by Holley Trent
When they didn’t respond, positively or otherwise, she turned and saw the two shooting death glares at each other from either side of the bed. They probably hadn’t even heard her, and she wasn’t going to concern herself with whatever they were mentally bandying. Her imagination didn’t have to be particularly spectacular to guess what they were saying to each other.
Sighing, she closed the door and reached for the shower knobs. What was she going to do with the two of them? Leaving them to work it out on their own would likely end with spilled blood and, depending on the winner, possibly some political fallout. The last thing Tess needed was more skepticism from the splinter groups or a rift within the Afótama. Things had been running smoothly until she came along.
Wasn’t that her life, though? She had the magic touch when it came to fucking shit up.
She shucked off her nightshirt and stuck her arm beneath the shower spray to check the temperature.
The door behind her creaked open and she nearly jumped out of her skin. She grabbed one of the fluffy monogrammed towels from the rack and threw herself away from the opening.
“Calm down, sweetheart. It’s just me.” Harvey slipped into the steamy room and leaned his butt against the counter. “Didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Tess put her hand to her chest and took a few deep breaths. When she could no longer hear her elevated pulse in her ears, she tightened the towel around her chest. “It’s all right. I forgot to lock it. Nadia doesn’t come in anymore when she hears the water, and I fell out of the habit.”
“I was sitting right outside, Tess. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you.” He rubbed his eyes and sighed. “And I hate to admit it, but I doubt Paul Bunyan out there would, either.”
“Good to know my gut feeling isn’t completely bogus,” she muttered. Louder, she said, “The door-locking isn’t a rational thing.” She pulled the shower curtain around her and dropped the towel to the floor before stepping over the tub side. “It’s just an ingrained response. If I go into a small space, I lock the door behind me. I can’t have someone walking in, or it triggers…” She stepped under the spray of water and let it drench her hair.
“Triggers what, Tess?”
Eyes closed, she patted the shelf for the familiar shape of her shampoo bottle. “I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”
He was silent a while, and then Tess heard him shifting against the counter. “I won’t push you. I do wonder what happened to you, though. Don’t mistake my respect of your wishes for aloofness. You’ve never wanted to talk about those things that made you so squirrelly as a kid, and that scares me because my imagination runs wild and I think awful things. I don’t want to think those things happened to you and that you didn’t tell anyone.”
Oh, she’d told everyone she was supposed to tell. They just hadn’t done anything about it. “Don’t mess up a good thing,” they’d said. “Make this one stick,” they’d said.
Maybe one day she could lay everything bare for Harvey, but she couldn’t guess when. The wounds were still too fresh to rip open. Besides, she didn’t want him pitying her, even though she was long overdue for some. She needed someone to feel sorry for her so she could go ahead and fall apart. She hoped that once she put herself back together, the new her would be stronger.
She cleared her throat and tried to put a little sunshine into her voice. “Did you need something, darlin’?”
“I like it when you call me darlin’, but give me a minute to remember what it was, will you?”
She couldn’t help but to laugh as she lathered her hair. Goodbye to all that mouse and hairspray. There were probably a few bobby pins left in there, too. Detangling was going to be a motherfucker, and she didn’t even have time to do it. Maybe she’d do it on the plane. Queen’s prerogative.
“While it’s on my mind,” Harvey said, “you do know I’ve seen you naked, right?”
The draft against her wet backside warned her that he was seeing it again, whether she liked it or not. She squashed the compulsion to turn around and face him, because a view of her ass was a lesser evil than a full-frontal display.
“What you did see, you saw in the dark.” Her fingers caught on one of those missing pins and she flicked it onto the soap dish.
“You confuse me. You go from being this irresistibly bold siren, to this shy, overly conscious thing who obviously has a skewed perception of how she looks.”
“Are you suggesting I seek therapy?” She dipped her head under the water again and watched the shampoo suds flow down her body to the tub floor.
“Of course not. I don’t want any shrink, whether they be Afótama or outsider, knowing that much about you.”
Good thing, because she didn’t need therapy. She always knew the reasons for her reactions, even if she lacked the will to change anything. She’d been withdrawn with Harvey and more daring with Ollie because one knew her too well, and the other, she had nothing to lose with. Ollie knew very little about her, and he’d had only a first impression to judge her by. He didn’t know about all the baggage. Harvey knew too much. He could probably read her body like a history book if she let him get close enough. Both men were appealing, yet not, because of what they knew and didn’t know.
“Are you always going to hide from me?” His voice was a whisper now, and she wouldn’t even turn to look at him.
“I don’t want to. No.”
“Then that’s good enough for now. Listen, I came in here to see how you felt about both me and Ollie flying with you to Santa Fe. It seemed a ridiculous scenario to me, but Ollie insists that it’d make more sense if we both go. Right now, no one outside of this building knows anything about your consort selection. If both of us go, people won’t assume that it’s either of us. They know me to be your friend, and they’ll think that big fucker is your bodyguard. He says the fair thing would be for us to have equal access to you until…”
“Yes, until.” He didn’t need to say it. She patted behind her for the conditioner bottle, still not turning.
