Work Text:
No one ever knocked on the door. Not until two months ago. The genteel bop-bop hit like twin spinal taps in the backs of her eyes, and Gideon rolled them, and sagged at the knees and groaned like she was poisoned and didn’t give a fuuuck if he could hear. Her wallet was still warm on the counter. She had just unwedged the sticky tub of leftovers from behind the garter snake or eel or whatever the fuck in the gallon jar of isopropyl. Pants, still on hips, fly down, unbuttoned. She didn’t even get her socks off. It was half eight and her ass intended to saw logs in twenty.
Too late to pretend not to be there. Gideon was compelled to abandon her post. Her microwave vigil. The dandan noodles must wait. She let her head whiplash back in another toddler ughhhhh as she stomped to the door. And condescended to zip her pants. The noodles crackled gorgeously in their own fragrant, spicy oil as Gideon yanked the doorknob and stood square, not bothering to hunch or bodyblock the kitchen this time. Fuck it. Let him see the dishes in the sink and the compost pile of pepto-pink Post-its and the fishtank of creepy crawlies next to the breadbox. Maybe he would stop coming around. “Look, man, I just got back in, there’s no way you heard –”
Jangling – her keys. Waggling toothy-bright where she had ditched them in the deadbolt.
“Thought you might want those.” Noise Complaint had coffee. He futzed with his glasses and grinned, kind of. “Morning.” He was always futzing with his glasses. “Or evening, for you.”
The first time Gideon had opened the door to him he was futzing with his glasses, and half-smiling with a dainty air of In case you weren’t aware, your TV... Gideon was long-acquainted with ‘smug.’ She was not familiar with ‘trying not to be smug.’ If that’s even what he was going for. The other two times, he looked alarmed.
She mumbled something sheepish. Half-shrugged, seesawing her keys free, already shouldering shut the door. Noise Complaint pressed his hand out to stopper it. “But actually – real fast. I've, ah.” He withdrew with as much reflex. “Been missing some mail. Was wondering if it might have gotten mixed up in yours.”
“Nop.”
“I see.” He futzed with his glasses. His eyes skated over Gideon’s shoulder and around the apartment – the counters, the kitchen, half the living room, Gideon’s door – in one silver circuit. “Could you check with your… friend?”
Oh, boy. “If I see her.”
His eyes pinched. “Thanks.” He studied Gideon’s face. It felt like getting downloaded. And Gideon’s hand, still on the doorframe. Any visible skin. He shifted his weight. “The name on it would be ‘Pa –”
The door slammed. Gideon flipped the extra deadbolt with a meaty thunk-thunk, flurried the privacy chain into its track and slid it shut with a schick, and wavered thumb above the surface bolt. The microwave purred. She tipped her ear to the door.
“... ‘Palame –”
She threw the surface bolt with a CHONK. And rattlesnaked the privacy chain with erratic spirit fingers.
She waited about ten seconds more with an itch in her nose. And instantly lost interest (heart soaring!) at the ding of the microwave. Gideon knew a busybody when she saw one. Just because he could hear through the crummy walls in this place didn’t make anything his business. Wear headphones.
She sidled back (pants unzipped) and click-popped the thing open and was mollywhopped with sweet capsaicin. Fuck. Microwaved too close to the sun. Her noodles had Rorschached chili oil all over the inside. Gideon would clean it later. Let Harrow bitch and gripe all she wanted; Gideon's messes didn't involve body parts.
She settled into the couch’s most accommodating ass-crevice and slouched into spicy, starchy pleasure. The noodle place three blocks down. So good. It was just a window in the wall, manned by a chain-smoking old lady, no space even for seating. Gideon knew it would be good before she had a single bite. After three minutes of spacing out at the offcenter display menu, scratching at the hairy part of her stomach and trying to decrypt what ‘dry-frying’ was, the spongy old lady tapped her cigarette over the sidewalk and rasped, “Buy something or leave.” Gideon was back at least once a week. Noodles: housemade and pulled on-site (but don’t smirk about it); veggies: sometimes crunchy, sometimes leafy, but plentiful and varied by week (Gideon only recognized about a third of them, but that said more about Gideon); and a savory, garlicky ground pork sauce that was hot enough to give the sinuses a solid rattle. Gideon sighed and sniffed on the couch. Really took the edge off a night of hauling and cleaning shit. She jammed a finger a couple nights back double-timing the bins, and it still smarted at certain angles.
