by Kit Rocha
He snapped the door shut behind him, and Noelle let out a breath and tried to meet Lex's eyes without flinching. "You must all think I'm a ridiculous, naïve fool."
"Of course you are." Lex leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. "You're from the city. They won't let you be anything else."
No judgment, at least, and maybe even a little sympathy. "I tried to be something else. That probably makes me more of a fool."
"Only if you thought it'd work." Lex pulled a small etched silver case from her boot. "Not many rules. First one is, the group means more than anything. We survive because we stick together--no exceptions. If you join up, it won't be a free ride, but it'll be a good one."
Tend bar, clean house, or suck dick. Noelle stared down at her brightly patterned dress and traced a finger over one swirl. A dark craving dug its hooks into her as the fantasy formed, one where she wasn't responsible for the filthy things they commanded her to do. Surely it couldn't be a sin if she didn't have a choice. "I'd have to give them all sex?"
"Nope. You don't have to lay a finger on anyone, not if you don't want to. Get a job, work the club, whatever. The sex is a bonus, not an obligation."
Noelle was sick, twisted, because the only emotion she felt at hearing the words was vague disappointment--and crushing shame to cover it. "Oh. That's good."
Lex grimaced. "I thought you were into fornication. What a waste. Anyway, one of the runners managed to get his hands on some fertility drugs, and now he and his woman are having a baby. She used to wait tables at the club, so there's an open job there. Ever done that sort of thing?"
"No." Her mother would have slapped her hard enough to leave marks for a week if Noelle had breathed a word about working outside the house. "I can learn, though. I've read books about pre-Flare technology, and I'm a hard worker."
"Any dance lessons?"
Finally, a question she could answer in the affirmative. "From the time I was five."
"But none of them were on a pole, right?"
She shouldn't even know what the question meant. Pornography was every bit as illegal as liquor, but it was the only place in Eden to learn about a stripper pole. "No, not exactly."
Lex just nodded. "If you don't want to wait tables, we can show you a few things about stripping. There's a ton of credits in it. Not as much as the hardcore shows, though."
Surely she didn't mean... "Isn't that illegal?"
Lex paused in the act of lighting a cigarette, her lighter sparked and waiting. "Honey, you're not in Eden anymore. The only laws here are the ones Dallas hands down."
"I'm not in Eden anymore." The words hit her in the gut, stark and real, the first thing to come close to penetrating her creeping numbness. Her breath rattled out of her lungs, and she shuddered and fought to drag it back in. "I'm not--I'm not in Eden anymore."
"Oh shit." Lex tossed the unlit cigarette aside. "Hey, it's okay."
"No, I know." Noelle clutched at her silly dress and tried to force herself to breathe normally. She wasn't in Eden anymore, so she might as well avail herself of one of the advantages. "Can I have a drink?"
"No." Lex held up her hands. "I'm not an uptight bitch, but you were rolling pretty hard when you came in here. I don't want to accidentally kill you."
Of course. Stupid. Noelle closed her eyes. "You're right."
The other woman sighed. "Look, bottom line. No one's going to force you to do anything you don't want to do. You have to work, but you can keep all your clothes on while you do it. And don't fucking listen to Dallas--he won't set you out. Not if I ask him not to."
It was too much to process. The loss of everything Noelle had, everything she'd ever known, everything she was...and the tantalizing promise of freedom that made her want to hope when hope was an emotion she'd never learned how to feel. "I think I'm just overwhelmed, and maybe still fuzzy from whatever that man gave me."
"Then you need to rest." Lex crossed the room and pulled a pillow and a blanket out of the small closet by the bathroom. "Want something else to wear?"
Anything besides her fancy party dress. "A nightgown, maybe?"
"Uh, T-shirt?"
"All right." Noelle managed a smile. "No more layers and layers of modest clothing, I guess. That's a good thing, right?"
Lex handed her a folded bundle of white fabric. "It's whatever you make of it, honey. Whatever you want, it's all up to you."
