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Chapter Text

The air threatens snow. That sharp smell so different from the threat of rain. More metallic, chillier. Rook crosses one leg over the other and settles back into the cafe chair where she agreed to wait for Neve.

The Christmas Market had been Harding's idea, but Neve had, in that sometimes inexplicable way she does, taken to it immediately. The first Christmas Market after the Plague, shots fresh in arms, a manic feeling in the air. Like livestock let to roam for the first time in their lives in a great, green field. The joy and mild, humming fear and uncertainty is palpable. Rook, holding a mug of gluhwein with both hands to warm them, feels numb.

She ought not to feel numb. Rook loves the Christmas Market. Loves Christmas in general even though she's never once set foot in a church (the cathedrals where she did her master's research, she figures, don't count.) It's the lights and the warmth and the general feeling all around her. The chance to break handknit sweaters out of the closet, wear flannel jeans. T stand around with your friends and blow cold air through your mittened hands. Rook told her Varric, her therapist, last week that she can't feel temperature anymore. That it's hard for her to feel anything. That she got so scared that something was physically wrong with her she burned her pointer finger on a candle, just to make sure she hadn't gone numb for real. Let's not do that again, alright? Varric said, looking at her over the tops if his glasses. And then he told her it was normal. Expected, common. That it's a form of protection for her body to shut a little down. That, in time, her nerves would come back online, knock politely at the door of her brain and ask to be let back in. It's been four months, she'd said, trying and failing to keep the exasperation out of her voice. Four months, Varric replied, setting down his clipboard, is no time at all, kiddo.

"How is it?" Rook jumps a little at Harding's voice, runs a hand through her hair to try and laugh it off.

She holds her styrofoam cup up in cheers. "Very, very alcoholic."

"Well, that's good," Harding says, sitting down across the patio table from her. She's drinking hot chocolate, Rook can smell it. "God you a pastry," Harding says, pushing a little, white paper bag across the table toward Rook. "Have it later if you're not hungry now."

"Thank you." Rook means to put it in the pocket of her coat, but through the paper, she can feel it's warmth. Fresh. She unwraps it. A cheese danish dotted with raspberries. She takes a bite and smiles. Her tastebuds, at least, still work just fine.

"Of course! Hell, I could go get you another one if you want." Rook laughs and shakes her head, glancing over at Harding who's turned her attention to the market, watching the crowds of people duck under the lights and through the little wooden huts. Harding knows a little - that something bad happened, that Rook is different now even in just the smallest ways - but not everything. The only one who knows everything is Neve.

And here she comes now, dressed in a long woolen coat the color of freshly baked bread and wrapped in a cashmere scarf that probably costs as much as Rook's couch at home. "I see I'm the only one out here doing the hard work."

Harding snorts. "What hard work? I see you out there, hunting scoops."

"Shopping," Neve corrects, handing Rook a little bundle. "Highland wool. Seller said they’ll keep you warm on the coldest nights." Normally Harding would say something like what, nothing for me, but today she doesn't. Today she just smiles and reaches over to squeeze Rook's knee. Sometimes she wants to tell them to stop - to stop coddling her, to stop looking at her like that - but  the pastry is still warm in her hand and the socks look beautiful, Look like they really could keep her warm for the rest of her life and so she just says thank you, says thank you and take long drink of the gluhwein.

The call comes in between bites of currywurst - Neve holding the basket, Haring and Rook feeding themselves and her with toothpicks - and when Rook sees the number is from work she goes cold, excusing herself to duck into one of the brick alleyways between shops.

She almost lets it go to voicemail. It's Saturday. She's not on the clock. She's out with her friends at a Christmas market trying to wake her nerves back up, listening for that knock on her door. But she does answer it, because she knows that if she doesn't, it will gnaw at her for the rest of the day.

"Hi Mae."

"Oh!" She says, sounding surprised, and it's comforting the way Maevarus always sounds so surprised when she answers the phone, as if she was so busy running the University's library that she simply hadn't been paying attention when they invented caller id. "rook." And there it is, the way everyone has been saying her name since it happened. Letting the end drop, heavy with pity. "I'm so sorry to call you on the weekend."

"It's fine," Rook says too quickly. She glances over at the market. Harding's wandered off, but Neve is looking right at her. She raises and eyebrow; Rook waves her off. I'm fine.

"I wanted to talk to you about yesterday." Rook grits her teeth. Her nerves are knocking, but not any sensations she wants to let in.

"Oh, of course."

"I wanted to say that given what has happened I'm not surprised that coming back to work might be difficult for you." What has happened. Mae knows, of course, what has happened. She's the one who's running the job search to replace him. Mae knows what happened on paper and maybe that's enough. Rook didn't have to explain why she had to leave work before noon, why when she asked she was white knuckling the reference desk to keep herself upright. Mae knows enough to be kind, to be lenient when Rook asks for time off (three weeks right after it happened), but she couldn't know what a physical shock it had been to sit down in that basement chair, trying to sort through the new collection that had just come in, and smell his cologne. And Rook doesn't want her to know that. She doesn't want her to know any of this. Or for anyone to know any of this. She doesn’t want to know it herself.

“Listen, I am so sorry -"

"Stop." Mae cuts her quickly off with a sort of finality that slams Rook's thoughts to a halt. Maybe Maevarus actually does know what it's like for a smell to gain a body, for a smell to have such a violent touch. One in five the nurse told her that night, or had it been morning by then? - holding her hand which didn't look like her hand but something cold and dead. The thought, that Mae might know, that Mae might understand, makes Rook feel worse, makes her feel a little lightheaded. "I don't want you to apologize and I don’t need you to either." By now, Neve's moved off the street and toward the alleyway. She's scrolling through her phone but Rook can tell she's paying attention, wanting for a moment to step in if need be, to reach out and take her hand. Rook wants to hang up the phone and take Neve by the arm and disappear into the lights of the Christmas market. But that would be crossing a bridge that no longer stands. She'd felt the same way that night. When the cops left and the nurse let go of her hand. When the nights were still warm and fireflies bobbed in and out of the darkness. Neve was waiting there outside the hospital to take her hand. I want to go back Rook said then, I don't want this. I want to go back. And Neve said nothing - what could she say? when she knew then, even if Rook did not yet, that there would be no going back - but pulled her into a tight hug and held her there for so long that even the summer night had begun to turn cold. All of that passes between them now, one week into December, snow falling in soft flakes, not cold enough for it to stick. "Are you still there?"

Rook readjusts, pressing the phone closer to her ear. "Sorry. I'm outside. It's a little loud."

"I have a proposition for you." Mae says, and Rook thinks she ought to feel something, but she's finding it hard again. Numb. “There’s a professor in the Classic department. A really nice guy from my limited interactions. He's been looking for a research assistant for a while. It's a little below your skill level but it's flexible and you don't have to spend much time in special collections.

"I can work." And Neve perks up at the sound of her voice, a little thin and a little too high a pitch.

"Of course you can. " Mae says, matter of factly. "and right now I'd like you to do this. How does that sound?”

By now, Neve is standing beside her, leaning against the brick wall and pretending to scroll through her phone. Rook can see Harding between the wooden shops looking for them, two more cups of cider or maybe mulled wine in her hands. "Who is the professor?" Rook asks, but in her mind she’s already agreed to it. Not because she wants to, but because the idea of heading back to special collections, sitting in the same places where he spent time watching her, thinking of thoughts she could not even conceive of fills her with a sharp, childlike fear.

"Emmrich Volkarin"

Chapter Text

The first time Varric suggested group therapy, Rook said no. Emphatically no, ungracefully no. No so quickly that he chuckled from his spot in the chair across from the couch where she sat. The couch where, for the first two weeks (when she was going three times a week, and arguing with insurance about it, unable to even move, even get out of bed, the hard fear inside of her like concrete), she did nothing but cry. By the time Varric brought it up - slyly, in his way, you're not alone you know and then she was thinking about the nurse all over again, one in five - she'd settled down enough that she didn't even cry every time. But she'd still said no. So fast it made her think, so fast it made her pause. How bad, she thought, still concrete heavy, could it possibly be?

 Not bad, Rook decides, examining the week's snack spread. A lot of leftovers from early holiday parties, she thinks. Not that she's complaining. A spritz cookie is a spritz cookie even if it's been out for a few days. She puts two on her plate and takes a quick sip of coffee. Whoever makes the coffee for these sessions, one of the church ladies who sets up the basement for them Rook has no doubt, burns the shit out of it every week. But Rook kind of likes that. It's an easy distraction. Keeps her mouth busy since she hasn't talked yet, doesn't really plan to.

At the end of the card table, Rook finds a glass dish full of brownies, frosted, with colorful little sprinkles applied a little too heavily to the frosting. “New girl," Taash says. Rook jumps a little. For someone as massive and muscular as she is, Taash moves in absolute silence. “New girl brought those." She nods her head toward the brownies and then over at the circle of chairs. A woman sits hands in her lap, looking down. She looks more nervous than everyone else. Which is saying something for this group. She has a thick mass of  dark hair piled atop her head and secured with a pin. Rook finds it a little hard to look at her because it is, just with the way she's holding herself, the energy that is wafting off of her, like looking in a mirror from a few weeks ago. “So what do you think, Blondie?" Taash says, nodding back at the brownies, “think they're any good?"

Rook takes a sip of coffee and and adds a couple more spritz cookies to her plate, these with glistening maraschino cherries on top. "I'm sure they're fine." She says and Taash just grunts. Aside from these brief chats in front of the snack table, she and Taash categorically do not talk. In fact, the moment they leave the neutral waters of the coffee and snacks, Taash ignores her with a intensity that if Rook had space for a single other emotion she might feel offended. But she doesn't, because she doesn't, and she takes another bite of her cookie and washes it down with burnt, bitter coffee.

The group is not for rape victims. If it was, Rook would have said no and meant it. The group is for women who have recently experienced violence. Both the recent and the violent seem to be matters of degrees. Not that she listens all that hard. She tries to, of course. In another life, she was a people watcher, a real listener. But her mind wanders too far too fast now and by the time the therapist leading group thanks them for sharing or holding space Rook feels as if no time has passed at all. In the blink of an eye, it’s over and she is the only one sitting in the chair circle. The new girl is heading toward the stairs back up to the church, brownies in hand, mostly uneaten, and Tassh is gone. She feels better, she always does, even though she doesn’t talk and can barely remember what is said. Osmosis she told Varric once and he'd just smiled in that sly, soft way he smiles. Whatever works, kid.

