“No?”
He looks out over the roof, noting scorch marks where there used to be a flourishing crop of marijuana, from her stories. There are baskets of toys here and there, and it looks like someone tried to make a swing set out of piping at one point or another. He wouldn’t ever trust a child on it, but it probably makes parties a little more interesting.
She sighs, and it takes more than he expected not to look back at her. Some truths are easier when no one’s watching. “I know he believes he loves me,” she says slowly. “Whether or not I believe he actually does . . . I don’t know. Maybe he’s like his father, it’s love as he knows it, but I don’t . . . I don’t think I want to believe that love can be that out of touch with reality.”
“Maybe he needs to believe it’s love,” he offers. From the corner of his eye, he can see her nod.
“I’ll buy that. If it’s real, maybe it absolves him in some way. Everyone’s fascinated by the things people do for love.”
“But you think it’s a little more than that.”
“If it wasn’t love, what was it?”
“Rape,” he says bluntly.
“Exactly. Boy like Desmond, he doesn’t want to think of himself as a rapist.”
“Why didn’t you read the letters?”
She’s silent for long enough that this time he does look back at her. She’s staring down at her slippers, fingers stroking the tufts of black along the Eeyore heads. The slippers are ridiculous and not something he’d expect her to love or even really to wear, but that’s probably exactly why someone gave them to her.
“Surviving the Garden,” she says finally, voice barely more than a whisper, “thriving in the Garden, relied on understanding the Gardener. Understanding his sons. I’m out of the Garden now, and I don’t want to understand anymore. I don’t want to live in that anymore. I get that he needs to explain, but I need to not listen. I need to not bear that weight. I need . . .” She swallows, her eyes bright with tears, but he suspects she’s pissed more than sad. “I need to not hear him swear he loves me.”
There’s something there, something Vic would probably recognize and know how to gracefully address.
“His feelings aren’t your fault, you know.”
Eddison is not graceful.
She snorts, blinking away the tears and the rage, back to more comfortable ground with mockery and sniping. “I learned a long time ago not to claim responsibility for men’s feelings about me.”
“Then you already know that whatever his feelings for you, whatever he thinks those feelings are, you don’t have to feel guilty about the pain they’re causing him.”
“Okay, Yoda.”
A squeal of metal gives them half a moment’s notice before a head pops up over the ladder to the fire escape. “Inara! Come introduce your agent!”
He glances at Inara, mouths Your agent?
She just shrugs. “It’s better than pet agent.”
Thank fucking God.
“Come on,” she tells him, sliding to her feet. “You can meet the ones here and then come with us. Now you’ve seen the apartment, you’re going to twitch until you check out our route to work.”
“You always take the same route?”
She just rolls her eyes and starts down the ladder.
Most of the young women are familiar from Inara’s stories of them. After introductions, four of them get dressed and head out, their uniforms already at the restaurant. They chatter and laugh on the subway, doing hair and makeup without mirrors or mistakes despite the swaying of the train and the constant stops and starts. They exchange greetings with a few people who seem to be regulars on the route.
Eddison has shared a hotel room with Ramirez enough to have a slightly befuddled awe for the process of full makeup, but that was seeing her tools spread out across the entire top of the dresser with multiple mirrors. Watching this quartet makes him fervently glad to be male, where getting his face ready for work may or may not mean shaving.
The Evening Star is much nicer than he expects, given where the girls choose to live. Even in his suit, he feels a little underdressed.
“Come meet Guilian,” Inara says, pushing him into the restaurant. “Besides, Bliss will pout if she knows you were here and didn’t say hello.”
“Pout? Or cheer?”
“I don’t see why she can’t do both.”
Guilian is a large, heavyset redhead whose thinning hair is retreating from his scalp and finding refuge in the bristling moustache that hides most of the lower half of his face. He clasps Eddison’s hand in a firm grip, his other hand on the agent’s shoulder. “Thank you for helping Inara get home safely,” he says solemnly.
If Eddison looks half as uncomfortable as he feels, he can completely understand why Inara is snickering beside him.
Bliss is hardly five feet of snarls and attitude and a mouth bigger than the world, but when she bares her teeth at him, it’s a hell of a lot closer to a smile than he usually sees from her. “I thought I felt the tone of the place lower.” Her curly black hair is pinned back in an intricate twist, safely away from the food, and it’s only seeing her stand next to one of the other waitresses that he realizes her uniform is slightly different.
The waiters all wear tuxedos, the waitresses strapless black evening gowns with stand-alone collars and cuffs in crisp white, black bowties at their throats. But Bliss—and, he’s willing to bet, Inara—has a style that comes up over her back, the collar stitched to the neck. It covers the wings.
He looks over at Guilian, standing in the door to the kitchen, and the restaurant owner and chef nods.
Small wonder Inara came back to work at the same restaurant.
Bliss kicks him in the ankle, more annoying than painful, and it isn’t hard to imagine a yappy little ankle-biter dog with her curly hair. “Please tell me he can’t write her anymore,” she says quietly.
“Not without consequence.”
“He doesn’t understand consequence as well as he should.”
“Perhaps not.”
“Is your other pet okay?” Her smile gets wider at his groan, almost friendly. Almost. “Vic mentioned you were gone for a case. Seemed a little strange he and Mercedes wouldn’t be there.”
“We do individual consults, you know.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine for now,” he sighs. He’s starting to think he did something terrible in a previous life to be surrounded by such dangerous women in this one.
He’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“If Guilian offers you the chef’s table, take it,” she advises him. “He doesn’t do it often.”
“Isn’t that in the kitchen?”
“Yep.”
“Don’t you all hang out in the kitchen when you’re not checking on patrons?”
Her wicked laugh answers that. A wiser man would make his excuses, maybe. Make his escape, definitely.
But Guilian holds the kitchen door open in invitation, and Eddison finds himself nodding, and what the hell, how often is he going to get to eat in a restaurant this nice?
The baby’s breath looks different this time. The tissue paper wrapping is sky blue, not green, and there are thin blue ribbons twined through the stiff clusters. The card is the same, though, and I dutifully send pictures along to Finney and Eddison before heading back inside to make sure we have a couple of clean mugs.
When my new agents arrive, Archer accepts the offer of coffee with a startled smile, while Sterling sheepishly asks if we have any tea.
Lord, do we ever.
Archer keeps giving me strange looks as they check over the bundle and ask me questions, like he expects me to still be bitchy about last Thursday. I don’t generally have the energy for grudges, but if it makes him sweat, I’m content to leave the impression uncorrected. Sterling keeps an eye on him, in a very subtle, understated way. Archer probably doesn’t even notice. I don’t know that I would have picked up on it if she hadn’t deliberately caught my eye before turning back to him.