you're too young & eager to love

I'm counting this as a warm-up rather than a piece, because it's not really anything close to what I wanted to write.

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I.

The first time Augusta hears of the Emerald Isle she has sand in her hair and blisters forming on the otherwise smooth contours of her palms. They’ve stopped for the night in a ramshackle tavern, held aloft by what looks like drift wood but can’t be, since they’re more than seventy miles into the desert and too far from the coast.

The name trips over the excited tongues of straight-backed boys cleaning tables, sets the eyes of the middle-aged bartender alight, tip-taps sideways from mouth-to-mouth down the bar by the customers, in-between mouthfuls of cactus juice and gin. Augusta is wrapped in layers, her lips dry and cracked from the weeks of traveling, and she raises an eyebrow at Radomir from across their teetering table to see if he has also heard the whispering. He casts a wide shadow, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, one of his large hands wrapped around a baked clay mug that he lifts to his mouth every few moments. There’s a tilt of his head in acknowledgement before he scans the crowd of men at the bar one more time.

They haven’t been bothered by their waiter (or any other prying eyes) since he split open the whole chicken they ordered with his rough, bare hands, his fingers oblivious to the heat and steam of the meat. He had cracked open the breast in the gesture of a blink. But Radomir never fully relaxes while they travel, so he keeps roaming his gaze, memorizing faces and listening to pulses.

She tells him it’s because she’s tired and they’re still three weeks from the mountains, because she wants a hot bath and a pretty, long-fingered girl to wash her hair. He knows, however, that the real reason Augusta tells him they’re changing course is because she doesn’t like anything to consider itself out of her jurisdiction.

She is resolved to be unimpressed, and that holds until the first time she sees Palmer in the atrium, eating a pear, leaning against a column beside the reflection pool. Palmer, she realizes immediately, is a switchblade, slim in the waist but broad in the shoulders and arms. Radomir circles him in what he must intend to be a casual manner as a one-legged woman continues to welcome them from somewhere to their left, but Augusta only half-listens. She watches the exchange between her beast and this business man, half-amused when they seem to circle each other like jungle cats, although Palmer is talking casually, motioning grandly with one arm, pantomiming ease.

“Your companion does not seem to like my partner.” The brunette woman says now that she is beside Augusta, her hands clasped in front of her slender body.

“No,” Augusta corrects, unwrapping one of linen scarf from around her head, the sheen of her hair bright beneath. “No, it isn’t that. It’s that they’re the same, I think, except your partner is a knife wound and Radomir is a closed-fist punch.”

To her surprise, the woman laughs. It sounds sweet, like honey, which does not seem befitting. “Yes, I think you are exactly right, Minister.”


II.


When Radomir had first seen Augusta, long before the fighting pits and her government position, she had peered at him with her bright eyes and the breath had been knocked right out of him. He had seen a lot of girls, been with a lot of girls, touched them and watched them and tormented them the good way and the bad, but Augusta, in her long-limbed, adolescent youth, had sucked his breath right out of his lungs like no other.

Eda does not elicit the same response. She’s a petite little thing, a little bird, ready to take right off. She’s got big eyes like a doll’s, lids sliding shut and open again in a languorous blink. She’s beautiful in a way that will only be ripped apart.

“I am not made of glass,” she tells him, politely, mistaking his slowness for hesitancy rather than disinterest.

Augusta tips her drink back, hiding a laugh, ice clinking, from a chair in the corner. She has been freshly cleaned, rubbed raw by the heat of the water and some attendant’s caring hands. Her hair is still damp and Radomir, briefly, becomes distracted by the smear of wetness it leaves on the side of her neck when she pushes it back.

“You’re like one of those …” He reaches out and touches Eda, his big hands running up her sides. “One of them little ballerinas inside the music box.”

She smiles. “That’s lovely.”

He is close enough now that all Eda sees is the wide breadth of his shoulders and the way his shirt stretches of his body. The hair on his forearms is fine, but dark. He is a collection of geometric configurations. He is planes and lines and points connecting harshly with the contrasting softness of mouth and eyes. He looks too large for the suite, even though it is the best the Isle has to offer, and Eda swears her moans will echo off the walls.

He undoes the tie of her shirt. He is gentle peeling it off her arms, gentle when pulling it up over her head. She notices, but does not mind, that his eyes aren’t on her at all. They’re somewhere over her shoulder, past her shadow, focused on the other woman.

Eda is certain this is some kind of seduction. She takes a relaxing breath. “You don’t need to worry about hurting me.”

From behind them, Augusta throws back her head and laughs.

In a way that could be fond, Radomir nips the bottom of her ear, his voice a growl. “I wasn’t.”