Gideon sniffled again and bumped at her nose. Spicy oil smeared a comma over her wrist. She licked it clean, but a smudge on her cheek spread to her thumb, and… She groped at the side table for the roll of paper towels that never managed to get put back in the kitchen. Nearly knocked over last night's water glass. A quick one-handed rearrangement of crap on the table revealed that Harrow had stripped the fucking batteries from the TV remote again. Fine. No TV. Gideon was going to eat her noodles in silence, maybe take off her pants, curl up on the couch and sleep.
If Harrow came back today, she would be locked out. Her own fault. She was the one to install the bullshit number of locks. Gideon hardly ever used any beside the standard deadbolt. And it wasn’t Gideon’s problem she never even turned up for days at a time. Harrow had done God-only-knows to make the first four months of rent before landing a job as a night auditor for a small chain of hotels in the area. So she said. Her schedule was predictable as the number of flies around the dumpster. She paid rent in cash. No social media. No accounts. And she never got a phone which made her a pain in the ass to try and coordinate with. Gideon could just undo all the locks other than the deadbolt. But also Harrow could be less of a bitch about 99% of the time. So if she wanted back in the apartment today, she better get her wispy ass in gear.
How fucked to bite it so hard. To still have her around. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Gideon had chewed her fucking arm off coyote-style just before fifteen to get away from it all. Years in shelters and couch-surfing. Hustling. Sort of. Not really. Some not great arrangements. But she made them work. She was tough, she was smart, Gideon survived. Survivor type. She managed a painstaking collection of new legal documents from the courts after a sufficient number of bureaucratic humiliation rituals (who knew jeans weren’t formal attire?) and figured her shit out enough to land a night custodian job that didn’t try to kill her on the reg. It paid enough to split a two-bedroom. Gideon felt like landed gentry. A real prince. She had a paper towel holder, to say nothing of her quantity of paper towels. Any spills, ladies? Things almost felt easy.
It wasn’t even that hard to get roommates in the postings. The only tricky part was keeping them. Gideon had some tics. Yeah. Who didn’t. Yeah like she had nightmares sometimes or remembered an argument in the shower and couldn’t let it go until she finished it the way it should have finished. And yeah sure it made sense to then come out to wide eyes in the living room. And it’s normal to ask if anyone has been messing with your shit. When other people live in the same place as you, it’s good to check that they don’t, and let them know you have an eye out, especially when your shit still went missing anyway sometimes. Boundaries. Basic. And she had this thing about food. You don’t throw away that much fucking brie, okay? All Gideon did was not let it go to waste, fuck the affront. She was shitting her brains out for days after but she would have done it again in a heartbeat. That brie cost two and a half hours on the clock. Or like, why would people buy stuff and not even use it? Once it’s expired it doesn’t matter if your name is on it. You’re basically ready to throw it out and it’s just a matter of not wasting it. Gideon wasn’t taking anything they wanted to use, anyway. And when she did it wasn’t a lot of it. And sometimes she kept her own things in the fridge past what their label said. Sure, they weren’t “best” anymore, but they weren’t bad. She could still find a use for most things.
The longest lasted seven months; the shortest, two weeks. Gideon must have been on the verge of running through the pool of available desperate people when Harrow fucking, manifested in a cloud of smoke. Her stock must have fallen hard and fast at home. Meteoric. Chicxulub shit. Wouldn't say how. And Gideon couldn't afford the place on her own.
So.
But she was building up to it. The clean break. The endgame. The Shangri-la of 100% gone. This was like, 75%. Maybe a soft 80. Good progress, all told. In the meantime, the fact was that Harrow was the only human on the planet that Gideon could sit next to in silence with hardly a thought, much less a second one. She would demand and gripe and torment and needle and harangue and harass and castigate, but she never really asked for explanations. There was something going for that.
But there were two problems. That were related. One was sort of stacked on top of the other. The problem – problem one – the first problem was that, in the meantime, the both of them slipped back into violence like broken-in boots. Like they hadn't missed a day. Gideon had put on at least sixty pounds and a few more inches since crawling back up the freezing, biting metal steps in full winter with Harrow’s shoeprint on her forehead, but that did not a whole fuck of a lot in terms of discouraging the supposed underdog.
