Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the final days of summer, Harrow takes a pair of sharp scissors and cuts through the last thread holding her life together.

It’s cool in the studio with that pungent mix of air-conditioned chill and drying sweat that seems to accompany Harrow wherever she goes. Aiglamene’s just unplugged the dusty box fan in the corner of the room and headed upstairs for her usual shower and the mid-afternoon nap she insists she never takes. Coronabeth and Ianthe sauntered out together to meet up with the man who’s either their younger brother or their cousin or their vampiric thrall—Harrow has never cared enough to ask. The teens left tugging each at each other’s hair and poking each other, and so now it’s just Gideon and Harrow. The baseline state of Harrow’s miserable existence.

Gideon is presumably here because she lives here. Harrow refuses to drive, so she has to wait for the damned bus. It was a particularly long practice. Harrow’s ankle has been bothering her since last week, and Gideon made faces every time she stumbled through the landing of her quadruple pirouettes—something she hasn’t done since she was about twelve, but for some reason, something that happened three times today.

Harrow pretends to be very busy looking at her phone. She does not think about winter competitions, and she does not think about Gideon. And she particularly doesn’t think about the two of those things in conjunction.

Gideon nudges her calf with her bare foot. Thankfully, she’s taken off the socks she was wearing, with little weed symbols. Harrow knows for a fact Gideon has never smoked weed, because if she had, she would never have shut up about it.

Besides, she never has time to do anything aside from help Aiglamene here, practice at soccer, and study. And apparently go to the gym with Camilla three times a week. One would think all of these activities would be enough to tire Gideon out, but here she is, like a lost puppy, pissing up Harrow’s leg.

Harrow ignores her.

Gideon moves closer, scooting her whole body over until she’s sitting against the mirrored wall where Harrow is, again, very busy playing solitaire on her phone.

“Evil queen,” says Gideon.

Harrow ignores her.

“My sugarplum fright.”

Harrow ignores her. In her head she’s running through her routine, trying to figure out what the turning point was—why she’s always so tired by the time she gets to the pirouettes, which should be the easy part.

Gideon clamps one big warm hand around Harrow’s ankle and tugs, and Harrow brings the toe of her other pointe shoe down on Gideon’s wrist before she can lose her balance. Gideon swears and lets go, waving her injured hand around ridiculously.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” Harrow informs her. She doesn’t want to talk to Gideon, not today.

“No, insanity is whatever you’ve got going on. What is your problem today, anyway? Did you stab yourself in the eye with your eyeliner? Did the stick reach a new part of your small intestine? Did your uncle disinherit you from the family fortune and are you or are you not planning his murder? Hang on, don’t tell me that.”

Left to her own devices, Gideon can talk for millennia. So that’s why Harrow says, “No, and it’s none of your business what my problems are. I would think you have enough problems of your own. Did that Dolce girl ever respond to your texts?”

Gideon scowls.

“Dulcinea. And yes, she did. But you wouldn’t know anything about that. Seeing as no girl in her right mind would ever start texting you in the first place.”

“Actually, I’m texting Ianthe right now. She says, ‘So you’re coming to the cast party on Saturday, right?’” Harrow types with her finger, narrating for Gideon’s benefit. “Wouldn’t miss it, thank you for the reminder.”

But Gideon throws her head back to look up at Harrow and scoffs.

“As though Ianthe counts. She’s basically a walking bread stick. If she ever spread her legs for you, you wouldn’t even be able to see them individually, they’re so skinny. Her pliés make her look like a stick bug. Besides, I know you’re not going to send that. You? Go to a party? That’s like asking me to skip arm day. Here, give me that.”

Gideon lunges for Harrow’s phone, and Harrow kicks at her again ferociously, but in doing so, she drops the phone. It lands in its toe-shoe proof rubber case on the wooden floor, bouncing a bit. Gideon lunges again, and Harrow dives for Gideon’s arm to prevent her from reaching it. Gideon hasn’t skipped arm day. She shoves Harrow aside and grabs the phone, standing up with it.

Harrow grapples with her, trying to get it free of her iron grip, but Gideon’s somehow managed to turn voice-to-text on.

In a terrible high-pitched imitation of Harrow, she says, “Oh Ianthe, I would love to come to your party. I want to get into your horrible leather pants, and I find the sight of your pasty bread stick body sexy A F. Just kidding! I hate you, die in a ditch.”

Harrow shrieks at Gideon, kneeing her in the stomach with all her might.

“And send!” Gideon says triumphantly. “Here you go.”

Harrow kicks her again for good measure. Gideon doesn’t even flinch. With her phone safely back in her hand, Harrow groans as she looks down at the conversation. Her bubble of text is frighteningly similar to what Gideon said, with only two minor misspellings. Underneath, she can already see a typing bubble.

“Nav!” Harrow finds herself otherwise speechless with rage.

“I actually improved your chances with her there. Trust me, girls like it when you’re a bitch to them. Ianthe’s probably about to cream her pants. Who knows how her twisted mind works? More importantly, who cares? But never say I didn’t do anything for you, Harrow.”

Aggravated beyond belief, Harrow tosses her phone into her dance bag and rounds on Gideon.

“I do not want to—to date Ianthe! I don’t care what she thinks. She’s disgusting.”

“Wow, a topic we agree on! Never thought I’d see the day. So if she didn’t reject you, then what’s going on?”

“Ianthe? Reject me? As if. I know how much experience you have with rejection, but don’t assume it’s so difficult for everyone. What did Coronabeth say to you again—‘you’re cute, don’t take this the wrong way, but—‘”

“Shut up! You were never supposed to hear that in the first place.”

“Well then you shouldn’t have had a private conversation in a public area.”

“Public area? It’s my fucking house! You’re the one sneaking around in my house, listening in on all my conversations for the past ten years because you’re a massive creep who’s obsessed with me!”

“I own this place, and you know it. Technically, Nav, it’s you who are living under my roof.”

“Oh yeah? Well, not in two months I’m not. I’m getting out of here. The acceptance letter just came in today. You can take a look at it yourself, if you haven’t gone through my mail already. Two months from now, you’ll be stuck in this shitty town doing the same production of the Nutcracker for the millionth year in a row and I’ll be kicking ass on a soccer team in Maine, and I’m never going to have to look at your ugly little ferret face ever again. What are your life plans, Harrow? Become a yoga instructor? Get Ianthe to marry you so you can consolidate your wealth? You can lord it over me all you want but you know, deep down, I’m doing something with my life. And you’re trying out for the same company over and over again.”

Harrow is boiling with fury. She is shimmering with it. It starts to crack open her ribcage like the monster in a horror film.

“I could throw you out on the street,” she says. “Don’t you dare even start, Griddle. I could dismantle your life in three phone calls. I could have done it any time—do you think it was coincidence no one ever checked up on your living situation? Looked for your parents? I protected you, I gave you a place to stay, and you owe me, and no matter how far you run, you’ll never stop owing me until the day you die—which I hope to god doesn’t take long.”

But Gideon just smiles, that lopsided smile that always makes Harrow feel like the butt of the joke. Somehow it’s even more irritating than usual. Her chest burns.

“No. You know what I think, Harrow? I think you’re jealous. I think you want all of my attention, forever, and you want me to be your creepy little womanservant and fix the leaks in your shitty studio and play all the shitty roles in your shitty little productions. I think you’re upset because I’m leaving.”

Harrow bites her tongue. She feels a sense of deep calm steal over her. She hadn’t meant to break the news this way, but Gideon’s made it inevitable.

“You are leaving,” she says, “when I say you can leave.”

Gideon laughs in her face. They’re standing chest-to-chest now, everything else forgotten.

“As if you have any power over me. Do your worst, Harrow. Do whatever you like to me. It doesn’t matter, and it never did, you absolute moron.”

Harrow wants to thump her fists against Gideon’s chest—she wants to find the part of her body that’s the softest and most vulnerable and bite down hard. She wants to take Gideon’s heart between her teeth and tear into it. But she just tilts her head up to examine Gideon. From this close, Gideon’s height makes it hard to loom menacingly at her, but Harrow gives it a shot. She stares into Gideon’s eyes without flinching. As always, they’re a warm golden color that reminds her of sunrise in the studio. Even if they are flinty with anger, there’s always a sort of softness to the way she blinks, slowly, pupils blown wide as she stares back.

“Whatever I like?” Harrow says.

“Yeah.” Gideon licks her lower lip. “I dare you to think of one thing you could do to me that would make things any different. Strike me down. I don’t give a fuck.”

“I don’t want to strike you down.”

This surprises Harrow herself, and she intends to follow it up with because I want to watch you trip on your own feet instead, but Gideon beats her to the punch.

“Well that’s stupid, because I want to kick your ass from here to next century.”

“Go on.” Harrow holds her hands up, palms empty in false surrender.

“Don’t say that. I’ll never stop.”

“Do anything you want to me. I’m at your mercy. You said it yourself. You’re leaving. It doesn’t matter.”

“Anything I want?”

Gideon is very close now. Harrow can almost feel the pounding of Gideon’s blood as it rushes through her veins.

“Yes! Did your eardrums fall out along with your last brain cell? Have you lost your sense of—”

And then Gideon wrenches her close by the arms and kisses her. Harrow’s mouth falls open in shock. The warmth of Gideon is hard to process—hips against hips, stomach against stomach, mouth against mouth, god. Her body feels stuck with a million pins, hot and cold at once, and Gideon smells of a long practice, sweat and rosin and the indefinable Gideon smell that’s like stepping into the studio after a long time away. It’s the first time Harrow’s ever really been kissed (that time with Ianthe doesn’t count), and she finds herself frozen to the spot, although somehow her fingers have found Gideon’s biceps and dug in against her own will.

Then something shifts in her gut, and she’s kissing back. Her mouth moves against Gideon’s bottom lip, pressing against the soft hot curve of it more gently than she means to. She means to bite down, to hurt Gideon, but she just pauses there, lips caught on Gideon’s, breath caught in her lungs.

Gideon abruptly breaks away, wearing an expression Harrow’s never seen before. Harrow tries to catch her breath. She’s shaking all over.

“Is that it?” Harrow finds her own voice saying, although it barely sounds like her voice, it's so high pitched and hoarse.

Immediately, Gideon’s face transforms into something more familiar—an expression of blatant indignation.

“Hey! I'm not that bad at this, am I?”

And it’s just like Gideon to make this about her own insecurity rather than the fact that her mouth—Gideon’s whole warm mouth that she usually uses to cajole and berate and whine at Harrow, the same mouth that once told Harrow to go jump off the second-story window of Ninth House Dance and Fitness—yes, that mouth was pressed up against Harrow’s mouth ten seconds ago.

“I mean, is that all you want?” Harrow says, because her brain has completely unraveled.

Gideon takes a deep breath. She looks like she’s gone into shock. Her face is totally, terrifyingly blank.

So Harrow punches her arm, hard. Gideon scowls, then looks down at Harrow’s fist, tiny against the bulk of Gideon’s left bicep. It’s left an angry little red mark, like a bite, and for some reason, looking at it makes Harrow’s stomach flip over. Gideon’s still not speaking.

Harrow huffs impatiently. “Well? What are you doing that for? Are you all right, Griddle?”

“No, I’m not,” Gideon says viciously, before her body moves into action again, hauling Harrow towards her by the hips. Her fingers dig in, and Harrow gives a little humiliating groan before wrapping her arms around Gideon's neck and tilting her face up helplessly, mouth open as it meets Gideon's again.

Gideon kisses her the way she runs a mile, the way Harrow's seen her jump and grab the top of the goal post after a soccer game: with a sharp hungry victory, rough presses of her mouth before she swipes her tongue over Harrow's bottom lip to taste her own vengeance. And it is vengeance. Vengeance for everything Harrow's ever done to her, every time she’s caught and held Gideon like catching a grasshopper by the legs. Harrow feels so caught. All she can do is will her fingers not to tremble against Gideon's jaw, will her knees to hold her up while she opens her mouth and her palms and her whole ugly ravenous soul to whatever Gideon will take from her. Gideon’s mouth takes and takes and takes.

She's never been touched like this, never will again, so she scrapes her nails against the back of Gideon's scalp. She wishes she had claws so she could sink them in. But at that, Gideon actually moans, a sound so unexpected that Harrow's whole brain, not very functional to begin with, completely goes offline and only finishes rebooting after Gideon's physically lifted her from her feet and put her on top of the barre, back to the mirrored wall.

Harrow hisses at the sudden cold of the mirror against the patches of skin uncovered by her leotard, and Gideon pulls back from her mouth to begin working her way down Harrow's throat. Her big warm palms drag down from Harrow’s hips to the tops of her thighs, and she presses her teeth to Harrow’s clavicle. Harrow shivers like she’s dying. She tries not to gasp when Gideon’s mouth presses down into the dip of skin at the lowest part of her neckline.

Her fingers do some sort of weird involuntary spasm against Gideon’s shoulder blades though, and Gideon pulls back slightly.

“Are you okay?” Gideon says, sounding breathless. “You’re shaking.”

“Because it's cold in here, you idiot!” Harrow manages, gritting her teeth against the possessive way Gideon's thumbs are creasing her upper thighs.

It is cold from the last gasps of the air-conditioning, but not cold enough that Harrow wore a bra today, because bras are her worst nemesis. Well, second worst. Her worst nemesis is the way Gideon’s gaze keeps flicking from Harrow’s eyes to her mouth down to her nipples which are hard as rock, and not from cold.

Gideon just grins. “Keep you warm?” Her eyes look glassy, but she throws a cocky wink in, because she's an asshole and a boor and a cliché.

“Please.”

Gideon draws her hands away from Harrow's thighs, which is a torture almost as bad as putting them there in the first place. Her thumbs rub along the insides of Harrow's legs as she lets go, and the heat in Harrow's stomach throbs, and she bites down on her own tongue hard to keep from making a sound.

“I’m sorry, what's that?” says Gideon, the self-satisfied prick. “I don't think I heard you right.”

“I said please. Fuck you.”

Gideon’s eyebrows raise to her hairline. “Is that what you want?”

“Come here,” Harrow's mouth begs before she can stop it, before she can make the whole thing sound reasonable. It's not reasonable. Harrow feels like a house on the brink of collapse. She feels like pine straw tossed recklessly onto a fire.

Gideon shuts up and obeys, pressing her palms to Harrow's sides, stepping in close. When she kisses Harrow again, Harrow thinks she’ll be prepared this time, but she’s not. The warmth of Gideon’s mouth is a shock to her system, again and again and again. The kiss tastes of blood from where Harrow bit her own tongue, but Gideon either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. The brush of her stomach against Harrow's does ruinous things to Harrow’s composure. Harrow’s back arches, and she lets out a little involuntary gasp. Gideon swears and bites her bottom lip on purpose, the inconsiderate ass.

