A/N: I had some extra time, so I was able to crank out another chapter. Occasional use of crude language and some sexual content, nothing terribly explicit. Additional A/N at end of chapter.
Go to Yankee Stadium, get Derek Jeter to have his photo taken while he's holding Bergstrom's photo, run it on the Jumbotron during the game with him saying, "Where's my man Russ?" Maybe get to have your picture taken with Derek, plus get to sit in the dugout with the rest of the team.
Put teams of bloodhounds, no, K-9s, no, rescue dogs, like St. Bernards, on the streets and get them to track Bergstrom's scent. Maybe get to have your picture taken with the rescue dogs.
Send up a flotilla of hot air balloons and drop flyers all over the city showing Derek Jeter holding up Bergstrom's photo with, like, a little word bubble over his head, "Where's my man Russ?" Maybe get to ride in one of the hot air balloons, with Derek Jeter.
Pete flung his legs over an arm of the loveseat in Myka's hotel room and dug into a bag of Munchies. "The last one gets my vote, but I'm happy with any of 'em."
"Because they're your goofy ideas," Myka said from a chair upholstered in the same fabric. Folders were open on a circular table in front of her.
"Maybe we should have gotten Drew a rescue dog instead of Shep." Pete brushed crumbs from his shirt.
"Shep is a rescue dog," Myka said. "We rescued him from a shelter."
"No, he's a rescued dog. There's a difference." Pete put the Munchies down and opened a bag of barbecue potato chips.
Helena took one jaundiced look at them before she bent over the desk again. She had hardly stopped writing since she and Myka had been at the cafe. They had been left undisturbed in their booth, Myka dozing and Helena ordering multiple cups of Earl Grey. The waitress had brought her stacks of old menu inserts announcing daily specials, and Helena had filled the backs of them with equations and cryptic notes in a scrawl that, unlike the rest of her, seemed firmly situated in the nineteenth century, spiked with emphatic dots and slashes and tails, the cursive equivalent of the decorative wrought iron fences that used to mark an owner's property - and nearly as impenetrable to the eye, even her own. She would probably still be in the booth but for the fact that Myka woke, disoriented and a little cranky, anxious to get back on Bergstrom's trail. She had consented to stay long enough to eat a hasty breakfast (Helena felt they owed the café that much for asserting squatters' rights over the booth), but then it was to separate cabs, with the agreement that they would reconvene with Pete, in Myka's room, in an hour.
They had been in the room for the better part of the day, Pete and Myka tossing out ideas for finding Bergstrom without setting off the artefact, Helena typing her theories, wild speculations really, on her laptop. Claudia or Jacqui would call in, asking for updates, sometimes providing them, although Claudia emphasized that her ability to help in the search for Bergstrom was limited by the needs and short attention span of. . . Shep. Myka had the speaker on her phone turned on, and Claudia's exasperation with the dog threatened to grow hands and reach out from the phone to strangle someone. "Play with me, feed me, let me out. The only reason I know that I'm babysitting him and not you, Pete, is because he has more hair."
"Have Drew play with him," Myka suggested, frowning at a sheet she picked up from one of the folders.
"Drew's too busy being Frank Lloyd Wright. He's building a fort or something with toothpicks and glue in the kitchen. Or maybe he's just gluing toothpicks to the table, because that's something a kid of yours, Pete, would do."
"He's probably building a model of the treehouse that Helena and Pete are going to build for him," Myka said absently, still staring at the sheet.
"An architectural model? Because that's something a kid of yours, Myka, would do." Claudia's voice sharpened."Since when do any of you have time to build a treehouse? You're supposed to be finding out who's replicating artefacts. Especially you, H.G."
"Claud, don't get your eyebrows in a tangle," Pete shouted from the loveseat. "H.G.'s inventing a new time machine. Or maybe she's filling out one of those DHS expense statements. It's worse than filling out a 1040."
"Dude, we all know that Myka does your expense statements as well as your taxes. So what are you up to, H.G?"
"Theories, that's all I can say at the moment." Helena rubbed her forehead.
"Theories, great," Claudia said sarcastically. "Let me turn to the only adult in the room. Myka, any ideas on how to flush Bergstrom out from wherever he's hiding? Because we're seeing absolutely nothing here. Granted, sometimes it takes awhile for a charge to work its way through the networks, but other than his stop at the ATM, he has no electronic trail."
"Would you be able to get into a hotel's registry?" Myka was working a Twizzler from a half-empty package.
"Possibly. It depends on the hotel and it depends on their systems."
"A few weeks ago Bergstrom rented a suite at a hotel here in Manhattan called The Regency. Maybe he had friends or family visiting, or maybe it was a spa weekend. Could be he decided to hole up there."
"I'll let you know. Dammit, Shep. . . . " Claudia's voice grew faint, and there was the sound of something shattering as the call ended.
"Spa weekend?" Pete said through a mouth full of potato chips."Is that what you and Jeff do?"
Myka ignored him, biting off a piece of her Twizzler. "I'll admit it," she announced to the room at large. "I'm grasping at straws."
"I'd say you're grasping at Twizzlers," Pete said, mimicking a rim shot. "Ba-da-bum."
"Funny." Myka reached for one of the loveseat's pillows that were littering the floor around her chair - earlier missiles from Pete - and sent it flying back at him.
He ducked, holding a finger to his lips and nodding toward Helena. "We're disturbing the genius."