There was always a part of Gideon that wanted to tamp it down. You’re twice her size, don’t hurt her for real. But then Harrow’s raggedy fingernail would catch her eyelid or her bony elbow would stab right in the mouth or tit or pussy bones, and then anger blacked out the top of Gideon’s head like a big schoolhouse rubber scrubbing her right off the paper. Ten weight classes shy did not keep the freak from struggling to yank Gideon’s unconscious body off the couch by the ankle at 3 pm, snarling about wet clothes in the bathroom or Quit jerking off on the couch, you pig! Or some innocuous fucking item left by her room and then Gideon's elbow was around her twiggy neck, and Harrow kiddy-kicking heels back into shins, and all of it.
For the record, Gideon would sometimes sleep on the couch because 1) fuck you she was here first 2) it was her couch (technically inherited) and 3) the heater in her bedroom still wasn't fixed and she didn’t like having to pick up her nipple shards every morning she went to bed, okay?
And even if she did. In theory. On occasion. It’s not like she would have left a mess. Gideon was quick. She could do it without taking off a stitch. Sniper style. Take the shot. In, boom, out. Real ninja shit. Harrow was probably projecting. Given the second problem.
Tssss, ouch – hot oil in a hangnail. Gideon shook the finger, and sucked on it, which did nothing helpful.
About the fighting itself. Not Noise Complaint. Necessarily. Not even the reliance on manual labor to make rent. Gideon thought it was just her, at first. But, haha. Hoho. Yuk it up. She wasn't a virgin or anything like that but the body confuses that stuff. The heart gets pounding. The mouth dries up. Breath, heavier, chest ticking tighter, head lighter gut fluttering blood puddling up where the blow landed or the skin scraped, where it touched. There was some confusion. Okay. The wires cross.
Anyway after they were too battered or tired or irritated from fighting there would follow a few days of avoidant truce. Mumbling woolishly to each other across the living room only when absolutely vital. Otherwise, they cut each other broad berths and shuffled stiffly around like there were Legos everywhere. Could maybe last as long as a week if their schedules were staggered. Especially if they left visible marks. Gideon never had enough coworkers on at the same time to worry about nosiness, but could not be certain about Harrow’s. If she really had a job.
But then a coffee spill on the mail, missing key, how long has this been here, bang, pow, biff, boom. The second either one of their guards dropped against the dam of old habits, they were back in the thick. The other one could only get pulled in by the ankle.
Harrow had improved overall. But she still tried the mile with each inch Gideon afforded. The closest they had come to hospitalization was when Harrow dumped her entire week’s worth of loaded baked potato soup from their (Gideon’s!) solitary pot to make room for some stupid fucking curing juice. Gideon, naturally, dumped it all down the drain.
What she remembered next was her knee hooked under one of the kitchen cupboards, half-concussed on the floor with the frying pan still ringinginging medieval from a fresh hot collab track with her skull. Harrow’s hands like angry little spurs around her throat. Thumbs over the blood. Gideon gargled. Sticky-tacky dots peppermilled around. Through them she could make out Harrow's panting, bowstrung mouth, tilted open in lapdog sips, the filigreed little crest of her snarl. She bore down over Gideon with an expression that meant to stake her through the eyes and to the tile.
Self-preservation gasped: Squirm away. Throw her off. Flip over. Something! Gideon tried to buck and roll, pro wrestler style, but ended up with a sloppy arch that went – this – that – thataway. Instead of politely falling off, Harrow sunk back down onto Gideon’s belly like rocking on a hobbyhorse, and moaned.
Then they were both immediately exploded and killed and disintegrated and smeared from the face of the planet and all existence because of a kind and loving God. Just kidding. The opposite of that happened. They stared at each other for one horror movie second while blood scurried around. Harrow rocketed up to standing (on Gideon’s fucking arm) and staggered – a liver-dark flush up to her ears – gave one last sizzling glower down from her one-handed brace on the counter, and stilted back to her room to slam the door. It didn’t open for days.