What a terrifying thought. "The last time things were up to me, I got arrested."
"Then I guess it's all looking up from here, huh?"
"I hadn't thought of it that way." But maybe it was time she started.
Noelle woke in darkness, disorienting in and of itself. She blinked up at the empty space above her and tightened her fingers around the blankets as her heart tried to hammer its way out of her chest.
She wasn't in Eden, that much was certain. Her bedroom had too many sources of illumination--the glow of the display panels that controlled the brightness and temperature in her suite, the soft light from the computer screen embedded in her desk, even the moon and streetlights shining through her gauzy curtains. Her family might live in the penthouse, far above street level, but Eden was a city of light. Too many of her parents' generation remembered the years of darkness, after the solar storms had plunged the world into chaos and shadow.
Her mother had been afraid of the dark, but Noelle had never shared that anxiety. Still, she felt a twinge of it now as she wet her lips and spoke. "Lights, twenty percent?" She turned it into a question out of instinct, and her answer was more darkness.
No, no one out in the sectors would rely on computers for something pre-Flare technology could handle just fine with far less expense. Which meant she had to stumble out of bed and find a light switch. How deliciously uncivilized.
The cement floor was cool under her bare feet, and rough. No plush carpets softened the hard expanse, only a rug half hidden by the bed that had folded out of the couch. Noelle skirted the edge of the mattress with halting steps and blinked into the gloom, trying to make out the shapes around her.
She stumbled a little as she worked her way around the room, but eventually her questing fingers encountered a switch. Turning it on flooded the room with low, diffuse light, something that made everything visible enough but kept the corners shadowed and the room itself...intimate.
Or maybe it only seemed that way because of the bed. All of Lex's furniture was nice, but her bed dominated one side of the room, piled with sleek cushions and luxurious sheets that could have easily belonged in Noelle's bedroom back home. High quality, expensive--and utterly out of place surrounded by unadorned brick walls and cement floors.
There were four doors Noelle could see. One opened out into the hallway, and another she thought might be the closet. Hoping one of the remaining two led to a bathroom, she opened the one closest to her and found a treasure trove instead.
This second room was smaller and contained only a table and a pair of chairs. But the walls were covered in art--not the digital kind displayed on the enormous plasma screens currently popular in Eden, but pre-Flare masterpieces. Hypnotized, Noelle moved to stand in front of the closest painting, an Impressionist piece in a gilded frame.
This close, she could smell the slightly musty scent of the canvas and paint, could see the individual brushstrokes. She touched a faded red rose petal and marveled at the subtle ridges of the paint, three-dimensional and vivid in a way nothing in Eden was, not anymore.
Lex spoke sharply from the doorway. "That's probably older than anything you've ever owned. You might want to stop pawing it."
Noelle stumbled, shoving her hands behind her back as if that would change what was already done. "I'm sorry. I've never seen anything like it outside of textbooks. I was just--" What? Snooping? No explanation was adequate.
"Having a look around. I get it." Lex dropped her black knapsack in the corner and began to peel off the high-collared jacket she wore. "It was a gift. The Renoir, I mean."
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nbsp; Noelle tugged at the hem of her borrowed T-shirt, self-conscious about her bare legs. "It's beautiful. Priceless. Someone must think very highly of you."
The woman snorted and turned toward a small sliding door on the far wall. "It cost money. Some people have more of that than they know what to do with."
Lex seemed to be one of them. Noelle tried not to be nosy, but the open closet door revealed tangled piles of jewelry and sculptures mixed with electronics that must have been smuggled from the city at great cost. She even saw one or two sleek weapons--guns, honest-to-God guns, something she'd rarely seen within the walls of Eden, and never anywhere but in the hands of the military police.
Noelle turned her attention back to the painting, back to Lex's words. People--men--with more money than they knew what to do with. Eden had its share of those. More than its share. "I'm familiar with people like that. They think they can buy anything. Or anyone." And in her experience, they usually could.
