"So? How was your vacation?"
Her eyes refocus on the pavement across the street from the bistro. Cobbles and shoes, a more intricate pattern than she could think up on the spot. Almost. She avoids the temptation to glance at the corners of her vision.
She smiles at Arthur convincingly, erasing the squint of genius.
"I think I've seen enough sand for a lifetime," she states frankly, almost coy, coffee burning her lips. It doesn't taste like anything.
The young man in gray looks down, sheepishly smiling as he tears his croissant in two, flakes sticking to his fervently clean fingers. His knuckles are cracked riverbeds.
"Cobb said you guys had a really great rest, said he can't wait to try Santorini or Paris next," he goes on. Mal feels her spine aching to lurch out of her skin.
"I wouldn't know about Santorini, I think he still has quite a few enemies there," she says briskly. She hasn't seen her husband in weeks. The cigarettes in her purse call to her.
"Cobb has enemies on every continent, it's a wonder he gets through customs," Arthur jabs, stirring his tea. "Seriously, though, I'm glad you two had a good time. I keep telling him a girl like you needs to get away from the drawing board every now and then."
Mal shuffles a laugh out of herself, taking a sip of jaunty, golden champagne.
"'A girl like me?,'" she echoes the sentiment with a rakish grin. "I can't tell if that's coming from the top of the deck or the very bottom."
"You know I'm shit with cards."
His brows rise wry and dark as he casually flicks two raw sugars into his cup. Mal fingers her silverware distractedly; last she recalled, Arthur always considering himself a savory over sweet fellow every time, hence the more than trim waistline and lithe musculature. She blinks slow. He must've seen Eames recently. A small smile winds across her face. Her boy's sweet tooth has apparently transfixed upon a new addiction.
A pigeon alights on a morsel of scone near the garbage disposal. Strange, being out of the house, being seen again. It feels incredible, the sun kissing her skin, the wind toying with her curls, the chatter and din of the patio dwellers a significant change from the mausoleum silence of her house, yet somehow the ceiling of the great open blue sky feels too high and too close at the same time.
"You know us so well; you could change your specialty to forgery," she gives him her softest smile. How lovely to not be invisible for an hour. Or four.
It's Arthur's turn to be gracious.
"I wouldn't do you any justice," he compliments as she reaches for her bag. "Cobb, on the other hand—," he begins, a rare grin easing over his features. Mal can't help a bright, girlish laugh. It's been an age. She pitches a scrap from her scone to a pigeon side-eyeing them with scrutiny.
"How is Cobb, by the way?" he asks, genuinely wanting to know, bringing that old stone to roll around in her gut again.
She tilts her head innocuously, tempering the severe tone lurking just beneath her civil veneer.
"Absorbed, as always. Probably with my father in a sleep den by the Seine. Why? He hasn't been to see you?" she feigns breezy surprise.
Arthur's brows knit, consternation a go-to these days.
"No. We finished the Andrew Mesh industrial five weeks ago. He hasn't been back?"
The confusion of a devotee is in his voice and Mal feels something akin to nausea and vitriol in her chest.
"No. He hasn't."
It's between her teeth now, drying out the flesh inside her lips. The strike of the lighter makes Arthur tense. Mal finally takes a deep breath, her shoulders slumping as she leans into the unforgiving decorative wire back of the chair, sheer silk blouse draping against her at the gentle suggestion of the breeze.
"I thought you said you were gonna quit, Mal," Arthur's tone is silver, faithful to her health in ways she herself has become cavalier.
She blows the smoke away from his neatly slicked hair and tosses her own. She knows he has a date later, or at the very least an opportunity for work (everyone wants a good Point Man) as he's wearing a musk-forward cologne. Wouldn't want the tar to spoil it, sour the interview, cause his date to ask about his nasty habit.
"I did," she kisses the filter again, brazen, resolved to make him uncomfortable with her apathy. She's bored in her waking time. "And I can do it again. Dom has his vices, I have mine."
"Does Cobb know?" he parries, head tilted into their sphere in case the world around them is listening. A glass breaks with a piercing shimmer at the table adjacent to them far across the patio. She barely registers anything else and taps her ashes away, smearing them into a sooty rainbow across the cement with the toe of her shoe. It's a loaded question.
"If he does, then he's taking it remarkably well – wouldn't you agree?" she says, pushing her coffee away, running him through with her gunmetal eyes. If this was the game he wanted to play, then she would play.
For behind his eyelids, in the dark recesses of his skull, they've swum in molten sheets together, and she knows it, has glimpsed some glistening facet of herself pinned beneath him, cool precise hands memorizing the elegantly toned arms braced against his headboard, every sacrilegious movement a golden homily to erase his nightmares.
Anyone else in her position might've been offended by this and reduced it to perversion. Mal, however, decided to be flattered. Arthur has always been flint: strike him in the right place and he'll spark. Sometimes the sparks are warm, and his smile is sunshine. Sometimes the sparks are cold like a welder's light, harder to look at but entertaining all the same.
She grins behind her cigarette. She likes to play with fire, to be the devil in his details.
Arthur shifts uncomfortably, rolled up sleeves and waistcoat and shoes polished to a Sunday shine – it's armor, and for nothing. She can bring shades of unease to the surface of his skin like no one else.
"I meant about the smoking," he says even more quietly. Checkmate.
She exhales, an impish upturn at the corners of her mouth.
"I know you did," she replies, glinting at the satisfaction of making him squirm. Infidelity makes Arthur nervous; she's corrupting the last decent American boy. "And you think I should stop?" She does not mean the smoking.
The shine of her lipstick and the hint of it left on the filter distracts him.
"He's my best friend, Mal, and your husband," he says, hands folding in his lap like a choirboy reciting his catechism. He's been practicing in the mirror, she thinks, a red die on the sink's edge just to be absolutely sure the heave and thrall of those vivid, carnal nights hadn't happened in the waking world.
A chime of laughter escapes her lips, but the wind that moves it is mirthless and cold.
"What does that make us, then: loyalists or masochists?" she asks, a sardonic flavoring to her voice. Arthur flinches.
"We all have to settle at some point," he mutters his own resignation. It's the only thing that makes their triad make sense: Arthur follows Cobb into the dark; Mal rewards him there. Cobb forgets either of them exist until the next big break.
Mal huffs, examines her fingers. She thumbs her wedding band, thinks of her two children.
"There's nothing else like it," she smiles reluctantly. The real mistress is the dream, the real drug the god complex. They all know this.
Somewhere down the block, a verdigried church bell tolls out five o' clock. Mal squashes the butt into the pavement and stands on it.
"Let me know once Cobb is back. Meantime, you'd best make yourself scarce. Wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong impression, would we?" she delivers the final cut, her eyes drawn again to the cobbles trampled beneath one hundred different feet. Velvet heels, leather dress shoes, the occasional sandal and sneaker. Such extravagant details. She admires the effort.
Arthur's eyes sting as he looks up into the sun, her golden-brown curls ringed with eight-minute-old fire as she waits blank faced for his response.
"I'll do what I can," he agrees, the pallor of a convicted man on his skin.
She blesses him with a smile and sears his cheek with a deliberate, cold kiss.
"Tell Cobb to visit his children soon, if you see him," she says, patting his shoulder before dashing into traffic. Several cars honk aggressively; the pedestrian signal glares orange behind her back as she reaches the sidewalk and joins the multicolored throng.
That night, Arthur dreams of sacred sweat and writhing with a forbidden brunette beneath the altar at Notre Dame. He doesn't dare ask her name.
