you're too young & eager to love

Here I go! Cracking my knuckles, blowing the heavy layer of dust off of the part of my brain that controls creativity, and it's once more unto the breach, dear friends.

P.S. I had trouble with my past tense vs. my past participle. Whatever.

( Blame no one but yourself for this )

Ten years ago, Harper had been searching. What for, she hadn’t known. It hadn’t been a hunger lurking, dissatisfied, inside of her or even an ache like it was now. It had simply been an awareness of the desire for opportunity, a desire for a new horizon.

She’d spent time in the desert, adept at navigating the wastelands, wrapped in scarves and scavenging the drifter towns. She’d visited the oasis so skillfully tucked between the vast, sloping dunes before exploring the ranches on the edge of mountains. Then she’d wondered to the seaside, called by the salt on the wind and pushed by the threat from the East where the nightmarish rumors suggested more truth than hearsay.

Even then, Hamu was a bustling port. The culture allowed for an easier, more affluent way of life, with diligent shifters eager for opportunity working alongside a range of humans. Bars swarmed with prospectors, restaurants brimmed with the smell of savory and sweet scents, enticing the citizens to come inside, and brothels tempted in the same fashion with their welcoming women cooing from balconies or doorways. Harper found work at Oakworm, a brothel claiming to be dignified with women ripe and unbruised. Old Martha had needed help, so she’d kept the men’s hands away from her and busied herself with the books and overseeing the girls.

Nearly forty, Zane Steiner had been at the peak of manhood then: well-defined arms with ropey muscle, a head full of dark hair, only the whisper of wrinkles around his devious eyes, a confident gait from a lifetime of entitlement and success. When he visited Oakworm, he didn’t come for the girls; he didn’t need to. He came for the atmosphere, to be doted on, and to watch.

He had been searching too.


--


“Harper,” he says, his hands in your hair, his mouth at your neck, your shoulder, your breast. “Harper. Harper. Harper.” Like a liturgy, as though you’re something worth worshipping, as though the sound and shape of your name in his mouth is divine.

You’ve never heard it said that way. It makes your skin prickle every time, like soft fingers down your spine.

When he trails his mouth lower and then lower still, you fist his hair. He makes you shake until your thighs are sore, until, laughing and gasping, you slap at his shoulders to make him stop, your body humming with tired pleasure in a way you’ve never experienced before. Oriol wears a smug smile, wet with the taste of you, and lazily kisses behind your knee.


--



Cato reminds her of caramel, the kind of indulgence that sticks to your teeth, the kind you should only have a little of. He has a wide grin that, much to her surprise, makes her smile in return. He’s boyish, as blonde as the sun, with a lean grace. He doesn’t look surprised to see her; he looks like he’s been waiting for her his entire life.

Harper’s wary by this eagerness. She was hoping he’d look mistreated, worn down, hungry, even just bored. She could have worked better with disenfranchisement. Instead, he’s more like that cat who ate the canary. She buys him a drink and a hot meal in a pub across the street from the one he works at. Drinking only coffee herself, she watches the way he watches her.

“A man I know said you were pretty well known around these parts. Popular.” Harper’s voice, as always, is even.

“Well, I must be famous enough for you to have found me off of just that description. What do you think? Do I look good enough for all the gossip?” he asks between spoonfuls of stew.

“I think you’re probably trouble.”

Cato shrugs. “Some people like trouble. You look like you might.”

She feels herself smile again, but it’s more softly this time. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“I could. If you’d like.” That shrug again, like it was all the same to him either way, like she wasn’t offering him a golden opportunity wrapped in a satin bow.

Harper shakes her head slowly.

He licks his spoon, his eyes shining, and sits back in his chair. He can’t be more than nineteen, cocksure and raging with confidence, alluring precisely because of the way he’s so comfortable. “You have beautiful skin, d’you know? Like cream.”

“Is that important to you? Beauty?”

“Isn’t it important to everyone?”

She shakes her head a second time. He lifts his eyebrows and leans a little closer to the table, his elbows digging into the old wood, framing his bowl of stew. “I think you’re a bluffer.”

“Takes one to know one, kid.”


--


“Can I sleep in here?” Oriol asks from your doorway, his arms full of bedding.

You look up from the book you’re reading, startled. “What? ...Why?” He’s only been here for a month, so you aren’t used to his voice or the sound of his steps in the middle of the night. You aren’t used to him, plain and simple, and you haven’t quite tucked aside your anger at his betrayal. His request seems out of place, but your steady pulse knocks too quickly at your wrists. Something inside of your flutters with heavy wings.

“It’s storming,” he says, as though this is a logical response. His huffs his hair out of his eyes, waiting.

“I don’t think Zane would-”

“He’s gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“He left late this afternoon. To visit the Everstons.”

