Outer Alliance Pride Day
Sep. 1st, 2009 12:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ashnistrikeAs a member of the Outer Alliance, I advocate for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity. I make sure this is reflected in my actions and my work.
Unfortunately, none of my work with queer characters is actually published. A couple of short stories are in submission, and can't be posted here right now. So you get a scene from Land Beyond the Border, one of two novels in progress. It's currently stalled in the midbook, actually; maybe this will help.
Quickie background and dramatis personae: Between Earth and Faerie lies a narrow borderland. Not all stories are true there, but the ones that have sunk deep into the collective consciousness take on a life of their own. Sherua is from the section of the Border that is, essentially, where Indiana Jones goes to steal treasure. As a Border native, she is fae-blooded, with mostly inconvenient results: an allergy to iron and limitations on her free will where it conflicts with the story defining her world. She is currently stuck in the dinosaur section, trying to return a stolen map to her people. Nadine Lopez is an anthropologist from the Field Museum in Chicago. She is currently helping escort Sherua through dangerous territory, and sitting really hard on her desire to write the whole thing up for journal publication. They are safe for the night in a walled town, and taking a much-needed trip to the bath house.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether Sherua would put up with a public bath, but the idea didn’t seem to faze her. We split up with Danny at the gender-marked entrances--of course--and found ourselves in a lamp-lit common room. Polished wooden chairs and benches, wet with condensation, were gathered around a fireplace. Others had been clustered on the far side of the room, presumably for those who wanted to cool off rather than warm up. The room wasn’t crowded, but there were two or three women in both corners. One dozed in front of the fire, flames flickering across her contented smile. A couple of the others looked up casually as we came in, then did double-takes at Sherua. She ignored their stares. She stripped easily and hung her clothes and towel on a rack. I got followed suit a bit more awkwardly. The other women in the bath house were--not models by any stretch, but none of them had spent the past eight months behind a desk either. And while some of them were probably tanned, my skin color stood out just as badly as Sherua’s.
For the actual bathing room, I guess I’d expected something like a swimming pool. Instead, round wooden tubs, about the size of a hot tub, were set into a floor of more hardwood. Beneath my feet the planks were smooth, but not slippery. Steam filled the air, and the wet wood gave off a pleasant, vaguely organic scent, like hickory smoke. A clean herbal undertone softened the smell. Potted plants along the walls brushed my ankles as I tried to find an empty tub. I tried to keep my eyes off of Sherua strutting in front of me. Long black hair fell to her waist. Normally when I pay any attention to girls, I like them with more definitive curves. Maybe it was just that I’d been sitting up against her all day. She didn’t even like my species. From the way she acted every time she opened her mouth, I probably didn’t like hers either, except out of anthropological interest.
A hawk-nosed woman with graying hair lifted herself as we passed. “Hey. You two with those topses that came barreling in this evening like a rex was chasin’ ‘em?”
“That was us,” I said before Sherua could say anything snotty. “It wasn’t a rex, but we did fight off an, um, a parrot hawk yesterday.” [Don't be fooled by the name: parrot hawks are about eight feet tall and hunt in packs.]
“God in heaven--hawks a day’s ride from Amity? Well, don’t be shy, come settle in and tell me about it.”
I decided a shared tub wasn’t such a bad thing. And gossip was always a good way to start a conversation--one of the near-universals. For humans, anyway. I eased myself carefully down the steps and settled opposite our hostess. The warm water came as a shock of comfort, soaking into muscles I’d forgotten could do anything but ache. Sherua followed, and the look of bliss that crossed her face suggested that this, at least, was something we had in common. The tub was cloudy, but I didn’t really care. I remembered to introduce myself, and Sherua too while I was at it, even as I closed my eyes and basked.
“Francy Watts,” the woman said. She peered at Sherua. “Goodness, child! You ain’t just pale.”
“I am from the Temple of Ramura,” she said, a touch of weariness creeping into her voice.
“Oh.” Francy shrank back, not quite moving away, but startled. Sherua didn’t appear to notice.
“We’re on our way north,” I explained. I gave her a basic rundown of our mission, adding in as many juicy bits as I had the energy to think of.
[Francy chats with them, giving a much-needed infodump about the section of Border they're about to enter. There are giant ants involved. Also man-eating flowers.]