"Not very geniusy, as you might say, at the moment," Helena said, arching her stiff back away from the chair. When she had first started at 13, Pete's antics, always at double speed when he was bored or restless, had been such an irritant that she considered requesting not to be partnered with him on assignments. She had also considered using some sort of immobility artefact on him, or one that would render him mute. She didn't think she had ever seriously considered killing him, but she couldn't say that, during moments of extreme stress, the thought hadn't crossed her mind. And she had been more than a little disappointed when she saw Myka not only tolerating his jokes and pranks but joining in them as well. It wasn't that at 12 there hadn't been the same seeking of diversion during slow periods, but the diversions had been different. Pubs and whorehouses for the men, except for Caturanga, who found his solace in chess, with or without a partner. As for her, before Christina, she had tinkered, either on the premises or in rented spaces in nearby warehouses. Once she had Christina, she still tinkered to fill the time between assignments, but she was far more receptive to being distracted by the whims of her daughter. Games of hide-and-seek in the parks, afternoons spent flying kites, she had even attended teas for Christina's dolls, gravely asking after the health of each one. After Christina had died, there was no need to fill time; instead, she ached for more of it, trying to devise and then perfect the machine that would allow her to resurrect her daughter.
So the childish jokes, Pete's jumping and running about, as if he were Trailer in need of being let out to pee, had not merely annoyed her, they had offended her. If he couldn't find a useful outlet, he could at least find an adult one, although pubs were clearly not an option. It was after one such day, when she had stormed out of the Warehouse unable to be near him, that Myka had followed her, urging her to be more patient with Pete. It was when she had first called Pete's behavior 'protective coloration,' and Helena had stared at her disbelievingly. But because Myka was Myka and because even then Helena had known there was almost nothing she wouldn't do to make her happy, she had sighed and reluctantly rejoined them.
She began to note that when Pete became most frenetic, it was usually following one of his vibes. Particularly if the vibe presaged something bad and he had little idea what or to whom the something bad was going to happen. She also became aware that his teasing of Myka was more pronounced - and persistent - when she was anxious about an assignment or blaming herself for a mistake, almost always unimportant, that she had made during a retrieval. Helena grew to understand, albeit imperfectly since she couldn't always shake the reflexive burst of irritation she felt when she saw him clowning around, that it was his way of reestablishing his - and, if necessary, his partner's - equilibrium.
This afternoon the pillow fights and wisecracks were more a sign of his frustration at the dead end they had come to with Bergstrom. Helena could sympathize with him; for all the hours she had spent trying to work out how much energy it would take to divorce a property from its artefact long enough to duplicate it and then how much additional energy it would take to weld the replicated property to another object, she had just the haziest idea that it would exceed the energy required to split an atom. Which meant that it was impossible in any ordinary sense. One replicated artefact, yes, perhaps. But several, as if they were flying down a conveyor belt at a warehouse for Walmart or Amazon? "All I've come up with so far is that we should have a mushroom cloud on the horizon every time an artefact's power has been replicated, but that obviously hasn't been happening."
Myka's phone rang. "Hi, Claudia." It was a brief conversation. "Okay, thanks," she said, clearly disappointed. She looked at Pete and then at Helena. ""First, she wanted me to tell you how kickass she is because it took her all of a couple of minutes to hack into The Regency's systems. Second, she wanted us to know that Bergstrom's not there."
Pete rolled off the couch, made a show of stretching, and shot the empty Munchies bag at a wastebasket. "I'm going to walk around and do some touristy things, like buy cheesy souvenirs. Maybe I'll even run into Bergstrom. You know he's out there, hiding in plain sight."
He was almost out of the room before Helena stopped him. "Hiding in plain sight, you said." Myka turned in her chair and looked at her, curiosity blunted by exhaustion. "What if he never left? Maybe that's the reason there isn't much of an electronic trail. He's still in his apartment building. There may be vacant units, or maybe he agreed to feed another tenant's cat or water her plants." Myka's gaze grew sharper, and Helena asked, "Where was that ATM he used?"
Pete let the door shut and perched on an arm of the loveseat as Myka flipped through a notepad. "It's on Houston Street. It's in the neighborhood."
"If we go over there we're going to scare him away again," Pete said. "He barely had to step into that nightclub, and he knew we were there."
"But it was only after he entered the nightclub that he knew," Myka said. "The artefact may give him a general sense of when trouble or danger is near, but its ability to pinpoint it appears to be limited. And even though Helena was in his apartment yesterday, that wouldn't have necessarily sent him running because he would have expected us to show up there."
"And he might not have known," Helena added, "if the unit he's occupying is far enough away. But all this is speculation. We don't know that he's there."
"It's better than anything else we have," Myka countered. "You were able to work your magic and get into his apartment." She pointed to Helena's phone. "Maybe you can coax some information out of that security guard."
"It's highly unlikely it would be the same one, and then what? We'd go over there and the two of you would flash your badges? If we put the security staff on alert, then we likely will spook Bergstrom."
"It's about time a little luck comes our way," Myka said smiling, "and I trust your ability to wheedle something useful out of whoever answers the phone."
"I believe she could wheedle someone out of their underpants," Pete said, unruffled by Helena's glare at him, "but we basically have one shot at this. Because she's right, otherwise we're going to get the security staff all edgy, and once they get hinky, Bergstrom's going to fly. Maybe someone less rusty at all the secret agent stuff should be making the call."
Myka shook her head. "Helena can get us what we need."
"You're the decider," Pete said, sliding off the loveseat's arm onto its cushions and fumbling for the potato chips.
Rolling her eyes at Pete, Helena called the apartment building's information number and asked to be connected to the security staff. Her heart sank as an unfamiliar gruff voice - not the one belonging to the guard with Artie-like eyebrows - answered. Starting to stumble through an explanation, feeling simultaneously that Myka's faith in her had been misplaced (yet again) and that Pete had been right, which was a truly unpleasant combination, she stopped as the man's voice began to warm.