It's sunny today, not a cloud in the sky, but bitterly, bitterly cold. Rook wraps her scarf closer around her. Harding knit it two years ago, before the pandemic, before all of this. One of her passing fads, but the wool is from a farm outside of town and keeps her so warm and feels so soft against her skin and smells, when she fidgets with it, like lanolin and freshly tilled dirt. Rook likes that the group gets out in the afternoon when, even in winter, the sun is still high in the sky and she wonders if that's on purpose. Probably so. Darkness is a common theme in what she catches of the conversations. Whether it was a car accident or an attempted murder that brought them into the group, everything gets worse, scarier, more real, when the sun goes down.

Not everyone has told their story yet, but most people have and none of them were raped. Or at least...Rook thinks about it, chewing on her thumbnail. She hasn’t chewed her nails since she was a kid, elementary school, but that night, morning, in the hospital she chewed all of her nails down to the quick and she starts in on them again, heading for the train station. No one in the group who's told their story mentioned rape. No one. But when Rook really thinks about it, she can imagine it there, lurking in the shadows of their stories. Of the woman who’s husband tried to strangle here. Where was it? On the bed? What would that mean? And she wonders, when the time comes, if it comes, how she'll tell her story. Will it be only about a coworker who came to her door in the middle of the night and knocked her hard in the jaw with his fist? Rook touches it now. There’s no bruise anymore but she can feel a phantom ache. Sometimes, she tells herself that the punch knocked her out cold. That she remembers nothing that happened after. Her phone buzzes in her purse and she digs for it, grateful for the distraction. It's Harding. A quick text about breakfast tomorrow to the group chat. Neve likes the message. Rook tries to remember if she has anything going on, past present and future flow strangely together these days, but before she can, an email comes in. From Professor Emmrich Volkarin. The subject line: excited to (virtually) make your acquaintance.

Chapter Text

He's...handsome. Which she didn't expect. Not that she expected him to be unattractive, but she just hadn't thought about it. Rook hadn't expected to pull up his faculty profile and rock a little back in her sear. Shape her mouth like an O and put her hand on her chest like a woman in an old movie. Her mother would call him distinguished. A distinguished older man with sharp features and soft, pale eyes with lines beside them that smile even though, in this picture, he is not. He has a thick head of salt and pepper hair - mostly salt - that he slicks neatly back off his face. He has the sort of thin, separated mustache that might look villainous on another man, but on him only adds to his hair of distinction. Outside the wind is blowing. It whistles coldly through the little cracks between the sill and the window. The snow has started too, after days of threatening. A fresh layer of powder that has started to bury the town. Rook's wearing two pairs of wool socks, holding her coffee with both hands to keep her hands warm. She pulls her legs up and crossed them on her dining room chair and draped a blanket over her shoulders. She feels like a piece of furniture, probably looks like one too. Rook scrolls back up to look at his photo again, tries to assess a little what it's making her feel, before abandoning the endeavor and scrolling down to read his CV.

Emmrich Volkarin is the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History and Classics at Harvard University. Rook keeps scrolling. His bio is long and as she skims it, she finds it oddly friendly. The sort of bio that she, in undergrad, would have read and felt safe enough to take a class with him. He lists his graduate students, none of which she knows, though that isn’t surprising. In special collections, she works primarily with 20th century documents and images. All of Emmrich’s students work on the ancient world. She takes another sip of coffee and presses a few fingers just under her jaw, feeling for her heartbeat. Rook knows she shouldn’t be drinking this much caffeine. Knows it by the way her heart feels when she does, by the way its beating rises up to her face and into her sinuses, the way her lips feel like moths, shivering like in the cold. Varric told her specifically that drinking this much caffeine would make it harder to self regulate. She drains her cup and goes back to reading.

Emmrich graduated from Oxford in 1984 with honors. A bachelor in Classics. Five years later in 1989 he graduated with his masters there. Also in Classics. Whatever he was doing in the three years between his undergraduate graduation and when he would have started his masters is left entirely up to the imagination. So Rook lets herself imagine it. She scrolls back up to his image, studying it, then opens a new tab and googles his name, flipping to images and scrolling down. What becomes immediately clear, no matter the image - and there are all manner of them: Emmrich presenting at conferences, Emmrich dressed in Indiana Jones khaki out on dig sites, Emmrich at dinner with colleagues - is that he is almost unreasonably tall. Standing nearly a full head taller than everyone - man, woman, or otherwise - he stands beside. So Rook tries to imagine him in the mid-eighties, tall and handsome, wearing mahogany suits and those long leather shoes everybody wore back then. She imagines him charming from across the bar, taking a drink and raising a single, mischievous eyebrow. She’s being silly. She tries to take another drink from her cup, finds it empty, still mimes the motion of drinking. She goes back to reading his CV.

Emmrich got his Ph.D. in 1993, also from Oxford. Classics and Ancient history, which he teaches now at Harvard, where he’s been a full professor since 2007. Before that, he taught in the Birkbeck College at London University. Rook imagines him now with a British accent. Posh, though she’s never been to the UK and only has the faintest idea what that might sound like. BBC English, Royal family English. It changes the way she looks at his picture now that she can imagine the way he probably sounds. It adds yet another layer of distinction to him and Rook again tries to understand what she’s feeling. Touch-starved, she decides. As touch starved as a feral child come wandering out of the woods. Touched starved for six months.. Buoyed by the softness of her friends and the pleasantness of all those minor interactions - baristas, cashiers, people smiling on the street, the students come wandering into special collections - she hadn’t noticed the chill on her skin and way her own touch feels so inadequate. Rook pulls her blanket closer around her, takes a moment to watch the snow outside the window, flakes falling dizzy like leaves down onto the houses and the street, then keeps reading.

Emmrich got the Rome Prize in 2000 and Rook works with enough academics to know what a big deal that is. Smart people get the Rome prize but not just smart people. Cosmopolitan people. He evolves again in her mind. She can see him standing in a piazza in Rome, smiling with a glass of wine in his hand, dressed in a smart pair of slacks, the setting sun casting gold across his grey hair. Outside, the wind howls. It’s 4pm, soon Rook will have to figure out dinner and the thought of it feels exhausting, impossible. She still has a lot of pre-made food in the freezer. From Harding and Neve, from the older woman who works at the circulation desk, even a few store-bought meals from Maevarus. She’ll find something.  Emmrich won a teaching award in 2015 - the Everette Mendelosohn Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students - and he evolves again. She scrolls back up to look at his department photo and his eyes look even kinder than they did before. Rook wraps her arms around her legs and rests her head on her knees. “Fuck,” she says to the empty room, “I am a really fucked up person.” She says it again to no one, to the wall and the window piling up with snow. Rook opens her email. Professor Volkarin, I would be delighted to…

“I don’t think I’ve heard you say that about a man in years.” Neve says over the phone and Rook tries not to flinch. “That’s good.”

“Is it?” Rook isn’t drinking coffee now, but tea. Because she’s over-caffeinated and it’s making her feel insane. More so than usual. Her new normal the sort of ambient anxiety that most prey animals feel. Neve pauses and Rook remembers her pausing a year ago just like this and not at all like this. Rook showed up unannounced on her stoop just before dawn, the pale blue light of morning just beginning to show along the horizon. You have to talk to the police Neve said, uncharacteristically shaky, let me go with you. I’m going with you. “God, I miss you,” Rook says on a sigh. Neve laughs as if to say I’m right here, silly, I live down the street, but she doesn’t say it because this is how they talk. How they have always talked almost from the very first time they met when Neve was writing a story about the University’s shadow investments and stopped into special collections to get some peace and quiet. She wonders if she’s ever seen Emmrich Volkarin before, if he’s ever wandered into special collection. She thinks not. Rook would remember a face like that. She comes back to herself. “I’m not gonna fuck a professor.”

Neve snorts. “I don’t recall ever accusing you of such a thing.”

“I know you.”

Another laugh, this one gentle, this one a little warm. “It’s just nice. to hear you talk about…whatever. It’s just nice.”

Chapter Text

"Emmrich, please," He says, sitting down across from her at the cafe. The pictures really didn't do him justice. To his height or the handsome lines of his face. "Professor is far too formal for someone of your stature." Rook laughs but lets the compliment stand. She needs it. When she sits down across from him, she catches a quick whiff of his cologne, warm and amber-y.

"Emmrich, then," she says with a smile. It's easy to be like this. Empty and easy and normal. Because what they're doing is professional. And it's easy to be professional, when she's not back in that basement chair. That’s what it had been really, what caused the meltdown. It brought her back to herself, activated the part of her brain she shuts down at work. Here, with his professor, she can slip into another version of herself, one that doesn't require a body. "It's good to meet you."

He has a charming smile. Broad and gentle. It deepens the lines around his eyes. Rookimagines, by those lines, that it's an expression he makes often. The gentle, knowing smile of a patient professor. And there's a twinkle in his eyes, she thinks, though she's not sure she'd ever describe someone like that before. A man with a genuine twinkle in his eyes, but maybe it’s just the reflection of the lights in the cafe. Rook's come here before, lots of times, between classes and on her lunch break - it has that cozy sort of feeling she loves with its dark brick and steepled ceiling - but she's never been here over the winter break. Probably because she's never here over winter break. Usually, by the time the students are strapping the contents of their dorms onto the tops of their beater cars, Rook is packing her own. Heading off to the Catskills or maybe even further afield, further north where the air is colder and the people are sparser. Anywhere with pine forests and craggy rocks. Cold, quiet air and skies alight with stars. Stars so bright they take your breath away. Somewhere she could go and be alone with her own thoughts. A cabin usually. Some place she'd find on craigslist or the many bulletin boards in the student union and outside the library. She’d change her voicemail to say that she was out of town and set an autoreply on her email. She would disappear from the world for three weeks and come back feeling herself again, newer and stronger. But she couldn't do it this year.

She tried. She booked a cabin. She packed her car. She sat behind the wheel, white-knuckling as the realization dawned on her in inches that should could not bear being alone. Could barely stand the thought of it. The thought of leaving her house, driving up those snowy, winding roads. Of staying in those places she used to love where the birds outnumber the people and stars are so unburdened by the lights of towns and cities that they gleam like new lives. She never thought about the shadows before now. All those places the stars couldn’t see. The locks on those cabin doors are so flimsy. She’d never thought about it before then, but now she could picture their splintering so clearly, vividly. She could, sitting there in her idling car, imagine the sound of her screaming as it echoed through the pines to nowhere and no one. Here, at home, she has new locks on her doors. Here, at home, she has neighbors that she know will call for help. The answer was as easy as it was frightening. The street was so silent when she unpacked her car, humiliation burning so hot and bright she left her coat in the driver’s seat.

So, no she's never stayed on campus before during the winter break, never seen this coffeeshop so decked out in pine boughs and multi-colored lights. And she must have been thinking about it for a very long time - the lights and the steering wheel and those visions of barren pine roads, her car crawling up them like the start of the Shining - because when she finally resharpens her gaze, Emmrich is sitting across from her, eyes gentle with just a touch of soft concern in them.