Francy rubbed her fingers. “Goodness, I’m turning into a prune.” She lifted herself carefully from the water. “You folks take care on your way north. Don’t fret too much, dearie--plenty of people make the trip every year. You just mind your step.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. She made her way out, footsteps splatting quietly on the wet wood.
Sherua held onto the side, and let her legs and torso float up under the water. I set to work scrubbing myself off. A little cubby hole held something that looked like a loofah sponge. I used it gratefully, rubbing away layers of dead skin and sweat, though I tried to be gentle around the various little cuts and bruises I’d managed to pick up.
“I wonder if they import these, or whether there’s an inland sea around here somewhere. It would fit with the dinosaurs, but I’m not sure where you’d put it.”
“Further south.” Sherua closed her eyes. “It is a small one, but they have many of the monsters that please you so.”
“They don’t all please me,” I said. “Or at least, I’ve decided I can appreciate parrot hawks best from a distance.”
“A long one, yes.” She stretched languidly and sat up. “This is very fine, like the hot springs at Bechelma, but crafted. And it doesn’t sting, as the city water does.”
It took me a moment to catch on. “Because the city water has metal particulates from the pipes. It would make you sick just to drink it.”
“And sick not to drink,” she agreed. She winced as she began to wash herself. Her own bruises looked more delicate than my own, blue-violet shadows against her milky skin.
“You need help with your back?” I asked on impulse, and regretted it as her glare immediately sharpened. “Sorry. You just looked stiff.”
She stretched behind herself, experimentally, and winced. Her look softened slowly. “You are right. I am not yet fully recovered, and I do not have my sisters here.” She handed me the sponge. I took it, trying to keep my body language as neutral as possible.
“Sisters?” I asked. Her spine curved gently, little spots of tension twitching as I washed them. “Is the Temple of Ramura all women?”
I worried that I’d get another rant, but the question didn’t seem to be a sensitive one. “Yes, of course. We have an alliance with the temple of Bes Rama; we meet with them at festival time.”
“And raise the kids at Ramura till they’re of age?”
She twisted her head over her shoulder, frowning.
“Just a guess,” I said. “It’s one of the common ways to deal with it when men and women don’t live together. The other is to have the men raise the boys after they’re done nursing.”
She snorted and pulled away. “Don’t try to predict us from human patterns, aruna." [Sherua's favorite epithet: it means "thief."]
“No offense intended,” I said. “I’m sorry--trying to figure out all the different patterns is what I do. Human is all I have to go on, but I’d love to know other ways. I’m curious.”
“Bait and trap both,” she said. She pulled herself onto the deck. “You’ll keep it in check, aruna, if you hope to survive once we reach the Ruins.”
“Sherua, wait.” I scrambled out of the water, bruising my knee. She turned to glare at me, the same glare she’d given every time I’d pressed myself into her attention as something other than furniture. I supposed that I hadn’t done any lasting harm this time. Thinking of me as a grave robber wasn’t exactly new to her. And I—I don’t want you for your body. I want you for your academically interesting cultural mores—if I wasn’t careful, I’d be playing puppy dog to her hard-to-get. And she wasn’t playing. Like the Southlands and the Wastes, the Ruins had a set of real-world stories setting their scripts. She could only stray so far. What would happen if I said that to her?
We were alone in the bathing room now. I had no one but her to make a fool of myself in front of. “There are vast treasures, aren’t there? Ancient relics, holy things that you’ll defend with your life, and all outsiders see are gold and jewels. So you fill your vine-draped, crumbling temples with intricate booby traps, mazes and rooms of snakes and poisoned arrows, but the adventurers keep coming. It’s what they do; they’re as much a part of the dream as you are.”
“Your point?”
“I’m trying to understand the Borderlands. Each of the places here seems to be a set of stories, things that have gotten so ingrained into belief that they had to exist somewhere. I could even make predictions--I bet there’s a gleaming city with flying cars somewhere, too, where everyone eats food pills?”
She nodded. “The Silver City, on the far side of the lake. We avoid it.”
“And a frontier town, beset by Indians who actually give a damn about scalping. A land with castles and knights and dragons and a distinct lack of plagues. Pirates. The place where sasquatches and mothmen and the loch ness monster all hang out.”
“Shall I name them for you? Some of them are very far away.”