Gideon's still sweaty from practice, warm because she always runs warm, and the firm lines of her abdominal muscles twitch when Harrow sticks her hand up Gideon’s stupid tight tank top and spreads her fingers out there. Gideon stills for a moment mid-kiss, seemingly rendered useless by this new point of contact. Curious, Harrow repeats the motion. She sticks her other hand in there too and runs her fingers all the way from Gideon’s navel to the edge of her sports bra, a long perfect line of overheated skin and shifting muscle that makes Harrow’s mouth dry. Gideon’s breath catches and her lips open and her eyes scrunch in something like pain.

From this close, Harrow can see the stubby golden-red lashes, the delicate skin of her eyelids. Ridiculous that anything this soft and lovely would survive Gideon’s lifestyle of 5 AM workouts and 3-in-1 body wash. But Gideon’s always been lovely. Bright and sharp and beautiful like the edge of a blade.

“God, Harrow,” Gideon breathes. “Remind me why we've never done this before.”

Harrow kisses her mouth again, too miserably turned on to bother being precise. The kiss lands sloppily, but Gideon, never a slacker, gives as good as she gets. She pulls Harrow closer to her and shoves her own hips against Harrow's.

“Fuck,” Harrow hisses. “Because we're lifelong enemies. Because you hate me.”

“That's not the word I’d use, but okay.”

She trails one of her hands up Harrow’s ribcage to thumb at her nipple, and Harrow lets out a terrible high pitched little sound that makes her flush down to the tips of her toes. Gideon circles her thumb there and Harrow’s eyes try to roll back in her head. Gideon’s hands are big enough to cup her whole breast easily, a fact that Harrow will never admit to considering before this point but that makes her arch her back, desperate for Gideon to touch her everywhere, and right now.

Gideon breaks away from Harrow’s mouth with a groan.

“Harrow, evil queen of my loins, if you don't want me to take this off you”—she takes the strap of the leotard between two fingers—"speak now. I really want to take this off you,” she admits.

Harrow’s brain struggles against a complete and total shutdown.

“Evil queen of your what?”

“Not important. So not important. Forget I said that. Do you want to get naked or not?”

“I.” And then Harrow can’t speak.

“Use your words.”

Harrow breathes in, then out. Her words have gone somewhere, drained out of her around the time they started this conversation in the first place. Gideon always drains her of everything except the fight or flight instinct, reduces her to a creature that wants to dig her claws in and hold on until they both tear themselves apart. Or maybe this time, she just wants. Her head feels fuzzy and light.

“Please say something. This is getting embarrassing for me. Usually girls aren't this reluctant.”

“What girls?” Harrow manages.

Gideon must see something ridiculous and envious in her face, because she laughs. Then she sighs and drops her head to Harrow's shoulder. Her warm breath is almost worse than her hands or the press of her strong body. Harrow is on fire.

“We can pretend this never happened if you really want,” Gideon says, only a little bitter. She kisses Harrow's cheek lightly. “Not saying I've never thought about it before or never will again, but I get it. It's weird for you. Hell, it's weird for me too. Because you’re my worst nightmare. You haunt me waking and sleeping, you little demon. We can stop. Probably should stop. What the hell am I doing?”

She seems to address this question not to Harrow, but to herself, or possibly to whatever deity she believes in.

“No,” Harrow says. “I want it. Please,” she repeats pathetically, reduced to half phrases in the wake of the yawning cavern in her belly, all the ways she wants Gideon suddenly, terrifyingly clear. Her desires laid out like bird bones drying in the desert.

“Fuck. Really?”

Harrow clears her throat. “Your shirt first.”

Gideon breaks away from Harrow in a streak of cruelty never before rivaled, but then she’s ripping off her ugly tank top and there’s the whole firm tan expanse of her stomach, the sweep of freckles over her collarbones, the little bit of extra fullness at her hips where they vanish into terrible lime green athletic shorts. There is so much of her. Harrow runs her tongue over her bottom lip.

And Gideon grins and winks again, because of course she does. It’s a lopsided, hungry grin, wolf-like.

“Enjoying the view there?”

Harrow arches an eyebrow, neat and prim like she doesn’t want to eat Gideon alive. She wonders what else she can get Gideon to do and feels a little drunk on the power.

“I’d enjoy it more if you took off that ridiculous sports bra. I didn’t know they made them with—” she gives it a disdainful up-and-down, “a pizza pattern.”

Gideon actually flushes.

“Well I didn’t exactly wake up expecting a hot girl to throw herself at me today.”

“Hang on, I didn’t throw myself at you. You were the one who started this!”

Belatedly, Harrow’s brain sticks on hot girl.

“Uh, pretty sure you were, actually.”

“Gideon. Take off the bra now. I want to see you,” Harrow’s mouth says before she can consider that she is practically begging now, if she hadn’t been before.

“Shit,” Gideon says, like she’s had the wind knocked out of her. “Okay.”

She rips off the terrible bra with a speed that Harrow might have mocked her for, if she hadn't been too busy taking in the new sights available to her. When Gideon stands bare from the waist up in front of her, Harrow can see that her chest is muscular like the rest of her, but the smooth lovely curves of her breasts are fuller than Harrow's own, wide set with perfect round nipples hardening in the chilly studio air.

“Come here,” Harrow orders.

Wordless, Gideon steps forward until they're a breath away from each other. Harrow can't meet her eyes, fears what she'd see if she did, so she just runs her fingers underneath Gideon’s right breast, tracing the curve. Gideon doesn't breathe. Her ribcage is so still underneath Harrow's hands, a perfect study of a human skeleton. Harrow traces Gideon's other breast, lets her thumb explore the peak of it, watches the way the nipple hardens even further. Gideon makes a low sound in the back of her throat. Ruthlessly, Harrow pinches the nipple between her finger and thumb, and Gideon's strangled groan sends a wave of heat to the place between Harrow's legs; the ache she’s been trying to ignore becomes insistent.

Gideon's ribcage expands again, and her hands fist on either side of Harrow's hips.

“You are so weird,” she says, muffled against Harrow's neck. “I knew you'd be weird about this. What are you doing, running some kind of tit experiment? You—oh.”

She breaks off as Harrow scratches her nails right down Gideon's ridiculous abs and then sticks her fingers into the waistband of her shorts.

“No you don't,” Gideon says, grabbing her wrist and pressing it back against the mirror with an alarming ease. Harrow kicks her in the shin, but Gideon doesn't let go. She lets Harrow struggle against her grip for a moment, body heaving against Gideon's.

Normally, this would be the point at which Harrow slipped away with a well-timed jab to whatever part of Gideon was closest. But all of Gideon is close now. Gideon’s warm mouth hovers above hers, and Harrow can’t catch her breath. She feels the wet slickness between her legs at the contact, and she can’t think. Her body goes limp in Gideon's arms, and her brain goes absolutely, blissfully empty.

It stays mercifully silent as Gideon accepts her surrender and slides a thumb underneath the strap of Harrow's leotard (the second strappiest one) and slides her other hand up to cup Harrow's whole tit again. Harrow's spine arches.

“Your turn, Odile,” Gideon says.

Harrow keeps her wrist where Gideon left it, pressed to the mirror, the only cool spot in a world of rapidly increasing heat. Her other hand grabs Gideon's right arm of its own accord.

Gideon gets the strap off, and then slides it down Harrow's arm. Harrow has to let go of Gideon to slide it all the way off her, and then she's sitting there with one breast exposed and the other half of her body still entangled by straps.

“Okay, other arm,” Gideon says. Harrow obediently offers her other arm, but here's where they run into trouble. The strap they just removed connects in a swirly pattern to the strap they are trying to remove. It snaps back against Harrow's arm, escaping Gideon's fingers.

“Uhhh,” says Gideon.

“Well, are you going to take my clothes off or not, Griddle?” Harrow snaps. “Don’t just look at me.”

Gideon's eyes trail from her one sad exposed breast to her collarbones to her eyes, back to her other shoulder. Then back to her tit. Because of course.

Gideon thumbs it with some familiarity, like it's a friend she's met before. To Harrow's own humiliation, she takes in a ragged breath. More of a gasp, really. Gideon continues to run her thumb back and forth across the nipple, while she struggles again with the strap on Harrow's right arm. Pulling it down drags the other half of the leotard tight. Harrow is also struggling, though the struggle is with her hips and the way they involuntarily press forward for any hint of friction against Gideon’s body.

Gideon's tongue flicks out to wet her mouth, and she swears softly. “Who designed this thing, Sisyphus?”

“Griddle!”

“Sorry, don't mean to stare, it's just I’ve never seen this much of you for this long. Can you blame a girl?”

She tries the strap again, seeing if she can work it down Harrow's arm slowly without fucking strangling her. Harrow helpfully elbows her in the ribs.

“Oh, I’ll do it! You're useless.”

She reaches around to the clasp at the back of her neck, where—god, it's stuck again.

“Gideon,” she says. “Can you just undo this? Then I think we can—mmf.”

Gideon, disobedient as always, ignores the leotard in favor of putting her mouth on Harrow. She kisses the curve of Harrow's breast, then swirls her tongue around the nipple. Harrow curses, fingers slipping on the clasp.

Gideon's palm slides up to her stomach, and her mouth works down, pressing kisses to the parts of Harrow still covered by the evil leotard. Then she kneels and gives Harrow's thigh an experimental bite. Harrow keens, almost slipping off the barre, held there only by the firm press of Gideon’s forearm.

“Fuck, Nav, please,” she says, although she doesn't know what she's asking for, just for more of everything, and all at once, or she'll die, she really will.

“Fuck, fuck,” she breathes, as Gideon presses her mouth up Harrow's trembling thigh, so close to where Harrow wants her. Silently, she curses the black tights she's wearing, thick enough to dull the warmth of Gideon's mouth slightly, but not thick enough to prevent her from soaking the bottom of her leotard.

“Shit, Nonagesimus. Have you been like this the whole time?”

Gideon presses a finger so close to Harrow's clit that she has to bite back a scream of frustration.

“Have you always been so useless? Get this off me. These tights are probably ruined now,” Harrow grits out, as Gideon's thumb makes lazy circles on her pubic bone, and her warm breath hovers between Harrow's legs.

Gideon finally obliges, standing up to fumble with the clasp of Harrow's leotard before finally, finally, the last strap comes loose and Harrow's able to wriggle the whole thing ungracefully down her torso, though it's sticky with sweat by now.

“See, this is why I don't wear these things,” Gideon says. The expression on her face comes close to awe.

“Yes. You wear…other stylistic choices,” Harrow agrees, putting as much disdain into her voice as possible. She eyes the green shorts again but can't stop herself from getting a little lost around the area they've ridden down to expose, a trail of light hair low between her hips. The hips themselves, powerful and just slightly fuller than the rest of her. They’re obviously where Gideon keeps any extra calories not burned off by her insane training routine. One day Harrow wants to put her mouth on each in turn, give them the attention they deserve. But for now—

Gideon is giving her the finger. “Fuck you,” she says amiably.

“Yes. Fuck me.”

“Shit. Okay, then.”

And from there it's a struggle to get Harrow's leotard the rest of the way down, to peel off her tights. There's some swearing involved, Harrow starts to think Gideon's right and she'll just never wear any of this again, and they give up when the whole thing ends up tangled in Harrow's pointe shoe ribbons. But that still leaves Harrow terrifyingly bare, shivering in the cold anywhere Gideon's hands aren't touching her, sitting on a wooden barre hoping distantly she won't get splinters. It doesn't matter. Gideon's mouth is trailing up her leg again; Gideon’s arm is pressed to Harrow's middle like a trap, to prevent her from bucking her hips and coming down on top of Gideon. Harrow sees the muscles of Gideon’s forearm strain as she licks the crevice of her thigh, and she moans high and long.

“Please,” she says again. She's beyond dignity. She's been beyond dignity since the day they met. She puts her hands in Gideon’s hair and tugs, she can feel the breath hiss out of Gideon, so close.

“I’m getting to it, your highness.” She presses a kiss to the opposite thigh. Harrow's nails scrape her scalp. “Full disclosure, I’ve uhh. Never technically done this before. So if it sucks, you know. Just remember you begged for it.”

And before Harrow can process any of that, before she can come up with a retort to prove to Gideon that she doesn’t actually need this, that she's never thought of this alone in her bed at night, Gideon dives right in. She licks a stripe from Harrow's folds to her clit, and Harrow cries out, too surprised to hold back.

Gideon makes a delighted sound, and then, in typical Gideon fashion, gives herself wholeheartedly to the cause. Whatever buzzfeed article she’s read on the topic obviously gave her the advice to hone in on the clit and destroy it until Harrow is a shuddering mess underneath her. Her tongue is too much, too fast, and Harrow has a brief out-of-body experience in which her brain can’t process all the signals her body is sending. When she comes back to herself and realizes that she’s making helpless little high-pitched sounds, canting her hips to Gideon’s mouth, she wonders if she’ll ever hear the end of this.

She wonders if she wants to.

Gideon pants beneath her, breath hot on Harrow’s clit, and looks up for a second.

“How am I doing?” she asks. Her chin is wet, and she’s grinning blissfully, no brain cells evident.

Harrow nearly kills her. It’s a close thing.

“Don’t stop, you idiot! You—oh!” she breaks off, as Gideon goes back to work. Looking back on the experience, Harrow would like to say that she didn’t beg, she didn’t curse, she didn’t say anything that could be used against her—that Gideon’s mouth didn’t reduce her to fractal parts spinning and reflecting themselves, that it was just a quick and dirty fuck between two people who mostly hated each other. These things happen.

But in the moment, Harrow isn’t keeping track of what she’s saying, just the way Gideon’s tongue makes perfect alchemic circles right where she needs it—quick study, Griddle always was—and then the match strikes, and Harrow goes up in flame, feeling the bloom of it from her core to the insides of her molars, choking down a cry that sounds, terrifyingly, like a sob of relief.

Gideon keeps going until Harrow stops immolating and finds the breath to say, “Fuck’s sake, Nav, get off me.”

Gideon gets off her—sort of. She rises up, knees popping, and puts her hands on the sides of Harrow’s face to tilt it up and examine it. This sets off all sorts of alarms in the back of Harrow’s brain, but she can’t find the willpower to shove Gideon’s fingers away. Gideon’s expression is strange, and Harrow can’t tell what she’s thinking. She’s not grinning her stupid cocky grin or baring her teeth in anger, or making a funny face for attention, or any of the other common Gideon expressions.

The closest Harrow can come to guessing is the memory of Gideon sewing the ribbons onto Coronabeth’s pointe shoes once after class, a task at which she was surprisingly adept. There was a careful furrow between her brows as she pressed the needle into the inside of the shoe, and Coronabeth, sitting on a chair next to her, had used her shoulder as an arm rest as she told the whole studio about her last bad date. Gideon’s eyes had gone restless and far away for a moment, like she wasn’t really listening at all. Only Harrow had caught it. The next moment, Gideon was laughing up at Corona, perfectly in time with the punchline.

For a second, Harrow thinks that whatever comes out of Gideon’s mouth next, it will change everything. And then Gideon blinks, grins, and ruins it.