"Sorry,” Rook says with a dry laugh, the gears in her head turning fast as she tries to piece the last several minutes back together. When she broke down in the basement she hadn’t remembered coming back up to special collections, hadn’t remembered what she said to Mae that made her grab both of Rook’s wrists. Had lost that time completely. Something, Varric would tell her later, normal for sufferers of PTSD. But he isn’t looking at her like she’s just said something off-color, something frightening, instead like she’s just been a little too silent for a little too long "I couldn't help looking at the snow." She gestures toward the big windows by the table he'd picked for them. Outside, snow is falling gentle and soft, big white flakes that pile quickly up on the sidewalks and sills.

Emmrich smiles, folding his hands in front of him. His hands are heavy with rings. Heavy and gold, some set with gemstones. He wears multiple on his fingers, stacking them, and what might look garish or kitschy on one of the students here, manages to look dignified on him. No ring, she notices, on his wedding finger. And while she’s looking at his ringless, she finds herself following them up to his hands, marveling at the length of them. They look dexterous. She feels a roil inside of her that is so tinged in fear that she cannot understand what it might be underneath. "I do so love this time of year." He’s watching her, she realizes, like a student and there’s something about that Rook finds she likes. It’s gentle. She no longer associates men with gentleness. “Let me get you a coffee,” he says, smiling softly, “and then we can talk shop.”

Rook picks at her food on the phone, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, perched on her kitchen table. It's chicken and rice, the only thing she can stomach lately. Not that other food isn't appealing, it is. The pastry Harding brought her the day of the Christmas market lives on hot and sugary in her mind, but whenever she's on her own, nothing in a coffeeshop pastry case can tempt her. Because it's hard now, to do anything. That night, underneath him, her body clenched tightly up and it hasn't released since. Varric recommended yoga. To get back in touch with her body. To let herself go soft again. She hasn't gone. There's something instinctual about the way her body shut itself down, and so she’s been holding it there, like if she unclenches, for even a moment, she'll fall apart like a marionette. And there’s something about buying a pastry, buying almost anything, that feels like unclenching. She bought four packages of Costco chicken thighs six months ago, before, and she's been living off that and the rice in her pantry almost exclusively. She used to season it with the garlic and ginger she had in the fridge, but when that ran out she just stopped - grocery stores felt like unclenching too - and now she just eats it with salt. She can't really taste it anyway and she hasn't felt hungry since that night when she walked home a little tipsy from Neve's house and thought it might be nice to stop in to that ice cream shop that stayed open late and get herself a scoop of ice cream. She wonders how summer will feel when it comes, wonders if it will ever come again, looking out at the blue winter night. Rook takes another bight of her chicken and rice. "I'm sorry," she says into the phone, "I wasn't listening."

"I thought as much," Rana says and Rook thinks she can hear a television in the background and wonders if the prosecutor is calling her from home. "There's been another delay."

"I know," Rook says, examining her nails. She's bitten them bloody. A habit she thought she broke in grade school. "Neve told me."

Over the phone, Rana groans. Rook imagines she has her fingers dug into her temples. She's the type of woman Rook's mother would have called handsome, which she would have meant as a veiled, almost jealous, compliment. When Rook met her for the first time, she'd felt just the briefest feeling of relief. The tall, muscular woman struck an imposing figure, and so did the grey hair around her temples and the faintest wrinkles at her mouth. An old friend of Neve's. Before, Rook might have asked if they were ex lovers, so was the energy in the room, but she’d spent all her words talking to Rana. "Neve is not supposed to be giving you updates before they've been set in stone,."

"Don't tell her I told you."

"No promises," Rook smiles briefly, her smiles these days flicker like old lights. She takes another bite of her dinner. It's gone cold, but temperature's another thing she's been struggling to feel. It's all ambient until sometimes, in the middle of the night, she'll wake up so cold that it feels like a part of her, like she’ll never get warm again. “The delay has nothing to do with the case and everything to do with covid-era delays."

Rook glances over at her front door. At her new locks, at her other dining room chair propped up under them. "Will he get out?"

"Not before the bail hearing, which is in two weeks now." Rook is sure now that she can hear the tv, Someone putzing around in the kitchen. Rana is calling her from home. "I think we have an awfully good chance that the judge will deny him bail given the aggravated nature of the crime, but…” she pauses and Rook feels the pause as though it were there in the room with her, a physical thing sitting across the table from her.  "I want you to know that the defense, right  now, is planning to claim that the sex was consensual." It feels like a stone dropping into the bottomless pit inside of her. It feels free falling, like she can watch it go, fall empty into the darkness. Like the feeling on a rollercoaster as it hurtles down, stomach flipping and flipping and flipping, but there's no end, there's no crescendo or journey back up. The sensation doesn't end. "I think it's going to be a tough sell, given the nature of your...injuries. But I wanted you to know. I don't want you to be blindsided."

Rook thanks Rana, makes polite small talk until it is socially appropriate for her to wish her goodnight and hang up the phone. She keeps her voice even, she does not let herself shake. And when she hangs up, she walks quietly, robotically, to the bathroom. She vomits until her sides ache.

That night she goes to bed thinking about the books she'll need to pull from the stacks for Professor Volkarin, for Emmrich. She thinks about the books, and their call numbers, and their places amongst the shelves and she thinks, like rapid cuts in a movie, of Professor Volkarin's hands, Emmrich's hands. His long fingers and delicate knuckles. Dexterous, she could tell just by the way he drank he coffee, even under all those rings. And she realizes, with a sudden shock, that all she felt sitting there with him at the coffee shop, talking about old books and even older etchings, was a quiet, empty calm.

Chapter Text

All goes well in the household. The orchids, by and large, are thriving, even the sun orchids that I had all but forsaken have returned to their blue prudence with some careful trimming and an adjustment to the humidity in their vivarium (the isopods there continue to thrive but I was not worried for them). Manfred seems to be settling in well. He has, however, excitable, curious cat that he is, made me reconsider the layout of my office. Never have I had such an efficient paper shredder before! The veterinarian at the shelter mentioned that I should acclimatize Manfred early on to having his paws handled (for nail trimmings, medical checkups, etc) and so I have set about doing that by engaging him in play (the feather duster Vorgoth gifted me seems to be the utmost delight for him). I am approaching my new life as a cat owner with the zest and perseverance with which I approached my early studies. Invigorating!

The house remains drafty, a project for the summer months when the cold relents and my joints relax considerably. The resumption of my daily runs has helped in that regard as has the addition of weights (per the recommendation of my doctor). My physician does seem to find my concerns amusing as I am in his words “as fit as a man half my age”, but one never knows when death or infirmity should strike and this pandemic, even in its retreat, has been a good reminder of that. So the runs shall continue, even when the weather is brisk (today a frigid high of 23 but the sun was shining beautifully so one should not complain). This evening I took my run at Mount Auburn and found that do so still enjoy it (even when it is buried under frost and snow) and the graves look very well kept (I shall make a note to commend the groundskeeper the next I see him). It was there that I ran into Lottie “in the wild” as they say. Not in the cemetery, but just outside. She was quite so bundled that I did not immediately recognize her. She has a wispy quality about her, as though ephemeral, but a stolidness too. I have not encountered someone so stolid in a very long time, much less in someone so young. We had a very pleasant conversation and went our separate ways. Looking back, I think she may have been waiting for the bus and I wish I’d offered her a ride.

Over lunch at the University, I read two excellent articles from the Norwegian Archeological Review. “Reshaping Gendered Narratives: Reinterpreting Female Art, Identity and Social Change in the Late Nordic Bronze Age” by Laura Ahlqvist and “A Material Culture of Medieval Disability: Contextualising Norwegian Votive Offerings” by Hólmfríður Sveinsdóttir. I’ve attached my notes on both in the index section of this diary. Though I don’t see myself pivoting to Scandinavia in the future, both articles presented such compelling theoretical frameworks!

Lottie, to me, is a quintessential Scandinavian name and her surname (Ingellvar) only puts a fine point to it, but I have yet to detect an accent so I shall assume she is American born. I do certainly detect northern Europe in her features, but I have spent more time speaking with her than I have looking at her. Maevarus has, on occasion slipped up and called Lottie “Rook”. When asked, Maevarus said it was an old nickname. Should it become appropriate, I’ll have to ask Lottie where that nickname comes from (perhaps it relates to chess! I would so like a new chess partner as it seems Strife knows all my best moves now by heart).

Another note about Lottie: she has reading glasses that she takes out when closely examining the written word and I find that quite amusing. I don’t have a clear read on her age (I seldom do these days when everyone appears so young to my eyes), but she must be at least twenty years my junior.

Reading glasses aside, she no doubt has a keen eye and a sharp mind. So keen an eye and sharp a mind that I do find myself wondering by Maevarus insisted she be the one to work on my little semester project instead of one of her graduate students. Or even a particularly precocious undergraduate. In short, she’s overqualified for the work I have her doing. By quite a degree. Regardless, I do so look forward to working with her further. Alas, I must go as it Manfred’s dinner time and he, sharp creature, seems to have begun to tell the time by the passing of the sun and shadows like civilizations of old.

- E.V.

Chapter Text

"I don't think I'll ever be able to have sex again." It hangs in the air inside the circle of chairs. Said apropos of literally nothing.

Rook looks up so quickly she feels a twinge in her neck. She didn't realize she wasn't looking at the speaker, didn't clock herself zoning out into the mild air. But now she is hyper focused. And the rest of the group seems to be too. Because no one's said it yet. Some people have danced around it, but no one has said it outright. Not everyone had this happen to them. She knows that. Taash is here because she got mugged, brutal horrible, left her right ear all kinds of fucked up, the tip of it knifed right off. It's not a big deal she said when the organizer finally goaded her to speak, but as she said that her nose twitched, the large muscles in her arms tensing as if primed for a fight. The woman, who hasn't spoken before, is looking around at the group as if for reassurance but everyone seems somehow unable to respond to her. "You know?" She says again, voice a little pleading. "Can any of you imagine ever letting someone touch you like that again?" The facilitator starts to say something, but Rook's already stood up. "I have to go to the bathroom," she says under her breath, not looking back as she heads from the room toward the narrow hallway in the church's basement where they hold these meetings.

In another life, one where that August evening ended with Rook back in her apartment, door locked, dead to the world in her bed, and very much alone - she would have tsked at the person she is now, sitting on the bathroom counter, legs dangling, head back to try and get more air into her lungs. In another life, she would have told herself to get a grip. It happened months ago. It's not happening now. It's over. Move on. Rook reaches over and turns the sink faucet on. Her mom used to do this for her when she was a kid. She had this funny anxiety about the bathroom, would clench up and cry and panic. And her mom would sit next to her and run the sink. It calms her down. It also makes her feel like she has to pee.