“So I’m thinking about what it must be like, to be native to someone else’s story. All these things that we know must be there, you know, and you don’t have any stories that conflict with your own. You have some leeway, like the australopithecene ‘beast men,’ but you’re still there basically to play a role. You maintain the traps and you fear outsiders, and if you’re really unlucky you might get won as a trophy by some square-jawed hero with delusions of empire. That ever happen?”
Her own jaw set. “You’re very clever, yes, I understand that. I repeat--your point?”
“I’m not from the same story you are.”
“You took the map.”
I sighed in exasperation. “I didn’t know it was yours. I didn’t know it belonged to anyone living, or I wouldn’t have bought it. You have no idea the trouble we get into for that sort of thing these days.”
“Ah. You are different. Of course.” She sat, and I joined her. The cool wet wood soothed me, slowing my breathing. “I am not ignorant of outside ways. Nor are most of the adventurers who seek our treasure fae-blooded. You are ‘curious’ about your people’s myriad cultures, while I’ve had to study them by necessity. As a species, humans are greedy and thieving, and imaginative in the thousand excuses they give to explain why their particular brand of theft is no such thing. Your religions and your laws, to a one, come down to such justifications.”
“Your cynicism takes my breath away.” I bit back further expressions of exasperation, but I swear she sounded like a freshman who’s just discovered the non-high-school version of American history. “We’re a mess, sure. I’m in no position to disagree--half my ancestors conquered and oppressed the other half. But humans spend a lot of time trying to save each other too, or stop thefts, or return what the bad guys have stolen. And I, personally, work to try and save little pieces of culture that would be lost otherwise. To honor the things I study, and to know that they’re sacred. That’s a story too--the one with temples of learning, where truth is the only treasure and you try to learn everything you can, even if you can’t possibly gain anything from it.” I stopped, embarrassed by my own lack of cynicism.
“You speak passionately.” Sherua looked away. “It is a matter of frustration. Our philosophers discuss it. To be the creation of a story, or perhaps only to be the source of the story that leads people to defile our temples, is its own form of defilement. We cannot be entirely free of the storytellers, though we despise them.”
“So they despise themselves, through you.”
“At least, they feel vaguely guilty. It is less than satisfying.”
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“Have our own lives, in spite of it all. Honor our mothers, and raise our children to know what they are and be it well. Worship our gods though the storytellers know nothing about them.”
“If the storytellers knew about your gods and your ways,” I said, “the stories might change.”
She snorted. “Unlikely. Besides, you’ve promised not to pass on any of what you see here.”
“I know. For a priestess in the temple of knowledge, I’ve gotta tell ya, it’s pretty darn frustrating.”
“Hm.” Wet echoes muted our voices. Contrasted with the chill wood, I could feel her body radiating heat even through warm steam. The steam mirrored the curving patterns tattooed on her arms. My finger had reached to trace one before I thought to stop it. She looked startled, but didn’t pull away. Maybe I’d imagined the body heat: her skin was wonderfully cool beneath my touch.
“These honor your gods,” I said.
“They are maps.” She smiled ironically. “Not of any space you could walk. Mnemonics for meditation, or for finding the soul’s way back from the sacred realms. This--” She ran a long finger along the vine leafing down her leg. “--is my life path. When I return home, I will add to it, to mark where I have been.”
My mouth rounded in delight. I bent to examine the leaves, wondering what I could read in them if I knew the legend and compass of their branches. She let me, this time. “It’s beautiful. More beautiful, now that I know that.”
“And you will not try to steal it.”
I sat up reluctantly. “I wouldn’t dare.” Hesitantly, I brushed her face. I shouldn’t do this. Not here.
My gesture drew an amused smirk. “Aruna who claims not be an aruna. You can hardly describe yourself as square-jawed.”
“Nor particularly imperialist, unpleasant Spanish ancestors aside. And you’re no trophy.” I drew my hand back. “It was just a touch. I’m not expecting to keep anything from it.” She leaned forward, and I was so surprised when she kissed me that I almost forgot to return it.
I started back at a creak from the door. One of the women from the common room stepped in and frowned at us. Sherua flowed to her feet and swept out past her. I gathered the soap, fumbling, and scrambled to follow.
“A little old for that, aren’t you?” the woman asked as I passed. I ignored her, cheeks burning.
In the common room, I dressed hurriedly, sneaking peaks at Sherua even as I wished I’d had some better retort. At least the woman didn’t come back to tell her companions what she’d seen.