No idea if Harrow played pocket pool. Signs pointed to 'hard no.’ Gideon had been made to hold a stress position for hours when, at the age of seven, she had gotten curious enough to squat over a hand mirror in the bathroom to see what all the hubbub was about. And Gideon was the reject. If Harrow was working through tension, cobwebs would probably be involved. Moths. Maybe some sort of ironclad jaws-of-life situation. Gideon did not think about that. She did not think about it like a champ. But it was hard to forget a body thrashing you – thrashing against you – and feeling it enjoy.
So… fuck. Right? Gideon had been retreating to her room to lick wounds and beat off for months. But that wasn’t saying much. Gideon ran on a high gear. Standard setting. She got wet from hitting more than one speed hump in a row.
A little short on outlets. She had mixed luck pulling girls. Working nights did not help. And when she did rally on the odd night off, most of them wanted to dance. Gideon could hold her own in a conversation and was hot enough that girls would sometimes come talk to her, but Gideon was not a dancer. That’s where the night would shit itself. Formative years spent knee-deep in muddy fields and lugging around sacks of lye in the cellar, where the fuck did they expect her to dig up rhythm? But she got far enough a few times to count as sex. One could have been a long term thing, even, but it got weird after. It felt like tuning a radio with no stations. Where was the plot? Gideon kind of stopped reading her texts. They had sex a few times though. It was more than once.
It didn’t make the whole hot-n-hemorrhaging thing less megafucked. It had been awhile. Okay.
After the pot thing, they didn’t have another fight for weeks. But once they did, and paused after the most of it to catch breath, with Gideon cornered in a pinchpoint against the countertops as Harrow bullied a cabinet door into her shoulder, Gideon made a move. No, she didn't. She almost didn’t. She was quiet. At the hem of Harrow’s shirt, Gideon’s fingers made a timid attempt at skin. Carefully curved over the bony hip. Pulled, a little.
Harrow froze. She stared in shock over Gideon’s shoulder at the backsplash of the wall. Mouth, parted. No other response.
Gideon swallowed. Her head tipped down: brushed her nose against the pulsepoint as it flickered the skin. It glitched shims of shade and light along Harrow’s neck, like a stumble past a curtain.
- ferociously repelled: two like magnets in science class. Harrow twisted away on a cellular level that Gideon could feel in the back of her mouth. Every molecule now cold and cold with anger –
“Idiot!” Cabinet door thunk and Gideon hid behind her hands – “Slime!” with a crack in the voice never heard before. And the storming off, and the silent treatment, and so on. So that was that. Thank God they never talked about it.
So those were the main problems. An honorable mention went out to the enduring fact that Harrow was a freak who kept up the creepy body stuff. It wasn’t taxidermy or outright morgue shit at least. But fuuuuck. Gideon dreaded whatever elephant graveyard was bristling under blacklights in her room (also locked and deadbolted, also against the lease) and what it would do to the deposit. A few months in, Gideon came home to a fishtank full of beetles and woodchips. She had to dig into an inherited box for the Post-its.
‘What the fuck’ does not suffice.
The room is too confined.
You need to get really good at Tetris really fast because we are not having Jiminy Cricket do Kirby shit right where I cook
Your room is larger. Exchange it for mine.
NO.
I have offered a solution and you have rejected it. The tank remains.
The tank GOES by midnight tomorrow or this thing becomes a birdfeeder you manipulative dickhead
The glass is specially treated to shatter if handled at the incorrect points of contact. Compromise the tank at your peril. Dermestids can infest every inch of the apartment in minutes.
Gideon didn’t know how much of that was true and how much was piping hot horseshit. With Harrow she never got to know. The tank was gone two days later but whenever it reappeared for random stretches at a time, Gideon pretended not to see it. Just thinking about it made her itchy.
And it was better than the real old school shit. She came home early one night after the power cut at work to find Harrow hunched over something brown and hairy in the sink, degloving. Gideon flipped. There was no fucking way. No fucking way, babe! Harrow pointed out that she had bleach prepared and Gideon pointed out that she needed a conservative twenty-six times that amount. Harrow noted that Gideon had never noticed any issues before. (“How fucking often do you do this!?”)
So Gideon drove them to the goddamn store for bleach.