“I’ve always wondered what you’d look like if you stopped scowling for a second. Turns out, I just have to eat you first. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Harrow kicks her. It lands this time, and Gideon swears, and they’re back on familiar ground. Well, if familiar ground meant that Harrow’s gray matter was still leaking out her ears. Harrow pushes herself down from the barre as regally as she can, given that she’s almost completely naked and her knees are still wobbly.

“You good?” Gideon asks, catching her and pulling her flush against her chest. Harrow has to take a second. Gideon’s arms are warm and firm around her waist, and the bare press of their stomachs together makes her feel light-headed. Harrow breathes in, then out. She finds her balance. Then, she tilts her head up to meet Gideon’s eyes again. When she smiles, she makes sure Gideon is watching.

“You’ve done me a favor, Griddle. But I haven’t paid you back. I can’t be in your debt, you understand.” She presses a finger to Gideon’s jaw and taps it lightly. “I need to settle the score.”

Gideon’s chest rises and falls, and her eyes widen. Harrow can feel the battle going on in her ridiculous jock brain.

“So you’re saying you owe me?”

“Of course. You can redeem the debt later for a favor of your choosing. Or,” Harrow drags out the word. “I could take care of you, now.”

Unexpectedly, Gideon scoffs. Harrow flushes. It’s not the exact reaction she’d prepared for, and what makes it worse is that Gideon’s actually burying her face in Harrow’s shoulder to suppress her laughter. After a moment, she draws back.

“Harrow. My rat monarch. The only way you’d take care of me is if you were personally throwing me off a bridge. The only way you’d take care of me is if you had your butler run me over in the Batmobile. The only way you’d take care of me is if you were deciding how many poisonous mushrooms to put on top of my pizza. You? Take care of me? That’s like asking a snake to take care of my car payments.”

“I think he’s a gecko.”

“What?”

Harrow clears her throat. “You’re wrong, Nav.”

She tilts her gaze down to Gideon’s shorts, then drags her eyes up again slowly, making sure to linger on the perfect curve of her breasts. Then she traces one finger from Gideon’s jaw to her clavicle to her breastbone to her navel. Gideon doesn’t tremble, but she holds her whole body tense. Harrow looks at Gideon slantwise and delivers the killing blow.

“But if you don’t want it, it makes no difference to me.”

She backs away slowly, like she’s retreating from a hostage situation. Gideon doesn’t move. Harrow starts to turn away. She thinks she might actually have to walk back to the changing room like this, a circumstance she hasn’t planned for. Then there’s the hand on her shoulder, shoving her back around. Harrow wants to sag in relief.

“Fuck you,” Gideon says again, and crashes into her. Harrow finds herself pressed to the mirrored wall again as Gideon grasps at her ribs, at her hips, hard enough to leave marks. God, Harrow hopes she leaves marks. Her mouth is a brand, scalding Harrow over and over again. Harrow’s own hands wander across the planes of Gideon’s torso, seeking the places that make her break and gasp for air.

Finally, finally, she drags her fingers down to the lowest part of Gideon’s belly, and Gideon arches into her touch. Harrow’s fingers delve beneath the awful shorts, past a layer of compressive underwear that mystifies her, and find a patch of course, wiry hair. When she drags her fingers through it, Gideon moans without restraint.

“Harrow,” she says, half a plea, half a threat.

And below that, the slick wet heat of her, so soaked through that Harrow’s fingers slip as she runs them over the labia, circles the core. She arches her eyebrow.

“Have you been like this the whole time?”

“Please, Harrow.”

It’s an invitation Harrow can’t resist. She slowly slides one finger in, and Gideon hisses until she starts moving it in careful circles, at which point, Gideon’s natural impatience takes over and she grinds down on Harrow’s hand, trying to press against her palm. Harrow’s never done this before. She only knows how she likes it, so she slides another finger in, waits a second for Gideon to adjust (during which Gideon swears at her profusely) and then curls her fingers up and presses down against the spot she thinks might be right, adjusting for height and position.

Gideon keens, and her entire body tenses.

Harrow keeps circling the spot with her fingers, and then she uses her thumb to brush lightly over Gideon’s clit (probably? That’s the closest she can get at this angle). She must get it right, because Gideon makes a sound like she’s dying, so Harrow keeps doing it, just light touches to warm up, and then—Gideon’s chest stops heaving, her lungs seem to freeze in her ribcage, and her mouth falls open on a soundless gasp. Harrow works her fingers until Gideon shudders for a while and then goes boneless, a mass of worn-out muscle and galloping heart, pinning Harrow to the wall with her useless lump of a body. She smells like sweat. Lazily, she presses a kiss to the juncture of Harrow’s neck and shoulder.

“That’s all it takes? Really?” Harrow says in open curiosity.

She pulls her fingers out of Gideon to inspect them. She’s tempted to put them in her mouth. Gideon watches her for a moment with half-lidded eyes, and Harrow drops her hand to wipe it on the ugly shorts instead.

Gideon grimaces, though whether it’s at Harrow’s ultimate victory or her own slick, Harrow can’t say.

“It’s been a while. Besides, you’re one to talk, miss fuck-me-now-please-or-I’ll-kill-you.”

“I did not say any of that.”

“Denial, the Harrowhark classic. Face it, you crave my pussy.”

“Shut up.”

Harrow tries to shove Gideon off her, but even post-orgasm, Gideon’s too solid to be moved.

“You’re in love with these guns.” Gideon pokes her own arm, apparently too exhausted to flex. “Even if you hate the rest of me. Can’t resist my hot body. But don’t feel bad. No woman can.”

“Hate is a strong word,” Harrow says, caught between Gideon’s warm body and the wall, breathing her in.

“Is it, Odette?”

Harrow swallows. She watches the curve of Gideon’s throat, perfect and golden and statuesque, even now, even after Harrow’s touched her.

“It’s more like, I find your personality repulsive.”

Gideon sighs and pushes herself off the wall away from Harrow. Harrow feels the absence, a sudden rush of cold. Gideon smiles in imitation of every other smile she’s ever aimed at Harrow, but her eyes look tired.

“Same to you, bitch. I’d say goodbye, now, but. I literally can’t, because I’m trapped in this studio with you every day. Kind of ruins the exit.”

Sometimes, there’s an alternate Harrow who says all the things Harrow’s most afraid of saying. This Harrow is lurking in the mirror now, a skinny naked girl with Gideon’s taste on her mouth, who says, very calmly, Then stay.

But she’s not that Harrow, or that Harrow lives somewhere far away and beyond every star she can imagine, so she crosses her arms over her naked chest and looks at the spot behind Gideon’s shoulder.

“Yes, it does.”

Defeated, Gideon shrugs and begins to pick up her discarded clothing from the floor. Harrow knows she should too, but it’s going to be a task getting back into the tights and leotard, not to mention the jeans and the shirt and the sweater, and somehow, she doesn’t feel up to it with Gideon watching. So she stands there bare as the day she was born and waits until Gideon collects all her clothes, puts them back on, and gives her what Harrow thinks is supposed to be a charming wink.

“Thanks for the nice time, babe. It was great except for the part where you were there.”

Harrow scowls. “Don’t worry. I forgot it was even you for most of it.”

At this, Gideon’s face turns to stone.

“Just make sure you don’t ever remember.”

And with that, she storms out of the room. Harrow closes her eyes for a single, terrible second, and then forces herself to work out the tights issue. She feels disgusting and dirty by the time she’s dressed in all her layers, but she fusses with the grown-out crop of her hair until it looks presentable, grabs her bag, replaces pointe shoes with black boots, and turns off the light of the studio, leaving it as silent and empty as it was before she unlocked it this morning.

xxx

So they’ve fucked now. Right. Well, Gideon always knew, somewhere back in the depths of her brain, that they eventually would. She and Harrowhark have been at each other’s throats for as long as they’ve even been alive. As a kid, she used to think that they’d end up killing each other when one tried to shove the other out the upper window of Aiglamene’s studio, but no, that couldn’t have been their end! Couldn’t have been a nice simple mutual destruction; Harrow couldn’t have given her the satisfaction.

It had to be sex. It had to be Gideon’s first time, too. Well, technically. She wishes fervently that things had gone further that one time with Coronabeth, or even that she’d begged Dulcinea to have pity on her, back before she’d known about Palamedes, back when she’d thought Dulcinea was serious about her. She should have downloaded that dating app. Propositioned someone from one of her soccer teams. Anything, anything to avoid the woeful fate of having her virginity taken by Harrow. It’s humiliating. The fact that Gideon’s sure it was Harrow’s first time too doesn’t make things any better.

She doesn’t care what that evil witch has been up to, or not up to, sexually. The repression isn’t her problem! Harrow can remove the stick from her ass in her own time, and it’s none of Gideon’s business, and it never would have been, if.

If Gideon had just walked away! Why didn’t she walk away?

She can’t say she’s never thought about it. Obviously, she’s thought about it. She and Harrow have been changing in the same shitty dressing room for their whole lives, and puberty hit Gideon with the force of a bulldozer. But the difference between accidentally peeking at a Harrow tit at age 12 and touching a Harrow tit at 18 is cavernous.

And now she’s thinking about Harrow’s tits. Palm-sized and soft and perfectly in proportion with the rest of Harrow’s tight, compact little frame, like one of those tiny houses in which everything you need is packed into half the space, and that’s not even getting to Harrow’s perfect little hipbones and the way her eyes opened wide and dark when she—nope, no, not thinking about it.

This is all going to be fine, as long as Gideon just doesn’t think about it. For a few weeks, they’ll skulk around the studio avoiding each other very obviously like two people who have just consummated a lifetime of being arch-nemeses by finally fucking it out. And then Gideon will be gone. She will be playing soccer at the university on the coast, and Harrow will be doing her evil swan routine or whatever Harrow’s plans are for the next fifty years. And they’ll maybe see each other once a year at Aiglamene’s holiday fundraising events, and Gideon will bring whatever hot sexy babe she’s dating now that she’s out of this shitty place, and maybe in passing she will say to said babe, “Oh look, there’s that girl who hated me back in the day. We hooked up once! Isn’t that funny?” And from a distance Harrow will scowl at her, but in that scowl, there will be a hint of longing for days gone by, when they were naked together.

It’s with this outcome firmly fixed in her mind that Gideon gets the fuck out of the studio, ascends the rickety staircase, and heads to the bathroom that she shares with Aiglamene. She showers until her skin turns red under the water. Then she looks out the window of her bedroom and waits until she can be sure that Harrow has walked the two blocks to her bus stop and departed.

After that, she gets dressed (in an even better sports bra, one with little tacos on it) and pointedly walks the opposite direction, towards the gym. Maybe Cam will come spot her. She’s going to need a million bench presses to begin to erase the morning’s events. As she looks forward to the ache of her muscles after the epic training montage that’s about to happen, she tries to ignore the sweeter ache where Harrow’s fingers touched her an hour ago.

xxx

The plan is going well. She and Harrow haven’t spoken in nearly a week, which is a new record of their lives. Cam’s only asked her about it once, and Coronabeth hasn’t even noticed Gideon’s absence from the studio, which, ouch, but par for the course. Ianthe caught her in the hallway once when she was going out to the gym and Ianthe was doing whatever Ianthe does when she’s not lounging her way through morning exercises.

“Trouble in paradise?” she drawled like the world’s worst sitcom character.

“Ianthe. What are you doing without the better hotter version of you? Are you even allowed out on your own? Tell Coronabeth I said hi next time you see her, since your function in life is basically the same as a carrier pigeon.”

“Oh, Coronabeth. She’s gallivanting with Deuteros again. Won’t last long. Second House girls never do. Stamina of Babs’s uncle who’s been smoking for twenty years, all of them.”

“Yuck,” Gideon said fervently. She didn’t think about Harrow’s stamina, which she’d tested thoroughly seven days and five hours ago.

“Yuck,” Ianthe agreed. “Maybe you’d like me to pass a message to our Harry instead. Since the two of you aren’t speaking.”

“I’ve told you to stop fucking calling her that. She hates it.”

“If you’re so certain, ask me why she’s still talking to me, and not you. Go on, ask. I love to be of assistance.”

Gideon rolled her eyes and pushed past Ianthe.

“It’s because I can do the sideways splits with my ankle on two bricks. The doctor said my hips are hypermobile. I don’t know about all that. I put my ankles behind my head the other day, though. I’ll show you if you’d like.”

“Yuck,” Gideon said again, from the bottom of her heart. “No one wants to know how far you can spread your legs. Maybe if Harrow was a circus master, she’d be more interested in you because you’re clearly a freak of nature. And I’m not even referring to your hips. It’s the rest of you that’s so weird.”

“Oh, hurtful,” Ianthe said gleefully. “Well, I don’t need to resort to name calling. I’ve already stolen your girl, so what good would it do?”

“She’s not my girl! And you definitely haven’t stolen her, because if you had, she’d be fucking you instead of me.”

And Gideon stomped out the door before she could hear Ianthe’s reply. Shit. Now everyone was going to know. So much for keeping this a secret.

But to her shock, no one had commented. She hasn’t been in the studio, but if Ianthe had told everyone, surely Gideon would be getting more texts.

As it is, no one has texted her except Cam and Pal, and they don’t even go to the studio anymore. They’re too busy doing cool biologist shit (Pal) and cool karate shit (Cam). Sometimes she envies their charmed life—living in a university basement apartment with practically a whole floor to themselves, room for Cam’s training equipment and Pal’s excessive amount of textbooks. Co-existing in peace with a best friend, a built-in partner in life.

She wishes her built-in partner wasn’t a total fucking dick who reads her mail and steals her magazines and seems to know as much about Gideon’s business as Gideon does. And who she’s fucked. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Cam and Pal platonic marriage of convenience situation sounds absolutely ideal compared to Gideon’s train wreck of a love life.

Did she mention she’s fucked Harrow?

Anyway, all of this is percolating in her brain when she receives a text from the last person she wants to speak to ever again—or even look at, hear the voice of, think about.

Yes, the text is from Harrow, and it reads,

Please come to the studio this afternoon at 3.

What? It’s the please that really gets her. Sure, Harrow’s said please (over and over) in a different situation recently, but that’s not normal, even if it’s become a normal part of Gideon’s alone time fantasies since. Which it hasn’t.

Harrow never requests. She demands, she orders, she manipulates, but she never just asks. And it’s that, more than anything else, that makes Gideon’s feet trudge down the stairs at 3:05 PM, turn into the hallway, pass by the changing room and the storage room and the first-floor bathroom, and arrive at the closed door of the studio.

She pauses there for a moment, deciding whether it would look more careless to wait another couple of minutes. On the opposite side, she can hear no music, no shuffling of feet, nothing to indicate class is in session. She does hear Aiglamene’s voice, slightly strained.

“You’ve got no right, child.”

“I have the right.” That’s Harrow’s voice. Unmistakable, like a prissy little witch. “It’s the only way we can—” the rest is indistinguishable. Gideon curses the thickness of the door, which is slightly more soundproof than the rest of the building. A fact that she’d been glad of nine days ago, but one she hates now.