"Hey, this is Carl, we spoke yesterday. You're Mr. Bergstrom's girlfriend."
Smiling broadly at Pete, Helena said sweetly into the phone, "Forgive me, Carl. I should have recognized you. You were so helpful to me yesterday."
He sneezed noisily. "Damn allergies. Make me sound like a foghorn, or so my wife tells me." His voice continued to warm exponentially. "But you, can't mistake your voice. It sounds so classy. I think I could pick your voice out of a hundred women's."
"Yes, well, thank you for the compliment." At this, Pete rolled his eyes and Myka stifled a laugh. "I was wondering, Carl, poor Russ is in such a tizzy about something he promised one of the other residents, he was going to walk her dog or collect her mail, something like that. He's practically prostrate with the flu, and here he is concerned about someone else." Helena sighed dramatically. "It's why I love him so." She paused. "You wouldn't happen to know who in the building's on vacation, would you?"
Carl made a sound that might have been concurrence with Helena's assessment or a reservation about Bergstrom's altruism that he felt he couldn't express more strongly. Helena heard a squeak, Carl was leaning back in his chair, and she wondered if it was prologue to a refusal to provide the information, filled with regret but a refusal nonetheless, and she thought that perhaps she ought to say something else in her 'classy' voice to push him a little, if he was undecided. Another squeak and then Carl was saying confidingly, "Sometimes Mrs. Levinson on the floor above asks one of her neighbors to look in on her cat when she's out of town. Maybe she asked him this time. But don't tell anyone I told you that."
"Not a word, Carl," Helena promised solemnly. Thinking a little effusion was in order, she added, "You have been my knight in shining armor these past two days. I fear you'd steal my heart if it wasn't already someone else's."
Pete put his hands to his throat and stuck out his tongue, rolling off the loveseat to the carpet and drumming his feet on the floor. Myka shushed him and nudged him none too gently with her shoe. In turn, Helena endured a few gallant offerings from Carl, some of which she thought his wife would definitely disapprove of, before he announced with great reluctance that he needed to return to work.
"Bergstrom's staying in the apartment above," Helena said. "Now we flush him out."
"Was the guard still wearing his underwear when you finished?" Pete asked as he crawled back onto the loveseat. Myka flung another pillow at him.
Deciding their plan had a better chance of working if they waited until later in the evening - "After the scare he must have had at the nightclub, he's probably staying close to home," Myka had said. "But just in case, let's wait until he's settled in for the night" - they plotted their approach. Pete would cover the back entrance while Myka would take the stairs to Mrs. Levinson's apartment to ensure the artefact sensed their presence. Helena would finagle her way into the parking garage. "Sensors and card readers aren't that difficult to confuse," she had said airily. They would have to depend on the security staff to watch for Bergstrom if he tried to leave through the main entrance.
Helena ended up being grateful that all she had to do was follow a car into the garage since the sensor/reader array was more complex than she had anticipated; she hadn't the time, patience, or tools for her ingenuity to be taxed. She waited next to the elevators, surely the artefact would have sensed Myka's presence by now. The doors opened, and she jumped forward, nearly Tesla'ing a teenager spinning the keys to his parents' car on his finger. She backed away, holding the Tesla behind her back, shrugging sheepishly. "Thought I'd surprise my boyfriend," she said lamely.
"More like you were going to mug him," he grumbled and shambled toward a late-model Lexus.
The next time the doors opened, she hesitated, but the gleaming bald head and, more so, the quick, furtive moving of that head from side to side gave Bergstrom away. She pushed the Tesla into his back. It didn't feel quite as absurd to her as she expected after all these years, holding a fund manager at gunpoint with a weapon that looked like a sleeker version of a ray gun. "We'll take that lucky charm from you now." But that line had come out of a B-movie replete with gun molls and trench coats.
His response wasn't at all what she expected. "Thank God," he said, raising his arms with alacrity. "I've been hoping someone would come and take it."
At first, he hadn't been interested in acquiring said 'lucky charm' or any lucky charm. Although Afton had sworn that the dice were making all the difference in the performance of his investments, Bergstrom had been cautious. When Afton had told him and Sheffield that he could get duplicates of the dice, or some other object that would be just as lucky - for a 'nominal' price, he said - Bergstrom had turned him down. There was something about the arrangement he hadn't liked. He and Sheffield couldn't communicate with the sellers themselves, they had to go through Afton, and they were supposed to exercise the utmost discretion when talking about the objects. There should be no e-mails, texts, or IMs, and they shouldn't discuss the objects where anyone might overhear. In fact, Afton refused to discuss the dice or their substitutes at work, preferring to have the conversations in a crowded sports bar where it was almost impossible to hear anyone. But Sheffield had bought in and when he reported to Bergstrom - in the men's restroom over the sound of a running faucet - that his money clip was making him lucky with the ladies, Bergstrom couldn't deny that he was intrigued.
They were in his living room. Pete was on one of the couches, looking longingly at the tv, Myka was next to him taking notes, and Bergstrom sat across from them, in a chair that his 6'4" frame dwarfed. Standing away from the three of them, her back to the windows, Helena reflected that at least she had tried out her furniture before giving the decorators her final approval. Bergstrom squirmed in the chair as if he had never sat in it, pushing at the armrests as though that might make the chair bigger. He stopped, glancing around the apartment. "I've pretty much been married to my work, which makes it hard to meet women. The last date I was on, my assistant had arranged it, which is really pathetic since it was with her sister-in-law. So when Dwight said women were falling all over him, I thought why not? I told Stew I wanted one of those luck thingys." He cast a mournful eye at the bag in which his rabbit foot's key chain had been neutralized. "But that isn't how it seems to work for me. What it does do, and which was cool at first, is that it prevents bad things from happening to me. Hell, I can't even nick myself shaving. But then it got so that practically everything was a threat, going out for a walk or buying the paper, and when you guys showed up, I couldn't stop running, from the firm, from my apartment. I wanted to go to the hospital to see Dwight, but I couldn't. It felt like I was going to have a heart attack if I didn't stay low."