The only place open was at the edge of the next town over. Gideon had to chaperone Harrow to the register and have her stand before another human being to pony up (Harrow acted like she wasn't there, which made it worse). This also meant Gideon had to come through on restocking paper goods like she had kept meaning to. Kind of hard to forget again.
On the silent drive back, in a pitch black stretch of road, Harrow ramrodded both hands onto the sedan’s dashboard and barked: “Stop!”
Gideon’s seatbelt jerked a bruising line right between her tits as her sedan shrilled on asphalt. The bottles of bleach (thunk-thunk!) catapulted into the back of Harrow’s seat and onto the floor behind them. Harrow was completely still, peering away from the road, into the dark, out towards the woods. The ditch. (“What? Fucking what?”) Without a word she unlatched the passenger side door with one hand and fumbled in her coat pocket with the other – lurched – had to reach back again to unbuckle her seatbelt. She left the passenger door open. Cab light on, beep-beep-beeping.
What the hell. Gideon glanced into her rearview. It was piss o’clock, so no traffic. Yet. “What the fuck are you doing?” Gideon had a knot in her shoulder that was throbbing. She wanted to get home and lie down. “Get back in!”
Harrow had slunk coltishly down over the shoulder of the ditch, picking around naked saplings like she had dropped something. (“I'm gonna leave you here, asshat!”) She hesitated; her focus wavered, like the trail was lost. Then did – something with her hands before crouching down. When she straightened up, she was carefully hefting a lump. Gideon watched her retrace her choosy steps back to the car. And then past it, maybe ten yards ahead of the windshield.
For a moment it seemed like Harrow was stupidly blocking the car with her stupid body to prevent Gideon from making good on her threat. Tough shit, there; Gideon hadn’t washed the sedan in weeks. She would barely have minded hosing Harrow off the hood except that it meant missing rent. Wrong, though: Harrow only wanted the benefit of the headlights. She hunched at the shoulder of the road, and laid out her prize.
A bird. It didn’t look hit. It wasn’t smashed up all weird, at least, or bloody. Not that Gideon could see. Just looked like it kind of gave up on the whole ‘moving around’ thing. Harrow’s hands (were black; she had pulled on a pair of those gloves that chefs wear in the videos) shifted around the plump, healthy, colorful body in the light: it was a kererū. Gideon always thought they looked like they were wearing big baby bibs. She dusted aside bits of gravel and debris, and laid the thing down within the light.
– and suddenly rose and strode back to the sedan. Gideon startled. Harrow made for the backseat. She dumped out the bottle of bleach from one plastic bag as Gideon finally got her word in edgewise. “Thing’s probably got every kind of disease.”
Harrow rolled her eyes. “She’s almost warm.”
“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have ticks or something.”
“The freezer will kill anything hitching a ride.” She returned to the passenger side. Still left the doors open. “Stop being such a baby.”
“Freezers are for food." Harrow scoffed. She mashed the button on the dashboard for the emergency lights, reached into the cupholder for Gideon’s phone and swooped out again in one clean bastard motion. “Hey –!”
She shone Gideon’s phone light down over the carcass and examined it. Gideon watched. Checked for cars. She left the engine idling for awhile. Then, ugh, Christ, biting her lip, she killed the ignition; left the headlights on. Click-click-click of the emergency flashers. Tutting like a disappointed teacher.
Gideon's phone was evidently useful in examining the minutiae. Harrow hovered it over some parts of the bird and then set it down again. In the splashy, jagged lighting from the car, Harrow hunched like a meathook. She picked up the body with remarkable care. In the spill of yellow, she unscrolled the wing. The top was muted dragonfly colors, fragile, webbed. Harrow’s fingers sifted through the feathers. She was gentle. Her expression was poised on that slippery tightrope between relaxed and focused, gloved fingers gently palpating the wing. She was searching for breaks in the bone.
Her mouth was still creased with the same frown lines she had sprouted at age seven. But the shape was different. The thought intruded that this was the look of her asleep, mouth lax, breathing even. The eyes just as bright and sharp but not to cut; only to clear away. She looked softly disarmed. Gideon had never seen that. Gideon had never seen her look like that.
They drove back the rest of the way in continued silence. The bleach, bag and bird in the backseat.