“Oh.” You’re struck by the news. Why didn’t you know this? Something on your face must reveal your surprise because he shuffles his bedding in his arms and smiles in a way that’s reassuring. Or hopeful? You can’t tell.

“He said something about the need for discretion or some such shit,” he says.

You don’t answer, but you close your book. Oriol seems to take that as an invitation because he walks in, settling the comforters on the floor in front of your bed. The silence that fills the spaces beyond the sound of thunder and the rain hitting the windows isn’t uncomfortable, but you’re unsure. Maybe it’s because you can smell his skin. It’s distracting. Like heat and oak and night time waters.

“You don’t have to do that,” you say after a moment. “Sleep on the ground.”

“What?” It’s his turn to sound surprised.

“I’m just saying. It’s a big bed.”

You don’t know why you offer. You wait for panic to seize you, but it doesn’t come. This in itself is disorienting.

When Oriol climbs on top of your bed, it’s with a grin that makes you think of his brother.


--


Kissing him is like coming home.


--

(hungry: I know you want me
to play it also)
- Margaret Atwood



Harper seems to come in on the wind, with the tide, unchanged from her journey or the rising sun. Gone one day, returned the next, perpetually cool and collected. While the estate had persisted without her, it eagerly embraces her return: the gardening staff release long-held breaths, their shoulders lowering from beside their ears, the cook gives her a warm, sloppy kiss at the corner of her mouth and pushes a fresh grapefruit into her hands, and the servants circle back to their respective corners, trying to remember how to lower their eyes.

She finds Zane shaving in his room. He’s dressed for business in a dark button-down that’s still undone at the collar and even darker dress pants. He keeps his hair boyish with a little length still tousled at top, but the sides are short and the brown is starting to show silver in spots. There’s age in the wrinkles around his eyes, in the rivets that frame in his mouth like a pair of parentheses.

“I didn’t think you were a vain man,” Harper says as she walks in, “but here you are, admiring yourself.” She has two cups of rich-smelling coffee with her, one in each hand.

Zane turns from the full-length mirror, the lower half of his face still smeared in shaving cream, the straight razor steady in his hand, and gives his trademark grin. “Appearances are important, and my father used to say that only wicked men hide behind beards.”

“You should keep it then. Show your true self to the masses.” Harper puts the coffee on the table next to the pitcher of water and the shaving utensils before standing behind Zane. She clears her throat suggestively and he hands her the razor. She steadies the blade under his jaw and smoothly, cleanly cuts down.

Zane doesn’t shrink from the feel of the cold metal against his throat. He likes it. Harper wipes the razor then continues. She nudges Zane’s head where she needs it, and he accommodates, eyes half-shut but gleaming between the lids.

“How was … where were you again?” He barely moves his mouth when he speaks.

“Keep talking, see how easily this razor slips.”

“No, really.”

“There’s nothing in the Alaskan gulf besides fish, which we have here, unless you want to begin a battle with the oil conglomerates.” She speaks easily, without much inflection, her hand steady and constant in its dragging and wiping. There’s nothing in her voice to suggest how much she had hated the cold winds and the rough, chopping seas or the bleak, gray days that had endlessly spilled, one after another, from a seemingly bottomless well. “How is Sienna?”

“Harper.” Zane’s smile fades, and he catches her eyes in the mirror. He looks disappointed. “You take things too personally, you know.”

“... You’re bleeding.”

Zane looks down at the razor. It’s streaked in red. There’s a two inch slash on his throat where the tip of the blade had been. He hadn’t felt a thing, the razor is so sharp. He jerks the towel from his shoulder and presses it to the wound, all the while giving Harper a look that says See? I told you so.

“My hand must have slipped,” she says, carefully placing the razor in his expectant hand.

“Sure. A mishap.” He shrugs like it’s nothing and wipes the remaining cream from his face. “Welcome home, Red.”





Sienna likes to help Delphine in the kitchen once she’s finished her cleaning for the day. She collects herbs from the garden and brings them to the cook in a wicker basket, twitching her hips while strolling into the kitchen from the outside. She has a tiny waist, so small that a man’s two hands can clench it, and she likes to draw attention to it. Even Delphine notices.

“You better not bring that trouble into here, missy.” Delphine raises her eyebrows while slapping a mound of dough onto a floured counter. She’s making baguettes for dinner and the muscles in her arms reflect her experience.

“I don’t know what you mean, Delphi,” Sienna simpers, her eyelashes fluttering. She places her basket next to the stove and starts shelling peas without having to be asked.

Harper can hear them talking from the hallway. Delphine’s kneading punctuates their conversation. It’s light, inconsequential, meaningless talk. House gossip and rumors from the docks, complaints over the lingering humidity, potential ideas for the night’s dessert.

“Tiramisu,” she suggests from the doorway. “It’s my favorite.”