 Rook shuts the water off and slips down off the counter. She pees in the stall further from the door and when she's done she just stays there, elbows on her thighs, underwear down by her ankles. She looks a them, simple, white. She has other, better underwear but they've sat unused in her top dresser drawer since that night. On the way home from the hospital, she bought a package ofd oversized fruit of the loom underwear cut so high they reach her navel. They're mostly white with a few other colors Rook's never seen before thrown in - brownish blue and sickly tan. Ugly colors that make her feel somehow safe. Everything about them makes her feel safe. the way they hang off her body a little, touch almost nothing., look sexless, like the very act of wearing them might ward of any kind of attention. Not that she'd know. She didn't know about him, or the way he was looking at her. Rook wipes again for good measure, but still doesn't get up. She's numb between her legs. Not really, not physically, though maybe she'd like to be, but its as if her brain has erased that spot on its internal map of itself. A black hole, barbie smooth. She hasn't thought about sex, not in the way she used to, in a long time. And maybe that's why she left to go to the bathroom. Introducing the idea that she'd ever have it again. That it would ever be an option. She’s been reading around sex, thinking around it. It’s erasure a project unto itself. Losing whole afternoons in the archives to reading substacks about celibacy, up too early after fitful sleep scrolling through the wikipedia page on anchoresses, going deeper and deeper until she'd wound her way around to female saints being burned alive. She hasn't been thinking about sex in a real way, a normal way, and she thinks that is definitely why she left. She didn't want to hear anyone acknowledge - not the woman, not the facilitator, not anybody else - that people might fuck again after they'd been raped. That she might want that, might be expected to do that. Rook stands and pulls her granny panties back up with her jeans.

She looks at her pupils in the mirror while she washes her hands. Big, blown out. Varric told her it was the body's response to stress. It's to let more light in, make vision more precise so that our prehistoric ancestors could make fast decisions about predators to avoid becoming prey. They're also supposed to do that when you're in love, Rook thinks, though she's not sure where she heard that from. Right now, it's just making the flourescent light above the sink harder to harder to deal with. She scrubs at her knuckles and it makes her think about Professor Volkarin. It's a shock that he should bubble up so suddenly. His long fingers, neatly trimmed nails. The way he'd folded them so gently one over the other on the table at the cafe. How she couldn't stop looking at them and also at the gentle light in his eyes. Gentle this, gentle that. If anything erotic has entered her mind since august, it's been the thought of a soft touch. Rook scrapes her hair back forcefully from her face, looks at herself and says "get a fucking grip" so loud that it has a faint echo.

By the time Rook sits back down in the circle, the subject's changed. The woman who asked about sex seems to have settled down, looking almost contented and Rook wonders what the facilitator said to make her look that way. She doesn't know how long she was gone, wasn't keeping track, and lately time seems to be moving at a new and unnatural clip. Sometimes an hour is a whole day and sometimes days pass in what feels like a single moment, lost in thought. Rook slips her sneakers off and crosses her legs onto the chair. She's wearing those woolen socks that Neve got her from the Christmas market. They're thick and a little scratchy, but they're so nicethat the heat they give off warms her fingers when she wraps them around her feet. Rook settles back into her chair, letting whatever the facilitator is saying wash over her into ambient nothingness, and then she sees Taash. She's always been too big for these chairs - too tall and too muscular - so she sits with her legs straight out, taking up so much space not just with her physical body but her energy too. Arms always crossed, nose ring swinging like a bull’s every time she sighs or groans, which, when the facilitator is speaking, is a lot. But now, today, she is staring at Rook with a sort of intensity that makes her flinch. Taash's eyes are completely unreadable. Rook cannot tell if the look she is giving her is unbridled fury or longing or something else entirely. The facilitator claps her hands with a smile and says “Great job every body and Rook stands, heading for the snack table. She can feel Taash's gaze still on her back.

"I run a boxing gym on the east side of town." Taash has sidled up beside Rook, leaning against the flimsy snack table, looking out at the empty circle of chairs.

Rook swallows her bite. She took a brownie this time. thick and cakey with a glossy frosting and colorful flecks of sprinkles. They're in a disposable aluminum container this week, not the glass they'd been in last week, and the dark haired woman Rook thinks made them is already long gone. "You own a gym?"

Taash scrunches up her nose, still not looking at Rook. "Okay, my friend does, but I work there. Teach lessons."

Rook takes another bite and considers her styrofoam cup of coffee. When she leaves the house, she subsists almost entirely on sugar and caffeine. It makes her feel a little high , a little out of her own body. But what Taash said has her hard back in her own body. She lets the sugar and chocolate linger on her tongue. "For like..." Taash shrugs, looking away. "Self defense."

Rook swallows. Of course it had been obvious. Of course it had. The moment that woman said sex Rook was on her feet, fleeing. “It's good for like," she shrugs again, still looking at the middle distance away from Rook, "dealing with your fucked up emotions."

Rook sets her plate down on the table and clears her throat. "Thanks, but...I don't think I can punch this one out."

"'Kay," Taash shrugs again. "Whatever works for you, I guess."

Chapter Text

Lottie used to do this a lot. Work late. Wait until all but the most studious of the students had headed back to their dorms and apartments. Until the sun sank over the campus rooftops and the streetlights blinked on all at once. The quiet is nice. The quiet has always been nice. Lottie is the youngest of five kids. Quiet, stoic Swedish stock with a Catholic flair for numerology. She doesn't like to think it formed her in any way, stubbornly resistant to the idea that bunking with three other kids in one room did anything formative to her, but it has of course. It's why she picked the apartment she did (facing back toward the courtyard and away from the street), why she used to book those long, isolated trips. It's nice to be kneeling here in between the heavy stacks, hemmed in by heavy, old brick, listening to the sound of her own thoughts. Here, in the dark and in the quiet, the library seems to settle into itself, exhale deeply. Lottie feels honored to be privy to it, the library letting its guard down.

Lottie came here after the library closed, let herself in with her key, nodding quietly to the overnight security guard who always dozes a little near the front door where the heat blows dry and too hot, to come and set up the hold shelves for Emmrich's spring classes and to set up his own shelf for the research. Rote work. There is so much pleasure now in rote work. Especially his rote work, which she can at least admit to herself now. Had a real get a grip moment that afternoon in the bathroom at Varric's office. She'd brought up the woman in group, what she said, about fucking, which is how she said it fucking. A total lack of intimacy to the word. Fucking is a word you can spit. And she really did spit it at him, almost vitriolic with the way it came out. He'd raised an eyebrow and asked, in that barstool easy way he always speaks, why don't we examine that? To which she replied with a stuff and suspiciously quick no and that had been the end of that. We'll put a pin in it. Lottie snorts, remembering, as she pulls a book from a low shelf. The Path of Shadows: Chthonic Gods, Oneiromancy, Necromancy in Ancient Greece by Gwendolyn Taunton. Lottie never really looked at what Emmrich does. Maybe she ought to, she thinks, examining the book befor adding it to her stack. She takes a minute to stretch her arms out over her head, to roll her neck. It's so quiet. So beautifully still and quiet. The metal shelves stand sentry, and the chill of the tile floor seeps through her jeans to her shins. Lottie closes her eyes. She breathes in, she breathes out. She runs her fingers in soft circles on the denim of her jeans, she thinks about Emmrich's neat nails and long fingers. She tells herself to get a fucking grip and adds the neighboring title to her cart already piled high with books for Emmrich. She runs a finger down their fabric spines. She tells herself again to get a fucking grip.

The smell of the coffee rouses him from his half-sleep, arms crossed, legs stretched out long in his chair. The security guard smiles, cheeks flushed in a way that remind Lottie of a mall Santa Claus. “Thanks, Lot,” he says, voice drowsy. It’s peaceful, the sound of it, almost cozy.

She hands him the little Styrofoam cup. “Vending machine was out of everything but hazelnut.” He makes a teasing face of disgust and takes the cup. “I know, I know.” Lottie takes a sip from her own cup. Vaguely sugary, metallic in that artificial sort of way. It’ll keep her awake, though, and lately the more exhausted she is, the more dreamless her sleep.

“Finished up for the night?”

“I am,” Lottie shoulders on her coat and winds her scarf around her face. “Finally.”

“Late night for you.” She nods, digging for her phone in her pocket. An email from Emmrich. Lottie sent him an email just ten minutes before, as she uncreased her dollars for the vending machine, to tell him that his lists were in order. Delightful, he replies now, and Lottie can’t help but smile at that, I see you’re a fellow night owl. She smiles wider, shouldering her way through the library’s front doors and into the night, thumbs hovering, trying to think of something to write back. Lottie feels warm despite the cold and, more than that, she feels…like herself. Even-tempered. Steady. Her brain feels very, very quiet. Zeroed in. Her chest tightens, reminded of…something. A taut sort of sensation crawling its way to her, a gentle memory warping into a new and strange shape. She swallows loudly and the night comes rushing in all at once on the cold wind and she finds herself standing at the bus stop, alone, bathed in the light of a long streetlamp, the world around her suddenly too big for her to take in, beyond her ability to catalogue. It catches in her throat, the darkness and the feeling it brings with it. Dizzy, a vertigo that slices right through the night. Fear. Terror. Not that she’s alone, but that she might not be, and that very specific ghost walks like fingers up her spine. Lottie glances back at the library. She can only see the security guard’s silhouette, but she can tell by the way he's slumped that he’s dozed back off. And what would he do anyway? Lottie adjusts her scarf; she grinds her teeth. The first time she had a panic attack, three days after it happened, she thought was having a seizure, or some kind of allergic reaction. Her hands went numb, her cheeks too, buzzing, and she’d felt so stiff. Like her arms and legs were dead and wooden and totally beyond her control. It’s because you stopped breathing, Varric told her during one of their first sessions, you stopped breathing, and your body was reacting to it. He’d shown her a breathing exercise that she found somehow patronizing then and, at the bus stop, finds totally impossible now. She’s clenched so tightly – stomach, chest, fists – but she can’t let go of herself, knows somehow in her own body that if she lets go, she will fall apart, never to put herself back together again. “Get a grip,” she says to her reflection in the route map’s glass, “Jesus Christ! Just get a fucking grip already!” Her voice doesn’t echo like it should, seems swallowed up by the darkness of the night. She doesn’t know when the next bus is coming and just the idea of moving, of checking, fills her with a new and sharp spike of terror. “This is pathetic,” she says to herself, “nothing is happening! Nothing is fucking happening to you!” But the panic doesn’t subside, it eats her indignation and rage like kindling. Her hands are completely numb now, hands tight in fists she has to pry open. She fumbles in the pockets of her coat for her phone, cursing at herself. “Coward,” she says and then she says it again and again until it does echo, fighting back the night. She should just wait for the bus. It'll come eventually. Nothing is happening, nothing is happening. She drops her phone in the snow, has to bend down to get it and her movements feel glacial, like she’s just barely wrested back control of her body. Her fingers are so stiff. “Get a grip,” she says, a final admonishment as she dials the number.