"No, not--" Lex stowed her bag and faced Noelle. "You can't buy people here with money, especially women. You buy them with security, safety, all the things that have always been true in societies where men hold the power. But we hold power, too. Remember that--there are things we have, things we can offer. Things they need."
Noelle couldn't imagine that any of the men here gave a damn about the things she'd been raised and trained to do. Organizing and managing a household, hosting elaborate dinner parties where she smiled at important city leaders and used her mother's encyclopedic knowledge of their foibles and vanities to flatter them into agreeable moods.
Noelle gripped the hem of her shirt again. "I don't have much to offer the men here. Except..." If she couldn't even choke out the word, how was she supposed to offer them sex?
"Fucking is the least of it," Lex muttered. "Everyone has a couple of holes a guy can stick his dick in. The important stuff is all above the neck."
It felt like her entire body had flushed, but Noelle fought past self-consciousness. "What's the important stuff?"
"Using your brain, baby girl. There's nothing you need to know about anyone that you can't figure out in ten seconds flat." She beckoned. "Follow me."
Lex walked into the bedroom, flicked on another lamp on the nightstand and sat on the bed, crossing her legs. "Now--how do you get under my skin? What do I like?"
During the course of their acquaintance, Lex had shouted at Jasper, whose formidable presence weakened Noelle's knees, and had snapped just as viciously at Dallas O'Kane, a figure of criminal legend. Everyone in Sector Four lived or died by Dallas's whim--Lex had admitted as much when she'd said he made the laws here.
But she'd yelled at him, and she hadn't shown fear. Noelle sank to the edge of the bed and rubbed her fingers over the expensive duvet. She thought about the priceless art, the silken sheets and the closet full of valuables hidden away like a treasure instead of displayed proudly, the way her father's friends showed off the things they bought with their vast wealth.
"You like beautiful things, but you don't need them to make you feel important." She smiled a little shyly. "Maybe you have a soft spot for things that get thrown away."
Lex laughed. "The last part's true." Her amusement faded. "Dallas gave me the paintings."
Noelle wet her lips. "Are you and Dallas--" Did people marry in the sectors? In Eden, marriage was a sacrament, but nothing sacred was likely to survive in the slums. "--together?"
"What do you think? If he had me already, would he be dropping thousands on pretty presents to catch my eye?"
"Perhaps not." She tilted her head and regarded Lex, searching for the meaning beneath the words. "Is that the only power we have? Not being caught?" The thought turned Lex's blithe freedom into its own sort of cage.
"No. It's your first lesson." Lex brushed Noelle's hair back behind her ear. "It's not like in the city. Belonging to someone isn't the endgame, the point where they're allowed to get lazy. It's a beginning, one you have to be damn sure you want."
Her skin prickled under the other woman's touch. Not sexual arousal, not exactly, but a sensual pleasure she'd only begun to crave when she'd started spending time with people who violated the social taboo forbidding unnecessary physical contact.
"Thank you," she blurted out, leaning in to Lex's touch. "For convincing Dallas to give me a chance. I'll learn anything I need to learn. I can't go to the communes--they're even worse than Eden."
"You'd go if you had to, and you'd be all right. Trust me, honey. That is the important thing."
To Noelle's everlasting humiliation, her eyes burned. She blinked them twice before realizing there was no stopping it, then squeezed them shut as the first tear slipped free. "I didn't really think my family would throw me away. I only wanted to feel something. I know I was privileged, that I must seem like a spoiled city brat..." Her chest felt tight, as if all the weight of Eden's claustrophobic expectations were closing in on her again.
"Are you kidding me?" Lex pulled her into a hug and made soothing noises. "No offense, baby girl, but I wouldn't have had your life there for anything."
Her tears soaked Lex's shirt, but the answer was there, just beyond reach. "Why?" Noelle didn't even know what she was asking. Why wouldn't Lex want her life? Why hadn't it been enough for her? Why had she thrown it all away?
Lex answered them all with three words. "You weren't free," she said. "You can be here, you know. Dallas talks big about shit, but he's never forced a woman to do anything she didn't want. Remember that too, Noelle."