“Delphi isn’t cooking for you,” Sienna says, not quite under her breath.

Delphine covers the dough with a linen towel then washes her hands. “Too heavy, duckling. What does the boss say?”

Harper shrugs. “What’s for dinner?”

“Seared scallops, radicchio salad, and peas poached in butter. You must be hungry for real food after your travels.”

“Delicious. Let me help with those peas.” It isn’t a request, and Sienna passes her the pods once Harper sits at the table. She’s quick, quicker than Sienna, but the other woman keeps shelling as well. Every now and then, their fingers touch.

The silence that settles over the trio is not tense, not really, but it’s hardly comfortable. Delphine busies herself with chopping the radicchio and humming under her breath. She occasionally glances back and forth between the other two women as though gauging pressure. Sienna stares at each pea intently while Harper watches her from beneath her eyelids. Sienna is golden, as delicate as spun sugar. She has a small mouth with full lips and soft chestnut hair. Even her wrists are fragile. In comparison, Harper feels like snow, impossibly pale and too long-limbed to be graceful, too sharp-edged.

“I thought you would be gone longer,” Sienna finally says, still not lifting her eyes from the bowl of peas.

“Whatever for?”

“Zane never talked about you returning.”

“Did you ask him while you were busy dusting his blinds?”

Sienna works her bottom lip between her teeth and splits a pod between her fingers. She doesn’t reply.

“That’s plenty, girls,” Delphine interrupts before Harper can wield another jab.

Harper waits for Sienna to leave the kitchen first. Delphine watches her go before taking the peas and shakes her head. “You know exactly where she’s going to, duckling. Or to whom.”

Harper shoots a glance at the cook. It’s on her tongue to reply. She would have liked to have looked for some kind of comfort there, in that easy camaraderie that can sometimes arise between women who feel no competition towards one another, but she can’t. She’s about to push back her chair and leave when Zane places his hand, heavy, on her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him approach; she doesn’t know what he’s heard or what he’s thinking, but her pulse skips and her heart knocks suddenly against her ribs, jolting her. Harper doesn’t turn to look at him because she’s trying to imagine Sienna’s face. The girl’s eyebrows might draw together and her mouth would tighten as though she were clenching her jaw. She wouldn’t pout, but her disappointment would be palpable, her large eyes as wet as a wound.

Zane squeezes, and Harper looks up, flashing him a smile that spreads her entire mouth.

How easy it is for him, this choosing of partners! Demanding? Harper doesn’t feel forced but compelled, driven, full of eager willingness. He might as well have brushed her hair from her neck and kissed her throat. Her response would be the same either way.





“Roll over,” says Zane. “Open your eyes.” At some moments he likes her to watch him. “Tell me what you want.”

“Don’t stop,” she says.

“Don’t stop what?” He pauses. It’s such pauses that will make her say anything.

Harper feels herself flush and presses a hand to his chest, skimming her sharp nails across his skin. He’s still paused, their bodies locked together but temporarily stalled. She groans with frustration and tries to lift her hips, but he holds her down, his fingers scalding against her pelvis. For one fleeting moment, she wonders if he pins Sienna in the same way.

“Don’t stop what?” he asks again, grinning cruelly.

“Okay, okay,” she breathes out, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling to look away from him. This type of abandon tortures her. “Don’t stop fucking me.”

“Why?”

She licks her lips. Her mouth is dry. “I want you to make me come.”

Zane slaps the high curve of her hip, light but sharp, and then they’re entwined again, snarled up in the sheets and each other, falling down into a rough rhythm.

So she must love him. Otherwise, is this the person she’s always imagined herself to be? A person so slack, so quick to give herself over, so easily rendered helpless, so lacking in grit. Harper pushes herself up from the bed and loops her arms over his neck so their chests are pressed together and his mouth is near her temple as he rests his weight on his knees. She can feel him breathing, heavy and strained, and she’s almost sitting on him now, his hands under her ass, her legs around his waist, the snap and pull of her hips making her muscles burn.

“Please,” she groans against his shoulder. “Oh, please.”

Is it worth it?

Yes, right now.






She hears him with Sienna two days later. Sienna’s laughter is interrupted by her high, reedy gasps. Zane’s moans are rough and raw.

She hears him.

She can’t remember when jealousy first started to choke her, but it sits heavy, like a stone in her throat, stealing her breath. It lodges there and does not budge.





Arkin’s hands are large, knotted trees. His arthritis makes them curl painfully together, but he still insists on overseeing the unloading of shipments for the Steiner estate. Harper, in turn, oversees Arkin. They have an easy, efficient relationship usually full of purposeful conversation and focus.

Today, she is quiet, wearing a light jacket with hair in a high ponytail. The look makes her seem younger, more approachable. Maybe that’s why Arkin speaks up, or maybe it’s the dimple between her eyebrows or the atypical distant, unfocused look in her eyes.