“I’m glad you called me,” Neve says, taking a long drag from the joint she just rolled. Neat and perfect like the pleats in her dress pants. She exhales and brushes the smoke with her hand toward the window beside the tub. It’s cracked just a little, letting in a wintry chill. They’re in the bath. Well, Lottie’s in the bath. Neve’s sitting on the floor beside it, her suit jacket folded neatly on the toilet, dress shirt a little translucent in places from drawing the bath. Lottie only vaguely remembers her doing that. A stiff sort of blur that has only just begun to recede.

Neve passes the joint to Lottie who takes a shallow hit before passing it back. She’s cold, even in the warm water. That sort of clammy, airy feeling she gets when her panic attack has started to loosen its grip. Her fingers are still trembling. It’s a high almost, the way it pushes her to a sharp edge only to let her back down. Or it would be a high, maybe, if she had any control over it. “Don’t you get drug tested at your job?”

Neve snorts, passing the joint back over the lip of the tub. “I’m a public defender, Lot. They can’t afford to get rid of me.” Lottie smiles around the joint and takes a long inhale. It’ll help her sleep, she thinks. Hopes. Lottie stares at the tile wall at the end of her tub arms crossed around her knees. She’s naked save for her underwear. She couldn’t take it off before she got in. It’s soaked now, see-through, a dark patch of pubic hair showing through the thin fabric. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” Lottie says, “no, I don’t.” Neve just shrugs, turning to lean her back up against the lip of the tub, gazing at the ceiling. The bathroom has a skylight, one of the many things that keeps Lottie here even though the building is old and the rickey landlord even older. It’s really just a panel of glass cut out of the wood paneling, but it keeps the plants Lottie has around the tub and counter ravenously growing and, in the summertime, she’d sometimes sit in the bath for hours, letting the sun warm her back. Most of it has been covered in snow for a month, but tonight there’s a little corner clear and open to the sky. Lottie thinks she can see stars. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“Nothing,” Neve says. Her eyes are still on the patch of open sky, but she reaches over her shoulder to take Lottie’s hand. “Nothing in the world is wrong with you.” A beat of lapping silence. “Be brave.” Neve squeezes Lottie’s hand. “I’ll be brave with you.”

Chapter Text

“You have to pay attention,” Taash says, and Lottie thinks this is the most focused she’s ever seen her, here between the punching bags, dukes up, stance wide. “That’s the most important thing.” Lottie doesn’t mirror her yet, stands in her leggings and big, old t-shirt in the mostly empty gym, the sun sinking down below the horizon at her back. “That’s why it works. Don’t be thinking about whatever bullshit, okay? Just think about the target in front of you. Narrow in.”

Lottie straightens up. The gym is a big wall of windows in an out of the way strip mall that sits between a highway on-ramp and an empty dirty lot. There’s a pizza place, a massage parlor, a laundromat with a broken window that looks mostly abandoned. A Navarran market. This gym. “I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

Lottie lands the first hit to say ~fuck you~. “Badly.” And Taash laughs. She took the brunt of it on her forearm. Did not flinch. Even through the boxing glove, Lottie can feel how solid Taash is. Like stone, marble, much more than like a human arm. Taash hasn’t said a word in their circle of chairs, so Lottie has no idea what happened to her that might land her in a group like that. It’s hard to imagine ~anything~ happening to her. If Lottie was this big, this hard, she wouldn’t be here right now. She’d be back at work.

“Save it for the bag,” Taash says with what could be a laugh or could be a grunt. “Right now,” Taash whirls on her, has one arm over Lottie’s shoulders, the other across her middle, “you need to learn what the fuck you’re supposed to be doing.”

There’s a lot more to it than Lottie thought. Not that she thought about kickboxing much before this moment. But she didn’t expect it to be like a dance. For there to be footwork, named moves, a pattern, a rhythm. She falls into it easier than she expects to. Librarians like patterns. This just feels like another one. A dewey decimal system with an uppercut between each call number.

“You’re good at this,” Taash says. She hasn’t even broken a sweat, hasn’t really even moved her feet as Lottie stands panting in front of her, hot even as snow has begun to fall outside, and the glass front does little to keep the outside air where it belongs. “But you need to hit me harder.”

Lottie laughs. “Are you kidding me? I’m hitting you as hard as I can.”

“No,” Taash says, throwing a punch that Lottie barely dodges, “you’re not.” Lottie just looks at her, sweat dripping down the sides of her face.  She’s bent over, hands gripping her thighs. “You’re scared to hurt me.”

Lottie scoffs. “Of course I’m scared to hurt you.”

“Well, you can’t.” Lottie laughs. “No, I mean it. You really can’t.” Lottie straightens, brushing some of her sweat soaked hair off her face. “Like come on, scrawny, show me how hard you can actually hit.”

Lottie stands even straighter now, blinks as if broken out of a trance. Taash doesn’t move, still primed to hit, or be hit. “This is ridiculous. I’m not going to hit you harder than I’ve already hit you.”

“Pretend I’m him.” Lottie freezes. “Or her. Or it. Whatever the fuck put you in that circle of crybabies every Wednesday night.” Lottie opens her mouth, closes it. Every time she imagines him now, his face is a whirled blur, smeared like paint. She can smell him better than she can see him. Every so often will catch a strong whiff of his sauvage cologne and the tide detergent that clung to his clothes. She can almost smell it now. She can smell it now. Like a phantom hovering over Taash. It was such a strange feeling when she opened the door that night and found him standing there. Confused at first, a little surprised. It took her a moment to remember who he was. She never saw coworkers outside of work and her brain spun a little bit to come up with an explanation for why he would be there at her doorstep in the middle of the night. She can smell his cologne. His hands were freezing even in the heat of summer.

Lottie goes, without even realizing it, right for Taash’s face. She blocks her, quick and sharp in every movement but when Lottie’s fist connects with Taash’s forearm she can feel how hard it hit. Taash has to take a step back, reposition herself. Lottie’s fingers ache even through the glove, pain shooting up her wrist, but it feels good. Lottie takes a step back, coming back to herself, but before she can apologize, Taash is shaking her by her shoulders, a smile she’s never seen on her face. “Yes! Yes! Goddamn!.”

They’ve been sitting in silence for a while before Taash says, “must have been pretty fucked up, huh?” Lottie only half shrugs. Her brain is enormously quiet, mouth still, right hand aching. “Yeah,” Taash says as if Lottie’s replied. “I get it.”

Lottie looks up at her. They’re in a back room in the gym sitting on two cardboard boxes next to an old microwave and a whiteboard calendar. Taash held a plastic baggie of ice against Lottie’s knuckles until it stung her skin. Now she’s wrapping them in athletic tape with the practiced ease of a surgeon. “Circle of crybabies huh?”

Taash tsks, doesn’t make eye contact. “Not you. I’ve never seen you cry in there.”

The heat blows dry above them from a vent near the ceiling, hot air and dust. “I’ve never seen you cry either.”

Chapter Text

It's the word that brings Lottie back to the conversation. She'd been dozing with her eyes open, watching a fixed point at the center of the circle of chairs. But when the woman says bondage she blinks herself back, unsure if she actually heard it right until she looks around the group and sees a smattering of confusion, some surprise. The woman, the same one who just a few weeks ago said she'd never fuck again, seems totally unaware of the reaction she's caused. Lottie straightens up in her chair, glances around again before returning to the woman's face. From her peripheries, she can see the facilitator squirming. "I saw it on reddit," the woman says, then laughs a short, insecure sort of laugh, "I know that sounds silly, but I've been so desperate, you know?" Some of the women in the circle nod but none of them look particularly sure about what they're nodding for. "I saw something about reclaiming your sexuality through violence." She's talking with her hands now, looking around at each face as if she's just now realized that maybe she's said something controversial. "It was like..." she trails off then seems to shore up her shoulders. "If you've had something violent happen to you, you can reenact it with someone you trust. You can take control of it again." Lottie feels nothing, thinks nothing, but her heart pounds loudly in the space under her jaw. "It's a way to find yourself sexually again!'

The facilitator finds her voice again, crosses and uncrosses her legs. "I think that’s very interesting Eleanor, but we all have to remember that while the internet can be a useful tool we need to be cautious when we-" Lottie tunes out, annoyed but not sure why. The woman looks reproached, but Lottie wishes she'd say a little more. Her heart is still pounding. She flexes her bruised knuckles, and the pain is a rush, a feeling of strange power. Lottie glances over at Taash who clearly hasn't been paying attention at all, arms crossed, legs crossed long in front of her. She’s scowling harder than usual, eyes soft and gone, directed blindly toward the door.

Neve likes this place because it's in midtown (she can't resist midtown) but they keep it so dark that she has plausible deniability to pretend she doesn't see any of her coworkers at the prosecutors' office when they inevitably come through the door. Lottie like this place because she has a voracious appetite for raw fish and Japanese side dishes in their little ceramic bowls and because the orange and red lightning make her feel like she’s floating in a paper lantern. They come here a lot. Mostly together.

"You look well," Neve says in between bites of salmon nigiri, washing it back with a swig of sake.

"Do I?" Lottie takes her own swig of sake. It goes down cold, the alcoholic burn softened by a kick of green melon. A summery sort of flavor comfortably at odds with the snow falling quietly outside.

"Aside from that," Neve says, nodding at Lottie's knuckles, The bruises, especially on her right hand, have darkened, blooming down her fingers to the top of her hand. The way Neve knee-jerked when she first saw the bruises brought Lottie way and darkly back to that summer morning at the hospital. But it's all a wash now. A more distant memory. Things slide off her back easier now. For better or worse, it all goes in the pit.

Lottie takes a few bites of stewed pumpkin. "I'm fine," she says, and Lottie knows just by the way her mouth thins that Neve does not believe her but, unlike Harding, she's not going to say a thing about it. Which Lottie appreciates. When Neve asked her what had her so flushed when she met her outside group therapy, Lottie’d  been able to chalk it up as from the cold, but she is burning. What the woman said had all but settled by the time the circle broke but when Lottie walked out into the chilly, fading light of evening, it returned loud and hard. And now, sitting in the moody light of Neve's favorite sushi place, she is inflamed by the thought.  Violence for violence. A cleansing fire. 