"I don't know what I want. I don't know anything."
"That's why you try things. Eventually, you stumble across the ones that make you happy." Lex kissed her cheek. "And you learn. Everything anyone tells you, file it away in that brain of yours."
She could do that. She'd always been mind-hungry, devouring everything in her parents' digital library before going so far as to learn how to circumvent tablet security to gain access to the more restricted titles, old books from a time before fear and morality had swallowed everything. "I'm good at remembering things."
Lex patted her back. "Go crawl in bed, honey. I'd let you stay in mine, but I don't think you really want to."
She rather did, and not just because the sheets would feel heavenly against her skin. Touching Lex meant having an anchor instead of being cast adrift in the darkness that would soon envelop the room.
But she'd already cried and laid her soul bare. Enough humiliation for one lifetime, let alone a single evening. She slipped from Lex's enormous bed and crawled back onto the lumpy mattress that folded out of the couch. "Can you help me find a job tomorrow?"
"We'll see, all right?"
It was as close to a promise as she was likely to get. Noelle settled her head against the pillow and closed her eyes, feeling more hopeful than she had in...forever, maybe. "Thank you, Lex."
The lamp clicked off, followed by the overhead lights. Clothing rustled in the darkness, and a light flared, illuminating the space closest to the couch. "Here," Lex murmured, setting the tiny round lamp on the end table near Noelle's head.
The glow was just enough to paint Lex's features in intriguing shadows, but not so bright that it would give Noelle trouble sleeping. "I guess you only needed ten seconds to figure me out," she said, trying to turn the words into a joke.
"Maybe a little more. Get me drunk sometime, and I'll tell you what I figured out."
How convenient it would be to have Lex explain Noelle's own secrets to her. Then she wouldn't have to bother to learn them herself. "As soon as you'll let me drink."
"Uh-huh. Good night, Noelle."
Lex
She didn't ask Dallas for much, never had, but she'd ask him for this.
Lex leaned against the side of the car. "She doesn't have anyone, and she's helpless. Tossing her out on her ass would just be wrong."
Under the hood, Dallas grunted as metal clanged on metal. "Eden spits out a dozen like her a week, love. That's what happens when you only give reproducti
ve drugs to the righteous. They pop out ignorant, helpless babies like it's a contest to see who can produce the most useless human being."
"She has a name, you know." Lex reached out to trace the shell of his ear. "And if she were really useless, she'd be crying in a heap on my bedroom floor."
Dallas spared her a look, turning his head just enough to bite the tip of her finger. "Don't tell me she's not damn close to it."
"A couple weeks, okay? Give her a chance. She'll probably blow you once or twice and then settle down, make one of the guys very, very happy."
He snorted and focused on the old car's engine again. "That girl couldn't spit out the word fornication without turning fifteen shades of red. What the hell happened after I left? I miss a hot time?"
Not even close, but the spark was there. The hunger. Lex could practically taste it. "She wants to be a little bad. How is she going to do that on a peanut farm or whatever?"
Sighing, Dallas straightened and tossed aside the wrench. "Are you seeing what's really there, Lexie? Or what you want to see?"
As if he knew the first damn thing about what she wanted. "Easy way to find out. You throwing a party tonight?"
"I was, yeah." He wiped his hands on a rag and rubbed his thumb over her lower lip, a clear sign that his thoughts had shifted from cars to sex. "You think she could survive it?"
"One way to find out." He still tasted like motor oil and metal. Lex licked the pad of his thumb and wrapped her fingers around his belt buckle. "Are you saving your strength for later?"
"My strength doesn't need saving, love. Not with you around."
His jeans were already tightening across the hard bulge of his cock. Lex kept hold of his belt and pulled him toward the back door of the warehouse.
Inside, she reached under his shirt and traced circles over his chest while her vision adjusted to the near darkness of the back hall. Dallas leaned against the wall and watched her through narrowed eyes. "Don't think I'm not on to you, girl."