When Etcetera finally hit on her, she surprised herself by saying yes.
The three of them had stuck around the B&B long after they’d gotten everything they needed to hit the road. That hadn’t surprised her. They were a good fit. The sarcastic one—he’d kept up the Gizmo von Puddleducks business and everyone called him “Ducky”—was a great storyteller and a fun opponent at board games. Both were highly prized skills in the B&B’s common room, and he’d become a fixture. The girl joined a survey crew that was chasing up feedstock sites IDed by the drone-flock. She’d come back from a hard day in some ghost town, grimed and wiry in a tank top and work boots, leading a train of walkers that crashed into the stables with their load of textiles, metals, and plastics, the sad remnants of collapsed industry and the people who’d slaved for it.
But Etcetera hadn’t fit in, no matter what he tried. None of the work captivated him. None of the leisure caught his interests. He had no stack of books he’d been meaning to read, no skill he’d planned on practicing, no project he’d put off. He was either a slack loser or a Zen master.
At least he wasn’t a pest. He did chores, got checked out on everything in the stables and did maintenance, laughed at Ducky’s jokes, and went out on crew with the girl—he called her Natalie, though she’d switched from “Stable Strategies” to “Iceweasel.” But he clearly didn’t give a shit about any of it.
One dawn, she went into the onsen and found him there, reclining in an outdoor pool with his nose and mouth above water, plumes of steam rising as he exhaled. She slid into the water next to him, anxious to get her feet off the icy paving stones and into the warmth. He raised his head, cracked an eye, nodded minutely, and sank back. She nodded at his vapor plume, reclined too. Within moments the fish were on her, nibbling here and there. She closed her eyes and let her face sink beneath the water until only her own mouth and nose stuck out.
A fish brushed against her hand, then did it again. It wasn’t a fish. It was his hand, casually laid alongside hers, pinky-edge against pinky-edge. She checked her own internal instruments and decided she was happy about this. She picked up her hand and set it atop his.
They were still for a long while, fish tickling them. The fish made it weird. She and Etcetera were the main attractions at someone else’s orgy, their own contact saintly in its chastity. Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.
When their hands entwined, it was anticlimactic. Now what? The tentative physical contact beneath the waters had been magic, but they weren’t going to give each other hand jobs in the pool. Oh, Etcetera, that was a romantic gesture, but now what?
She got tired of wondering and disentangled her hand and went inside. She wasn’t often up this early, but when she was, she liked to come to the onsen because she had it to herself. It was empty. She stood by the hottest pool, chilled from the walk through the frosty air to the steaming door. The door behind her opened and Etcetera came in with a distracted smile. He dipped a bucketful of near-scalding water and soaked his small towel, then drew it out in a cloud of steam.
She smiled back, liking where this was going. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, giving him a head-tilt invitation. It was enough. He rubbed the near-scalding towel on her back tentatively, and she rocked her weight towards him. He rubbed harder, soaked the towel. He knelt to do her butt and legs, and she turned around when he got to her ankles and he started to work his way back up. As he got back to his feet, she met him with her towel, steaming from the pail, rubbed his chest and arms. They held hands again and stepped into the hottest pool, water so hot that it obliterated all thought except for the hand squeezed in hers. They lowered themselves, hands so tight that their knuckles ground. Hand in hand, they went to the coldest pool, took towels in hand, and washed one another down.
Back and forth, his left hand in her right, washing one another down, clinging tight to one another, alone in the onsen and merging into one being of flesh, nerves, heat, and cold. When they were done, they sat at the showers and soaped each other, sprayed each other with the shower wands. They went into the changing room and put their robes on, separating briefly. When they did, she felt the ghost of his hand in hers. When they clasped again, it felt like something missing had returned.
Hand in hand, they walked through the dim corridors. They skirted the common room and the groggy voices they heard over the gurgle of coffium. They took the stairs slowly, gaits matched, feet rasping on the gritty laminate on the treads. On the first landing, and she used her free hand to ask a touchable surface about empty rooms, located one on the uppermost fourth floor, which had the smallest rooms—coffins, almost.
Wordless, breathing heavily, they ascended, hearing the building waking around them: a baby crying, someone peeing, a shower. One more floor, a few deft turns through the twisty little maze of the fourth floor, he put his hand on the doorplate and it rolled aside. The lights came on, revealing the bare cell whose loft-bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets. Beneath it was a desk and chair and some homey touches—a few books, a handful of sculptural prints of mathematical solids. Some part of Limpopo’s brain remembered putting them there, because this was one of the rooms she’d finished. She hadn’t been to it in more than a year, and she was pleased the B&B had kept it up. Either its tenants had been conscientious, or the B&B noticed the room getting moopy and had it on the chore list, and someone had taken care of it.
Now they were in the room, and the door was rolling shut behind them and clicking. He reached out to dim the lights, but she cranked them back to full. She found she liked looking at his face in full light. Staring straight at a relative stranger’s face in full light, without pretending to be looking at something else, while that stranger looked back at you—it was something she hardly ever got to do. It was as intimate, in its own way, as anything physical.
He had a confused smile. She liked the curve of his lip.
“Is this okay? I mean—”