And she's still thinking about it, what the woman said and, more importantly, why the fuck she can’t let him go - Neve consumed in work emails and a firecracker roll – a when she sees him. At first, Lottie feels a sharp spike of humiliation, like she's conjured him up. She hadn’t thought of him necessarily as all of this was banging around in her mind on the walk from the group to the restaurant, but she hadn’t…not. Humiliating for real. Not a violent bone in his body, she doesn't think, not a cleansing fire within a fifty mile radius but maybe that's why she thought of him. Abstractly, of course. His fingers, the lines alongside his eyes, the wry curve of his mouth. And so, it's a shock, really, when Emmrich comes up to the table and says hello. She had not, in fact, conjured him, he'd simply arrived, in a sharp pair of slacks and a warm, elegant sweater over his button-down. In the deep, orange light of the restaurant, he glitters. She hadn't noticed before just how swathed in gold he is - little gold hoops along the shell of one ear, all his rings, thin ropes of gold around his neck, his wrists. "Goodness, Lottie!" He says, smiling broadly. And what a smile it is. So disarming. Glittering like his gold.

For a moment, Lottie finds herself at a loss for words. She'd been at sea, tossing in her thoughts, tinged with darkness and vaguely of him. The fine, bookish smell of his office and the amber of his cologne. Lottie's only felt this way once in her life, when he left that summer night, and she shut the door behind him and her world tipped 45 degrees at an angle and she felt like she was drowning in her own thoughts. But this isn't like that, not really. In intensity, yes,  but not in flavor. And Neve, in her quiet clairvoyance, must sense it, must be able to read the most minute movements of Lottie's face because she puts her phone down and stands, extending her hand. "You must be Professor Emmrich Volkarin."

“Caught and cornered,” he says with a chuckle. “Are you a friend of Lottie’s?”

“Neve,” she says, shaking his hand.

“Wonderful to meet you,” he turns to Lottie, “and so wonderful to run into you.”

Just the sound of Neve's voice brings Lottie back to herself. Just like that. A snap of fingers. That wave gone, she returns to the frozen pool inside herself and stands, smiling. "What are the odds?" He takes both of Lottie's hands in his and it's funny how he can be so effusive and yet so professional. Not a hair out of place, not any strangeness.

"Not very good, I'd say, but I'm glad they’re in our favor." He glances over at Neve, still smiling, "unfortunately, I'm expected to show face at the cocktail lounge down the street," he winks knowingly at both of him. "We're wining and dining a new hire in the department. A Byzantinist. Very interesting woman. So I would love to sit with the two of you for a chat and another glass of sake, but we’ll have to put a pin in it." And then he lets Lottie's hands go. And inside herself she reaches for him, that dreamy feeling again, but outside she smiles and tells him to have a good night and does not look over at Neve who is most certainly giving her a sly sort of look. Not knowing that this is different than it looks. Lottie tells herself that. This isn’t what it looks like. She wants to reach for his hands again.

After dinner, on the uber ride home, Lottie googles BDSM in the backseat. Angled away from Neve, back to the window, she feels like an embarrassed teenager. Like when she typed sex into the search bar on her parents’ old clunker, sitting in the living room, waiting for the dialup to boot up, crossing her legs when the image finally loaded - a man on top of a woman, her legs in the air, long Lucite heels. "You know," Lottie says, legs pulled up on the seat under her, "Varric told me that some people become hypersexual." The city whizzes by outside the car, the lights a long line of fluorescent color. She scrolls down a wall of black leather and legs spread with metal.

Neve shifts. "Oh yeah?" Silence. Lottie clicks back to web. Pornhub, reddit, a few forums. A medium article called A Dom’s responsibilities to their sub. "He's more handsome in person." More silence. "Very gentlemanly. Gentle, you can tell." Lottie puts her phone in her lap. She closes her eyes, lays back against the window, the chill from the glass spreading across the back of her head. The driver has talk radio on, but so low it’s just a faint whisper. "You like him."

The pool of ice inside of her ripples. "Who knows what I like anymore."

Chapter Text

Back with Neve. Back eating. This time at her house. This time a bowl of warm olives flecked with orange rind. This time with company. An old scene playing out in a new form. One of her parties that’s not a dinner party but still has the best food in town. Neve’s invited some of her coworkers this time (or they’ve just shown up). An odd thing that Lottie intends to ask her about once everyone else has left. It’s a swirl of people she knows and sort of knows in the lantern glow of Neve’s winter apartment. A scene repeated year after year after year. Lottie’s never been more different. She feels, sometimes, like she’s shed an old skin, a protective layer, a better self.

“Do you think Harding’s okay?” Neve asks, shaking another round of martinis over her sink.

Lottie drains the last of her first and shrugs, secretly pleased that Neve is fretting over someone that isn’t her for once. “Has something happened?”

Neve pours the drinks messily over the top of a tray of coup glasses. The living room is bustling, clanking glasses and ambient chatter. “Well, she’s not here.”

Lottie snorts. “Harding never comes to these.”

“Right,” Neve turns toward Lottie. “So just fyi,” Neve says, slowing her saunter, dropping a drink down on the kitchen table beside Lottie, “I didn’t invite him but-“

“I saw him,” Lottie says, plopping a warm olive into her mouth, frowning that the Harding question was just a segue back to her. “And you don’t have to worry about it.” She takes the drink Neve left for her and starts to slowly follow Neve back into the living room, fuller now with people than it had been when they first headed to the kitchen. “We’re on good terms. Great terms even.” She takes a long sip, regarding Neve from over the lip of the glass. “Did you forget that I was the one who ended things with him?”

“I did not,” Neve says. They’ve moved to the far end of the room where an old bay window looks out at the street below. Neve never really talks to people at her parties. They work like terrariums: Neve creates the conditions and then leaves it be, lets it thrive. “I just wasn’t sure…” She trails off, glancing over Lottie’s shoulder. Lottie doesn’t have to look to know that Neve’s looking at her ex. The most recent one even though it really wasn’t that recent at all. “What he…knew.” Lottie swallows, takes another long drink. “Sorry.” Lottie rolls her eyes, playing unaffected, but her guts twinge. What does anyone know? When people look at her, the ones she knows and the ones she doesn’t, what do they see? Lottie avoids her reflection in the window and takes another long drink.

The night is quiet when Lottie leaves, early, even though it’s well into the night. The sound of the party muted abruptly by the close of Neve’s front door and as Lottie wanders down the stairwell and out onto the city street, the quiet remains. As if the city itself is sleeping. Lottie likes that even if maybe she shouldn’t (there is safety in numbers, in the crowd). Likes the way the snow falls silently against the black backdrop of the sky, the way cars crawl so quietly down the street. For a moment, it’s easy for Lottie to imagine herself in the passenger’s seat of one of them, drifting off to sleep as the driver shepherds her safely home. In the fantasy, she doesn’t turn to look at the driver, but she doesn’t need to. It’s him. Emmrich. In the fantasy, she can smell that bookish maturity, his warm, amber cologne; his gold glints in her periphery, lit by the passing streetlights. When’s the last time she felt like that? Dozing while someone else took the wheel. Not since she was a child. The last time someone took the wheel they yanked it out of her hands. That shakes the fantasy from her head, that memory, hands pressed hard to her mouth, a front tooth chipped, one she’d had fixed right away so she didn’t have to look at it every time she brushed her teeth. Lottie blinks herself back to the night. She’s walked quite aways on autopilot, along the outside of a park where the streetlamps bob through the trees like winter fireflies and the snow falls lightly on dark pine boughs. Lottie glances around, heart quick just under her jaw. She’s been asleep in the passenger’s seat with no one at the wheel. But her feet have taken her where she wanted to go – the station that’ll take her home is just a few blocks away, bathed in fluorescence – and no one’s really around, bad or good. Lottie brushes her hair from her face. She’s clammy, hot, even in the dead of this winter night. Shivering like she’s sick.

Lottie takes the steps slowly up to the station, careful to avoid a few thick patches of ice. She checks her phone once she reaches the platform. A text from Neve: please text me when you make it home. And one from Taash: im crashing out. Lottie frowns, opens the browser to google “crashing out” then frowns even harder. She texts back three question marks and an exclamation point. Taash doesn’t immediately reply. The station is quiet, bright, heat blowing dry from the electric heaters. Her train, going east, is ten minutes out. Taash texts back: tell you at the gym. Lottie’s fingers hover over the screen, but before she can think out a reply, Emmrich emails. Her cheeks heat. First with excitement, then humiliation. She shouldn’t react to him at all. He’s asking a simple question, easily answered. And she answers it easily, about to tuck her phone away, when he emails back. A fellow night owl, the preview says, and she smiles. She can’t not smile even here in the cold dead of night, even with that film of strangeness from the encounter with her ex still clinging to her. He makes her smile. A dangerous, near frightening realization. Lottie opens the email. If you’re out and about perhaps you’d like to join me for a late-night bite to eat. She goes cold. Her body a core of icy water. Her first urge is to put her phone away, no, worse, to throw it. Right onto the tracks, watch it smash. To run from it, out into the night, arms spread like wings. She wishes she had been brave enough to go on her trip, to head off into the mountains and bury herself in the snow. It’s so cold now. In the fantasy, in the passenger’s seat of the car, she’d been so warm. The cold comes in all at once. The email is cordial, friendly, easy to decline, probably on purpose. But her body doesn’t discriminate. Not anymore. Her body is a prey animal primed to bolt. Her body wants to go home. Her brain…doesn’t know. Emmrich, she thinks, is not a threat. She can feel it in her cold, unsteady core. The safeness of him. The gentle way he pages through books. The soft lines of his crow’s feet when he smiles. She wants to go home, to crawl under her covers, the dining room chair pressed up against her front door. A barricade. She wants to sit across a table from Emmrich. She’s hungry, she’s touch-starved, she’s cold. Neve tells her to be brave, steam rising from the tub, her voice on the shell of her ear. Be brave. Her train comes rushing into the station. Lottie lets it pass. Sure, she types, where should I meet you?

Chapter Text

Lottie does a double-take once she's outside the building, checks the address he gave her. She took the train west, way out of the way (even though she, for some reason she still can't totally parse, assured Emmrich that she was already in the neighborhood more or less), and now she's out here, in a part of town she's never been in before. Which she expected, but what she didn't expect was the neighborhood to be…so run down. She expected him to ask her to meet just a few stops more west where the streets are wide and tree-lined and the old, stately homes are full of professors and their families. But this is a little south of that, a strip of old, brutalist apartments that look like were left long behind in the eighties. And the address he gave her? A diner. And not one of those new american places that have been popping up all over near campus. It's an honest to god railcar greasy spoon with a mostly empty parking lot lit only by the highway overpass's big, white light. Lottie checks the address again. This is the place and as she steps inside, bell dinging loudly over her head, she hits a wall of warmth. It smells like brewing coffee and grease and pie crust and that sweet, sweet scent of cherry pie filling from a can. Inside, the old lighst are golden and the fine layer of dust on the revolving glass pie case is somehow comforting. Deeply familiar even though she can't remember that last time she was in a place like this, or if she ever was. A radio plays quietly from the kitchen and Lottie can hear a man's muffled called from the inlayed window

"Don't worry, Vorgoth," Emmrich calls from where he's parked himself in the far corner at a table flanked by windows. "It's only a friend of mine." The man doesn't respond, but the radio gets louder and Lottie hears the click of a gas stove. "Lottie!" Emmrich smiles wide. He claps his hands, gold glittering on his dexterous fingers. She feels wild, mad. "I'm so pleased you were able to join me." And she feels pleased too, in a strange, distant sort of way. It's easy to sit down across from him.

