnerable again?
I’d been looking for Lana to be like Jenna, and so that was all I had seen.
Fuck.
She didn’t deserve it, and neither did I. But what could I do? She’d left. Quite reasonably, she’d left and she wouldn’t be coming back. And I couldn’t bring myself to bemoan my misfortune when I knew it was my fault. I needed a distraction. I needed…I needed a puzzle to solve. Something to fix.
I cast around for open questions in my projects at the lab, tried to determine which pieces I could expand further, which I could justify the extra effort on. Images of the cork board in my office, covered in newspaper clippings and string, swam in front of my eyes and I knew that would do.