“How are things on the estate?”

“What?” The question startles her from her reverie. Harper takes a moment to process, and she looks more confused than before. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“People only say fine when they aren’t.”

Harper turns her face away and doesn’t reply. Is this what her life has become now? Is she so obvious that dockmen and servants now know her need? Her discontent? Her jaw tightens. She has a reputation for capability and professionalism, and now she’s what? Idle gossip? She tries to think about the last time she had been at the docks with Zane. If she had stood too close to him. If she had found a reason to brush sand from his shoulder. If she had looked at him in the way of a woman rather than the way of a partner. Had Arkin been there then? Had he seen? He must have.

“You need a friend, I think.”

There’s something almost lecherous in the way he smiles at her, but Harper laughs. “I have friends, Arkin.”

“No, a friend.”

“Oh, you mean a companion.” She raises her hands, palms facing out, as though warding off the idea. “I don’t do that … purchase our own kind, that is. It doesn’t sit well with me.”

“You mean that high moral code of yours?”

“And not that it’s any of your business, Arkin, but I don’t need anymore bedmates.”

It’s Arkin’s turn to laugh. “Bullshit. Ain’t nobody just happy with one, miss Harper.” He shields the sun from his eyes with one of his warped hands and shouts an order at a nearby handler struggling with a crate full of expensive coffee. When he turns back to her, he’s wearing that same suggestive smile as before. “There’s a boy gaining a bit of a reputation for himself down in Southside. Quite a reputation, actually. He’s handled by some Tragen fellow, runs a bar, I think. Tragen? Troggen? I heard about him on my last visit. Saw him too. Like I said, a young thing.”

“Careful now, old man,” Harper says, not unkindly.

“I’m just saying. Think about it. You know where I am if you got questions.”

She doesn’t. Not yet. But she will.

She’ll think about it later, at dinner, painfully aware of the way Sienna lingers in the dining room, pouring wine while stretching her nubile body across Zane’s body. Between the scrape of knives and forks against expensive china, she’ll think about the nature of control. Of ownership. Of opportunity. Of being indebted. Of gratefulness.

When she looks at Sienna, Harper will think of the many ways people can be replaced.

She’ll feel that stone, the one she’s been choking on for so long, start to slip.

Newbies! About a year before the actual planned story line takes place, so this is all background and dynamics.


-------

“I dwell with a strangely aching heart...” - Robert Frost


There is nothing Harper appreciates more than order. There is a calmness to everything having its proper place, to routine, to control. Meticulous, methodical, careful - they’re adjectives she values and words she lives by. Spontaneity causes panic, hot as a fire, to blossom in her chest, along with the fear of not knowing, of impotent empty-handedness and a will that lacks agency or direction.

This is why she’s the type of woman who, lying in bed, stares at the ceiling and makes lists in her head rather than turning her face into the pillow to seek sleep. The type of woman who wakes without an alarm, as the first rays of light barely breach the gap between the curtains, and why she does not linger in bed. The type of woman who walks with a purpose, her back held straight, her gaze always direct.

It’s that gaze which makes her infamous in the Steiner estate rather than her need for efficiency or her demand for perfection. It isn’t so much a look of fearlessness or boldness but one that is focused and highly alert so that all of her attention is centered. With her wintry eyes, it’s a chilling force to endure, like a blizzard or the bite of frost. So the servants in the estate call her Dagger on account of that cold, disapproving look she often directs their way, the one that makes them fidget and wring their hands and bow their heads. It’s never to her face and always out of sight, but Harper knows anyway. She knows and does not mind because she’s always thought there was something appropriate in the title. She is not, after all, a delicate thing with a lilting voice.

Her paleness, her leanness, could be contrary to the point, but the heat and the sun and her very own blood burned away the chance for her to be anything other than capable long ago. She is built for perseverance; she is no ornament. Her nose is a little too wide for the sharp angles of her face, and her jaw is strong (a trait that only intensifies whenever she shifts to feathers and red, leathery skin). She does not bruise easy; she does not shrink at the sight of blood; she does not gag at raw meat. She likes terrible smells - rotting bones spoiling in the kitchen, a carcass festering in the midday sun, a water-wrecked corpse dragged to the shore. The cries from the fighting pits excite her. She is not soft.

And yet …

And yet, Harper has started pressing her nose to the corner of Zane’s shoulder when she lies with him in his bed. She likes to smell the parts of him that are distinctly human, the sweat beneath his arms, the ink beneath his nails, the pallid, ordinary blood coursing through his veins. Without thinking, she has licked the salt of his skin from the inside of his elbow in a way that makes him laugh, loud and jarring, as though he were startled. She has brushed her fingers against his neck, as purposeful as a signature, when adjusting his collars over the silk of his business ties.