“We’ll find another way. You know that she’s worked for—” indistinguishable.

--“Not the point. If we don’t—”

“She won’t do it.”

--“Has to—you’ll see, I’ll—"

Gideon opens the door. Both Harrow and Aiglamene whirl around to face her, expressions purposefully blank.

“What’s all this?” Gideon tries to look casual. She stretches an arm back to scratch her neck and tracks the way Harrow’s eyes flit from her arm to the place where her tank top rides up on her hips, then away guiltily.

“We’re having a meeting,” Harrow says very officially. Like she never choked out Gideon’s name in a gasp. Like she doesn’t even know what sex is. Like she’s the queen of everything in the universe. You would think Gideon’s brain would register that tone as off-putting, but to her own dismay, she feels her heart rate pick up. Harrow’s little fingers are tapping against her leg in agitation, the only sign she feels anything other than absolute calm. At the back of her neck, her hair’s grown out enough to lie in awkward little wisps that look like fun to disarrange.

“And you invited me? Wow, I’m flattered. I’ve never been a part of the decision-making process before. Is this like a welcome to the Jedi council type of thing? Do I get a weapon?”

Aiglamene’s eyes cut between Harrow and Gideon. She crosses her arms over her chest and scowls. That means basically nothing. Aiglamene scowls constantly. Probably has been scowling since the day a knee injury cut her badass company career short and condemned her to a life of teaching brats like Gideon and Harrow rather than ageing gracefully into, well, probably the same life of teaching tiny ballet brats.

“No, you do not get a weapon,” Harrow says disdainfully, when it becomes clear Aiglamene won’t speak first. “As if you need more tools of destruction.”

Gideon very nearly makes a joke about how many women have told her that her ass is a tool of destruction, but no one has told her that. Not in so many words. Besides, that’s when Aiglamene clears her throat.

“There’s a job I have for you, Gideon.”

Shit. Aiglamene’s breaking out the first name. Aiglamene never calls her by name—it’s always brat, or child, or some other potentially-affectionate nickname. Sometimes it’s Nav, almost ruefully, as though to remind them both that they have two different last names.

“All right. Let me guess. You want me to clean the gutters again.”

“No, brat. I’m perfectly capable of cleaning the gutters.”

“Sure you are,” Gideon mumbles.

Aiglamene points a finger at her. “I feed you—no easy task. When I ask you to clean my gutters, it’s because you’re my kid, and that’s what kids are supposed to do, if they’re brought up right.”

Gideon’s brain hits the pause button. Aiglamene’s never really acknowledged that before—the fact that Gideon is her kid. Sure, everyone knows, but it’s never been official, and at first, Gideon assumed it was more to keep her out of everyone else’s hair than out of any warm fuzzy feelings. Gideon herself is on the verge of feeling a warm fuzzy feeling, but that’s when Harrow ruins it, because of course she does.

When she steps towards Gideon with a look more tentative than any that has ever crossed her face before, Gideon just knows she’s about to ask for something nasty and unfair, and Aiglamene’s not going to stop her.

“Listen. This was my idea, I should—Gideon. I need a favor.”

Up until this point, the alarms in Gideon’s brain were only at a yellow alert, but this sets them off full blast. She raises her eyebrows.

“You need a favor from me? Thought you said you forgot about me. Now that I’m not under your eternal command.”

“You’re not under my command, I just need you to do something.”

“Right. Contradicting yourself as usual there.”

“I need you to help me win the Canaan House competition this winter,” Harrow blurts out. She looks up at Gideon as though she expects a bomb to go off.

Gideon just laughs. Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been this.

“Right. Except I’m busy then. Anyway, what do you need me for? You’re better at all this shit than I am. Not that I’m bad. I mean, women have told me that I’m a force of nature. Dynamic, is what they called me. But you, Harrow? You’re a genius on stage. You don’t need me there. You’ve got this one, babe.”

Distantly, she notes that Harrow’s cheeks have darkened. But in the next moment, Harrow does the equivalent of casually pulling out a noose.

“It’s a pairs competition this year,” she says evenly. “Pas de deux. I need to win. It’s my last chance to be accepted into The Company.” From the way Harrow puts emphasis on the words, Gideon knows she’s talking about the Lyctors again. Fuck the Lyctors and their weird secret funding events and their exclusive parties and their snobbery for not immediately snatching Harrow up in the first place. They clearly don’t know the first thing about good dancing, because if they did, Harrow would have already left with them for some fancy uptown studio with lighted barres and a spa room or whatever.

“Fuck them,” Gideon says with feeling. “If they didn’t want you before, they’re not going to want you more with me in tow.”

“They will. They’ll have to. It’s my last chance,” she says again.

And Gideon just loses it. She feels her anger rise up within her like a riptide.

“Fuck your last chance. What about my first chance? I’m leaving, Harrow. There’s nothing you can do to stop me. I won’t be here this winter, or ever again. Find someone else.”

“There is no one else! Who do you expect me to compete with, one of the kids? Ortus?”

“Coronabeth. She’s right there, she maybe doesn’t lift as much as I do, but with some training—”

“I won’t win with Coronabeth. Besides, she’s…she’s competing with the Second House. She and Deuteros.”

“Shit. Really? I didn’t think Ianthe was serious about that one. Wow. Wouldn’t have thought Judith and Marta would compete separately, but hey, good for Coronabeth. Getting that Second House p—”

“Nav! Listen to me.”

“I was about to say pirouettes.”

Aiglamene swats her on the shoulder. Gideon ducks her head and leans away before Aiglamene can swat at that too. Yeah, Aiglamene is right. She should have gone with something in the singular. Piqué, maybe.

“Listen to her,” Aiglamene says sternly. “It’s not a bad idea. Your studies can wait a semester, surely. It’s not an eternity. It’s a few months.”

“Why should I listen to her? Why the fuck should I listen to this bitch? She has done nothing her whole life but drag me down, and now she wants to drag me out of a sports scholarship into the same stupid competition I’ve been hearing about for ten years, and I’m sick of it! I’m not staying here. I’m not helping her. I don’t care about your charity, Harrow, and I don’t care about your career, and I don’t care if those Lyctor idiots ignore us for a million years. They aren’t shit, they don’t matter, and I’m sick of pretending they do.”

“Gideon Nav,” says Aiglamene, forcefully steering her to the stool next to the outdated speaker system at the front of the room and sitting her down on it. Aiglamene can be quite forceful when she wants to be. “Do you think that’s all this is about?”

“Well…yeah. I mean, most of my life has basically been spent listening to people talk about Harrow and her massive ego, so. Yeah.”

“My massive ego? I caught you holding up a women’s health magazine next to your arm in the mirror and comparing your muscles to the woman in the photograph.”

Gideon’s muscles had definitely been bigger, although that’s because those magazines always choose the women that men like to look at rather than the ones that are total beefcakes. Gideon has some magazines she thinks they should consult for the next edition of women’s health. Just for reference. She doesn’t say any of this.

What she says is, “Oh, so you’re creeping on me in the bathroom now? Typical.”

“You left the door open!”

“Harrowhark,” says Aiglamene. “Gideon.”

They settle into sullen silence, a state common enough between them that Gideon knows the exact flavor of it, the exact moment when Harrow will get bored and try to sneak some horrible little expression past Aiglamene’s Harrow Bullshit Sensors.

Aiglamene doesn’t give her time.

“I’m in debt, child,” she says to Gideon. “There’s a reason Canaan House is the competition of competitions. You have to compete to even qualify. The Lyctors fund your studio for a year if you win. That’s not considering the visibility it would bring to us. I am in need of new students. As you may have noticed, the average age of Ninth House students has only increased over the years.” She smiles wryly. “Not to knock the old folks. I am one. But I also need to pay my mortgage, and two basic fitness classes per week plus Harrow and the twins? I hate to say it, but it’s not enough.”

“Then you fund her,” Gideon says, gesturing to Harrow. “Have your parents write a check, or something. They’re filthy rich and they’ve already kept this place in business for years.”

A look passes between Harrow and Aiglamene that Gideon can’t interpret. Harrow glances back to Gideon.

“What do you think I’ve been doing? I—we can’t keep this up forever. Crux refuses, and I’ve looked at the data, and I can’t. Not without help. The Ninth House is all I know, Gideon. I know you want to leave. I can’t stop you. But I can ask.”

Well, shit. When you put it that way.

“Fine,” Gideon hears her own mouth saying. “Yeah, fine. Fuck it. The scholarship wasn’t that much anyway.”

The scholarship was enough to get her through a year, if she was careful. In Gideon’s mind’s eye, she sees that year. Runs on the coast, new friends, new sights, hot girls, and most importantly, leaving this town and never coming back. Never coming back.

She lets out a long breath. The fury has in no way abated. If anything, the moment Harrow’s face softens in something like gratitude makes it worse. What right does Harrow have? Does she think because they fucked once that Gideon will just do whatever she says? If so, tough luck. She’ll do this for Aiglamene, for the Ninth House, because it’s all she’s ever known. But Harrow can go die in a ditch for all she cares.

Anyway, the whole thing is doomed to failure from the start—she and Harrow competing together? They’ll murder each other before the competition can even begin.

Gideon turns away towards the door, unable to look at Harrow and Aiglamene any longer.

“When this plan backfires and you wind up on your ass, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Chapter Text

Harrow dreams of the girl again. Lately, Harrow’s dreams have been scattershot, flimsy things. Gideon’s eyes, glaring at her, Gideon’s mouth, accusing her of being a tyrant and a hypocrite and a greedy, petulant child, of wanting Gideon to belong to her completely. And then sometimes in these dreams, Gideon’s mouth does other things besides.

Harrow’s sleep patterns, always erratic, have taken on a particularly desperate quality. She fears sleep.

She’ll stay up thinking about the competition, thinking about Crux’s warnings, worrying that he’ll tell someone—but no. He wouldn’t.

And besides, when she wins, she’ll have enough money that people will stop questioning her entirely. Even Crux. She’ll be untouchable. She’ll be a Lyctor. Career fully off the ground, future secure. And Gideon will go to the college on the east coast, free of all demands, with as much of the prize money as Harrow can afford to give her. That’s how she justifies the whole thing.

But at night, alone in her bed, she drifts off one night to the sound of the train passing by out her window, and when she opens her eyes (does she really open them?), Alecto is there.

Alecto always comes to her when she’s too anxious to stop her, so Harrow supposes she must be anxious now, although she doesn’t feel it. She doesn’t feel much of anything when the other girl sits gently on her bed and traces her finger over the comforter right next to the place where Harrow’s hand lies.

“What are you doing here?” Harrow asks. It comes out reverent. It always comes out reverent, where Alecto is concerned. Alecto barely speaks to her in life, and in the dreams, she’s much the same. She just smiles her small perfect smile. Harrow wants to put her fingertip to the place where Alecto’s bottom lip curves in the middle. The divot there is ever so slightly lopsided. You can only really tell if you’ve watched her smile like this a million times.

“Will you stay?” Harrow asks.

The girl’s brow furrows. “I stay only as long as you want me here. It’s not up to me.”

Harrow listens to the sounds of the house. Empty bedrooms, hum of the fridge from downstairs, whirring of the ceiling fan overhead. The hollow in her heart expands and expands until there’s no room for anything else.

“Forever,” she says.

Alecto shakes her head softly, and the look in her eyes—a brown so near gold as to be almost indistinguishable from it—nears pity.

“Harrowhark, you don’t want that.”

And she traces her fingertips over Harrow’s forehead. Harrow closes her eyes.

When she opens them to the first traces of daylight, she’s alone again.

xxx

“Do you ever have one of those workouts that just makes everything worse?” Gideon asks.

She’s lying facedown on the cool wooden floorboards of Pal and Cam’s Underground Pad, the Sequel! Not to be confused with Pal and Cam’s Underground Pad, the Original! which developed a strain of black mold so insidious that Pal probably used it in his undergrad thesis.

“No,” says Camilla, at the same time that Palamedes says, “Isn’t that the only kind?”

“Ugh,” says Gideon.

With her cheek pressed to the floor and her arms stretched out above her head, Gideon is doing her best to find inner peace—or at least, avoid a muscle strain. From somewhere above her, Gideon can hear the sound of papers shuffling—Camilla—and laptop keys tapping—Palamedes.

“You’ve got a sentence fragment here,” Camilla says, presumably to Palamedes. Gideon’s essays, though riddled with sentence fragments, have already served their purpose of getting her into college.

Oh wait, that’s right, she’s hitting pause on that to lift some little bitch above her head five times an hour.

“Do I? Are you sure it’s not purposeful?”

Cam clears her throat. “From this angle, Buffy’s eyes shone like twin diamonds, hard and brilliant. Willow leaned in recklessly, ready to accept that whatever Buffy’s plan, she herself was the inevitable. The inevitable what?”

“Oh, you’re right, Cam. That was rather vague. I suppose I meant to signify the inevitability of Willow following her.”

“The pronoun usage is also a little vague.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” says Palamedes. “My readers thank you.”

There’s a long pause, during which Cam taps at something.

“Oh, you’ve hit three hundred kudos. When was the last chapter posted again?”

“I believe it was 4:20 this morning.”

Gideon’s too tired for the obvious joke.

Cam hums. “This commenter says you’ve ‘truly managed to capture the yearning of an unrequited crush,’ that this chapter ‘broke me and put me together again in a different order,’ and that if Buffy and Willow don’t kiss they will, and I quote, ‘come to your house, knock on your door, and drop to my knees in front of you holding up the shattered remains of my heart.’”

“Oh, excellent. That’s exactly the sentiment I was trying to inspire. I’m dedicating this next chapter to…”

“Roselalondestan666.”

“Roselalondestan666, I write for you and you specifically. Do you think it’s too soon to add a kiss?”

“Yes,” Cam says. “But I'm looking forward to seeing how you pull it off.”

“Your faith in me is gratifying.”

Gideon groans. Enough is enough.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Getting over a breakup,” Cam says, at the same time that Pal says, “Writing fanfiction.”

Gideon peels her cheek off the floor and looks up. “What breakup?”

Camilla and Palamedes look at each other for a moment, and it seems like they’re having one of those disagreements that doesn’t require words. The thing about being over at Cam and Pal’s Fungus-Free Funhouse is that they do this constantly—they’re always having conversations right over Gideon’s head. Usually, it’s amusing to watch them exchange eye glances until they remember that they have to speak out loud; Gideon once timed it at a minute and a half. Another time, she got a whole squat rep in. But today, it just annoys her.

“What breakup?” she asks again, louder.

Camilla taps her fingers against the arm of the couch and flattens her mouth.

“With Dulcie,” she says. “They’ve called things off.”

“Technically, things can’t be called off if they were never called on,” says Palamedes. He stops typing for a moment to rest his head back against the sofa. Gideon sits up all the way.