Sherua glanced back disdainfully as we stepped into the cool night air. “Cynical, am I?”
Unfortunately, none of my work with queer characters is actually published. A couple of short stories are in submission, and can't be posted here right now. So you get a scene from Land Beyond the Border, one of two novels in progress. It's currently stalled in the midbook, actually; maybe this will help.
Quickie background and dramatis personae: Between Earth and Faerie lies a narrow borderland. Not all stories are true there, but the ones that have sunk deep into the collective consciousness take on a life of their own. Sherua is from the section of the Border that is, essentially, where Indiana Jones goes to steal treasure. As a Border native, she is fae-blooded, with mostly inconvenient results: an allergy to iron and limitations on her free will where it conflicts with the story defining her world. She is currently stuck in the dinosaur section, trying to return a stolen map to her people. Nadine Lopez is an anthropologist from the Field Museum in Chicago. She is currently helping escort Sherua through dangerous territory, and sitting really hard on her desire to write the whole thing up for journal publication. They are safe for the night in a walled town, and taking a much-needed trip to the bath house.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether Sherua would put up with a public bath, but the idea didn’t seem to faze her. We split up with Danny at the gender-marked entrances--of course--and found ourselves in a lamp-lit common room. Polished wooden chairs and benches, wet with condensation, were gathered around a fireplace. Others had been clustered on the far side of the room, presumably for those who wanted to cool off rather than warm up. The room wasn’t crowded, but there were two or three women in both corners. One dozed in front of the fire, flames flickering across her contented smile. A couple of the others looked up casually as we came in, then did double-takes at Sherua. She ignored their stares. She stripped easily and hung her clothes and towel on a rack. I got followed suit a bit more awkwardly. The other women in the bath house were--not models by any stretch, but none of them had spent the past eight months behind a desk either. And while some of them were probably tanned, my skin color stood out just as badly as Sherua’s.
For the actual bathing room, I guess I’d expected something like a swimming pool. Instead, round wooden tubs, about the size of a hot tub, were set into a floor of more hardwood. Beneath my feet the planks were smooth, but not slippery. Steam filled the air, and the wet wood gave off a pleasant, vaguely organic scent, like hickory smoke. A clean herbal undertone softened the smell. Potted plants along the walls brushed my ankles as I tried to find an empty tub. I tried to keep my eyes off of Sherua strutting in front of me. Long black hair fell to her waist. Normally when I pay any attention to girls, I like them with more definitive curves. Maybe it was just that I’d been sitting up against her all day. She didn’t even like my species. From the way she acted every time she opened her mouth, I probably didn’t like hers either, except out of anthropological interest.
A hawk-nosed woman with graying hair lifted herself as we passed. “Hey. You two with those topses that came barreling in this evening like a rex was chasin’ ‘em?”
“That was us,” I said before Sherua could say anything snotty. “It wasn’t a rex, but we did fight off an, um, a parrot hawk yesterday.” [Don't be fooled by the name: parrot hawks are about eight feet tall and hunt in packs.]
“God in heaven--hawks a day’s ride from Amity? Well, don’t be shy, come settle in and tell me about it.”
I decided a shared tub wasn’t such a bad thing. And gossip was always a good way to start a conversation--one of the near-universals. For humans, anyway. I eased myself carefully down the steps and settled opposite our hostess. The warm water came as a shock of comfort, soaking into muscles I’d forgotten could do anything but ache. Sherua followed, and the look of bliss that crossed her face suggested that this, at least, was something we had in common. The tub was cloudy, but I didn’t really care. I remembered to introduce myself, and Sherua too while I was at it, even as I closed my eyes and basked.
“Francy Watts,” the woman said. She peered at Sherua. “Goodness, child! You ain’t just pale.”
“I am from the Temple of Ramura,” she said, a touch of weariness creeping into her voice.
“Oh.” Francy shrank back, not quite moving away, but startled. Sherua didn’t appear to notice.
“We’re on our way north,” I explained. I gave her a basic rundown of our mission, adding in as many juicy bits as I had the energy to think of.
[Francy chats with them, giving a much-needed infodump about the section of Border they're about to enter. There are giant ants involved. Also man-eating flowers.]
Francy rubbed her fingers. “Goodness, I’m turning into a prune.” She lifted herself carefully from the water. “You folks take care on your way north. Don’t fret too much, dearie--plenty of people make the trip every year. You just mind your step.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. She made her way out, footsteps splatting quietly on the wet wood.