“Does that suit you?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does. Don’t misjudge my restraint, sweetheart. I’m a man with a sizable ego. I’d like nothing better than for you to put your foot down and tell him it ain’t happening because you’re with me.”
She sighed. “You know I can’t.”
“I do know. That’s why I’m trying to be civil. Usually, that’s easier for me.”
“Come now, you’re not really trying that hard,” came a deeper voice from just the other side of the doorway.
Now Tess did turn around. Growling, she swatted Harvey’s hand away from the curtain, and shouted, “Fuck, get out!”
“You heard her,” Harvey said.
“I’m talking to both of you. Unless you want to hit that light switch and turn on some music, that is. This bathroom isn’t really big enough for a full-bore orgy, but as long as one of you doesn’t move too much—”
The door closed.
Tess grinned and turned up the heat on the water. They were probably out there thumping their chests at the very insinuation they should be in a room together at the same time with their clothes off.
She didn’t realize her hands were inching closer and closer to her sex as she thought of them. Her chaste cuddling with Ollie had left her unfulfilled, and any opportunity they would have had for an erotic good-morning had been dashed by Harvey and Nadia.
“Could have sworn we’d locked that door.” She threw her head back as she worked her fingers over her clit, her pussy clenching around nothing.
With a good night’s sleep and last night’s stressful social torture put behind her, climbing onto that big hunk of man for a good morning ride would have been the perfect way to start the day. And she just knew he’d be so gentle…until she begged him not to be.
“Mmm.” She slipped two fingers between her folds and rocked on them as if they were her big Viking’s—
The pounding on the do
or made her yank her hand free and reach for the curtain. “Shit, is there a fire?” She stepped out, grabbed a towel from the rack, and unlocked the door.
Harvey pushed the door in. His tan skin bore an unusually red flush and his breath came out in shallow pants.
She knotted the towel at her breasts and pushed her soggy hair out of her eyes. “What happened? Did he try to kill you?”
Now she noticed Ollie in the doorway, too, and he looked equally aggrieved.
“Tell me!”
Ollie’s gaze trailed down her body and stopped in the general vicinity of her pussy. “When you…when you do what you must have been doing a minute ago, you transmit your arousal on broadband.”
“To just you two, or…”
Harvey groaned. “Probably, but does it matter? What the fuck were you just thinking about?”
Chagrined, she rocked back on her heels and crossed her arms. “A dick in each major orifice. I guess we’re short one.”
Harvey blanched, but Ollie, after a moment, laughed, and walked away adjusting himself.
Harvey spun her around, gave her a sharp swat to the bottom, and nudged her back toward the shower. “You deserve that and more. Rinse the conditioner out of your hair and quit torturing the peons or, queen or not, I’ll bend you over my knee.”
She wriggled her ass at him and grinned over her shoulder. “You promise?”
The glint in his eye before he reversed over the threshold said, Yes, I most certainly do.
She closed the door and locked it case he decided to return, then rubbed her thighs together hoping to distract from her sex’s continued emptiness. “They’re going to drive me insane.”
She stepped back into the shower and immediately yelped. The fucking water had gone cold. “Somehow, this is all their fault,” she muttered and quickly rinsed her hair.
Delicate laughter floated into the room, and Tess forced her stinging eyes open and pulled the curtain back.
No one was there.
She turned off the water and poked her head out slowly, scanning the room for unaccounted-for air vents. Maybe there was some ductwork that tread into staff workspace downstairs, not that she liked that idea at all, because if she could hear them, they could hear her.
“No, no, look inward, not around,” came the voice.
It was in her head, but not. When Afótama communicated telepathically, their words boomed in her head the same as if they were speaking with their voices. But the voice in the bathroom was half in, and half out of her head. It was sort of a whisper that wasn’t spoken beside her ear, but just inside it.
“We should speak more often so you know my voice.”
“Ótama.” Relief freed the tight band around Tess's lungs, and she sucked in a calming breath. She wrapped a towel around her body and sat on the open toilet seat. “I thought you couldn’t talk to me anymore.”
“Close your eyes. Come to me. I can not come to you.”
“Where are you?”
“On the ship, silly. Where else would I be?”
“Of course.” Tess closed her eyes, waited a minute for a spark of intuition, and then gave up. “I’m not exactly sure how I should come to you.”
“You are connected to all Afótama queens going back to me. Can you feel it?”
“I don’t know what I feel. I feel…so much of everything. It’s because of Ollie, I think.”
“Yes, because of Oliver. Speak quietly or your men will pound down the door. That will not do.”
“Nope, it wouldn’t.” They probably thought she had enough missing marbles as it was, and they were being kind enough to hide that condition from the world.
“Just imagine our network as a mighty web in which each silk is a ladder rung you may climb on. Climb back from one queen to the next until you find me.”
“You just made that up, didn’t you?”
“It is that obvious?”
“Yes.”
“Try anyway. What you construct in your mind in your realm becomes real in mine. Our mental playgrounds merge. Hurry. We are short on time.”
Tess drew in a deep breath to center herself. There was no harm in trying, silly as the exercise sounded. She didn’t really know what she was capable of. Ótama had said that each queen’s gifts were different. Tess still didn’t know what hers were.
