AuthorNote: Sorry I've been so long. The last updates were merely me typing out oodles of notes, but now I have to write all new stuff! I hope this was worth the wait…
When she unlocked the door to their arbitrarily-selected room, it was to the sound of hurtling water from a high pressure geyser. Passing the bathroom door, left confidently ajar, King allowed her eyes to stray over the perspex curtain. The blurred figure stood tall, one leg out behind the other, shoulders back and chest brought up, face tilted back into the hard spray. She was not, for the moment, moving. And neither was King, the woman realised as she came out of her temporarily glazed state. "Vieux travesti perverti," she scolded herself in a mutter. And yet her shame was not significant. Certainly not on a par with her interest.
Shedding her matador-cut jacket and hanging it on the cupboard door, she wondered on a suitably nonchalant pose in which to be discovered. Reading a novel, that was nice and sophisticated. She quickly scanned the small collection in her portable library and selected 'Women in Love' by D.H. Lawrence. She lingered on the possibility that Leona may have never heard of him. Which she might just decide to find charming.
Her eyes were fixedly on the pages of her literature when Leona emerged, a haze in her peripheral vision. The text was becoming a Rorschach Test before her, because the words didn't matter. The hard, tanned body was wrapped in an eggshell blue hotel towel; King saw that much before dropping the book and raising her eyes.
"Feeling better?" She had decided to counter Leona's rudeness with disarming charm and consideration, with the hope that she might eventually be guilted into conversation. Not the noblest of plans, King conceded, but sometimes circumstances dictate like a boss who doesn't like to type his own memos.
By the looks of her, Leona was not surprised to see King there; though she didn't look exactly thrilled either. The slight curl of her lip and the way she looked out from under her dark brows seemed to genuinely query: Haven't you got anything better to do? Presumably she had been trained to answer direct questions, however, so she did.
"He did not hurt me badly."
King coughed. "Which match were you watching? In fact…" Her eyes drifted to Leona's chin, where the long, clean cut was beginning to blush anew after the hot shower. The muscles in her hands moved, wanted to go to the wound, but after barely an inch she caught herself, admonished her presumption. Instead she merely gestured with her head. "He got you, babe."
Unlike most people would do, Leona did not touch her chin in order to check for blood. She did raise her jaw slightly, though, as if to safeguard the carpet.
"You don't waste much time on yourself, do you?" said King, with a blend of dismay and disapproval. She noted that she ought not to pretend that it surprised her.
"Foolish people collect mirrors," the soldier replied proverbially.
"You quoth Heidern."
Leona shook her head. But it was not, King realised, because she disagreed with the statement, but rather that she was scaring excess water from her mane. King looked down at her silk-finish dress shoes.
"Gladly I've never been one for suede."
Surprisingly, Leona became shamefaced at that, casting her large, dark eyes from the shoes to the bathroom.
"Don't worry about it," King assured her. Then, taking off the spotted footwear and crossing her stocking feet on the bed, "Join me in a meditation on the day?"
Because it was not about self and vanity, but rather personal discipline, Leona acquiesced. Mirroring King's position on her own bed, she closed her eyes and let her jaw become slack. (King was momentarily amused at her failed expectation to glimpse a set of predatory canines.) Like a deflating hot air balloon, the tension gradually left her shoulders. This loosened the robe, which slipped down her arms, exposing the relaxed weight of her breasts.
Had King been meditating properly, she would not have noticed it. But, truth be told, she was one who took pleasure in the sight of others in repose; however, since watching non-intimates sleep pushed her boundaries of voyeuristic creepiness to a point where even she found her skin crawling, this was as close as she could get in good conscience.
The breasts were a good decade younger than hers, and had benefited from considerable sunlight and chest training. But, King noted, if she doesn't start using a full-body moisturiser soon, that youthful elasticity in her skin won't last. Indeed, the creases in the nineteen-year-old's neck and underarms were already showing signs of drought. Her mind daringly took her to a place where she rubbed aloe vera in aqueous cream between her palms to warm it, then gently massaged Leona's trunk, smoothing and spreading with her fingers and kneading with the heels of her hands.
Leona's eyes opened and looked at her with distrust. The deep sigh that had traversed King's fantasy to escape through her lips had been both unbidden and irrepressible. "Oh," she said, thinking with the quick grace and agility of a squirrel, "the spasm in my lumbar vertebrae just released."
Leona's face returned to its default (the android comparison unavoidable) and her eyelids lowered once more. Plutôt dangereux, King chided. What was she doing, mixing duty and desire like this? The girl was no Emmanuelle! She was most likely an emotional eunuch, if Heidern had had any say in it. If women could be spayed he would do it, of this she had no doubt. Every one of Leona's taut, honed muscles had gotten that way through the pursuit of stoic excellence. It was conceivable that she could sooner levitate than allow for the selfishness of personal gratification.
Then why, King wondered, do my metaphors for her conflict so? Can she be both she-wolf and automaton? A conundrum.
Her first case-study – for the sake of argument, dubbed Operation: Frock – had revealed little, other than a certain amount of self-loathing. And that was only natural (or unnatural, rather), given her upbringing. So what was the key to the magic box? And what would merely ensure another lock upon it?
She could hear Blue Mary in her head: 'Careful, Kingy-baby, your obsession stocks are rising!' I just need to know one thing, she told herself. Am I doing this because I'm an old roué, or because I feel the stirrings of philanthropy in my grisly little heart?
This time her sigh was contained within. Je ne sais pas. Best play it safe.