Sherua held onto the side, and let her legs and torso float up under the water. I set to work scrubbing myself off. A little cubby hole held something that looked like a loofah sponge. I used it gratefully, rubbing away layers of dead skin and sweat, though I tried to be gentle around the various little cuts and bruises I’d managed to pick up.
“I wonder if they import these, or whether there’s an inland sea around here somewhere. It would fit with the dinosaurs, but I’m not sure where you’d put it.”
“Further south.” Sherua closed her eyes. “It is a small one, but they have many of the monsters that please you so.”
“They don’t all please me,” I said. “Or at least, I’ve decided I can appreciate parrot hawks best from a distance.”
“A long one, yes.” She stretched languidly and sat up. “This is very fine, like the hot springs at Bechelma, but crafted. And it doesn’t sting, as the city water does.”
It took me a moment to catch on. “Because the city water has metal particulates from the pipes. It would make you sick just to drink it.”
“And sick not to drink,” she agreed. She winced as she began to wash herself. Her own bruises looked more delicate than my own, blue-violet shadows against her milky skin.
“You need help with your back?” I asked on impulse, and regretted it as her glare immediately sharpened. “Sorry. You just looked stiff.”
She stretched behind herself, experimentally, and winced. Her look softened slowly. “You are right. I am not yet fully recovered, and I do not have my sisters here.” She handed me the sponge. I took it, trying to keep my body language as neutral as possible.
“Sisters?” I asked. Her spine curved gently, little spots of tension twitching as I washed them. “Is the Temple of Ramura all women?”
I worried that I’d get another rant, but the question didn’t seem to be a sensitive one. “Yes, of course. We have an alliance with the temple of Bes Rama; we meet with them at festival time.”
“And raise the kids at Ramura till they’re of age?”
She twisted her head over her shoulder, frowning.
“Just a guess,” I said. “It’s one of the common ways to deal with it when men and women don’t live together. The other is to have the men raise the boys after they’re done nursing.”
She snorted and pulled away. “Don’t try to predict us from human patterns, aruna." [Sherua's favorite epithet: it means "thief."]
“No offense intended,” I said. “I’m sorry--trying to figure out all the different patterns is what I do. Human is all I have to go on, but I’d love to know other ways. I’m curious.”
“Bait and trap both,” she said. She pulled herself onto the deck. “You’ll keep it in check, aruna, if you hope to survive once we reach the Ruins.”
“Sherua, wait.” I scrambled out of the water, bruising my knee. She turned to glare at me, the same glare she’d given every time I’d pressed myself into her attention as something other than furniture. I supposed that I hadn’t done any lasting harm this time. Thinking of me as a grave robber wasn’t exactly new to her. And I—I don’t want you for your body. I want you for your academically interesting cultural mores—if I wasn’t careful, I’d be playing puppy dog to her hard-to-get. And she wasn’t playing. Like the Southlands and the Wastes, the Ruins had a set of real-world stories setting their scripts. She could only stray so far. What would happen if I said that to her?
We were alone in the bathing room now. I had no one but her to make a fool of myself in front of. “There are vast treasures, aren’t there? Ancient relics, holy things that you’ll defend with your life, and all outsiders see are gold and jewels. So you fill your vine-draped, crumbling temples with intricate booby traps, mazes and rooms of snakes and poisoned arrows, but the adventurers keep coming. It’s what they do; they’re as much a part of the dream as you are.”
“Your point?”
“I’m trying to understand the Borderlands. Each of the places here seems to be a set of stories, things that have gotten so ingrained into belief that they had to exist somewhere. I could even make predictions--I bet there’s a gleaming city with flying cars somewhere, too, where everyone eats food pills?”
She nodded. “The Silver City, on the far side of the lake. We avoid it.”
“And a frontier town, beset by Indians who actually give a damn about scalping. A land with castles and knights and dragons and a distinct lack of plagues. Pirates. The place where sasquatches and mothmen and the loch ness monster all hang out.”
“Shall I name them for you? Some of them are very far away.”
“So I’m thinking about what it must be like, to be native to someone else’s story. All these things that we know must be there, you know, and you don’t have any stories that conflict with your own. You have some leeway, like the australopithecene ‘beast men,’ but you’re still there basically to play a role. You maintain the traps and you fear outsiders, and if you’re really unlucky you might get won as a trophy by some square-jawed hero with delusions of empire. That ever happen?”