She closed her eyes and imagined a giant web. In her mind, it was made of rope and stretched up as far as the eye could see at a forty-five degree incline. She grasped tentatively at a section at eye-level and found it shockingly solid. It was real in the in-between realm, and she’d constructed it.
Maybe I do have a little magic, after all.
Planting her foot into a lower rung, she began climbing.
She climbed aimlessly, as there seemed to be no end in sight, and risked a look down. Instead of the bathroom she’d left her physical form in, there was a frightening void. Pitch-black nothingness.
“What kind of unholy shit…”
Ótama’s laughter filled her head again. “Look up, not down. The way back will be easy to discern when you are ready to seek it. You are not trapped in here the way I am.”
Tess pulled her gaze from the swirling darkness at her feet, and looked toward the heavens and, thankfully, there Ótama was. She leaned over the side of her longship and extended a hand to Tess.
“Come on up.”
Tess grabbed hold of her and climbed up into the boat, panting more from stress than from exertion.
“What just happened?” Maybe there once really had been a kid named Jack who climbed a giant beanstalk…in his head. Trippy psychic shit would explain the appalling fuckery of most medieval fairy tales. Comatose princesses being kissed awake by princes, ladies using their long hair as rope ladders…the list went on and on. If it had all been in some psychic’s head, then anything was possible.
Ótama clapped her hands excitedly. “Oh, I could not have predicted it, but this is perfect!”
“What’s perfect?” Tess wiped some seawater off the wood floor beside Ótama and sat.
“Harvey and Oliver. Individually, they are certainly impressive. You would be a proud queen for sure with either, but together—oh, you would be unstoppable.”
Tess stared slack-jawed at her ancestress. She’d be lying if she’d said she hadn’t given that any thought. She just had, in fact—right there in the shower.
“I told you I get only limited glimpses of what my descendants are doing, but this was a special time since your grandmother gave up her title last night. The gods afforded me a wider lens.”
“Just how much did you see?” Tess wondered if she could blush in The Playground. Implied sexuality was one thing, but giving a folks a front-row seat of the action? Hell nope.
Ótama flicked a dismissive hand. “Your era is full of concerning ideology about sex.”
“And yours wasn’t? I missed a lot of school as a kid, but to the best of my recollection, you guys were more or less monogamous.”
Ótama nodded, but the implicit “whatever you say, dear” was unmistakable.
Tess didn’t know how to respond.
“To be the most liberal of all of our queens to date, you certainly do not react the way I expect.”
“That liberalness has gotten me in a lot of trouble. I’m trying to clean up my act. I didn’t really have a warm-up period for this gig, you know, so I’ve had to quit a lot of bad habits cold turkey. Tell me how I should respond, and I’ll try to give you that the next time.”
Ótama canted her head and narrowed her eyes. “Who said you needed to clean up your act?”
“No one. I assumed it had to be done—that people would expect me to be upright and decent. I mean, I was overdue for the whole growing-up thing, anyway. I couldn’t be a delinquent all my life. Might as well make something of myself.”
“Do not minimize your past thinking that doing so will pave the way for your future, Contessa. Your unique experiences are what shape your gifts. Do you know how Vikin
gs got their names? They were based on distinguishing features and deeds. Erik the Red had red hair and a red beard. He also had a terrible temper, which most redheads are maligned for. Just ask your grandmother.” She chuckled. “His son, who gets credit for discovering your world”—she rolled her eyes—an action that was all Nan—“was Leif Erikson, son of Erik, obviously, but also Leif the Lucky. If you strive to be the queen who toes the line, you will be the queen not worth remembering. Be bold, Contessa, and see what name history will record for you.”
Tess’s chest puffed up at the challenge. When she was dead and gone, she wanted her legacy to be of the relatable queen that had been badly broken, but went on to do remarkable things. She didn’t have to be perfect to do her job.
“That is not why I summoned you here, however.”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Good. Then you should not act with surprise when I ask that you give serious thought to keeping both men.”
“You assume I would have a problem with it.”
“Do you not? Have you forgotten that I am the progenitor of your gifts and that I can glean your thoughts?”
Burn. Tess put up her hands. “I think this time, you’re misreading me. Hell, it would take two men to put up with all my bullshit, and let’s be frank; they’re both winners of the genetic lottery. I’m vain enough to admit it. The problems with the arrangement, however, are that, first, neither of them seems interested in sharing. Second, most Afótama are far more conservative than I am, and probably won’t feel comfortable with me having two dudes. Third, society. Having two husbands is illegal in all fifty states, and probably Puerto Rico and American Samoa, too.”
Ótama shrugged. “Is your government’s idea of marriage the same as yours?”
“Not even a little bit.”
“Then keep the government out of your business.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Are you a cowering queen or a bold one?”
“Touché, granny.”
Ótama gave Tess’s arm a playful pinch. “If you want them both, you will figure out a way to keep them. It has been a very long time since our warriors have been called home. You need them as much as they need you. Oliver and all the other outliers—you need them to balance the group. You are not meant to evolve separately, but beside each other.”