Why do you do that? Gideon almost asked. Why? Or maybe it was What do you do with them? Who is it for? When they were six and five, Gideon threatened to sneak into the morgue and leave a human hand in Harrow’s bed. Harrow was the one who made good on the threat.
“What?” Harrow sneered in the passenger seat. They were back within streetlight territory. As the car floated by, the flashes of them felt like old film reel.
“What, what?”
“You keep looking at me, nitwit.”
Gideon turned back to the road. “I didn’t say anything.”
Bangbangbang. “NAV!”
Snorting awake – oil right down the sinuses, fuck.
“Open the fucking door, you incompetent!” BANGBANGBANG. “GRIDDLE!”
It was a little after 2:00. Six hours. Gideon really needed more. She staggered upright (pants still on), crossed the kitchen. Stifled a yawn. Scrubbed the back of her neck. Fumbled the locks loose and leaned back just enough to avoid the edge of the door shaving off her nose.
Harrow stormed past and drew all the curtains closed.
“Come on, it’s cold enough in here.” Gideon was already faceplanting back into her own sleepy smell on the sofa. Though she might sleep better in the dark.
Harrow ignored her. She moved like a pack of hornets to the cabinets. Glass clinked dangerously. “You left an oil slick in here. Clean it up.”
Gideon rolled her eyes underneath her arm. It was nicer with the curtains closed. “Noise Complaint thinks you’ve been stealing his mail.” The clinking fell quiet. Gideon waited. “Are you?” She lifted her arm from her face. “You fucking goblin. You’re going to get us shitcanned. I got this lease by the skin of my dick! If they evict me, you’re on your ass again.” Harrow carefully replaced whatever noxious little jar she had taken out from one shelf. “No mummy or papá to slither back to.”
“You’d be slithering down some drainpipe already without me here.” Clinkink. “You won’t lose your precious lease. Stop pestering me about it and sleep in your room, for once. And quit masturbating on the couch.”
“It's my fucking couch. And I don’t!”
Clink – crack. Harrow snarled disgust and wiped her hand furiously on her jacket. “You tracked oil everywhere! You slug!” She rummaged, snarling. “Here –” Something sailed across from kitchen to couch and hit Gideon in the chest with a meaty whap. “Clean your repugnant fingers before you spread it anywhere else. Don’t you clean for a living?” The fridge door opened and slammed. “Animal. It’s like living with a pack of wild dogs.”
Gideon fumbled with the projectile that slid down her chest and into her chin: a package of baby wipes. From the all-purpose Bowl of Whatever on the counter. She sat half-upright, waited for Harrow to turn a corner, reared back – and pelted it square at her little xylophone ass.
Harrow stumbled; her spine loaded up straight like a bullet clip; her wretched little fists balled up at either side and she whipped around to swoop up the package and barrel towards the couch all swelling like a thunderhead, eyes black and static.
– and stopped. Maybe ten feet from Gideon, Harrow stood frozen, package in-hand. This was odd. Harrow lowered it back to her side. No words needed to read her, only the set of her chin and her narrowed eyes: Harrow was considering her options very carefully.
What options?
Gideon watched. And balked as Harrow resumed approach… but now slow. Measured. Non-threatening.
This was deeply motherfucking troubling. If Harrow had stopped mid-retaliation to play white flag, it was only because she had some far more psychologically ornate bullshit planned. Klaxons keyed the back of Gideon's skull as she squirmed upright partway.
It made Harrow pause. Eyes flashing. She waited for something. She glanced to Gideon's door – not far – unobstructed. So did Gideon.
If Harrow wanted to fight she would have cut to the chase by now. She had never cut herself off from a good rage ramp-up. Her chin and eyes were set as normal. She had come to a decision.
Gideon watched her stalk closer. Too late for her. The instinct to freeze won. Curiosity, too, if Gideon was honest. She had propped to one elbow, but made a strategic retreating burrow into the back of the couch as Harrow closed in slowly. Not quite in arm’s reach. Looking down at her. Gideon could not place Harrow's expression. Maybe she was trying to place Gideon’s.
Then Harrow (Gideon swallowed) lowered herself. She perched at the edge of the couch near Gideon's hip, stare black and impassive. Only needed a few inches. She let her body turn crooked in a kind of sidesaddle. Part of her back was exposed.