Her own jaw set. “You’re very clever, yes, I understand that. I repeat--your point?”
“I’m not from the same story you are.”
“You took the map.”
I sighed in exasperation. “I didn’t know it was yours. I didn’t know it belonged to anyone living, or I wouldn’t have bought it. You have no idea the trouble we get into for that sort of thing these days.”
“Ah. You are different. Of course.” She sat, and I joined her. The cool wet wood soothed me, slowing my breathing. “I am not ignorant of outside ways. Nor are most of the adventurers who seek our treasure fae-blooded. You are ‘curious’ about your people’s myriad cultures, while I’ve had to study them by necessity. As a species, humans are greedy and thieving, and imaginative in the thousand excuses they give to explain why their particular brand of theft is no such thing. Your religions and your laws, to a one, come down to such justifications.”
“Your cynicism takes my breath away.” I bit back further expressions of exasperation, but I swear she sounded like a freshman who’s just discovered the non-high-school version of American history. “We’re a mess, sure. I’m in no position to disagree--half my ancestors conquered and oppressed the other half. But humans spend a lot of time trying to save each other too, or stop thefts, or return what the bad guys have stolen. And I, personally, work to try and save little pieces of culture that would be lost otherwise. To honor the things I study, and to know that they’re sacred. That’s a story too--the one with temples of learning, where truth is the only treasure and you try to learn everything you can, even if you can’t possibly gain anything from it.” I stopped, embarrassed by my own lack of cynicism.
“You speak passionately.” Sherua looked away. “It is a matter of frustration. Our philosophers discuss it. To be the creation of a story, or perhaps only to be the source of the story that leads people to defile our temples, is its own form of defilement. We cannot be entirely free of the storytellers, though we despise them.”
“So they despise themselves, through you.”
“At least, they feel vaguely guilty. It is less than satisfying.”
“So what do you do?” I asked.
“Have our own lives, in spite of it all. Honor our mothers, and raise our children to know what they are and be it well. Worship our gods though the storytellers know nothing about them.”
“If the storytellers knew about your gods and your ways,” I said, “the stories might change.”
She snorted. “Unlikely. Besides, you’ve promised not to pass on any of what you see here.”
“I know. For a priestess in the temple of knowledge, I’ve gotta tell ya, it’s pretty darn frustrating.”
“Hm.” Wet echoes muted our voices. Contrasted with the chill wood, I could feel her body radiating heat even through warm steam. The steam mirrored the curving patterns tattooed on her arms. My finger had reached to trace one before I thought to stop it. She looked startled, but didn’t pull away. Maybe I’d imagined the body heat: her skin was wonderfully cool beneath my touch.
“These honor your gods,” I said.
“They are maps.” She smiled ironically. “Not of any space you could walk. Mnemonics for meditation, or for finding the soul’s way back from the sacred realms. This--” She ran a long finger along the vine leafing down her leg. “--is my life path. When I return home, I will add to it, to mark where I have been.”
My mouth rounded in delight. I bent to examine the leaves, wondering what I could read in them if I knew the legend and compass of their branches. She let me, this time. “It’s beautiful. More beautiful, now that I know that.”
“And you will not try to steal it.”
I sat up reluctantly. “I wouldn’t dare.” Hesitantly, I brushed her face. I shouldn’t do this. Not here.
My gesture drew an amused smirk. “Aruna who claims not be an aruna. You can hardly describe yourself as square-jawed.”
“Nor particularly imperialist, unpleasant Spanish ancestors aside. And you’re no trophy.” I drew my hand back. “It was just a touch. I’m not expecting to keep anything from it.” She leaned forward, and I was so surprised when she kissed me that I almost forgot to return it.
I started back at a creak from the door. One of the women from the common room stepped in and frowned at us. Sherua flowed to her feet and swept out past her. I gathered the soap, fumbling, and scrambled to follow.
“A little old for that, aren’t you?” the woman asked as I passed. I ignored her, cheeks burning.
In the common room, I dressed hurriedly, sneaking peaks at Sherua even as I wished I’d had some better retort. At least the woman didn’t come back to tell her companions what she’d seen.
Sherua glanced back disdainfully as we stepped into the cool night air. “Cynical, am I?”
