Chapter 16 – Meet-Cute #3
His skin was opalescent, an immaculate white with the faintest iridescent sheen as the lights played over him.
The other abaya was a murky grey, hunched; in contrast, Araxis stood upright and tall, his shoulders perfectly square.
He was dressed in dark abayan formal-wear: trousers that tucked into high boots; a high-necked shirt with crisp seams and gleaming jewels for buttons; a jacket that was pressed to within an inch of its life.
His crest was pale and tipped in charcoal, perfectly braided and threaded with gold beads, like Vivith wore theirs.
His hands rested behind his back, unmoving.
The others in the line, except maybe the two voltaari and the seemingly disinterested human, had an air of semi-feral desperation about them.
Araxis held himself like he had come to win, like it was inevitable: he radiated competence, and my heart pulsed unsteadily whenever I looked at him for too long.
He had promised to help me. He had promised to fix everything for me. And I believed that he could, and he would.
What had I ever done to deserve him?
I had to look out at the crowd so that my face didn't betray any of the wave of emotions that were surging through me: gratitude, pride, hope, affection.
Maybe more than affection.
The announcer went on for a bit longer, naming several important sponsors and flashing lights on them in the crowd, and then we were all sent on our way to make merry, drink cocktails, and mingle.
As the lights pulsed in the room, I could make out dancing poles placed on elevated platforms throughout the area and it didn't take long for dancers to trickle out of secret doors tucked artfully behind frondy plants and begin twirling and twisting on those poles.
I scooped a drink from a passing tray and stopped near one to watch.
I'd always thought gaanith dancers had an unfair advantage: prehensile tails made so many of the transitions easier.
But even the drink and the dancing couldn't distract me from the nerves tightening moment by moment in the depths of my belly.
We'd agreed that Araxis would come to me on the first night. Waiting felt like torture.
My wristband buzzed against my skin, and I flipped up a message.
Go dance, it said, and when I glanced up, my eyes landed on Silver Sea, watching me meaningfully with wide yellow eyes from across the room.
She tipped her head to the nearest pole.
When I just stared at her – I mean, really, right now?
– my wrist buzzed again. It will be good for your metrics.
I smothered a sigh and set down my untouched drink on a nearby table. After the gaanith dancer completed a particularly difficult flip, I sidled up. "Unusual hand placement," I offered. "Is that all your tail, or are you doing something interesting with your thighs?"
Her red-skinned face, which was upside down and currently hanging near my shoulder, tilted a little to one side.
"I've been told my thighs are always interesting.
Do you dance?" she asked, letting herself slide down the pole as she slowly turned twirled around is, undulating her spine in time with the music.
"Mostly swords," I admitted, watching her dismount onto the raised platform where the pole was anchored. "But also pole. Sometimes both, in Alet Trident's den on Yellow Fin."
She smiled at me, crouching down and reaching with one three-fingered hand to touch my shoulder, squeezing down to my bicep through my sleeve. The leathery flaps at the base of her head fluttered in appreciation. "Oh, you aren't lying, are you?"
"If you think that's impressive," I intoned, craning my head close and watching as her ears ruffled, interested, "you should feel my thighs."
She cackled, and I grinned and asked if I could borrow her pole to stretch things out a bit.
She slipped down from the platform and offered to hold my jacket – it probably was a blouse; I'd never had one of those before – and I leapt up and spun myself about lazily while we chatted about dancing.
I did some casual twists and flips, nothing so strenuous that I couldn't keep up the easy back-and-forth I'd fallen into with the gaanith dancer.
In truth, flirting with her while floating around the pole in time with the music that throbbed through the air made me feel like I'd skipped back in time to a few weeks ago.
It was like shrugging on one of my ugly, worn out sweaters.
Except that, as I caught a glimpse of the silver cameras buzzing overhead, as different sets of hungry eyes shifted my way, I realized that it was almost like I'd never noticed how that much that sweater itched or how tight and uncomfortable the collar was.
Maybe I didn't like this after all. Araxis had asked if I'd wanted to be a dancer, and I hadn't really understood: after all, what else had there been?