They studied each other.
Gideon at gunpoint could not recall the last time they had been this physically close without fighting. Outside the darkness of the car ride, or confined in elevators where they both looked grimly elsewhere. This close, this still, for this long, with the benefit of both eyes, Gideon could see a tiny discolored scar along the bridge of Harrow’s nose. Backlit, the curlicue of her top lip showed a dusting of fine hairs. She smelled like stale cotton and ink. Formaldehyde.
Gideon’s stupid fucking idiot vagina was wet, because of course. Fucking. Chest was tickly. So her breathing had already heavied just a whiff when Harrow held her palm open. She had evil little barbs for hands. Deft though. Shaped for being sneaky. For cheapshots. She had used that exact hand a few weeks back to yank out a chunk of Gideon’s hair.
Now the fingers flexed once, politely. “Your hand.” In the other, she was still holding the baby wipes.
This proposal would hold the same appeal of proffering her limb to a hydraulic press. But Gideon was actually wildly curious. This courteous Harrow. It was weird. There was no urgency in her pinched expression as she waited for a response. When Gideon glanced to her bedroom door again, Harrow’s hand began to lower.
Mystery had its way. Gideon offered her hand.
Harrow’s eyes brightened and she took it by the wrist to scrutinize for several neutral seconds. She ran hotter than Gideon. She swiped along the whole hand, front and back, and the arch beneath the thumb. It was genial but efficient. Unsentimental. She made a sound in her throat to prompt Gideon to spread her fingers more, and Gideon suppressed a nervy shiver as she cleaned there, too. Had not stopped to think how sensitive the skin was.
More than once, Harrow’s eyes flitted over to Gideon as she watched this extremely strange but actually pretty pleasant … whatever. “Stop staring at me.” So Gideon watched her work instead. She felt Harrow’s eyes on her, off and on, assessing. She was meticulous with each finger. Cleaning in small, overlapping twists that warmed. When Gideon grunted at the ring finger she relaxed her hold.
Harrow watched her hand flex and slowly took it again by the wrist. Watching Gideon, she tested the finger.
“How painful?”
“There.” Ow. “That’s too far.”
Harrow made some grayscale noise in her mouth. She discarded the wipe on the side table (slob) but didn’t let go of the hand. She tested. And – Gideon gawped a little – masterfully cracked the knuckles on each finger, which felt nice but was odd to have done by someone else. With the ring finger she was much more cautious. Harrow compressed the lump of muscle under the thumb, and Gideon sighed. The pressure slowed; repeated. Harrow was watching her responses. Limbering up the tissue. She poured careful pressure into the flesh of her palm, the tendons, and Gideon’s arm relaxed all the way to the socket. It felt like a massage, which had heat tracking up the back of Gideon’s neck, but it wasn’t just that: Harrow was feeling the bones through the meat. Making certain of their shape.
Then she was done. Gideon’s hand was clean but tacky with baby chemicals. Harrow considered it. She watched Gideon’s expression as she leaned over to the side table for one of the paper towels. Dabbed it into Gideon’s day-old water glass. Then she repeated the process – rinsing. Water trickled down Gideon’s forearm to the elbow and it left a trail of goosebumps.
Harrow used another to dry. Then she was really done. But she hadn’t released her hand. On the verge of Gideon asking what the hell this was about, Harrow gave her a command. “Make a fist.”
Gideon did. She let her forearm bunch up and crushed her hand together into one perfect meathead club. She had never hit Harrow with a closed hand. But she had tried. Harrow braced one hand against it. She tried to wrap around it and squeeze – tested the gaps between her knuckles, their comparative heights. She pressed into the knucklebones tucked tight beneath the skin, thinned out from force.
“Curl your fingers.” Gideon curled them like claws and watched, neck itching as Harrow tested their strength. Trying to uncurl them. She got a little smug flash watching Harrow struggle to straighten one, even with the benefit of both hands.
“Relax.” She held around the wrist and rotated it. She felt the fingers. The mellow, controlled focus of a curator.
Then Harrow guided Gideon’s hand to wrap around her hot throat, and met her eyes with black ice.