Emmerich looks genuinely abashed when Vorgoth - a grizzled old man with faded tattoos on both of his arms - comes out with two plates of food before they've ordered. "I always get the same thing," Emmrich says with a quiet laugh, "and whenever I bring a friend we just share so I'm sure he thought….I am more than happy to-"

"This is great," Lottie interrupts and she means it. Not just because the pancakes are wide as dinner plates and flecked with blueberries, the hashbrowns glistening with oil and salt, but because it's nice to have someone make a decision for her. Someone who doesn't know about it. How grim, she thinks as she sits down across from him, unwinding her scarf, how sad. "I love blueberry pancakes."

"Do you?" Emmrich's smile widens. He's so well groomed, she thinks wildly, his mustache, his neatly trimmed nails. He's elegant, even now, nearing midnight, here in this greasy spoon. "I find them so delightful," he spreads a thick pad of butter across the pancake he's forked onto his plate. "The ultimate comfort." Lottie doesn't trust the gentle way that makes her feel, what he's said and the soft tenor of his voice. "Here," he says, pushing the plate across the old, blue, chipped linoleum table, "please. Help yourself."

They're on their second round of hot coffee, clock crawling toward one am, when Lottie finally asks him the question she's wanted to since she arrived. "So, do you come here a lot?"

Emmrich laughs. There's a boyish gleam in his eyes as he takes a bite of hashbrowns, drenched in ketchup. "I've been coming here for two decades."

"Really?" Lottie raises an eyebrow, rests her chin on her hands and remembers that, once, she'd been charming. She feels almost that now, an approximation of it at least. Her body feels limber, loose. She forgot it could feel like that, that it could open back up. "No offense," she starts, taking a big bite of pancake. Emmrich was heavy headed with the butter and the syrup. "But this is that last place I expected you to eat."

His chuckle is warm and knowing. It's so easy to imagine him at the head of a lecture hall, or legs crossed at the end of a long library table. Lottie bets his office hours are crowded. His passion is so gentle. She's not sure she's seen that before. A man brimming with knowledge and so eager to lead you by the hand to it. Passionate, gentle. It's been so long since she's traveled down any road even resembling desire, thought about anyone like this. How fucked up and inconvenient that it would be him. Someone in the field, her boss, even if only temporarily. Even if he's invited her out here, just the two of them, in the middle of the night. Lottie takes another bite of pancake, this one crowded with blueberries, and washes it down with a gulp of coffee, taking solace in knowing she's not going to do anything about it, these feelings, not going to act on them. Can't even really go there, maybe ever again. Not with her body, not with her mind. "Well," Emmrich says, steepling his fingers, the look on his face almost sheepish, "it is very cheap." Lottie glances, without thinking, at his jewelry and he chuckles again. "We were all students once, no?" He looks out the window beside the table where the snow has started to accumulate, light and luminescent under the moon and the highway on ramp. A distant, nostalgic sort of look on his face. "Or, in my case, junior faculty." He leans forward conspiratorially. "I always suspected they set the starting salaries to weed out the dispassionate."

Lottie can't help herself. She laughs, almost a giggle. A high and light sound that is so foreign it feels strange in her mouth. And when she's done laughing she looks at him, really looks at him and sees him go steady in her gaze. She has this effect, she knows. Eyes narrow and clear. Disarming, sometimes. Her mother once told her she's had it since birth, came out of the womb watching. Lottie kept her eyes closed that night in August, letting the warm air come in from the open window and skitter across her half-naked body, trying to let that be the only touch she was feeling. She can't imagine sleeping with her windows open now. What kind of woman had she been? A woman with open windows in the middle of the night. An ex once told her you're beautiful and you frighten me in the same sentence as though they ran together, belonged to the same thought. Lottie doesn't know why she's thinking about all of this now when she hasn't been able to for months. The coffee maybe, a real meal. The company? The company. Emmrich doesn't wither beneath her gaze, doesn't try to challenge it either. Seems, instead, to be intrigued by it, his own gaze searching. He looks at her deeply with those pale eyes. Soft. Gentle. She keeps saying that, variations of that word. Like a prayer. Like wishful thinking. There is a darkness inside of her that she hadn't realized was gone until now. It slipped quietly away when she sat down across from him, but it bubbles up now, heavy like drowning from the base of her ribs to the tip of her tongue. She sees his mouth moving, one brow lifts. He's saying her name. One, twice. She blinks herself back. "I'm sorry."

"Oh no, no, no," he says, "no apologies necessary. I was merely asking if you'd like to split a piece of pie with me."

She pauses, feeling unreal, humiliated. Clawing herself clumsily back. Please god. Not here, not now, not with him. "Yes, yeah, that sounds great." His eyes are so soft, concerned. She wants to let him be. Concerned. About her. "I'm sorry," she says again before she can stop herself. "I was just…"

"Thinking?" Emmrich offers.

"Thinking," she agrees, letting her shoulders come down from up around her ears. The sky in her mind starts to clear and the diner comes back into focus.

Emmrich smiles again. A smaller smile. A private smile, just for her. "This," he says, laying his hand so close to hers that she can feel its warmth, "is a safe place for deep thinkers."

They split a slice of cherry pie - filling glistening from a can but a homemade crust with that tender flake, flecked with raw sugar - and Emmrich orders himself a slice of chocolate cream pie to go and by the time the check comes - Emmrich insists on paying a professor's prerogative - Lottie feels soft and quiet, brain no longer buzzing. She wraps her scarf around her neck as she watches Emmrich shoulder on his long, woolen coat. The grey matches the salt in his hair. His scarf looks cashmere, his gloves are a shiny brown leather. How funny, Lottie thinks, to see him here like this. So elegant in the softly falling snow, lit by the harsh neon of the diner's revolving sign. She feels sheltered by him, realizes it all at once and ripples move in the darkness, so heavy with feverish humiliation that she has clench her whole body to fight back. "This was wonderful," she says, like a ward against this growing feeling. "Thank you so much for inviting me out."

Emmrich rubs his hands together as if to warm them and smiles broadly again. So much smiling tonight, Lottie thinks, when was the last time there was this much smiling? "Oh, it was simply my pleasure! What a delightful evening this was."

"Night," Lottie corrects, a little sly, a little more limber.

"Night," he says on a laugh. "And what a chilly winter's night it is. May I drive you home?" The question probably means nothing, but the darkness feeds on it, its ripples widening. Lottie finds herself stiff and cold again, lost out in the night. He pivots without missing a beat. "A cab, then. Allow me to call it for you."

"No," Lottie says before she realizes she's done it. For a moment, she slips back into the evening's fantasy. Just long enough to remember the feeling of his hands on the wheel. Be brave, be brave, be brave. "A ride would be lovely. Thank you."

Chapter Text

Entry 670: December 14th, 2021

All is well in the household. Mannfred continues to test the rules of courteous engagement (honing his claws on the Egyptian cotton couch, pouncing at my ankles from his hiding spots amongst this or that) but he has begun a rather delightful ritual of laying beside me just before the sun rises, back to my chest. The warmth is a delight, as is the knowledge that a little creature who cannot understand my words has chosen to trust my intentions. The orchids are all well despite the gloom of mid-December. Their blooms are timid but resplendent still. I continue my morning runs, now with ten pound weights on my ankles and have noticed a growth in muscle tone in my core and my thighs. I’m sure my primary care physician will be most pleased at my next appointment.

Perhaps I have seemed rather distant in my last few entries. I read back over them, and many read like grocery lists. What I ate or read, how many miles I ran. I have certainly felt distant as I write them. Guilty, perhaps, a little criminal. Much has been on my mind and all of it too jumbled to record here. Though I must endeavor to. In order, perhaps, to understand it.

Three nights ago I had dinner with the young Lottie. Though perhaps dinner is generous as it was in the small hours of the morning, and we merely drank coffee and shared a slice of pie. It was impulsive of me to ask her and perhaps I only did so because I was sure she would refuse me. Not that I wanted her to. It was delightful to see her. I would not have asked her to come if I did hope she would.  

Now, I must be very careful here to not misconstrue myself. I am not desirous of her. I have no romantic or, God forbid, other intentions for her. That would be highly inappropriate, unprofessional, borderline immoral. I simply find her quite interesting. There are so many shades of Lottie, so many layers. She was so stiff when I met her, so deeply focused, but that night I saw a different side to her. A more relaxed side, perhaps even a wry side. I felt, in that moment, such a strong urge (and I find this so odd, so very in need of examination) to protect her. I’ve not felt this in a very long time, but I felt it so intensely as we stood outside the diner (how funny that I am now so old and so established that Lottie could not imagine me there, the location I visited perhaps most of all in my early years as faculty here) the desire to take my coat and shield her from the falling snow. I have no doubt that she is fundamentally not in need of my protection – that stoicism speaks, I am sure, of deep reserves of personal strength – but for  a moment as I drove her home it seemed as though she might be dozing there in my passenger’s seat and it made me feel…I’m not sure how it made me feel. Useful. What a strange thing to say. I’ve never considered myself not to be just that. Never in all my years with all my defects have I thought of that as one. But I felt so profoundly useful in that moment. Can you see now perhaps why I have avoided writing about her? This is all very unlike me and very unprofessional. Perhaps it is the settling of winter upon the world and upon this house that makes me wax so. The promise of Christmas and the drear that follows it. Perhaps I should, as Strife so often tells me, “get out” a little more. Perhaps that would be good for me.

E.V.

Chapter Text

She says it on a punch. One that hits hard, knocks Taash rough on the forearm, who retaliates by knocking Lottie in the jaw and flipping her into a headlock. “What?” She’s not even out of breath.