When he does not ask her to his bed, she wonders why, and then she wonders why she wonders. The lists she makes in her head circle back to him, like a current, until she twists in her sheets and feels hot enough to blister.

When she cannot abide it anymore, she wakes even earlier than usual, dressing quickly in the dark with nimble fingers, and forces herself not to pause in front of his closed door on her way downstairs. Her strides are quick, deliberate, unfaltering, but each one feels heavier than the last until she begins taking the steps in two. The cook in the kitchen is the only other person awake, but Harper does not stop to say hello. The churning noises and wafting scents make her nauseous. She is endlessly thirsty. She does not allow herself any water, as an atonement, and walks the entire way to the docks, ignorant to the lush beauty of the surrounding landscape or the harmonic, lulling crash of the waves and the briny smell of the sea in the air.

Most of the vendors are preparing for the morning. The smell of fish is strong and the sounds of the men working are loud - the heaving of the lines, the shouting of orders, the loading and unloading of crates. Harper buys three oysters from a stand and sucks them raw into her mouth. They’re slick and unsatisfying. She tosses the pearly shells into the water and keeps walking, traveling the perimeter of each dock.

There’s nothing beyond her but the ocean, deep and restless.

It doesn’t soothe.

She stays anyway.





“I could use another,” Zane says by way of introduction, swirling the last of the melted ice in his glass, when she returns in the afternoon. He’s in the office, although the ornate furniture and bountiful floor-to-ceiling bookcases make the space seem more like a small library.

“Say please.”

“Please,” he replies promptly, but he’s already holding out his glass, and she’s already taking it.
He hasn’t looked at her. His feet are kicked up on the same desk he’s been using for the past eight years and his collar is unbuttoned. There’s a small stack of supply orders in his hand. He leafs through the first few pages before shuffling them to the back of the group. A knot of frustration is beginning to crease the space between his eyebrows.

Harper pours him a finger of whiskey and adds one ice cube from the cart near the desk. With her back to him, she can focus on the coldness of the glass, of the dry, leafy smell of the whiskey.

“Did I miss a shipment today?” he asks, although the question is merely his way of interrogating her; they both know there wasn’t a shipment.

“No, but there’s always news on the docks. If you’re willing to listen.”

Zane makes a noncommittal noise, and she hands him his drink, balancing her weight on the edge of his desk in the space not crowded by his feet.

“Is that from the Isle?” she asks. “Let me guess... Mosaic for Eda’s wading pool.”

Zane tosses the papers on the desk and leans back further in his chair, the leather a rich chocolate that’s grown accustomed to bearing his weight. “No, no. It’s for the compounds in the East. That family is notoriously private with all of their affairs, but Harrow has no problem showing us how much he trusts us by making his usual difficult demands.” Harper gives a smirk and nods. “So, what is the news then?”

“The oysters are in season.”

“And?”

“And the cook is an early riser, which is an undesirable trait if you’re as heavy-footed as she is. She’ll wake the whole house.”

“Better than the old one. The Pacific man? Meanest cook alive, I swear. Genius with a roast though.”

“Is that why you loved him more than you love me?”

Zane doesn’t answer, but when he takes a drink, Harper sees the smear of whiskey left on his mouth. She grins at him, her lips pale and her teeth hidden, before sliding off the desk.

“Don’t drink too many of those,” she says on her way out.

“Harper.”

She’s reached the doorway when he says her name. She stops with her hand on the frame, the trim white and carved. She doesn’t look back.

“Why don’t you go back to your usual hours tomorrow? I know how much routine matters to you.”

“Sure, boss.”

“And Harper … ”

She’s almost around the corner. She has to turn back. Her hand finds the frame again, only this time she’s facing him, her gaze unfaltering. She lifts her pale eyebrows.

“Send in Sienna.”

“Say please,” she says.





Sienna is a waif of a thing with large brown eyes and quick hands who spends most of her days tidying the rooms in the main house and tending to Zane’s less official needs. Harper barely speaks to her, and she finds her smell assaulting: wet, buried dirt and dry grass, a sharp acidic undertone of anxiousness, like lemons.

Harper can still smell the girl on Zane in the morning.

It’s the lemons she detects first when he, not bothering to knock, walks into her bedroom. Hers is modest in comparison to his, the bed made up in sand-colored linens with coppery soft curtains that flutter in the wind when she leaves the windows open to catch the breeze from the water. The furniture is all golden oak that had to be shipped from the Arabian sea. The walls are papered in a wood pattern, a hundred birch trees in muted tones of beige lining the room with their thin branches arching from one to the other. She has two bookcases and few visible personal touches. Unsurprisingly, there is no clutter. It’s a space intended for its functions.

