Page 4 of Her Ice Queen

"And in the morning?"

Carla looked down at her, at the green eyes and the silver scar and the mouth she already knew she'd think about at least once next week, and told her the truth, because anonymity made honesty cheap.

"In the morning, this never happened. I wanted you for the night and nothing more. That's all I have."

Indra held her gaze while she weighed it, and whatever she was weighing, none of it reached her face. "That's all I asked for," she said, and climbed up into the bed of a woman whose last name she didn't know, and was asleep within minutes, easily, like trust was nothing, like it cost nothing at all.

Carla lay awake a while longer with a stranger's breathing beside her and the Meridian email finally, blessedly silent, and the last thing she thought before sleep took her was that she hadn't asked one single question all night that mattered, and that she'd gotten the better end of that bargain.

2

INDRA

Indra woke at 6:14 to a ceiling she didn't know and a body that remembered everything.

Thin early light, glass on two sides, the city below still half-asleep. Beside her, the woman she knew only as Carla lay on her stomach with one arm flung across the empty middle of the bed, breathing slow and even, dark hair loose across her face in a disorder Indra suspected very few people had ever been allowed to witness.

Her thighs ached. Her palms carried the faint memory of the rail. Every place that woman's mouth had been still hummed, one by one.

Up. Now. This is the good part, leaving while it's still perfect.

She slid out from under the sheet by degrees, feet finding cold hardwood. Her dress was folded over the chair where she'd been told to put it, and even that sent an inconvenient pull through her, the memory of the voice that had told her. She dressed in the bathroom doorway, silk cool against sleep-hot skin, and carried her heels in one hand across a living room the size of her whole apartment.

At the door she stopped. Went back three steps. Looked at the sleeping woman one last time, the commanding mouth gone soft, the fortress unstaffed.

No note. Notes were for people who wanted to be found.

She let herself out, rode down alone in a walnut-paneled elevator that smelled faintly of lemon oil, and stepped into the earliest version of the morning, the sidewalks empty, the air not yet hot, a street-sweeper grinding somewhere out of sight, her own reflection sliding along dark storefront glass looking rumpled and smug.

This was exactly what she'd needed. That was the whole truth of it. One clean night, no last names, no follow-up, no one's moods to manage or needs to anticipate beyond the frankly luxurious needs of a woman who knew how to ask for what she wanted.

With Renata, wanting had been a rationed good. Two years of learning the daily forecast before she spoke, of trading her own plans away in small denominations, dinner by dinner, weekend by weekend, until her friends stopped asking and her wants went quiet from disuse. She'd left fourteen months ago with two suitcases and a promise to herself, sworn in the parking lot of a U-Haul depot of all unromantic places: never again would she hand someone the whole of herself and call the change they gave back love.

Friday hadn't broken the promise. Friday, strangely, had kept it. She'd knelt on a stranger's rug because she chose to, because it thrilled her, and the choosing had run through the whole night like a current. Say stop and I stop. Everything else, I decide. She'd heard the terms, wanted them, signed. Surrender that she authored was a different animal from surrender extracted a compromise at a time, and her body had known the difference before her head found words for it.

So she had gone out and taken a night purely for herself, and it had been.

Her cheeks heated on the empty street. It had been.

She bought a terrible coffee from the first open cart she found and drank it walking, and by the time she reached her car she had put the night where it belonged: perfect, finished, hers.

"Okay," Maria said on Sunday, sliding into the window seat at their usual place on Sunset with two coffees already ordered, because Maria always ordered for both of them and was always right. "Before you say one word about the new job, I need you to explain your face."

"My face."

"Your face." Maria narrowed her eyes over the rim of her cup. "You're glowing. Who was she?"

Indra took her time with a sip. "Nobody. Exactly nobody. That's the point."

"Oh my God." Maria set the cup down with a clack. "You actually did it. You went out Friday like a functioning adult woman and you, what, at that secret club you can't tell me about?"

"Can confirm nothing."

"Details. I've watched you be a nun for eight months, I've earned details."

Indra gave her the highlights with the names left off, which was easy, since there was only one name and it was half a name. A woman at the bar. Older, gorgeous, ran the whole encounter like a closing. The best night she'd had in years, possibly ever, and she'd left before sunrise without waking her.

"No number," Maria said.