"Scared like a rabbit," Pete muttered.
"Yeah, that's about it," Bergstrom sighed heavily.
Myka and Pete were taking turns questioning him. It had already gone on for awhile and could continue for hours, Helena knew, but Bergstrom patiently, willingly answered every question - every time it was asked. And the questions were exhaustively repeated, a slightly different twist added to each iteration. At some point he ordered out for pizza and soft drinks, as if this were a gathering of friends and he was the host. Helena might have pitied him except for the niggling suspicion that her refusal to invite anyone into her loft, to have her isolation exposed, was only the inverse of Bergstrom's obliviousness to his.
Bergstrom's answers never changed, and they were few in number compared to the questions. He never knew who supplied Afton with the artefacts. Afton referred to them as friends, but he never explained how he knew them. Bergstrom didn't think they were clients, if for no other reason than most of their clients were institutional, pension funds and other retirement plans. He didn't know how Afton communicated with his 'friends.' Neither he nor Dwight, to his knowledge, had ever received any communications from them. The never's and other negatives - no's, I don't know's, not once's - piled up so quickly during the questioning that finally Helena interrupted with a question of her own, just to hear him say something different.
"Did Afton give you the print behind your desk?"
"Stew wanted me to have it," Bergstrom said, relieved himself at being able to answer something affirmatively. "He gave it to me a few days before he died. I should have known then that something was up because that painting meant something to him, because of who gave it to him, I think. I got the impression that she was the one who got away. He never told me much about her, I couldn't even tell you her name." He played with his empty soft drink can. "We knew that his investments had gone sour, and he was upset. But we never thought. . . . we were all so busy. He told me I needed something to put on my wall, and I just laughed. I meant to give it back to him, when he felt better about things. Then it was too late." He carefully put the can down on a diminutive end table. "I felt like I had to put it up."
Myka looked at him sympathetically, but Helena recognized the steel behind the sympathy and knew Bergstrom was about to face another battery of questions. And so followed the no's and never's. Helena opened the door to the balcony and stepped out. It was pleasantly cool, and off to the east, the sky was beginning to show striations of pink and yellow and lavender. Dawn wasn't far off. They had been here that long. She groaned softly and leaned against the balcony's metal railing, looking down at the streets below, which were beginning to fill with delivery trucks. She had never been afraid of heights, as a child, perched in the highest branches, challenging Charles to climb a tree faster and as a Warehouse agent racing to the tops of belfries and to the vertiginous ends of parapets in pursuit of an artefact. In her arrogance, she had thought her lack of fear was confirmation that she belonged to a higher realm, even if it was only imperfectly realized in the modest skyline of turn-of-the-century London. Now she was all too aware of the slimness of the margin between reaching the pinnacle and falling from it. A single misstep, a bobble, a bout of dizziness. But the possibility that she could plunge to her death didn't alarm her - should the railing give way, should she be foolish enough to tap dance on it. She had seen people die in worse ways. She had caused people to die in worse ways.
The door opened, but Helena didn't turn around. Pete would have already been talking, exclaiming over the view or wondering how high a superball would bounce if he threw it down to the street. As for Bergstrom, she doubted that he ever thought to come out here. There was no furniture, and the drapes were perfectly three-quarters closed over the windows, as if one of the decorators had told him it was the optimal look, and he hadn't dared to change it since. Myka joined her, not choosing to rest her arms on the railing like she was, hands clasped over space, but not cringing three feet behind it either.
"We're taking a break," she said. "In fact, I don't think we're going to press him anymore. We've asked every question twenty different ways, and we're still getting the same response."
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
Helena straightened. "They're adapting, the ones doing the replicating. According to the files, there was no apparent connection between the race car driver and the people who received the replicated artefacts. They were contacted individually, or so it appears. Now they're using one point of contact and relying on him or her to reach out to others. Fewer points of vulnerability for them. It's as if they're watching us trying to find them."
The breeze wasn't strong, but it was enough to trail strands of hair across Myka's face, and she pushed them back, tucking them behind her ear. "Do you really think someone in Congress is involved?"
"You said that you thought there was something mercantile about all this, which there may be, although I think the money is more an attempt to ensure that the players have skin in the game. But using an artefact in the end is about power, the power to cause change or to stop it. Who would as naturally be attracted to it as a politician?"
"We can go back to the files and see if there's any connection between the race car driver, Afton, and the congressmen interested in the Warehouse, but a contribution here or there isn't going to persuade the regents," Myka said warningly.
The sky was growing lighter to the east, the yellow and pinks intensifying, and a trembling rim of orange was just beginning to peep above the horizon. It was hard not to believe that the sun wasn't lifting itself, shimmering with effort, as though each day was guaranteed only to the extent that the sun had the strength to ascend. It didn't lend an air of contingency to the whole business of getting up in the morning and conducting your life but confirmed, rather, that it was a bit of a chore. Not the most uplifting of thoughts. "What is Pete doing with Bergstrom?" Helena asked.