She has already been awake for an hour and is sitting at her vanity; she catches his reflection in her mirror and pauses with a tube of nude lipstick in her hand. That smell again, of sharp citrus, hits her and makes her nose wrinkle.

It’s ten steps from the door to her vanity, and Zane takes them in silence. Harper feels a twist low in her belly and a spike in her pulse.

When he stands behind her and gathers her hair from her neck, she rolls her head back with the action, feeling his fingers find anchor at the base of her skull. She should care more, she thinks, as he tilts her head to the left and stoops to mouth the tender spot below her ear. She can feel the scratch of his beard that needs to be shaved, and she still smells lemon, but she arches at the sensation anyway and reaches behind her to cup him through his jeans.

Zane leaves her door open, and they don’t bother moving to the bed. He wants her stretched across the golden oak floors for the others to possibly see, to hear. She opens to him anyway and enjoys the greedy, demanding way he fumbles with her shirt and tugs at her jeans. He doesn’t waste time. Pushing between her thighs, he drives into her in one quick tear, a hand at her throat and the other bracing against the floor.

She doesn’t know who this is for, him or her. She should care more, she thinks again, before losing herself to the pressure aching inside of her.





“I want to talk to you about something,” he says afterwards.

She’s been looking at his face, at all the small changes time has started to collect. He’s still handsome enough to be smug, but there’s a sprinkling of grey to his dark hair, and the lines on his forehead are deepening. His statement feels like an opening shot, startling her, and it’s an unfair one considering he’s already zipped up his jeans and buckled his belt. He’s tucking in his shirt while she’s still undressed, her own shirt unbuttoned and her breasts exposed. Her underwear is caught around her knees along with her jeans. She adjusts those first, lifting her hips to slide them up in one fluid movement. She doesn’t break eye contact, but she doesn’t reply.

“About an opportunity,” he continues. “I need you to check out an investment possibility in the Alaskan gulf.”

Harper keeps her tone level. “The gulf? That will take at least a month.”

“Hardly,” he says, without much conviction.

“Are you sure this isn’t a punishment?”

“What?” His brow furrows, and he grabs her arm, helping her to her feet.

She doesn’t reply to that either. Her shirt is still open revealing the long slice of her stomach.

Zane gives a confused laugh, gesturing in the air with one hand. “What’s all this then? Long hours at the docks. Waking up before dawn. Cryptically mentioning punishment. What’s bothering you?”

Harper shakes her head dismissively and works the buttons of her shirt, fastening them one by one. “I hate sea travel. It’s not meant for … I would have preferred a visit to the Eastern compounds. The desert I can handle.”

When Zane catches her by the jaw, his thumb digging into the side of her chin, she does not flinch. “You’ll handle what I tell you to. When I say sit, you do it. When I say come, you fucking run. Remember?”

“I didn’t forget.”

Zane brushes his thumb across her bottom lip. “Good.” He stares until she flicks her eyes away then presses a kiss to her temple. “You can leave in a week.”

Before she leaves, he’ll tell her that absence makes the heart grow fonder. He’ll mock her, she thinks, and she’ll feel panic spread like wildfire from her stomach to her heart. It’s an organ she’s always found useless, a perfunctory part of her that’s never factored into her way of life.

But now Harper will listen to it yearn.

Writing! Woo! It's been so long.

Ignore the flashback where I clearly struggle with the correct tense. Fuck it. I proof read, but there's probably still some typos. You know how it goes.

Heeereeeee we goooooo!



( to die )

This was supposed to be the opening section of a much larger piece. But it's been sitting around for so long that I forgot where I was supposed to be going with it. Figured I could post this bit at least.


--



Augusta has grown.

It's the first thing Maximus thinks as he's lead into Albtraum's executive suite. They've had the generators restored since The Incident, but he can see that they're supplementing the emergency lighting with candles, so the room is full of shadows. There's a low fire burning in a stone hearth, and the smell of cinder is everywhere. In the middle of it all, his daughter sits. Pretentious. Self-Assured. Vindicated.

Augusta is his eldest, but Maximus sometimes confuses her for another one of his offsprings, one of his younger daughters from his third wife. He's less surprised by her demeanor and more surprised that she's at the writing desk, a gigantic structure made of solid oak, square and masculine in its cut. Harrow had always leaned against it when entertaining diplomats or conducting meetings, but Augusta claims the center seat. Her ankles are crossed one over the other, modest-like, one foot bare, her left toes balancing inside the tortuous straps of a leather stiletto. It's only when she tilts her head up at the sound of his approaching that he sees the full length of her face, all the dips and planes that adulthood has sharpened and life has weathered.

She's beautiful, but she makes no attempt to hide her cruelty from her beauty. No amount of cosmetics could soften the hardness of her mouth, of her eyes. Her hair falls against one side of her face and down her back, the ends blunt and harsh. Her nails are clear and sharp.