When Taash releases her, Lottie stumbles back a little on the mat before taking off her gloves, wiping sweat from her brow with her bare fingers. Her skin is burning, heart pounding in her jaw and her temples. Lottie wipes damp hair from where it’s stuck to her burning skin and says again, “I think I want to fuck someone.” She puts her gloves back on. It’s easy to say this to Taash. Easier to say it to Taash than to even admit it to herself, like she can only let it become real behind her gloved fists, up to spar. If she can say it like this, blood pumping, maybe she can exorcise it from her mind. Maybe, now, when she closes her eyes, she won’t see Emmrich’s hands on the steering wheel. Their dexterous length heavy with rings. It’s better than what she saw before, sure, him on top of her, hands over her mouth, pressing down so hard it felt like her teeth would crack with just one errant movement. She doesn’t like them slotted in the same place. That there’s no room now for Emmrich except in the spot he inhabits. She doesn’t like that she’s thinking about fucking at all. Saying it doesn’t exorcise it, just inflames it. Lottie throws a reckless punch at Taash’s face. The kind of punch that’s she’s not supposed to throw when they spar like this. The kind of punch that would normally have Taash flipping her onto the mat.

But instead Taash just volleys up, gloved fists almost lazy. “Whoa.” Outside, snow blows through the dark, each flake a wintry firefly. They swirl clear underl the light of the single streetlamp on the edge of the strip mall’s parking lot. Taash pauses, bounces from one foot to the other. “You got raped, right?”

It’s so nonchalant, asked so casually, that Lottie actually laughs. Straightens up and laughs, gloved hands at her sides. How refreshing it is to be asked like this. No broken eye contact; no soft lilt to the voice. Just a question. “Yeah, I got raped.”

“When?”

“August.” And that’s easy too, for the first time. Just a question and an answer. Just August. No sticky air through the window, no sweat pooling in the dip between her hips, his sweat. Just August.

“It’s a big deal, right?” That question sends a bolt of energy through her, but Taash doesn’t disappoint, doesn’t ask anything about August, about rape. Just asks, “wanting someone after that? To fuck?”

And Lottie’s thinking of Emmrich again. His hands on the steering wheel. The soft lines beside his eyes when he smiles and even when he doesn’t, lit warmly there in the diner, eating a forkful of cherry pie. She wants to fuck him, she thinks, can’t spend precious energy trying to parse what else she might like. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

There it is, the sharp edge of Taash’s nonchalance: the reasonable question. Lottie bounces from one foot to the other, hands up, ready. Before Taash can ask it again, Lottie throws a punch. Her answer.

“That didn’t happen to me,” Taash says from across the locker room, a wall of shower steam between them, “for the record.”

Lottie pauses, bent over, toweling off her wet hair. Taash has her back turned, all the hard muscles in her shoulders tensing, her body hard and unyielding. “What didn’t happen?”

“I didn’t get raped.” Lottie stands all the way up. They’re the only ones in the locker room. Most days, they’re the only ones in the whole gym, but there’s something intimate about this that hadn’t been there before. Taash doesn’t turn her back to Lottie, not before now, doesn’t talk like this. Ever. Not in group, not on the mat, not here. “I got the shit beaten out of me. Two guys. Broke my jaw. Cut off the tip of my right ear.” Lottie swallows. She thinks that Taash wouldn’t mind, maybe would even like, if she asked why? For what?, but she can’t do it. Maybe part of her, a big part of her doesn’t want to know. Maybe she thinks it’ll invite more questions from Taash. About it. Taash turns to look over her shoulder at Lottie. “That’s why I’m in Sad Town, USA with you every week. That’s why I am the way I am.”

 Lottie almost says I’m sorry but she thinks Taash would probably hate that, and Lottie doesn’t have the swagger to say anything irreverent, to be on Taash’s level. But standing here, even so much smaller than Taash, so much weaker, she remembers how much older she is and feels the sudden importance of that. To say something. Something smart or guiding. She comes up mostly empty. “What do you mean the way you are?” Taash says nothing, she’s turned her head back toward the wall, pulling a big t-shirt on. Lottie keeps her eyes on her, feels her way into the legs of her jeans. “Does this have something to do with what you texted me?”

“What?”

“Two nights ago. You texted me. That you were crashing out.” Lottie pulls her sweater on over her head. “Is this what you were talking about?”

“No.”

Taash is very still, and it feels like a standoff now. “You know, we can talk about-“

“Nah,” Taash says, cutting Lottie off. She turns, face blank. “Save that shit for the mat.”

Chapter Text

Lottie is here because when Harding called to invite her to this, she had thing in her voice. The one that Lottie never heard before this past summer. The one that told her that the last time she saw Harding she hadn’t worked hard enough on her I’m fine act. I think it would be good, Harding said over the phone too early in the morning, if you came out with me! It’s friendly, it’s fun. A year ago, Lottie would have laughed and told her, nicely, to fuck off with her weird bar trivia invite. Today, now, Lottie is wedged between Miller and another one of Harding’s forest service coworkers whose name she can’t remember but smells like bar soap and mulch. She’s taking too many sips of beer too fast because it means that she won’t have to make small talk with these people she knows but not well enough. Lottie doesn’t like beer, has never liked beer, but this place – too big to be a bar, too dank to be a restaurant – doesn’t have wine and Lottie can’t drink seltzer anymore.

“Give me your least offensive beer,” she says when she wedges herself back at the bar after finished her first.

The tattooed guy at the taps gives her a long onceover and says, “what? Wheat beer too offensive for you?”

“Maybe just some sparkling water then. Put a lime in it, or something.” Lottie sort of scoffs, sort of laughs, completely wishes that she had just said no to this whole outing. What would Harding have done? Really. Called Neve who would have told her that actually no one likes bar trivia, that it’s just something people do when they can’t figure out how to meet new friends or when their apartments are too small to host anyone. No, Neve wouldn’t have actually said that. Neve only says that to Lottie after a couple glasses of wine when Harding’s blowing up the group chat. Neve probably would have told Harding to leave her alone. Lottie gets a night in or two, alright? She can be by herself. But can she? Lottie thanks the bartender for the drink and turns to get a better look at the place. In the week after it happened, she’d become so frighteningly attuned to her surroundings, so good at quickly going through a roster of faces in a room. It stopped being necessary after he was arrested but the surveying’s stuck. Harding’s back over with her coworkers. Beside them, a table of older men with a zoo of empty glasses. Near the bar, a bachelorette party looking out of its depth. In the corner booth, Emmrich. Lottie stops. She blinks. She looks again. Yeah, it’s Emmrich. In the flesh. Sitting at the bar’s corner booth, hands primly tented in front of him. His beer, dark, looks mostly untouched, and Lottie has a sudden and extreme urge to leave the bar now. It’s an old, almost teenage impulse. He can’t see me here. He cannot see me here. But of course, he does. Of course he sees her. And of course, of course, his face lights up when he does and Lottie is stranded there in the middle of this bar she so badly does not want to be in, clutching this lame drink, thrilled despite herself when he stands to greet her.

“Lottie,” he says, arms wide, smile big. He’s dressed in a warm, cashmere sweater in a color that brings out the salt in his peppery hair. A pair of slacks, dress shoes that clack on the bar’s sticky floor. And he’s halfway to her, when he falters, and she realizes, smiling a little at the realization, that he’s just realized where he is, and looks almost sheepish when he finally makes his way to her. He scratches at his neck and it’s so unlike the man she’s gotten to know whose easy competence has her in such an iron grip. He laughs, glancing around the bar, then back to Lottie. “I’m sure you can imagine that I don’t frequent establishments such as these.”

Lottie smiles, relaxes a little. “Me either.” She nods back behind her toward Harding’s table. “Got dragged out by a friend.”

“Me as well,” he says. Lottie glances over to the booth to see an older man sitting there now, dark hair long down his back in two neat braids. “Perhaps we need to get out more.”

Lottie returns to Emmrich. “I think we get out enough.” And somehow it comes out hot from her mouth. She startles herself, makes half an attempt to gain some composure. She swallows hard. The music is too loud now where before it had only been playing in the background. It smells strongly of liquor even though they don’t serve cocktails. Just beer. Just awful fucking seltzers. “What kind of beer are you drinking?”

 “Oh,” he says, straightening a little, “this is a stout.”

“I don’t like beer,” Lottie says, holding her water glass up by way of explanation.

“Then you certainly won’t like this one. It’s quite intense.”

And she can smell that, the intensity. A coffee, chocolate, musk smell. Liquid so dark in the glass it looks almost thick. “I like intense.” And her voice is as heavy as it is even. She watches his adam’s apple bob as he swallows and feels a funny sense of pride that she’s elicited that from him. Feels something decidedly else when she looks up and sees something wolfish in his eyes. A look that he is quick to school. And that’s when she realizes it, that he wants her. Maybe as badly, as raggedly as she wants him. But that he won’t let himself. That he is using every cell in his body to pull that desire back, to leash it. He keeps a firm hand on his desires, she realizes. And she realizes too, in that moment, as they stand there in the middle of the bar but might as well be in their own private world, that his leash, his firm hand, is perhaps the sexiest thing in the world. The fact that he wants her but won’t take her. Her body pulses. Her brain shivers “It’s good to see you,” she says, trying to diffuse it, this tension pulled suddenly so taut between them, “even in a place like this.”

Emmrich’s smile is friendly, eyes soft and gentle. “Perhaps especially in a place like this.”

She takes a cigarette from Miller and smokes it with shaking hands outside the bar. Lottie hasn’t smoked in years, not since grad school, and she’d be further mortified if anyone caught her doing it. But the bar smelled so strongly of tobacco, and she’d felt so intensely like doing something besides simmering in her booth. They’re winning, she thinks, the trivia team, though she can’t be sure because she hasn’t contributed a single answer. Emmrich is still inside. Across the bar from her. Smiling, furtive glances. So subtle.

When he raped her, she laid for a long time on her bed after. Long after she heard him leave, heard his heavy footsteps down the hall stairs. When she peeled herself up from her summer blanket, one that Harding got her, a quilt she found in a thrift store on a trail crew in upstate New York, it felt like she left her body there. Or a husk of it. She remembers looking back at the bed and feeling so surprised there was nothing there but a bit of blood and a shape in the covers she didn’t recognize. Her nose bled from the force of his hand on her mouth. She’d been halved and how tragic it felt that her body didn’t show that.

Some parts of her went numb, she knows that. The first time she tried to masturbate it had been like touching someone else’s body or the arm of the couch. She’d hurt herself badly at the beginning of fall from sitting on a nail on campus. Urgent care. Tetanus shot. Her thighs were numb. She hadn’t felt it. Didn’t feel it as she healed. Didn’t feel it all the times she went back to her primary care doctor to have them look at the wound. She felt her thighs in Emmrich’s car. The feeling came back to her thighs, and between them, there in his leather seated car, his hand on the gearshift. That night when she almost fell asleep. “Hey,” Lottie blinks at Miller, startled. She’d forgotten they were out here together. Miller juts her chin at the cigarette, “you’re gonna hurt yourself.”

Lottie looks at the cigarette. It’s burned down to her fingers. She hadn’t felt the heat. It hisses when she puts it out in the snow.