"They're playing video games on that big tv Pete is lusting after." Helena could hear the smile in Myka's voice. "Pete's excusing it by saying that we all need a brain cleanser."
"Is that why you're out here?"
"I wanted to take in the view. Not what you get in Rapid City." She turned slightly toward Helena. "Why are you out here?"
"Sometimes I like to see the sunrise. It reassures me that I'm not one of the undead," Helena said wryly.
"What else do you do to convince yourself that you're still alive?"
It was teasing but not playful, and Myka's smile wasn't the indulgent one that had laced her comment about Pete with an almost maternal affection. It was half-challenge, half-invitation, and her eyes, neither green nor hazel but gray in the early morning grayness, had dropped to Helena's mouth. Helena couldn't remember if Myka had ever looked at her like that before or smiled at her like that before, but she knew what that look and that smile meant. Myka had even drawn closer and tilted her head to make it easier. Helena reminded herself that she had done this a million times before. Perhaps a million was a slight exaggeration, but all she needed to do was bend her head and graze Myka's lips with her own, deepening the kiss as Myka's mouth parted.
But she was breathing a little too fast and her heart was beginning to pound, which were interfering with the smoothness of her movements. Her head was moving too forcefully, and her lips weren't grazing Myka's but grinding into them, as if she were a runner sliding into home. She felt her upper lip mash against Myka's, and their teeth click, and then Myka was pulling away, rubbing her nose. Bollocks, it wasn't that hard, she had been more inept than a teenager on her first date. In fact, her own first kisses, not that she could remember them all that well, were marvels of adroitness by comparison.
"I am so sorry," she said, unsure whether she should be apologizing only for her bumbling or for the kiss itself.
"Helena, it was just a kiss."
The seeming dismissiveness of the remark made her think that perhaps she had invented a desire where there hadn't been any, seen an invitation in a look and a smile that hadn't existed. "You know, I did miss the DHS training on sexual harassment. In a sole proprietorship, which is essentially what my appraisal business is -"
"Helena, it was just a kiss," Myka repeated, but it sounded different this second time, knowing and amused and not at all admonishing. Myka took Helena's face between her hands, and for one almost unbearably deflating second, Helena thought Myka was going to kiss her, no, not kiss her, plant a kiss on her, the type of kiss one person gave another to signal that all kissing was over with, forever. They would go back to being friends, friends-who-had-tried-but-couldn't-be-something-more friends. But the kiss wasn't like that. It was sweet and almost chaste - Myka wasn't trying to tease her mouth open - but there was a promise in it too, particularly in the way Myka had moved into her, pressing her against the railing and slipping one leg between hers, that they would try this again.
And then it ended. Myka was halfway to the door by the time Helena had pushed herself away from the railing, knees a little wobbly (because they had been locked, Helena told herself), and pulled needlessly at her shirt to straighten it.
They left Bergstrom with a video game on at a loud volume on the tv and a living room strewn with pizza boxes and soft drink cans, and he was smiling a strange, regretful smile, as if he were sorry to see them go. They had only a couple of hours before they needed to be at JFK for their flight, and Helena spent most of her time packing a couple of suitcases (she had no idea how long she would be staying at the B&B) and trying not to think about the kisses on the balcony. As Myka had said, they were just kisses, and with some minor awkwardness, she was sure that the two of them could pretend that they had never happened. Because that was the wisest course of action. Despite what Claudia had said, Helena hadn't come back to repair her relationship with Myka and certainly not to start up a different kind of relationship with her. To hammer the cliché home, she didn't do relationships. Not anymore.
With Myka you couldn't have anything else.
So absolutely not anymore.
She was going to march out to the airport - metaphorically, of course, because taking cabs was the furthest thing from marching - after one side trip, and she was going to greet Myka and treat her like the colleague she was, the professional she was. As Claudia had groused over the phone, they didn't have time for treehouses for eight-year-old boys or, as Helena added to herself, romancing the eight-year-old's mother.
Not that she would be doing any romancing. Because she didn't do that. Because she didn't call, she didn't remember, she didn't care.
She had left 13, left Boone because of Myka. It was madness, Claudia's this time, to think she would have returned because of Myka. Maybe it had been bordering on madness to have kissed Myka on the balcony, but it certainly was madness still to be having this conversation in her head. She didn't do madness either, not anymore.
Helena arrived at the gate before Pete and Myka and upgraded her seat to first class. She wasn't going to be scrunched into coach, not today, especially if she had to be scrunched next to Myka. She saw them at the far end of the corridor, Pete carrying a plastic bag branded with a name of one of the airport shops, laughing, mugging. Because Myka looked dejected, it was in the slump of her shoulders, the downturn of her mouth. As they came up to Helena, Pete opened his bag and took out a Yankees jersey and cap.
"Not bad for five minutes' shopping, eh?" He stuffed them back into the bag. "Miss Perfection here didn't find anything 'sufficiently cool' for our son." He gave her an exasperated glance. "He's eight, Myka. It's not like he was expecting you to bring the Empire State Building home with you."
This was exactly the wrong moment to open her own bag, the result of her side trip. It would look. . . ingratiating? Worse, intrusive, after the kiss, as if she were trying to muscle her way into Myka's life. It had been an impulse trip, an impulse purchase, and her plan had been simply to give it to Drew the next time she saw him. But here she was, opening her bag and taking out a model of the Empire State Building. "After Claudia said he was trying to build a fort, or a treehouse, out of toothpicks, I thought he should perhaps start with something easier." She handed it to Myka.
Who promptly handed it back. "Helena, no, it's your gift -"
"From someone who's barely more than a stranger to him. It's an easy solve, Myka." Helena put the box in the bag and gave the bag to her.