"Do you want me to make nice?" Augusta asks by way of greeting, pausing in her writing. The tip of her fountain pen hovers, bold with fresh ink, above a stack of official looking letters. "Father arrives and corrals the disobedient children?"

Maximus wraps his knuckles around the top of his cane and taps the tiled floor absently. "This is why I married you off," he says at last, "because of your untempered spirit."

Beside Augusta, a predator cat growls, the sound low and threatening. The hair on the back of its neck rises, a rigid line following the length of its spine. It's too large to be anything but a shifter, and even next to that gigantic desk, it looks huge. For one brief moment, before he can compose himself, Maximus is startled. He hadn't noticed the beast laying beside Augusta, it's gold eyes full of intelligence and anger. A younger Maximus would have seen it immediately, but he hasn't been young for some time. He's nearing eighty. His eyes are milky, and he needs his cane more than he would like to admit. There's not much left beneath his expensive suit; he used to be a broad bull of a man, but age has weakened him. Even his voice rasps with death.

Augusta is looking at him. She sits back in the chair and drops a hand to the mountain lion's head, the way one might do to a loyal dog, her fingers idling above its brow. Its amber hair smooths, but the creature keeps staring, its eyes as defiant as Augusta's.

"And how well did that work out, father? Or can you even remember?"

Harrow mumbles something unintelligible, the slurred words jerking into the conversation from behind Augusta. He's slumped in a corner chair, half folded into himself, his mouth slack from too much whiskey, his voice a croak of impotent anger. Maximus hadn't noticed him before either.

"What's that?" Augusta asks over her shoulder. Beneath her stroking fingers, the lion starts to purr. The sound is worse than its growl.

Maximus lifts his grey eyebrows, frowning. "Sober him up. He has work to do."

"No."

He looks as though lightning has struck him between the eyes. "What did you say?"

"I said no. In fact, let's bring him another bottle. If we're lucky, he'll drown himself in whiskey, and we can say goodbye to all his foolishness." She gestures to a plain girl in a khaki colored uniform, and the girl skitters off without hesitating.

Maximus stutters on his breath. Augusta waits, scratching behind the lion's ear, and it closes its bright eyes, it's tail making a lazy, long sweep above the floor. In the background, Harrow mutters a line from a lullaby and shifts drunkenly. His eyes are only half open, but they're red and unfocused. Maximus stares at his son, trying to will him into action by the sheer force of his gaze, but there's no power in his eyes anymore, and Harrow's too busy pining over his swan to notice. His swan and his kingdom and his pride.

Augusta clears her throat. Light. Demure. Ladylike.

"Was there anything else, father? Because if not, I have a number of correspondences to address to assure the remaining compounds." She flicks her pen with her right hand, gesturing to the letter.

Maximus' mouth is a thin, grim line. It's white and wrinkled, like the rest of him. For a moment, he considers confronting his eldest, of stalking forward and cracking his knuckles across her mouth the way he had when she was a child, the way he had when her mother had also become too impertinent for her own good. Again, his hand curls tight around his cane, and he shifts his weight. He manages one step closer before the lion's eyes have opened, have pinned him with their stare. It bares its teeth like it can read his thoughts.

"Let's discuss this more over dinner," Augusta suggests before she begins to write again, the scratch of the pen deafening. At the same time, the maid returns. She's carrying a fresh bottle of whiskey.

Thanks to Muffin for the idea/direction here! Let's hope my formatting sticks.

( nor are we forgiven )

Just a little warm up/blurb.