Pebbledrop pulse and the skin, hot, the skin thin above the blood, skin in motion by her breathing. Her throat. Something scalding and invisible spilled in the middle of Gideon’s lap and belly. The blood underneath. Gideon felt the throat against her fingers swallow and Gideon swallowed. Oh, fuck. Harrow’s eyes like drillbits. Gideon squirmed and did not whimper, “Fuck.” Like being forced to stick her head in the lion’s mouth by the lion.
Harrow drank this in. She made the fingers tighten. She watched as she flinched against the feeling. Wouldn’t take her eyes off of Gideon. Hand buzzed over voicebox: “You’re a pervert, Nav.”
Right to her clit.
Harrow pulled the ragdoll hand away. Tipped the palm, upward, tilted her head, and – not taking her eyes off lock for a second – brushed her tongue against Gideon’s thumb.
“Oh,” that was a whimper, “God?” that one was a whimper. The heat from the tongue zapped the power grid in one go and her clit shorted. The wettest Gideon had ever been probably in her life. She did it again and every muscle in Gideon’s waist snaked, “Oh, fucking,” and then holy shit, her mouth, “why,” the neat little brush of her tongue in the center of her palm, Gideon yelped like handed hot coal.
Harrow paused and watched between the cage of Gideon’s fingers and waited. Breath a patient furnace. Then she brought her other hand up to spread Gideon’s fingers. Hot tease along the velvet low between them, oh my God, lightning crunched up Gideon’s middle. “I can’t,” but Gideon could watch, and she did watch: Harrow bracketing apart her thumb and index finger: lacing her teeth over the fleshy web of skin (could feel her own heartbeat in there): watched Harrow slowly sink them together. The pressure became painful quickly.
She kept biting.
Gideon spluttered – “oh, fucking,” – the pain came like a cleaver and Gideon’s hips jumped upward, crooked, like the bite had kissed between her thighs. Her other hand covered her mouth. Oh, God. Oh, God. Harrow had bitten her forearm before until it bruised. Couldn’t tell how hard this was but it hurt – it rattled around in her ribs and guts and clit. She fogged over one gauzey moment and came back to see Harrow, eyes and teeth, hunting each pained reaction and viciously drinking them in. Her gums showed. Her teeth relaxed; took more flesh; bit again. Gideon moaned and shrieked and arched, fucking Christ – breath, hissing, like handling an animal, like fingerfucking a kettle, handcuffed to a scarlet stovetop.
When Gideon was almost sure she must have broken skin, Harrow relented. Gideon’s ribs must have shrunk five sizes. She whined with each exhale like some malfunctioning machine, her free hand over her eyes, or balled in her hair, sweating, shaking. Harrow had slowed again, fascinated, marveling at the indentations her teeth had left. No blood. Gideon couldn’t believe there was no blood. Her boxer briefs stuck ruined to her thighs.
Harrow turned the hand for inspection. She examined the thumb and (Gideon didn’t whimper, invalid) settled her mouth over it, teeth bared. Uncertainty flickered. Something with her eyebrows. Then Harrow laced her teeth midway down the bone, tightened, and pulled like she meant to strip the meat.
Every cell clanging like a Test Your Strength blang! and Gideon’s body rocked like she had been shot.
Gideon hissed and gasped – hot, inward breath that shrunk up her throat – as Harrow stripped down her index finger in grating, dragging pulls that rung through her whole body down to her cunt. Harrow left off the middle to bite it from the side, and “please,” Gideon babbled – more pressure? Less? What? Fuck! – watched her pass the ring and right to the pinky, and crunched the tip between molars like she meant to keep it. Sucked her pinky into her mouth to the hand and slowly tightened like a vice again, like she wanted to bite it off and chew, until Gideon shouted in pain, and then the little bitch sucked on it, oh God, “oh, God,” the wires were crossed and Gideon crushed her face around behind her into the couchback and looked for something to bite, to muffle – she arched up to dryhump a whole lot of nothing in one humiliating cartoonish grind.
“I said,” Harrow panted, “you’re a pervert.” Rasping and fretted at the edges with light-headedness. Saliva watercolor at the corner of her lips. Her eyes were only soft with appetite. She fumbled to force Gideon’s other hand downward with her own, shaking– “Act like it,” – and she buried it beneath Gideon’s waistband.