She offered to pay for upgrades for them to first class, but she had known from the outset that they wouldn't agree to it. When the first class travelers were asked to board, she left Pete and Myka companionably bickering about who would get the window seat when they boarded. Aside from the awkwardness over the gift for Drew, Myka hadn't shown the least sign of discomfort or self-consciousness. She hadn't avoided looking at her, she hadn't ignored her, she hadn't buried her face in a magazine. It was as if the only thing they had exchanged on Bergstrom's balcony was conversation, and Helena was grateful. To be honest, she was just the slightest bit annoyed, but she realized she should be grateful. She breathed out a satisfied "Ahhhh" as she relaxed in her (relatively) roomy seat, asking for a tonic water from the flight attendant. He was quite nice looking, and as he brought her back her drink, she smiled warmly at him. Catching the smile, he leaned against the seat in front of her and let his eyes appreciatively trace her features. Someone bumping down the aisle toward coach with her roller bag aggressively jostled him into the seat, and as he started to fall over, maintaining his balance only by slapping his hand against an overhead bin, Helena saw the crooked grin on Myka's face. "So sorry," she murmured. Pete waved merrily behind her.
It was hard to put any energy behind her flirting after that, and though the flight attendant gallantly made an effort, bringing her refills before she had a chance to ask for them, asking her about her travels, she eventually picked up the airline magazine as a snub and flipped through it. After she heard the last of the beverage carts trundling noisily down the aisle, she rose, telling herself she needed to stretch her legs, and wandered through coach. She spotted them toward the back of the cabin. Pete had the window seat, Myka the seat next to him. Her head was on his shoulder, her eyes closed. It was hard not to imagine their spending countless flights this way, Myka asleep, Pete stolidly supporting her. They were a unit, married or divorced, and Helena knew she had nothing comparable to offer. She never had, which was why, in one sense, it hadn't been difficult to take the astrolabe Mrs. Frederic had entrusted to her and disappear, starting over with a new (old) name, in a new place, with a new set of lies about who she was and where she came from. That she would never quite measure up to Nate's wife, never love him as she had, those failures on her part didn't loom so large; Nate wasn't asking for all of her, didn't want all of her. She was an able companion, and she cared for Adelaide as if Adelaide were a daughter to her. That had been enough for a still-grieving Nate. But Myka would have never settled for crumbs. What had Pete called her? Miss Perfection. Miss Perfection would have demanded all of her, every last reprehensible inch of her, and Helena wouldn't burden anyone with that.
She went back to her first class seat and, though it was only two in the afternoon, ordered a whiskey sour from the once-beaming now-impassive flight attendant. She didn't visit coach again.
The flight from Chicago to Rapid City was delayed. They didn't board until almost eight in the evening, and it was after ten, mountain time, when the plane landed. The airport was nearly deserted, and the three of them were quiet as they headed toward the parking lot.
"Drew have math camp tomorrow? 'Cause I'll drop him off." Pete began to veer away from them, toward a Mustang parked at the other end of the lot.
"No math camp, no soccer camp," Myka said.
"Can I keep him for the day, then? Because I've hardly had a chance to see him. You'll give me a personal day, won't you, boss?" He smiled cheekily at Myka.
"Drop him off tomorrow evening, not too late. He does have math and soccer on Tuesday. And if you need me, I'll be working from home."
"Gotcha." Pete snapped off a salute and started jogging toward his car.
Helena was trying to pick out her own nondescript sedan from the small huddle of them in the center of the parking lot. Myka had stopped where she was; she wasn't searching for her car but there was something indecisive about the way she was standing, as though she might spin around and head back toward the terminal.
"Did you forget something?" Remembering that she could use her remote to identify her car, Helena took it from her handbag and pressed the alarm button.
"No." Myka clapped her hands over ears as the alarm went off. "Look. . . . Hey, hey," she said more strongly as Helena hadn't stopped walking toward her car, dragging her bags behind her. Her gaze darting around the parking lot before coming to rest on Helena, Myka said, "Come home with me."
Not sure but what the car alarm wasn't still ringing in her ears and warping what had been "See you tomorrow" into "Come home with me," Helena said, "I'm sorry, you said -"
"Come home with me." She took a few hesitant steps toward Helena. "I want you to come home with me."
"Really, it's an inexpensive toy that I picked up on a whim. A simple thank you, darling, would suffice." The words and the tone, arch, mocking, were out of her mouth before she could stop them.
She thought she could see Myka close her eyes and hear her count to ten. "God, you can make it so difficult sometimes." Myka had defensively wrapped her arms around her chest. "So let me make it simple for you. I want to take you home with me. If you want that too, roll your bags this way. If you don't, well, then I guess I'll see you Tuesday, and I'll be the one taking the sexual harassment training."
Helena picked up her bags and walked to where Myka was standing. Her heart was beating so hard she thought that her 148-year-old arterial system wouldn't be able to take the pressure, but her voice was steady. "When you told me that I would know when you were trying to seduce me, I didn't think you meant this."
Myka laughed and she uncrossed her arms, but her laugh nervously trailed off and her eyes skittishly slid away from Helena's. "I'm running a little short on romance right now."
Helena dropped her bags. She was in a parking lot, accepting perhaps the worst come-on she had ever been offered in her life, matched only by the awfulness of their first kiss. For all of her work with the Warehouse and artefacts, she had never been much of a believer in portents, but perhaps these were signs worthy of her attention. "Myka, if this is out of curiosity -
"Helena, I've been with a woman before," Myka interrupted impatiently. "This is not some bi-curious ad on Craigslist."