And I really hadn't minded my work – I liked dancing; I liked feeling strong and capable; I liked being desired – but right then, in that moment, I thought that if I got to choose again, it would have been something else.
Not that there was much else for me to choose from.
Anyway, it wasn't the time or place for me to have a career crisis, especially not when I was being filmed from fifty-seven angles while I was also upside down and holding myself so precisely that I could feel each separate muscle in my torso engage.
I let myself flip down, catching the pole with my thigh near the base of the platform, and the gaanith dancer made a happy sound. "Very nice," she said as I swung myself off the pole and dropped down from the platform. "You have good core strength, and your lines are lovely."
I fluttered my eyelashes and made some mindless comments while I shrugged back into my blouse, casting a quick glance around the room to see if I could catch anyone watching.
But of course I wasn't looking for anyone: I wanted to know if Araxis was watching, if he had seen me.
The dancer was cozied in tight, her head craning up to look at me as her slitted pupils reflected back the oscillating lights overhead; I glanced over the top of her head across the room, and then my stare fell on a pair of black eyes.
My heart stuttered in my chest as I saw Araxis's pale face. He was speaking quietly with some marn representing a major sponsor, a drink held close to his chest, but his eyes were pinned on me and that stare – even across the distance of the room – was pure heat.
I forced myself to look away as my pulse picked up, my mouth suddenly dry. "Thanks again," I said brightly. "I should probably go talk to some of the sponsors or something, although I'd rather hang out with you all night."
Her spiny ears fluttered again as she lifted herself back to the platform. "Find me after, if you're free," she said with a little wink, and then she was back to twirling around the pole and scaling it like it wasn't any harder than going for a stroll.
I moved away, searching for another server so I could get a fresh drink in my hand.
It didn't take me long to track one down while my nerves continued to thrum inside of my body.
When I allowed myself to look back to where I'd seen Araxis, he was gone, and I let the star-fire burst of anticipation burn brighter.
I took a sip of my drink, finding a little nook by one of the columns where the crowd wasn't quite so thick but I could still watch the gaanith dancer.
At least seeing her perform helped take my mind off the jittery feeling beneath my ribs.
She'd launched herself into a slow sequence of controlled flips, which was impressive to the untrained eye and even more impressive to the trained one, when the air behind me shifted.
I sucked in a breath, heart fluttering, but when I turned, it was the other human who'd sidled up and was squinting at me from his craggy face.
"Oh," I said, smile slipping for just a moment before I righted it. I switched out of Standard and into English, herding my thoughts reluctantly to my first language. "It's Grigor, right?"
He had a square, heavily stubbled jaw and a nose that looked like it had been broken a few times, with pale skin that was washed out under the pulsing blue and purple lights from above. "Don't you look pretty," he sneered in a low, rumbling voice, looking me up and down as his lip curled.
Ah, so it was going to be like that. This man wasn't the first human I'd seen since leaving Seraphim – they featured prominently in pit fights, and sometimes Trident would bring some in to spice things up for a night or two in the den when certain clients would be on-station – and his reaction was one I'd encountered before.
After all, you could take the man out of Seraphim, but you couldn't always take the backwater prejudice out of his heart, or whatever.
I looked him over as well: he was wearing a green jumpsuit, which was clean but utilitarian and clearly his own; over his heart was a patch with a mining drill, the words Grace Mining and a series of numbers below.
I knew those numbers. I knew the verses they referred to.
Any of the anticipation I'd been feeling at seeing Araxis curdled into sludge in my stomach. I wished suddenly that I hadn't picked up a drink and that the sugar wasn't lingering, syrupy and saccharine, on my tongue.
Why would Seraphim send someone to compete?
That didn't make any sense. They hated the big, bad galaxy beyond their station and colony; Seraphim had been determined to minister to the space heathens and, when they realized the universe didn't align with their scripture and the aliens didn't want to open their hearts to an Earth god anyway, they'd locked things down and decided to keep interactions to a bare minimum.