“Right, but you were together. I mean, you weren’t seeing anyone else. You kept texting her all the time!”

“We never agreed to anything. I don’t blame her for wanting to keep her options open. With her health the way it is, she doesn’t have the energy to stay up late sending messages to someone she’s never even met in person. We were friends, that’s all.”

“Bullshit,” says Cam. “She propositioned you—twice.”

At this, Pal’s face does something interesting around the eyebrow area, and his cheeks darken.

“It doesn’t mean we were in a relationship. Two instances of phone sex between friends is nothing to—”

“Urgh, enough information!” says Gideon. The idea of Palamedes and phone sex in the same sentence sort of makes her head hurt. “Anyway, she was friends with me, and she never—I mean, we never—nothing ever happened that—”

“Don’t strain yourself,” says Camilla.

“I never had sex with her!”

Palamedes arches one thin eyebrow.

“I’m well aware.”

“I mean, I don’t make it a habit to have sex with my friends,” Gideon’s mouth continues saying, “Nope, definitely never done that. Or my enemies. You know, you should really only have sex with people you want to keep having sex with because it’s a bitch to try and pretend it never happened. Like whoops, I stumbled and fell into your pussy. Totally an accident. My bad.”

Gideon can feel Cam’s eyes on her. They’re probably narrowing in preparation for a full Camilla Interrogation, or they would be, if Palamedes, her top priority, wasn’t having massive, massive girl problems.

Is there anyone in Gideon’s life who’s not having girl problems? Maybe Ianthe. She and Harrow looked pretty friendly last time she saw them both in the same room. Apparently, they’ve made up from whatever weird fight they were having a few days ago. Oh, and Coronabeth is dating Judith now. Wow, there’s a pattern. It’s almost like anyone who fools around with Gideon immediately regrets it and ditches her to find someone more her type.

“Therein lies the problem,” says Pal wryly. If he’s noticed her panicked glance away, he hasn’t given any indication.

“Phone sex,” Camilla reminds them both.

“Will you guys stop saying that? I’m having enough trouble erasing it from my mind as it is.”

“Gladly,” says Palamedes. “I’m ready to put the whole thing to rest. I intend to drown my woes in bad fanfiction and ice cream my stomach will immediately reject. You know, rejection of a gift is no insult. I’m lactose intolerant.”

“I know,” says Camilla. “I bought the dairy-free.”

“Did you really?” Palamedes sounds disappointed. “And here I thought I’d come up with the perfect metaphor.”

“Okay, Shakespeare, save it for the Archive.”

Pal and Cam always refer to their nerd writing site as “The Archive,” a title which impressed and intimidated Gideon until she realized that the top secret files they kept submitting were actually just Buffy/Willow friends-to-enemies-to-lovers erotica. And while Gideon appreciates a good tit, well described, she’s also never been able to see the Buffy/Willow appeal. It’s like, Faith is right there.

Anyway, Gideon had stopped watching Buffy shortly after Jenny Calendar died. It’s almost like all of Gideon’s crushes end in total disaster.

“Anything you want to tell us about your personal life, Gideon?” Camilla asks unexpectedly, and Gideon’s spine immediately straightens. “Now’s a good time.” Camilla is looking at her with keen stone-grey eyes and an expression that suggests she knows each one of Gideon’s secrets.

“Haha,” Gideon says. “Nope! What would make you think that?”

“She’s just checking in. She puts it on her calendar.” Palamedes takes off his glasses to rub at his eyes.

Camilla neither confirms nor denies the presence of a calendar notification entitled Ask Gideon What Bullshit She’s Done This Time. She just shrugs and pops the cap off a highlighter, then returns to the ream of paper in her lap.

“You seem tense,” she says with no particular emphasis. She marks a line bright green.

“Hell yeah, I’m tense. I have to enter the world’s stupidest competition with my worst enemy, and oh yeah, if we lose, Aiglamene’s out of a job and a house.”

Now Palamedes frowns.

“You don’t have to do anything,” he says, as though it’s that simple.

“Did you miss the part where if we lose, Aiglamene loses the studio?”

“Gideon, Aiglamene’s career isn’t your responsibility. Harrow’s choices are her own. If you don’t want to be here, and you have the option to leave, it’s your choice whether to leave or to stay. No one would blame you for leaving.”

Gideon scoffs. “Oh, I know at least one person who very much would blame me.”

“As I said, Harrow’s choices are her own.”

Gideon scuffs at a crevice in the wood with the toe of her sneakers. She lets out a long sigh.

“It’s not just that. I don’t care about Harrow. Obviously—have you met her? But Aiglamene raised me. Sort of. I can’t just leave.”

“My mother raised me. I left her in New Zealand, last I checked, and she’s having a wonderful time. She’s teaching at a university there, and she won’t tell me, but I suspect she’s having an affair with her latest co-writer.”

“Okay, that is not the same situation at all.”

“Who knows,” says Camilla. “The point of affairs is that you don’t know. We can’t rule anything out.”

“Yuck!” says Gideon with feeling.

“No, Cam’s right. The fact is, we don’t know the full extent of our parents’ lives. They’re fallible people, just like us. Sometimes, one can only assume they have affairs or choose the wrong career path, or potentially even get denied several thousand dollars in grant money the same week that one of their best friends decides to break things off.”

“They might even write Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction about it,” Camilla remarks, turning her head to Palamedes. He looks back at her and smiles with the very corners of his lips.

“They might, Camilla. They might.”

Cam doesn’t smile exactly, but the lines around her eyes go soft. For a long moment, Cam and Pal have one of those conversations that might not even be a conversation at all. Camilla’s highlighter stills, and Palamedes looks at her through slightly squinted eyes, not bothering to put his glasses back on. Gideon feels something ache in the very back of her chest, behind all the other more important aches. After a moment, Camilla taps him lightly on the shin with her highlighter and stands up, stretching one arm behind her back and reaching for it with the other. She performs these efficient Cam movements for a few seconds, then heads to the kitchen.

“Oh, by the way, Gideon,” she calls, “We’re entering the competition too.”

Pal nods. “For the money, obviously. Otherwise, Cam’s body is a karate temple now.”

“But we’re going to win. So you might want to work that into your plans.”

Gideon bounces up on the heels of her feet and hurries after Camilla. Where a fridge door opens, there goes Gideon.

“What? Like hell you are!”

xxx

Predictably, the first few practices go like absolute shit.

Gideon didn’t have high hopes for an autumn that had started with daydreams of hot girls and coastal runs but quickly veered into The Harrowhark Show, Season 18. But still, the level of shittiness surprises her somehow.

Maybe she’d expected, now that she and Harrow have released some of their tension on each other, things would settle. They’d find a routine. Harrow would stop stomping on her with her pointy little toe shoes and say things like, “Thank you, Gideon, for bringing me my water bottle so I don’t pass out like a dying hummingbird in the middle of practice” or, “I don’t even mind those socks you wear” or maybe, “your biceps are perfectly adequate for holding me up, eight out of ten”—no wait, where did that come from?

But anyway, Harrow does not start showing human decency. What she does is shoot down every single one of Gideon’s ideas.

As the unfortunate daughter of a household obsessed with Tchaikovsky, Gideon’s seen every classical pas de deux in the known universe. Hell, she’s performed most of them, after men became so few and far between at the studio as to be almost nonexistent. She hates most of these dances with a dull boredom that comes from being made to stand around while someone critiques every single one of her partner’s moves. But still, she knows them.

“Giselle,” she suggests, a week and a half into a torturous series of early morning practices.

“No,” says Harrow vehemently. “That dance was made for people with long limbs. Besides, Ianthe says she’s doing Giselle.”

“Oh, who gives a fuck about Ianthe. With Babs? We’ll show them up easily.”

“I’m not doing Giselle.”

From the corner of the room, Aiglamene eyes them warily, as though she’s the referee at a boxing match. It’s clear that she has no particular stake in who wins, but she’s going to disapprove either way.

“All right. Sugarplum fairy. I could wear a crown. You could look sweet.”

“Absolutely not!”

Gideon pauses mid-calf stretch to regard Harrow, who’s standing by the mirror flexing and unflexing her feet with a sour expression on her face. Her mouth is all puckered up like she’s just eaten a pickle. Gideon grins.

“Yeah, you’re right, you’d never look sweet. I guess suggesting Swan Lake would be too obvious, huh? Since you’re acting out your cute little black swan routine every second of every day already.”

To Gideon’s astonishment, Harrow’s face flushes ever so slightly darker, and she looks away.

That’s the other thing that’s been happening recently. In all their previous quarrels, Harrow always looked her dead in the eyes, glaring at her like an alley cat being shot with flea medicine for the first time in its life. Harrow loves a glaring match. It’s her signature move when she can’t think of anything that sounds appropriately menacing. But lately, she barely seems able to look at Gideon for longer than five seconds without suddenly becoming fascinated by the opposite wall.

It’s really starting to piss Gideon off.

“Don’t have anything to say to that one, huh Harrow? Guess it’s just too hard to face the truth—that you have the personality of the grim reaper and the clothing to match.”

“Shut up!” Harrow rounds on her, though she’s still more subdued than normal. She can apparently only get within five feet of Gideon, no closer. Ironic, considering how close she’d wanted Gideon a few weeks ago.

When they try to do exercises together, Harrow takes her hand like someone holding a decaying jellyfish. Surely Gideon’s not that disgusting to her. She’s caught Harrow glancing at her biceps no less than five times.

“I just didn’t think you’d want to attempt the lifts in Swan Lake—” Harrow continues.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Since you’ve made it absolutely clear you don’t even want to be here in the first place. You’re not even really a dancer anymore. Swan Lake requires a level of…contact, that I wasn’t sure you’d be comfortable with. I thought it best to give you as little to do as possible throughout the routine.”

Oh, that’s rich. Contact? Gideon will show her contact.

She steps forward into Harrow’s space. In the corner of her eye, she can see Aiglamene step forward too, but most of Gideon’s attention is focused on the way Harrow’s throat works as she takes an uneven breath. Gideon looks Harrow in the eyes, tilting her head down to make sure Harrow is looking back.

“Oh, so you wanted me to just stand there while you peacocked around? Is that it? You wanted a dance partner who’s useless? Why didn’t you just choose Ortus then?”

“You know his back is—”

“Not the point! You picked me. You need to win so you can ascend to that terrible company, and I can get the fuck out of here. So let’s win. Give me something to do, or cut me loose, Nonagesimus. But don’t act like I’m not here.”

“Fine,” Harrow snaps. Now she’s looking at Gideon. Now the storm in her eyes promises only disaster. Gideon’s traitorous heartbeat picks up. “Fine. You want to do the lifts, we’ll do the lifts. Get ready.”

Gideon isn’t sure what, exactly, she’s meant to be getting ready for. All she can tell from Harrow’s expression is that the possibility of getting stabbed and then eaten is high.

“Swan Lake,” says Harrow.

“Okay.” Gideon stares at her.

“I said, Swan Lake.” Harrow gestures at Gideon as though she should be doing something.

Gideon rolls her eyes.

“All right, my demon duchess. That’s super vague. Like, what part of Swan Lake? Are you Odette or Odile?”

At this, Harrow’s expression becomes unreadable again. When she speaks, her voice drips with scorn.

“What do you think?”

And she begins to dance. It takes a second without the music, but Gideon recognizes the movements. Those are the steps from the pas de deux in the middle of Swan Lake, the one Gideon has always found hilarious. Here, Harrow plays the role of the seductress. See, it’s funny because Harrow couldn’t seduce someone if her life depended—oh wait. Yeah. The realization isn’t getting any less terrible over time.

Anyway, this is the bit where the evil swan seduces the hapless prince. At this point, assuming Gideon is the prince—which is an insane assumption, but when has Harrow ever not taken her for granted—Harrow is supposed to take Gideon’s hand now. So Gideon steps forward and takes Harrow’s hand. Her palm is warm and firm as a vice. Harrow uses Gideon like a barre for a few seconds, doing her tiny evil swan piqués, and then she pirouettes right into Gideon’s arms.

Gideon knows this part. Harrow is supposed to lean backwards over Gideon’s arm with her own fingers stretched to the floor. One slow, miserable afternoon last summer, they’d been practicing this one, and in an impulsive fit of irritation, Gideon had dropped Harrow before she could finish her elegant arch. She’d landed right on her ass, screaming in fury, and Aiglamene had made Gideon scrub all three toilets in the house until they were sparkling.

It had been worth it, though. Harrow had stolen her phone and read all her texts the day before, and one small hint of justice was all Gideon ever really needed.

Today, though, Harrow looks at her with a ferocious gleam in her eye that says not only does she remember last summer, but that she’ll kick out both Gideon’s kneecaps if she repeats it.

So Gideon dips her low, and Harrow’s spine arches in a perfect curve underneath Gideon’s palms, and Gideon can feel the release of breath, the clench of her ribcage around her lungs, and then Harrow’s bending back up, and it’s over.

She looks at Gideon for a moment, the rest of the pas de deux forgotten. They aren’t exactly dancing now. Harrow’s tongue slips out to wet her bottom lip, and Gideon, against her will, tracks the movement.

“Sleeping Beauty,” Harrow says.

And she starts to dance the pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty—the one with the deep arabesque where Gideon is supposed to hold her up. Once a couple of years ago, when Harrow’s face had approached her own and Gideon was feeling weird about it, she made a dirty joke and Harrow tripped on her own feet getting up. It made Gideon’s week.

And now—Harrow leans in. Gideon kneels, holding her around the waist. Harrow’s hands find her shoulders, and she bends so close that Gideon can feel her warm breath on her mouth. And they haven’t been this close since—no, nope, not happening! Harrow’s outstretched leg finds the ground again, her body rises away from Gideon’s, and then they’re moving into the next steps of the dance.

Only Harrow stops. She looks at Gideon. There’s a challenge in her eyes.

“Romeo and Juliet,” she says.

And Gideon doesn’t have to ask which part. She knows which part. They’d practiced it for hours one long dull morning when Ortus had been out with a head cold. This was before Gideon had discovered protein powder. In her defense, the fact that Harrow’s leg had gotten stuck hooked over her shoulder and they’d both nearly crumpled to the floor was half Harrow’s fault for being a useless collection of stick limbs.

Now, Harrow rushes towards her with all the self-assurance of someone who knows that this time, if she fails, she can blame it all on Gideon. So they won’t fail.

Gideon turns around, showing Harrow the back of her shoulder, and Harrow jumps for it, balancing for just a split second before Gideon’s hands find her armpits and lift her up behind Gideon’s back. Harrow does her arabesque or whatever the fuck she’s supposed to do while Gideon’s shoulders ache from the awkward angle, and then—this is the tricky part, Gideon pulls forward and Harrow’s sliding over her shoulder into a bridal carry.

Like this, she’s so light. Just a terrible little bundle of bones and bad intentions. Gideon almost doesn’t want to put her down, she’s so harmless. But then Harrow’s looking at her again, and her eyes are big and dark and it’s intolerable, actually, so Gideon deposits her on her feet again.

