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It wasn't that it was her, exactly. She's not your type. When you really get off, it's always with someone like him, someone vicious and violent and your inferior. Jack. Well, Slick. Crowbar. It happens from time to time. There's something about them hating you even as they're fantasizing about you that roils in your stomach, your jaw, and proves irresistible when you find it.
It's not a constant draw the rest of the time. You used to be treated very well indeed, and you miss that. Your husband. Your throne. Power. You miss that.
But really, above all, you find yourself missing your enemy. She was very beautiful, as beautiful as you, and unlike everyone else in two kingdoms, she understood. You wish sometimes that she'd been thrown out too. You could have had something. Even if you didn't, she'd still be here.
And, in the end, that's why you like this little woman so much, for all she's nothing like the White Queen and nothing like your usual flings. It's just that you are so very sick of men.
You're surrounded by them in every aspect of your life. Your allies, your master, your enemy and the rest of the world feels like it's all harsh and masculine, and doesn't understand. But this woman does. She doesn't understand what's normal for you, but she understands that.
And it is, against expectation, a great relief.
You first met in a club, sitting in the center while the world formed into a cyclone of attention around you. There was a ten-foot gap between you and the rest of the world. On the stage, a man played piano, sometimes punctuated with lyrics. You avoid jazz clubs except when you're looking to mess up Slick, so it was closer to just a bluesy classical, a lot of lovely spaces of arpeggios and torrents of flurried races across the keys.
As you sat alone in the center of the storm you created, watching, a short woman, curvy, and with a silly-looking hat, appeared next to you. "I'm sorry," she said, "would I be able to sit here? Everywhere else is taken."
You looked at her in surprise. Didn't she know who you are? Didn't she fear, or hate you, or the idea of being seen with you? But no, the woman just looked at you and asked, and you let her, and then she smiled, right at the second the pianist removed his hands from the keys for a beautiful dramatic whole rest before he hit the next section. Her smile hit you harder, honest and charming and just a little manipulative in the way pretty women tend to learn.
After the set finished, you asked her why she was here.
She rolled her eyes. "My boyfriend," she said, as if there was nothing more to say on that subject. Eventually, she settled on, "For a smart guy, he is real stupid sometimes."
"They all are," you murmured, and bought her a drink.
By the end of the second set, you found her hat not quite so silly. It set off the flip to her hair. It took you awhile to realize she wasn't like you, so you really couldn't judge her on the same standards. After awhile, you began to think of her hat as becoming for her, and left it at that.
You meet frequently, in every kind of club but jazz, because it can only remind you of Slick, and she says her boyfriend has jazz fever too, though he can't play a note on any instrument. She's a relief, an oasis, which is a ridiculous term to use on this desert world where there's only the one, but that's how it feels. A world of men and just the two of you. It reminds you of home.
You know you can't pretend she's the White Queen, your sister and your enemy. She is far too practical, too down-to-earth to be anyone but herself. And, in a way, you're happy at this, happy to be distanced from the past, from the future, and just experience the present. It's not something you've gotten to do, to enjoy something for no reason other than that you enjoy it, no power plays or manipulation beyond simple flirtation and the understanding that you have separate lives.
You won't be able to pretend forever. But you find yourself in her flat again and again, both of you buzzing with too many drinks, too early, and laughing into each other's skin. She's so soft, so smooth, curved and rounded and smelling like vanilla. Her apartment is quaint, tiny and bright, white sheets and blue walls and all signs of her boyfriend tucked carefully out of the way. You catch them, from time to time; a pile of folded clothes, a photo of them in front of the river. He looks friendly and absent-minded, and she was wearing a dress with a flower print that flipped up at her knees. You are impossibly, sadly jealous.
But you can pretend something else, for a while, falling into bed with her and luxuriating in the clean smell of the place, lavender-scented sheets with lace, crisp pillows. The Manor is old, and old places stay dirty, and nothing you can bring there can retain its colour. It fades to green in days. Her place is very her, and there's nothing green in it. It is a joy.
She hadn't done this before, and you not in a very long time, but the two of you figure it out, and it isn't like it would be with one of them, not rough and fast, but slow, funny, so strange. She thinks you are glamorous, so tall, with your dark looks, and you think she is delightful. You tell her, your bodies pressed together, and you forget for awhile about the people who run your life, and you surround yourself with her.
Her lips are very soft.
One night, the two of you go out to dinner, turning heads, and you ignore the world. It is just the two of you in it, you pretend, and when you've had enough wine and watched her nibble a piece of cheesecake from the end of your fork, you get a taxi to her apartment and make her purr with your hand curled on her leg, just beneath the hem of her flirty, flippy dress.
You stroke her soft skin, brushing your fingers over her and watching her twist, and you slide her dress off her and onto the floor. You're down to your slip and bra, and she was wearing a blue and white corset with lace under her dress. It cinches her waist in, smoothes over her stomach. You can tell she's a little nervous about it; will what impresses men impress you? The answer, in this case, is yes, emphatically, and you play your tongue over the edge of it and down into her cleavage. When you do get it off her, laughing at tangled strings that will need to be painstakingly relaced, there are straight lines from the boning traced down across her chest. You run your fingers across the patterns, and then your tongue.
You are much slower than you'd be with a man. It feels like you might be up all night, touching her, your fingers dipping inside her, teasing her with your tongue, with your mouth. But when you've brought her gasping into a drawn-out finish that lasts forever, and when she's returned the favour, you end up slipping into sleep, instead, curled around her. You stroke a hand down her side, over the curve of her hip, and then you are asleep.
The next day, you're mocked thoroughly by your allies, who assume (with some due cause in the past, you admit) you've been fucking Spades Slick again, that the two of you were up all night rutting in the Midnight Crew's headquarters, and that you've only just crept home. Itchy is, as always, the worst, but Crowbar is fuelled by jealousy. You never thought you'd meet a soul in the world who wanted to be Spades Slick, but he does, and he burns himself inside-out at the thought of you with him, though you've made it so clear that anything between you and Crowbar is merely a matter of convenience to you. (It's a lie, but one that Crowbar needs to hear if you're ever going to have any privacy.)
Oddly, though it caused it, your night made it better. Their blows hit, but they didn't puncture your armour, and as the day and insults continue, you decide you'll go back. You'll surprise her.
You find yourself humming on the way. That is when you realize you barely know yourself. Why are you so happy? It's not an emotion you recognize easily. But it's good. It's so good. You buy a bottle of wine to bring with you, and you're just crossing the street to her apartment when you hear her voice.
And another voice, masculine and amused. You can hear the smile in it. They crest the hill and you step back. He looks a little shabbier than he did in the photograph, and his smile is tired. But his eyebrows are raised in mild humour, and she is laughing at his words. She wears a cocktail dress that flips at her knees, and her silly hat is set at an angle. On the doorstep, she fixes his tie and uses it to pull him into a kiss. He stumbles forward. You can't believe how much they laugh.
Then the door closes, and you are left outside, with jealousy burning a hole in your heart. You stalk away, throw the wine in the trash, and go to find Slick. Someone who embodies anger, someone iconic in their violence, someone who'll let you hide the racing envy in your heart with the way they treat you, with the way you can treat them. It doesn't matter if you find him. If you don't, Crowbar will do.
You knew you couldn't pretend forever.