There's really nothing in this to suggest that the girl is a prostitute, unless maybe you squint and look real close? Originally I wanted to develop a priest and a prostitute in a Western setting, but the thing with driving by the seat of your pants while writing is that ... well, your writing just develops as you go. So! Ta da.

~~~~


Won’t you just let me pretend
this is the love I need?
And I will grow
out of all the empty words I often speak.
WAXAHATCHEE





Sourstone is a forgotten town. It’s tucked behind what the locals refer to as The Black Woods, a patch of forest a few acres long, as full of thorns and old oaks as a tick full of blood. Except for Timber Creek winding its way precariously through the thicket, the Black Woods are nearly impenetrable, so most everybody has to trudge the long, lone path circling the perimeter of the forest if they want to find the town.

In his early days, before he was considered a local, Father Bathe used to sit on his back porch at dusk and he’d see a woman out in those trees. The White Woman, he called her, a slip of a thing in porcelain colored lace with eyes as blue as an Arizona sky. Sometimes she would seem to be smiling at him. Sometimes he wouldn’t be able to see her face, and he’d swear she was crying along with the owls and the foxes and all those other night creatures that were just starting to emerge. He’d only just begun to drink in those days, a few cautious sips from the bottle after dinner, and while he’d needed those sips to strengthen his resolve against the godless territory he’d suddenly found himself in, he knew the White Woman wasn’t a drinker’s delusion. She’d had too much light around her; she’d shone bright against all the dark trees. Back then, he’d thought everything was a spiritual sign, and the Woman was no different.

Bathe never told anyone about her, but sometimes the Sourstone urchins would babble about seeing a lady lost in the woods. Once, a child went missing, and the bereaved mother blamed it on a woman in white, a woman luring her baby into the woods, as evil as a fairytale witch. Bathe never questioned the mother about it, but he’d held her hand and bowed his head and prayed to St. Anthony. They never found the child, but the White Woman stayed around.

By the time Bathe is fifty, she’s a Sourstone legend, a bit of local myth, a story whispered by weary parents into the ears of naughty children. Bathe hasn’t seen her himself in over three decades, either because she’s taken offense to the amount of whiskey he now drinks or because God no longer sees him worthy of receiving His signs, but he can still picture those dusky nights, still see the glimpse of a slender figure on the brink of the woods, beckoning to him with a sad smile and a silver arm; he can still remember the sound of a woman whose cries reminded him of an owl’s trill.





He finds Modesty on his property line a week later as the sun starts to dip down over the horizon. She’s unconscious and covered in cuts from thorns and branches. Her bare feet are bloody. She’s wearing white.

Bathe thinks he’s caught himself a soiled dove.





What she sees first is the white of his collar, a pristine ivory square staring out at her sharply from the base of an older man’s throat. His shirt is black and sharply creased, like it’s new or well ironed, but all the darkness makes his build hard to identify when he looms so closely above her. His face comes into focus slowly. It’s lined and weathered with cracks -- above his bushy eyebrows, at the corners of his eyes, framing the sides of his mouth -- but it is not an unkind face. The man has the nose of a hawk and bloodshot eyes; his hair is the muted brown of dead leaves, but the grey at his temples gives him a more studious look than the alcohol on his breath reveals.

When he realizes she’s looking, he sits back on a three-legged stool beside the couch she’s been placed on. He’s tall, solidly built like a farmer or laborer, but he hunches to hide it.

“What’s that about?” she asks by way of an introduction, looking at the white square on his neck again. Her voice is scratchy, and she’s never been so thirsty in all of her life.

“It’s a clerical collar.”

“You’re a man of the cloth.”

“Yes,” he says, but something in the way his eyes draw together and his mouth grimaces makes her think otherwise. “I’m Father Bathe. I found you on my property. You seemed to have come from the woods, although I don’t know how. Can you tell me what happened?”

“My name’s Modesty.”

“And?”

She shrugs a bony but smooth shoulder. She wants something to drink, but she doesn’t want to ask for it.

“Rest some more.” Father Bathe has a confident and soothing voice. He pats her hand the way docile men are supposed to. Modesty can remember many things, even now in the fog of wakefulness, but not the last time a man touched her so passively.





The girl, Modesty, falls back to sleep within two minutes. Her eyes blink rapidly for one second, and then she sighs before turning her head into the couch pillow. Her hair, a red bronze like certain coins, falls against her cheek. Bathe thinks about tucking it back behind her ear, but he decides not to. He’s already been intrusive enough by cleaning the scratches on her arms and legs and bandaging her feet. He knows how far the freckles run up her calves and how they slope beyond her shoulders, decorating her back like constellations.

He lets her rest.

He doesn’t think of going for help. Sourstone residents mostly keep to themselves except for church meetings on Sundays, and it’s only Wednesday, and she’s only a girl.





She stays until her feet have healed. And then she stays longer.





“I think you could be a sign,” he tells her over a third glass of whiskey on a night that is dark with sin. He’s starting to slur his words and his mouth is wet. His eyes seem hungry when he looks at her from his hunched position against the table.

“A sign from who?”

Bathe stares at her, hard. She's been with him a month and sometimes he has trouble remembering her name, although her face comes to him often. He clears his throat. “That’s what I’m tryin’ to figure out.”

Modesty smiles and stretches out her foot. She rubs his ankle with his toe.






When Bathe thinks back on his time with her, he’ll wonder at how easily he let the devil through his door.

Companion piece! Or at least a piece from Haven's POV when her and Luke are teens and stuff is ~happening~.

( nobody saw it coming but the little red devil in me )

Sooooo, Haven has been on my mind lately. Probably due to the copious amount of Lady Gaga I've been listening to while driving around in this Virginia heat. I'm glad I followed my gut and decided to write with the siblings.

Originally, I was going to do the first half from Luke's POV and then write a second half with a different scene from Haven's POV that thematically connected, but ... I didn't want to push my luck. I'm happy with how this came out.

Thanks to my muffinpants for being encouraging and for finding a suitable quote for me to snag!


( hear my sinner's prayer )