Gideon is breathing hard. Harrow is breathing hard.

“What’s next? Are you going to give me an actual challenge or are we going to play on easy mode the rest of the day, Nonagesimus?”

Harrow’s eyebrow ticks up. “Well, I suppose you aren’t completely useless,” she says coolly. “But you’ve been working with both arms. I’m still not convinced you can do anything one-handed.”

“Oh, I can do a lot of things one-handed, babe.”

Gideon could almost swear Harrow flushes, but she’s also tilting her jaw in the classic Harrow throw-down pose.

“Is that right, Griddle? Then show me.”

Gideon grins.

“Coppelia,” she says, just to be a dick. Harrow hates this one.

But there’s no time to think about the way she’d once hurled Harrow all the way over her shoulder (that one was an accident!), because Harrow is launching herself at Gideon without hesitation.

With one arm, Gideon lifts her to her shoulder. She’s rougher than she maybe has to be. Under the vice grip of her bicep, she feels Harrow’s tight little abdominal muscles clench in just the right way to keep her back arched, her toes pointed out behind Gideon’s head. Gideon doesn’t have to see it to know that the cross of her feet, one over the other, is perfect. Harrow never reaches for Gideon, and so Gideon doesn’t reach for Harrow with her other arm.

She counts to five. Her grip loosens as Harrow’s legs swing down, and then they’re standing way too close to each other again, and nope, nope, nope.

Gideon sees the same panic in Harrow’s depthless eyes.

“Manon,” Harrow says with the air of someone trying to pick a topic on a blind date.

“Fuck it,” Gideon says. “Go.”

Harrow knows the lift. She backs away from Gideon, then runs full force into her arms and jumps, letting her momentum and Gideon’s arm strength propel her upwards until Gideon’s arms wrap around her thighs. Hey, from this angle, Gideon’s face is right where it was when—no, absolutely not, not even time to think about that, because now their shared velocity is turning them around, Harrow upright in Gideon’s arms until—

Mid turn, right on schedule, her body releases its tension and goes limp, trusting Gideon to keep her from crashing down. Gideon reaches up, grabs her, lifts her back over her shoulders and into her arms. Then she lets Harrow’s weight guide them both to the ground, placing her hand behind Harrow’s head to shield it in a gesture that Harrow doesn’t deserve, because she’s an evil witch and the bane of Gideon’s life.

It’s part of the routine to shield her, to hold her close, to break down in false tears along her neck. To kiss her.

Harrow’s eyes are very wide as she looks up at Gideon. They’re supposed to be closed. This is the part where the protagonist dies. Maybe Harrow is playing almost dead, faking the heaving breath, the delayed blink of her lashes.

Shit, this is it. Gideon bends down—Harrow’s mouth is parted, and Gideon can see her small white teeth—fuck this. Fuck Harrow for this. She’s not kissing Harrow ever again.

She leans in further. She waits until her mouth is an inch from Harrow’s. Then she says seductively, “You actually passed out at this part one time, remember?”

For a second, she thinks Harrow’s going to snap up and bite her. The rage in Harrow’s eyes is priceless. Totally makes all of this worth it.

“Oh, bravo!” comes a voice from somewhere behind them. Gideon immediately rises up on her knees to look around. In front of her, Harrow flinches and scoots away from Gideon.

It’s Ianthe, because of course it is. She slinks in the dim, dusty corner of the studio like a particularly nasty spider, skanking it up in a leotard that barely covers her tits.

When Gideon looks back at Harrow (mistake number one!), she sees that Harrow’s face is flushed with embarrassment, mixed with the same old familiar fury. Well, what else is new? When Gideon looks at Aiglamene (mistake number two!), she sees her reluctant parent observing her with an eyebrow raised and arms crossed over her chest.

Ianthe claps obnoxiously.

“That was quite the performance. So, Harrow, are you still on for the party this weekend, or are you going to be busy swooning into Nav’s admittedly hunky arms? I noticed you couldn’t be bothered to show at the last one. But now I suppose I know why.”

Harrow scrambles to her feet, clenching her fists, nearly electrocuted with the force of her indignation and disgust. Gideon’s feeling fairly disgusted herself.

“I was not swooning, Tridentarius. That’s part of the routine—which you would know, if you ever practiced any routine besides that awful parody of Giselle.”

“It’s a reimagining. Giselle, through a modern lense. If I wanted to dance the same ancient moves forever—well, I’d be dancing with Nav instead.”

“Hey!” Gideon gives her the finger. “I never signed up for any of this. But at least I can lift Nonagesimus over my head. Can Naberius even get you off the floor?”

Ianthe shrugs. She pulls her scrunchie out, and her hair falls past her shoulders in a disgusting greasy swoop that is probably supposed to look hot and carefree. Instead, it just draws attention to her dandruff.

“Oh, Babs. Who cares about Babs? I’m the real draw here, obviously. The one in the revealing costume always is.”

She winks at Harrow. Gideon is abruptly done with this conversation.

“If you don’t need me,” she says, “I’m leaving. I think I’m done here.”

Harrow’s attention whips back around to her, knife-sharp.

“You’re done when I say.”

“Children, enough,” Aiglamene intervenes. “Surely you can sort the details of your social calendars later. Gideon, Harrow, you’re done for the day. It’s time for my next class. Considering what you’ve just showed me, it’s clear that you have the very small potential to be capable of working together. I suggest that your routine incorporate elements from a variety of ballets, so pick your favorite steps, and we’ll discuss them tomorrow. Is there anything else?”

She looks between Gideon and Harrow with an expression on her face that suggests there had better not be.

Gideon shakes her head. Beside her, Harrow looks at the floor.

“All right. Shoo. Out of my studio. Ianthe, I hope your partner will be along shortly. We’ve taken ‘one-woman show’ as far as it can be taken.”

Gideon doesn’t stick around to hear the rest of this conversation, although normally she would have loved to watch Ianthe get a good scolding. Right now, she just needs to get out of the house, maybe go get some terrible fast food and then see what Cam and Pal are doing. She’d text Dulcinea, but Dulcinea hasn’t been responding to her texts recently. That leaves Coronabeth—busy perfecting her own routine at the Second House, the teens (no thanks!)—and Harrow. Which no, obviously not, she’s trying to avoid spending time alone with Harrow.

She makes a beeline out of the studio, down the hallway, and out the front door, not waiting to see if Harrow’s going to follow her.

Two hours later, after a shit ton of curly fries and a chicken sandwich, as well as a trip to the gym, Gideon gets two texts.

One is from Harrow, and she opens it immediately to find a couple of links. Upon opening them, she discovers two different variations from Swan Lake. In one, a vicious black swan does fouettés. In the other, a prince leaps across the stage.

For our routine? Harrow’s typed underneath. Which makes Gideon feel kind of weird, so she ignores it in favor of opening the other message.

This message is from Ianthe, and it reads: Hey, Gullible, Harry isn’t responding to my texts, so let her know, the party is a fundraising event. Several lyctors are going to be there, if that sweetens the deal. And she’ll need a plus one, so tell her not to be coy. I can pick her up if she wants. I know she doesn’t drive.

Gideon feels a sense of satisfaction like she hasn’t felt since before this whole shitstorm began.

Get fucked, Coronabeth’s leftovers. She’s just not that into you.

And, send.

Gideon opens Harrow’s thread again and types a new message.

Hey babe miss me yet? A little cuckoo bird told me you need a plus one to the epic lyctor keg stand. You’ve got two choices—and let’s face it, it’s really only one. Name the time and place I am ready to get wasted

At this point, Gideon can feel herself starting to ramble and overthink her phrasing. She’s never been truly wasted in her life, and Harrow knows this. Well, who cares? Gideon hits send and then scrunches her eyes closed for the next thirty seconds to five minutes.

When she opens them, she has a single new text.

We will meet at the event. Do NOT wear themed socks, tank top, or cap.

And a second later,

You are not getting wasted.

Oh, Gideon’s definitely getting wasted.

xxx

Gideon’s getting completely wasted somewhere in the background, and Harrow knows she should be dealing with that. It pings in the back of her mind like a little constantly ringing bell—when Harrow is not aware of Gideon’s location, there’s always a tinny little alert in the back of her brain telling her that she should be.

Because she’s responsible for the whole thing. For Gideon’s whole presence in her life. She couldn’t let go, and so now Gideon is stuck here getting drunk at this garish, unbearable party with Ianthe, and if Harrow was a halfway decent person, she’d have turned her loose months ago and none of this would have happened.

Harrow feels a bit dizzy. She wants to drop to her knees, confess her sins.

Starting with Gideon and ending with Gideon’s mouth. And then moving on to all the other parts of Gideon that she’s ever stomped on or clawed at or ruined herself on.

She might be a bit drunk, or she might not. She keeps taking the tiniest sips possible from her glass in order to look busy.

If she can just—there was a reason she came. If she can just see Alecto for a single moment, all will be forgiven, she’s sure. Alecto will look at her with golden eyes and see into her soul the way she did the first time, and then all of this will be worth it. Harrow will know why she’s competing, why she’s trapping Gideon here. Why she has to be a Lyctor.

It will all make sense again, the moment she meets Alecto in the flesh for the second time.

And so Harrow winds her way through the party—past Coronabeth in the kitchen charming a group of sponsors, past Marta making brisk conversation with a pleasant-faced woman in green, past people she doesn’t know or doesn’t care about, evading the unwieldy clack of Ianthe’s ugly heels, not looking for Gideon, not thinking about Gideon, focused solely on the girl she sees in her dreams.

Harrow searches every dimly lit room for what feels like hours, though it may only be a few minutes. She takes more frantic sips of the probably-champagne in her hand, tries to look reasonable. Feels like a forest fire.

And then, in an alcove, just there! The girl in the shroud, the unburied woman from Harrow’s best memory, the tall lithe dancer Harrow’s longed to imitate since she was ten years old. Alecto is standing slightly apart from all of the other guests, except for a brave man with a round face who’s trying to offer her a biscuit. She seems to be nodding at random, not quite in time with anything he’s saying.

Harrow wishes he would disintegrate. She wishes she could move. Her whole body feels frozen to the spot as slowly, the woman’s head turns. And her eyes lock on Harrow’s.

And then, because for one shining moment, the universe loves Harrow, the woman smiles.

It’s the same as the first time she smiled at Harrow. It’s almost a weapon, that smile. It’s not like any other smile she’s ever seen, because when Alecto smiles at her, it’s not a smirk, it’s not full of laughter, it’s not patronizing or blandly polite. No, Alecto’s lips turn up ever so slightly in recognition and surprise. Harrow knows that Alecto remembers her. Eight years, but Alecto remembers. Harrow’s heart trips over itself. She can’t breathe.

Alecto brushes past the man, and Harrow nearly drops her glass of champagne, and steps forward despite herself.

“Harrowhark, is it?” that voice is saying. Harrow’s ears ring. “I’m Alecto,” the girl continues. “We may have met before. At least, I saw you once.”

“You saw me?” Harrow manages.

Alecto nods. She’s standing right in front of Harrow now. She smells of something either floral or acidic, and the perfect curve of her mouth twists up in concentration. She’s wearing a dress that belongs on the dead—nearly a nightgown, it’s so shapeless and pale and god, so sheer. Harrow catches a glimpse of slender, muscled thigh and has to look away.

“I watched you last year,” Alecto says. “I saw all the candidates for new Lyctors. But I thought you’d win.”

At this, her brow furrows, and Harrow instantly regrets everything she’s ever done. So Alecto doesn’t know her. Doesn’t remember the first time, only her recent failures.

“I—I tried to win.”

“I know. I thought it was sweet. No, that’s not the right word. You were…explosive, like a reactor—and John is so fond of reactors. You’re very lovely, just like I was when I started. Anastasia used to say that I'd broken out of my containment zone.”

“What?” Harrow can feel all the blood in her body rushing up to her cheeks. “I’m not—I’m nothing like you! I could never be. To watch you dance, it’s like watching a dream. One day, I can only hope to be a poor imitation.”

Alecto smiles again, though this time she looks wistful.

“I didn’t say it right. Sweet girl. That’s not what I meant at all.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to overstep, I—"

“You, overstep?” Alecto laughs, and there’s a joy in it that Harrow doesn’t know how to describe. “You wouldn’t know how, even if I told you. I didn’t know at first either. It was better, I think. You’re so…” she waves her hand vaguely in Harrow’s direction, as though expressing something so obvious words are no longer necessary.

“I don’t understand.”

“No. You wouldn’t yet.”

“You could explain.” Harrow feels a hint of irritation seep into her voice.

But Alecto just shakes her head, brow furrowing slightly in a gesture somehow both familiar and alien.

“I am explaining. Don’t become a Lyctor, Harrowhark. We have nothing for you.”

“What are you saying?”

But at that moment, a small whirlwind of pink fabric descends upon them. The woman wrapped up in it has a thin, Grecian face that is contorted in an expression of annoyance so pungent as to be lethal within three feet of her.

“Hello!” she announces, shrill enough to be easily heard over the violin music playing on the speakers. “Gremlin! What are you doing speaking to this child? I remember specifically telling you to stay put. Did I not say that? Were my exact words not ‘Alecto, stand still right over there like a good little statue while the adults tend to something very important?’”

She grabs Alecto by the arm and tugs. Nonplussed, Alecto looks down at the slender clawing fingers wrapped around her wrist. She does not try to escape the woman’s grasp, but neither does she move. She looks back at Harrow with an expression Harrow can’t read.

“Ugh!” the woman resorts to stamping her foot perilously near to Alecto’s big toe, with force enough to maim someone who wasn’t prepared. Alecto slides her foot gracefully out of the way. “I knew I should have made Augustine babysit. Now he’s busy flirting with that ugly bartender, as though it will do any good. Anyone would have to be five drinks in to make him tolerable.”

Harrow’s beginning to wish she was five drinks in, though she’s not sure she likes the feeling of being drunk. The room is starting to waver around the edges like a bad TV. Is the new woman’s hair a remarkably similar color to her dress, or is it the lighting, or is it the champagne? All of her looks like a sour little strawberries and cream drop from someone’s kitchen drawer.

“Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Alecto finally frees her wrist from the woman’s hand. “Joy, you can’t fix us all in place forever,” she remarks cheerfully. “I like to move. By now you should know that we leave when we choose.”

At this, the woman’s face does something complicated and unpleasant. Her eyes look like storm clouds on Mars.

“Don’t start.”

Alecto shrugs one beautiful pale shoulder, not looking at Harrow anymore. “I’m six feet from where I was at the beginning. Surely I can walk that distance, sister.”

Harrow, too confused by pondering how these two could possibly be sisters, too busy burning with curiosity to be ashamed of witnessing what clearly should have been a private conversation, too haunted and mortified by Alecto’s dismissal, isn’t prepared when the pink woman, Joy, turns to stare directly at her.

“The distance,” she hisses, “Is not the problem, you miscreant. What do you want with this twelve-year-old? Are you feeding her canapes? Are we running a charity for malnourished orphans now?”