"I think we need to revisit your don't-kiss-and-tell policy, but for now, what I meant was if it's out of curiosity to see what things might have been like between us, with me -"
"Really? Are you that full of yourself to think I've been dying to bed H.G. Wells, the sexual adventurer?"
"No," Helena said quietly. "What I'm trying to say I'm apparently saying very badly, so let me make it simple. If you're just interested in fucking me for a night, Myka, I can't do it." With everyone else in the universe, people seem to think, but not with you. Never you.
Myka bunched a clump of her hair in her hand and released it. "I don't know what I want, but it's not that. I'm trying to take you home, Helena. I've not done that with anyone, not even Jeff. I've had no one in that bed with me, except for Shep." She held up her hand. "I know how that sounds, don't even go there." She paused. "I'm choosing you, and if we haven't managed between the two of us to suck all the possibility out of this evening, I want to spend the rest of it with you."
"Are the sheets going to have dog hair on them?" But Helena was already standing beside the passenger door of what she hoped was Myka's car.
Thankfully the car's trunk opened, so she had guessed right. Myka put in her bag, then Helena's, and carefully placed the Empire State Building on top of them. Shutting the trunk, she said slowly, "No, but I have to admit I didn't change the sheets before I left." She started to laugh, ruefully, disbelievingly. "I don't know how you could turn this down."
"I'm not. Get in the car, Myka."
She wasn't supposed to be doing this. She had decided there was going to be nothing more, and yet here she was on her way to Myka's house to do. . . something. Maybe all that would happen is that she would end up on Myka's sofa or in her guest bedroom. Nothing they had said to each other seemed very likely to lead to "more" and, in fact, it all seemed to point to the opposite. It was conceivable that tomorrow morning, once she had risen from the sofa and Myka from her virginal bed, there would be even less between them than there had been when she had arrived a week ago. That's all it had been, a week. This was madness. Yet she had taken Myka's hand between her own, and she was letting her fingers trail lightly across Myka's palm, around and over her knuckles, between her fingers, down the back of her hand.
Until Myka withdrew her hand, not ungently, and said, her voice strained, "If you keep doing that, I'm going to have to pull off the highway, and I really don't want it to happen here, in the car."
"We're going to have to broaden your horizons, darling."
They left their bags and box in the trunk. Myka didn't turn on the lights in the kitchen, taking Helena by the hand and leading her around the island, down the hallway, past Drew's room and the guest room, to her bedroom. Helena wasn't sure she had breathed once Myka had turned the car into the driveway, and based on the fact that Myka hadn't said a word since they had gotten out of the car, she suspected Myka wasn't breathing either. The evening was still at a tipping point, and it seemed even the slightest thing, the sound of a trunk slamming or the flash of a light being turned on was enough to push it over. To the "nothing more" side, where they would clumsily back away from the caress and the invitation and the kisses and let the swell of those ten years wash everything smooth. Not "as if" nothing had ever happened because nothing, in fact, had happened, would ever happen.
In her room, Myka did turn on the light, and they blinked uncertainly at each other as their eyes adjusted. Myka looked tired, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth more noticeable. Helena knew she looked no less tired, and she feared that the whiskey sour she had consumed hours ago was still coating the roof of her mouth. She should at least brush her teeth, swig some mouthwash. Could she do that discreetly? But she hadn't brought in her bag.
Myka said, reading her mind, "There's stuff in the bathroom, if you want to wash up."
In the bathroom, Helena bowed over the counter, putting her head in her hands. So this was how it was it going to end, not with a bang, but with the flush of a toilet. With the others, none of the details to be gotten out of the way - the bad breath, the needing to pee - had mattered because being with them hadn't mattered. It was just sex. But it had taken the two of them so long to come to this and, even then, they were being so bloody clumsy and tentative about it - just wanting to get the stale taste of alcohol out of her mouth seemed likely to derail it. She found dozens of spare toothbrushes, and she gamely brushed her teeth with one of them. Perhaps Myka was digging out a pillow and blanket for her now, and she would pad to the living room and lay on the sofa, turning on the tv. She couldn't do this with Myka, not now; the cosmos had opened up, like a book having its back cracked, and she couldn't help but read, "This is a disaster." It had stopped giving out signs because she was too stubborn or too stupid to pay attention to them and was literally spelling out the message.
Later she would think it had all swung on the Altoids case. When she had opened the bathroom door, Myka was sitting on the edge of her bed, still in her suit pants and the pale pink blouse she had worn with them. Next to her was a case of Altoids. Peppermint. Thank God, the cinnamon would have been too much. Too sweet, too cloying. And why she was making judgements about the breath mints belonging to a woman she was now never going to kiss, she didn't know. It struck her as funny, so she started to laugh. In fact, the whole day, starting from their time together on Bergstrom's balcony, had been funny from a certain perspective, so she started to laugh harder. Not hysterically, but richly, because, well, it had been funny, sad-funny, but still funny.
Myka laughed with her at first, but she sobered, and those eyes, whose true color always seemed to be beyond Helena's ability to determine, grew serious, and she stood up from the bed with a swiftness that had the breath catching in Helena's throat, and it was like Tamalpais but better than Tamalpais because, although Myka was backing her against the wall, it wasn't a gun or an arm against her throat, but Myka's mouth, hot and insistent and . . . pepperminty. Helena started to laugh again, but then Myka's mouth was swallowing her laugh, and she was groaning into that mouth, and her hands were working Myka's shirt out of her pants, and if there was going to be 'nothing more' between them, things needed to stop very soon. Then Myka's hand was on her breast, and Helena realized that things weren't going to stop. Myka wasn't going to stop them, and as Helena unzipped Myka's pants and slipped her fingers between Myka's panties and her skin, she knew she wasn't going to stop them.