At this, Harrow’s hackles rise. “Excuse me?” she begins, only to be interrupted by an arm slung around her shoulder. Instinctively, she flinches. She smells cheap wine and a miasma of bad apple-scented perfume, confirming her initial feeling of revulsion.

“There you are!” Ianthe drawls. She’s clearly had more to drink than Harrow. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Oh, I hope I didn’t interrupt anything?”

She glances between Joy, Alecto, and Harrow with no subtlety. She’s wearing a horrific sequined dress that dips nearly to her belly in the front, exposing miles and miles of sour milk skin and what looks like nearly every bone in her sternum.

“Yes, you did,” Harrow says. “I was complimenting—Alecto, on her technique. She dances with the Lyctors.”

Harrow tries to jab Ianthe hard in the ribcage without making it look like she’s jabbing Ianthe in the ribcage. Ianthe just raises one thin eyebrow.

“Her technique? Is that all? My apologies, Alecto…Mercymorn Oct, is it?”

The pink woman’s face twists up in horror. “It is not,” she says, without any additional explanation.

“Ianthe,” Harrow grits out, “Is there any purpose to this intrusion?”

Ianthe smiles slowly. “Oh, I am merely the messenger here. My sister tells me that your girl is throwing up in the bathroom. I simply thought you’d want to know. Count me as a helpful informant. I do live to serve.”

Harrow whirls around, nearly serving Ianthe with a fist to the gut. “My what?”

“Nav,” Ianthe unhelpfully specifies. “Your pas de deux partner. Your shadow in side-boob-baring tees. The hulking giant with the terrible one-liners. You know, Gi—”

“I know who Griddle is!”

“Well then, you should also know that she requested you specifically. I tried to help. But apparently, I wouldn’t do. I don’t hear that very often, and I’m excusing it only on the basis that we’re—” here she leaned harder into Harrow’s side, and the disgusting apple odor became even more repellant—“such close friends, and she’s your friend, so—”

“She’s none of your business, is what she is. Some of us are trying to have real conversations here.”

“Are you? From over here, it just looked like gawking. This is a rescue mission in more ways than one. How much have you had to drink, Harry, dear?”

Harrow flushes in absolute fury. She turns back to Alecto and the woman who is not Mercymorn Oct resolutely.

“I apologize for my…friend. She’s been very rude. A chronic condition, developed in the womb. I need to leave. A situation requires my presence.”

Mercymorn’s face twists in disgust, and she turns her back on Harrow, striding off so resolutely that she clearly expects Alecto to follow.

Alecto tilts her head to study Harrow for a long moment, completely ignoring that Ianthe exists. Finally, she shrugs.

“Then again,” she says, “Maybe you have something for him. Oh, you do look like Anastasia.”

And to Harrow’s shock and horror, Alecto leans down like she’s about to tell a secret, smiles, and kisses Harrow on the side of the temple, just where her hair has started to wisp in the humidity. For a moment, Harrow’s whole world is the sharp metallic tang of aging perfume, the flutter of sheer fabric, the feather-light press of lips. And then it’s over, and Alecto is looking at her again in something like nostalgia. After a moment, she nods and then trails off after Mercymorn, leaving Harrow speechless in her wake.

Ianthe nudges her in the ribs.

“Well,” she says with a great deal of emphasis. “Who knew looking like someone’s ex could get you into the Company. Well done, Harry. Never would have thought you had it in you, but I’m almost impressed. You know, I could help you practice for next time. I’m generous with my advice. Among other things.”

Harrow is barely listening to her. “Do shut up, Tridentarius,” she offers. It’s an all-purpose response that works for nearly everything Ianthe has ever said.

“God, you do play hard to get. I’m starting to understand the appeal.”

“Where is Nav? Wasn’t that the purpose of all this?” Harrow gestures to Ianthe in her entirety. “If you want to help me, show me where the bathroom is. This place is a maze. I would make a map for future generations, but I don’t have the time.”

Harrow can feel herself start to ramble with exhaustion and keyed-up anxiety at once.

Ianthe rolls her eyes, flips her hair over one bare shoulder, and grabs Harrow’s wrist. Harrow struggles in her grasp minutely before accepting that this is the type of party where one might get lost without a tether to reality. Harrow has found nearly all parties to be of this type.

“Follow me,” Ianthe says. “Remember that I cannot be held responsible for events which I’ve merely witnessed, and I have done nothing wrong, ever.”

Gideon is being massively sick in the bathroom. How Nav managed to inhale enough alcohol to be sick in so brief a period of time is beyond Harrow. To be fair, Harrow’s not exactly sure how long it’s been since the start of this interminable night. Gideon makes a few more disgusting noises into the toilet.

“And this is where I leave you. She’s all yours,” Ianthe says, patting Harrow on the shoulder in such a condescending manner that if Harrow’s attention hadn’t been mostly on figuring out whether Gideon was going to die or merely wake up with a headache in the morning, she would have ripped her arm from its socket. Ianthe glides away in a cloud of terrible perfume and glitter.

“Griddle?” Harrow asks cautiously.

Gideon’s head emerges. She’s sweating quite a lot, and her eyes are hazy, but when she sees Harrow, something about her sharpens.

“Harrow,” she says in disbelief. And then she says nothing more. She just stares at Harrow. Harrow can’t tell what her expression means. It’s got a lot of venom in it, but it’s watered down by surprise and drunk confusion. Her eyes are wide and golden and almost innocent, in spite of everything.

“Well, what do you want me to do? Have you had any water recently?” Harrow asks in disdain. She doesn’t want to come any closer.

“Yep!” Gideon says cheerfully. “That’s what that was.” She points to the toilet.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Ianthe said she’d get you. I told her. Hah. I said I didn’t think you could make it. You seemed—” here Gideon appears to lose her train of thought for a moment. “You were busy.”

“So you had every mixed drink in the building?”

Gideon shrugs one shoulder sluggishly. “I was bored. Think I’m done throwing up now, maybe.”

She gives the toilet an uncertain glance.

“Phenomenal.”

They sit in silence for a moment, Gideon on the tile floor and Harrow perched on the bathroom counter, which more than supports her weight. If Harrow focuses on pointing and unpointing her toes in her dress flats, she can avoid Gideon’s eyes and her whole obnoxious presence for a little while longer. She came to make sure that Gideon hadn’t died, and Gideon isn’t dead, so she’s done her job. Then again, Gideon is in no state to be driving home.

As if on cue, Gideon sighs and scoots over until she can rest her cheek against the wooden cabinet perilously close to where Harrow is sitting. Her breath smells atrocious.

“Hey Harrow, tell me something,” she mumbles. “While I’m here, tell me a story. That's what you’re supposed to do. Camilla said.”

Harrow nearly kicks her.

“I’m not going to tell you a story.”

“Then tell me something that happened to you while I was gone.”

“While you were drinking margaritas with Ianthe?”

Gideon gives no response. Harrow sighs. It's unlikely Gideon will even remember the details of this conversation later.

“I met Alecto again.”

“Hah. I saw. Was she nice?”

Harrow frowns. “She told me she didn’t want me in her company.”

“Dick.”

“She—I don’t think she meant to hurt me.”

“Well for someone who didn’t mean to hurt you, she sure found the one thing you care about and dug her weird little claws in. Maybe she can give me some tips. Can I sign up for tutoring? She could start a Youtube series: Fucking With Harrow, Part One of Two Hundred.”

Because Harrow’s patience is gone and her brain is running on backup power, she says, tonelessly, “You would know more about fucking me than she would.”

Gideon’s mouth opens and then closes again. It’s intensely satisfying, the way that taking Gideon aback is always satisfying, like a good stretch at the end of the day or a favorite sweater warm from the dryer.

Then she realizes what she’s said.

Gideon just looks up at her with wide golden eyes. Confusion and awe in Gideon are so closely tied together that you can hardly have one without the other.

“Shit,” Gideon finally says. “I thought we were just going to pretend that didn’t happen.”

“You can pretend all you like. I live in reality.” Harrow intends this to come out with quiet dignity, but her voice sounds unsteady.

“Yeah. I guess you do. I wasn’t doing a great job pretending, anyway. Don’t get me wrong, it was still better than this conversation we’re having right now.”

“You asked me to tell you something.”

Gideon huffs. “Yeah, I meant tell me something I don’t know. I know you want my p—”

Harrow does kick her, just barely, with the toe of the foot that’s closest to Gideon’s arm.

“Ow,” Gideon says, though otherwise she doesn’t react. “So was that a one-time thing or are you just constantly stopping yourself from boning me?”

“It is never happening again.”

“That’s what your mom said last time we spent the night together.”

Harrow gets down from the counter, not bothering to avoid brushing against Gideon’s knee as she does. She nudges Gideon again with her toe.

“You’re clearly coherent enough to walk. Get up, we’re going home.”

“Uh, Harrow? I’m not sure I’m good to drive.”

“I’m driving. Up.”

“You never drive. Do you even know how? Do your feet even reach the pedals?”

Harrow does not dignify this with a response. After several minutes of groaning and complaining and threatening to vomit on Harrow’s feet, Gideon finally obeys. She has to lean quite heavily on Harrow’s shoulder as they exit the bathroom. She still smells awful, and her body is warm as a furnace and twice as heavy.

Harrow desperately hopes she doesn’t run into anyone else she knows on the way out to the car. This whole night has been utterly humiliating, not that anything about Harrow’s life has been less than humiliating since she was forced to team up with Gideon. She should have taken Ortus to this function after all—if he even agreed to go out past nine.

They make their way out past all of the people at the party, who by now seem like a blur of faces Harrow knows she should recognize but doesn’t. They’re only stopped by a woman in green, maybe the same woman Marta was speaking with earlier? She looks tidy and she’s holding a glass of something clear, and, incongruously, a pencil. She approaches from the left, where Gideon’s bulk acts as a complete blinder to that side of the room, so Harrow doesn’t see her until it’s too late.

“Are you all right?” the woman asks, but her voice sounds far away, and Harrow, immune to this question from years of not being all right, pretends she hasn’t heard. She lugs Gideon out the door through force of will alone.

She navigates the porch, with its random angles and sharp steps, and makes her way out to the yard, which is so spacious that it seems more like a field. And in this field, careless of the grass, cars are parked so close to each other there’s barely space to slide between them.

Harrow could get through easily enough, but Nav continues to be worth less than her weight in stones off the side of the road.

Finally, she locates Nav’s car. It’s not actually that difficult, considering that it is the oldest, most bedraggled, and has by far the most stupid stickers—very few of them Aiglamene-approved. There’s neon green duct tape on one window to hold the pane in.

Harrow allows herself a sigh of relief to see something so homely in this field of sleek grey hybrids. When she was fifteen, Gideon had tried to spray paint red flames on the side of this car. To match her hair, she’d said. Aiglamene had grounded her for two weeks.

Gideon must feel Harrow’s minute movement, because she leans even further onto Harrow’s shoulder. Much more, and she’ll be slumping on top of Harrow completely. Her big hands keep clutching at different parts of Harrow for balance.

“Will you—stand up, Nav! I can't believe you were stupid enough to get drunk at a fundraising event.”

In frustration, Harrow shoves Gideon off her shoulder into the side of the car and presses her there with one palm against her sternum. Gideon keeps trying to tip forward, so Harrow uses her whole forearm to ram Gideon back against the car.

From this close, Gideon’s eyes glitter golden in the ridiculous twinkle lights someone’s strung from every available surface of the house.

“Oh, okay then,” says Gideon. She doesn’t look chastened, and she doesn’t look like she's going to stay put. Her tongue flits out to wet her bottom lip. She's gazing at Harrow drunkenly with an expression that, to Harrow's horror, she recognizes from her life's deepest regret.

Harrow uses the opportunity to frisk her for her keys, methodically searching each pocket. Gideon doesn’t say a word the whole time. She submits to having Harrow's fingers jammed in every nook and cranny of her outerwear. It isn’t as though they'd feel new and exciting.

Through the pockets of her “nice jacket,” which is really just a hoodie but black and with no rips, Harrow’s fingertips brush Gideon’s stomach.

The warmth leeches through the thin fabric. Harrow can feel the muscles shift and tense and--

“I’m not going to have sex with you against this car,” Harrow says, because it has to be said. “In case that's what you were thinking.”

“Well it is now,” Gideon says.

Her pupils are blown wide. She grins, and Harrow wants to knock it right off her face.

Instead, she slides her hand underneath the jacket to Gideon’s waist, and the breath Gideon lets out is nearly a gasp. Harrow finds the keys in their most obvious location—clipped to the belt loop of Gideon’s jeans. If Harrow’s knuckles linger at the zipper of the jeans longer than strictly necessary, it’s only to disarm Gideon so this next part will be easier.

“Shut up,” Harrow says belatedly. In fact, Gideon has been uncharacteristically quiet for the past few seconds. “Get in the passenger seat.”

“Anything you say, nightmare girl.”

And Gideon gets in the car.

To say the drive is tense would be an understatement. Harrow hasn’t willingly spent time with Gideon outside of practice since what she has started to refer to as The Event.

But the tension in Harrow’s shoulders as she clutches the wheel with white knuckles has little to do with Gideon’s oversized presence, her inability to stop fidgeting, or her wide golden eyes that keep looking at Harrow in open curiosity. Harrow is focusing very hard on making the pedal stay in one position, on looking at the speed limit, on searching the side of the road for any obstacles, on flinching every time a car drives around them with headlights that might as well be spotlighting the worst performance of her life.

“Are you like, good, my liege?” Gideon finally says, after the fifth car drives around them.

“I’m excellent. Thank you for asking.” Harrow grits her teeth minutely harder.

“Jesus christ. I should have done this.”

“And crashed us both into the nearest telephone pole because it had a stain that looked like a breast? Not likely,” Harrow snaps.

“I mean, you didn’t have to come with me. You could have just left me. Didn’t you take the bus?”

Harrow breaths in through her nose, out through her mouth.

“Believe it or not, I could not have left you.”

“Aw, Harrow, that’s—”

“I could not have left you,” she continues, “because your behavior reflects on me. If I want to win this competition, I cannot take the risk of isolating anyone connected with the Lyctors. Leaving you to die in their toilet would have seriously damaged my future liaisons with them.”

Gideon bristles. In the tense silence that follows, she puts her dirty boot up on the dash and slouches in so purposeful a manner that Harrow can only take it as she takes anything Gideon does—with full offense intended.

“Your ‘liaisons.’ Right. Well, don’t worry, I’m not planning on stopping you from fucking your way through the whole company, if you want. Seems like you got a pretty good head start tonight, I wouldn’t want to ruin it by, I don’t know, helping you achieve your lifelong goal of dancing with them.”

“From doing what? That is not—how dare you assume that I—”

“Assume? I don’t have to assume. I have eyes and a brain.”

“You most certainly do not. It’s clear that neither one of those faculties is connected to anything in your disgusting hovel of a body.”