It wasn't the kind of coordination they had developed as partners that was needed here. They had never worked with each other naked was the ridiculous thought that went through Helena's mind as they fell back gracelessly onto Myka's bed, Myka's pants pooling onto the floor, and Helena trying to work out of her half-buttoned blouse. Helena wasn't sure she had ever seen Myka naked, maybe a flash of hip in a hotel room, but that was it. Coordinating the movements of arms and legs and heads, it was awkward and occasionally painful. When Myka's head accidentally cracked her under her jaw, Helena said softly, "You're making me see stars."
"And not in a good way, sorry." Myka winced for her and gently touched her jaw. Helena kissed the worried creasing between Myka's brows and then the corners of her mouth, trying to tug them upward in a smile. They hadn't so much flung the covers off as pushed them down, and Myka still had on her shirt and bra, somehow, while Helena was wearing only her locket. As Helena worked to remedy the balance of clothing between them, in favor of there being none at all, Myka said almost shyly, "I used to look up at your window in the B&B in the mornings, just before my run. I was always hoping you were looking for me."
"I was, but I was standing back. I didn't want you to think I was stalking you."
"I wouldn't have thought that. Helena, if I would have seen you looking at me one of those mornings, I would have been flying back up those stairs, you know." Myka was smiling, but it wasn't quite in her eyes, and Helena recognized, with a jolt, that perhaps Claudia had been right, that she hadn't seen what was right in front of her. She was, truly, an idiot.
"I wouldn't have known to open the door." And again, she had just proven herself to be an idiot. That was not the thing to say. How many times could she cold cock this before Myka threw her out of the bedroom?
"I know that now." The smile had made its way to her eyes. "It's time to open the door, Helena."
The awkwardness didn't entirely go away, there were still inadvertent bumps and pokes and pinches, and then there was the fact that the woman sometimes on top of her, sometimes under her, sometimes simply next to her was Myka. It made her more hesitant and unsure, something that she had rarely felt in a sexual encounter. But because it was Myka, every caress felt different, more intense, as if she wasn't only naked but, on some deeper level, stripped bare, and when Myka went inside her, it felt as if she were being touched everywhere and when she cried out, it sounded - and felt - as if it had been ripped from her, loud and pained and exultant all at the same time, and so foreign to how she usually came that it was hard to accept the cry as her own.
Myka worked an arm beneath Helena's shoulders and drew her close. "Are you all right?" She asked, nipping Helena's ear.
"Very much so," Helena said, with a chuckle. "But you've made a screamer out of me, and I'm not quite sure it fits my self-image. I do so like to maintain an air of mystery."
"I like the screamer just fine," Myka whispered, rolling onto her back and taking Helena's hand between her legs.
"On second thought," Helena said, moving carefully so her hand wouldn't lose contact with a heat that had her nearly biting through her tongue - which would have seriously impaired her future plans - and balancing herself on her knees and the hand she placed next to Myka's shoulder, "an air of mystery can be overdone."
Myka had been an internalizer for as long as Helena had known her, so she didn't find it surprising that Myka kept most of her orgasm in, only letting out a long, hissing breath at the end. "Hard to let loose with a child in the house."
"Don't kid a kidder," Helena said, lightly rubbing Myka's stomach, feeling the hard muscle underneath. "You don't let loose."
"There's something we can work on," Myka grunted. "But in the meantime, just to prove to you that I have the potential." She sat up and turned over on her stomach. "See it?" On the small of her back, there was a tattoo of a dagger. "It was supposed to be a foil. Pete and I had just gotten together, and we had finished a horrible, horrible retrieval. We were waiting for our flight out of LAX, when he said, 'Let's drive down to San Diego for the weekend,' and we did. He dared me to get a tattoo, and I dared him to swim naked in the hotel pool."
"I think he got the better end of the deal," Helena said, appraising the dagger.
"I think so, too," Myka sighed. "I come up with the worst dares. I keep thinking I'll get this removed, but it's too easy to forget it's there. I don't want to be some seventy-year-old woman flashing my wrinkled, tattooed back at every other seventy-year-old woman in the locker room."
"And why would you be flashing your back at other old women in a locker room?"
"Senior swim at the Y," Myka said in all seriousness. "My knees aren't going to be able to take the running forever."
"Darling, don't worry, I won't let you go to the Y, I won't let you go out, period, if you still have that tattoo when you're seventy."
For a moment, they were both quiet, realizing what she had said, what it implied.
First, Myka said, "I'll take a picture and send it to you, wherever you are, to prove that I've had it removed."
Then Helena said, "If you don't, I'll fly in, from wherever I am, to wherever you are and conspire with whomever you're with to have it removed." She smiled as Myka inched over and began to nuzzle her neck. "Did I leave things open-ended enough?"
They moved with each other and against each other with more assurance as the night wore on; there were fewer apologies, fewer words altogether. They began to intuit each other's rhythm, and though they slept, it seemed to Helena that she would no sooner close her eyes than she would instinctively begin reaching out for Myka or Myka's hands would be roaming over her. In the early morning, they rolled away from each other, but Myka hooked a foot over hers, and they slept apart but still touching.
The night had brought them from "nothing more" to "more," Helena hazily, drowsily realized before she drifted into a deeper sleep, although she didn't know what the "more" was or how long it would last.
A/N: For those of you expecting something steamier or more explosive, there will be something of that in a future chapter. But for this first time, I opted for a warts-and-all approach. It seemed truer to two people trying to reconnect.