“Not that disgusting, though, right? Don’t think I haven’t caught you watching me. You want me, bad. I’ll let you in on a secret: you could have had me. If you’d tried a little harder to act like a normal human being instead of an absolute psycho, you could have had all this”—Gideon gestures from her head to her toes—“whenever you wanted. But I’m in high demand. And you’re not. I get to choose if I stay or go, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Harrow feels a steely cold descend over her entire body.

“Nothing I can do? Nav, I’m driving us home. I could crash this car right now. Everyone would say it was an accident.”

The light overhead turns green. Harrow ignores it. Gideon meets her eyes for a long moment, fury shining out of each of her movements. The way her fists meet on her knee. The insolent angle of her jaw.

“Then crash it,” she says quietly, and it’s worse than if she’d raised her voice. “See if I give a single fuck. Nothing you do to me could be worse than spending the first eighteen years of my life with you, you dick.”

Harrow very nearly does crash the car. Gideon’s eyes are hard and unyielding, not a hint of forgiveness anywhere. Behind her, a car honks before driving around them. Something in Harrow’s chest pulls and pulls, straining to get away from the rest of her.

“Why are you even here?” she asks. She doesn’t know why she asks. Maybe because between them, there is nothing left to say.

Gideon’s fists don’t unclench, and her eyes don’t soften, and her posture doesn’t relax. But she takes one long, heaving breath, and Harrow knows somehow that the argument is over. She’s won without understanding how or why. It makes her stomach sick.

Gideon shrugs. “You asked me to be here, didn’t you? Or are you denying that one too?”

Harrow opens her mouth to say something, but she doesn’t know what, so she closes it again. She turns back to the road. Hardly anyone is out this late. Overhead, the light turns red, then green again.

“Harrow, I don’t feel good. You need to take a left up here.”

Harrow puts her foot on the gas pedal. She takes a left.

The house is still and silent when they stumble through the door. Aiglamene must be asleep, because she hasn’t bothered to leave any of the lights on. Through long practice, Harrow fumbles with the switch of the hallway lamp outside the studio door and it lights up. The corridor ahead is still shrouded in darkness.

Gideon continues to walk into it, towards the staircase to the upper floor. She no longer seems to need Harrow’s help to stand or to maneuver herself around. Harrow collects herself. She tries to remember if there are any taxis this late.

“Come on,” Gideon calls. “Bedroom’s this way.”

Harrow instantly flushes, to her own chagrin.

“I am not going to your bedroom!”

At this, Gideon turns around to give her a funny look, half annoyance, half something else.

“Sure you are. Where else do you think you’re going to sleep? Aiglamene’s first class is at eight. That’s…” Gideon seems to do some complicated math in her head, then shrugs and gives up. “Soon. Living room’s got tutus up to the tits everywhere, she’s doing some work for a client. Can’t sleep in the dressing room, can’t sleep in the living room.”

“I will find a taxi.”

“Too late. Harrow, that party went on for ages. And I thought I was never going to get out of that bathroom. It was like an alternate dimension or something.”

It’s the note of complaint that does Harrow in, more than Gideon’s casual carelessness, more than her willingness to forget that she and Harrow hate each other.

Harrow gives a tiny nod, avoids Gideon’s eyes, and follows her up the staircase.

She’s been in Gideon’s room numerous times over the years, and it’s changed little. Gideon doesn’t bother to turn on the lights, so Harrow can only witness the tacky posters, the stacks of magazines, and the workout equipment in the light from the streetlamp outside. But Harrow knows where to place her feet to avoid the squeakiest floorboards. She knows which posters to avert her eyes from most quickly.

And most of all, she knows how Gideon’s body fits into the space, knows exactly how she looks spread out on the bed without even having to glance her direction.

She clears her throat and pretends to examine a magazine on the tiny folding table next to Gideon’s tattered armchair. Of course, she can’t really see the title.

After a second, she hears Gideon scoff.

“You can look at me,” she says, yawning. “I won’t bite. Although, I noticed you didn’t have any complaints last time I did.”

“Shut up,” Harrow says automatically.

Her cheeks haven’t cooled since she stepped into the house. Since she took Gideon out of the bathroom at the party. Since a month ago when she kissed Gideon’s mouth.

“Oh, I’m going to feel this tomorrow. Is it too soon for me to have a hangover? I think I’m getting one.”

“We have practice tomorrow,” Harrow reminds her primly.

She hopes it makes Gideon absolutely miserable.

Gideon groans.

“The fuck we do. Get over here.”

She lies down, puts her whole arm over her eyes to block out the weak light coming through the miniblinds, and pats the spot next to her on the bed. It’s not a large bed. Harrow turns to the armchair, considering whether she can sleep on it. She can. She’ll have to. Or she just won’t sleep. That will be easier. She feels her muscles protest in advance, but what can she do?

“Harrow. I’m not going to ravish you. I’m not even going to look at you. I’m so miserable, I’ve forgotten what it even means to ravish anyone, and I’ve decided I’m going to resign myself to never having sex or drinking anything stronger than an iced tea again.”

“What? No you’re not.”

Harrow pokes one magazine off the top of the pile spitefully, and it flutters to the ground, landing open on a page with what is either tits or an ass. Harrow can’t tell from this angle. Her eyes are finally starting to adjust, though, which is terrible.

“No I’m not,” Gideon agrees. “Just come here.”

Harrow approaches cautiously, sitting on the very edge of the bed. Even from here, Gideon’s warmth leeches over to her corner. Somehow the whole bed is warm with her, even though she’s scraped herself over to the far side close to the wall. Harrow takes a shaky breath and lies down.

Gideon doesn’t move. After a few long minutes, Harrow thinks she must be asleep, though that’s an uncomfortable position to sleep in. Both her arms are flung out over her head now, and her T shirt has come untucked from her jeans. Harrow can see a long, golden-brown sliver of stomach and hip where the shirt has rucked up. Her eyes wander to it once, then twice by instinct alone.

Harrow was right the first time. She is never going to sleep again.

“Take a photograph,” Gideon mumbles. “Lasts longer.”

And she opens her cloudy eyes to regard Harrow in something like amusement. Harrow tries to summon her fury, and finds the well is empty. She’s exhausted her list of insults. She can do nothing but look back at the girl she’s fought against her whole life, the girl whose lips are now turning up ever so slightly at the corners.

“I have nothing left to say to you. Go to sleep.”

So Gideon huffs, turns her back to Harrow, and settles herself in the pillows like it’s any other night. Harrow turns her back to Gideon. After a moment, she feels something warm and soft cover her. Gideon has adjusted the blanket so it falls over Harrow too. Harrow’s fingers clench in the soft fabric, which smells of sweat and cheap shampoo and bad body spray and something earthier, like the ground after rain.

She loses time for a while.

Harrow must drift off, because soon enough, she sees Alecto standing in front of her. Slowly, so as not to startle Harrow, the girl walks forward. When she stands so close that Harrow’s breath disturbs the silk at her hip, Alecto bends down. Harrow thinks that she’s going to kiss her again on the forehead, but she doesn’t. Instead, she cups Harrow’s cheek in one cool, slender hand.

“Is this how it happens, then?” she asks. She looks over Harrow’s shoulder at Gideon. It’s strange that Gideon is there in the dream—as though Harrow couldn’t manage to forget the nearness of her body. She’s sprawled on her back again with one arm flung over her head. Ridiculous. Her hair lies in unruly red tufts at the top, and her mouth hangs open for no reason at all. Her lips are chapped.

“No,” Harrow finds herself saying. “No, it’s not.”

But she’s already drifting back into the warmth of the bed, watching Gideon’s chest rise and fall, envying the emptiness of her brain that must lead to such an untroubled sleep.

When Harrow looks back, Alecto isn’t there anymore. Harrow closes her eyes, and she doesn’t dream of anything at all for the rest of the night.

Chapter Text

When Gideon emerges from blissful unconsciousness, the first thing she notices is that her head hurts, and her body feels weirdly heavy. She forces her eyes open. The second thing she notices is that she’s late for practice. The light is way too bright for early morning, isn’t it? Or is her headache just telling her it is?

The third thing—oh shit. The reason her right leg and arm won’t move is that Harrow is lying directly on top of them. And the reason Gideon’s belly feels warm is that Harrow’s knobby spine is pressed right up against it, her skin warm as a little heater, her ass against Gideon’s hips.

Oh shit. Shit, shit, shit.

The shot of adrenaline that jabs straight into Gideon’s brain nearly erases the headache, but for some awful reason, her body has decided to play dead. As though maybe, if she lies still enough, Harrow won’t notice she’s alive. Maybe she won’t sink her claws in this time. Maybe everything will turn out all right.

So Gideon just lies there, counting to ten, remembering the events of the previous night. Why had she thought it was a good idea to hang out with Ianthe, again? Maybe because Harrow had been busy and she’d been bored out of her mind.

But after that…Harrow had come to find her. Harrow had dragged her out of the terrible bathroom, put her in the car.

Harrow had driven her home even though she’d been shaking with anxiety the whole time.

And now, Harrow’s so still, just the slightest movement of her ribs to indicate breathing. To Gideon’s dismay, she finds that her own hand cups Harrow’s left hip—nearly the whole thing, it’s so small. A sense memory of putting her mouth on that hip floods her mind, and her fingers twitch in response.

Harrow breathes in sharply.

“Gideon?”

Gideon’s body turns to stone.

“Yeah?” her voice actually cracks, like she’s Isaac a year ago. She can’t stop her whole-body cringe, which just shifts her even closer to Harrow’s ass, and she thinks she’s going to have a breakdown, here and now.

“Gideon,” Harrow says slowly. “You’re awake. Good.”

“No it’s not!” Gideon tries to hold back a laugh she knows would come out hysterical.

She can feel the moment Harrow stiffens.

“I meant, now that you’re awake, you can release me.”

Release her. That’s a great idea. Why hadn’t Gideon done that sooner—like, say, the instant she realized she was fondling Harrow’s hipbone?

Harrow’s blouse has ridden up, and in a desperate bid to stop feeling Harrow’s bare skin against her fingers, Gideon moves the only direction she can think to move in an undersized twin bed—up on her hands and knees above Harrow.

Oh, this was a mistake. For one thing, a shot of pain lances through her skull when she moves her head in any direction. For another thing, now that she’s awake and sober and there’s daylight streaming through her window, she can see all the little details about Harrow that she didn’t notice last night. The way her black jeans hug her thighs. The dip of her dark blouse at the neckline—lower than anything she usually wears, exposing the smooth skin of her neck and collarbone. The obsidian black wisps of hair that stick to her temple and frame her features. Her dark lashes and severe forehead and the arch of her eyebrows as she stares back up at Gideon.

Shit.

“Nav?” Harrow glances at Gideon’s arms, which have conveniently landed on either side of her, boxing her in. Harrow’s legs shift minutely, and it hits Gideon that she’s gone and stuck her knee right between them, inches away from—nope!

Gideon’s panic overwhelms her for a moment.

“Shut up,” she says, although Harrow isn’t saying anything. “You know this wouldn’t have happened except that I was off my tits drunk.”

Harrow’s expression freezes. It almost seems like she’s feeling the same endless void of terror—but then, predictably, her eyebrows draw down and she scoffs.

“Well, I apologize for overstepping your boundaries,” she says acerbically, “after you asked me—twice—to get in bed with you.”

“I never—”

“Oh, but you did, Griddle. Let me remind you. You said, and I quote, ‘get over here.’ ‘Here,’ in this instance referring to the location of your bed.”

Gideon sighs in frustration, feeling her whole body tighten with the pain of dealing with Harrow this early in the morning.

“I know that, dickhead. I remember that part.”

“Oh?” Harrow’s face is the picture of innocent curiosity, and Gideon’s anger starts to burn low in her belly.

Harrow readjusts herself in the sheets until she’s perfectly arranged for arrogance. Unfortunately, this brings the crotch of her jeans just about level with Gideon’s knee, a fact Gideon is heroically trying to ignore.

“Then what part confuses you?” Harrow continues. “The part where you disgraced me in front of the Lyctors or the part where you all but begged me to stay with you?”

Gideon’s fists clench in the sheets.

“The part where I keep doing you favors, and you keep throwing them back in my face! The part where I take you to a party, and you spend the whole time gaping at some milf like maybe she can fix your damage. The part where every time I think I can deal with you, like maybe things are getting better, you immediately grow a new set of teeth to sink right into me. The part where you’re an evil, desperate bitch!”

A noise comes out of Harrow’s throat that is not quite a curse. Her eyes blaze in fury. And, more importantly, her thighs tense on either side of Gideon’s leg.

“If you think you’re doing me any favors, you must have squandered more brain cells last night than I assumed. I don’t need you specifically, Gideon. You were convenient. I’d rather have had almost anyone else.”

Gideon sees red. She intends to throw a list of Harrow’s sins in her face, beginning at birth and continuing from there, to give her an epic comeback the length and thoroughness and sheer power of which will be noted in the Guinness Book of World Records.

But that’s not what she says. What she says is:

“If you don’t need me, then why are you humping my leg?”

Harrow’s mouth opens in shock, but nothing comes out. She looks down at Gideon’s knee between her thighs, and her flush extends from the dip of her neck all the way up to her ears. And her hips twitch, ever so slightly.

“I am not humping your—oh—”

She breaks off as Gideon’s leg moves an inch forward. It sounds like she’s got the wind knocked out of her. Her mouth opens in a perfect round shape that melts Gideon’s insides.

For a second, Gideon’s brain goes completely blank. She can think of nothing aside from the tiny breathless noise Harrow just made.

And now—now Harrow’s hips really are shifting against Gideon’s leg, the heat of her scorching even through layers of denim. Harrow’s eyes are huge and dazed, as though the endless clockwork gears of her brain have suddenly stopped turning, leaving her devoid of anything except the same old burning intensity, the one that threatens to devour Gideon whole.

And then it hits Gideon—she could have Harrow. She sees the next fifteen minutes in dazzling color and surround-sound. Harrow on her back underneath Gideon, gasping her name. Harrow coming on Gideon’s thigh with a choked-off moan, begging for her fingers, her mouth. It makes Gideon dizzy. She could have Harrow right now.

Harrow could have her.

Fuck.

Gideon sits back, away from the riptide of Harrow’s perfect little thighs and her soft mouth and her endless clawing want—not for Gideon, necessarily. For anyone. For that random icy bitch at the party. Maybe even for Ianthe.

For control. For the chance to take another part of Gideon. Has Harrow ever done anything in her life without an angle?

The lingering nausea from last night briefly overwhelms Gideon.

Now, Harrow’s squirming back too, as far away from Gideon as she can get, a look of confusion spreading across her face. Maybe even hurt?

No, Gideon is definitely imagining that. If Harrow had a soul, maybe she would hurt with it, but Harrow has a pit in the center of her heart as deep and dark as a tomb. It would be stupid to mistake that for a cozy nest and burrow in.

“Sorry,” Gideon says.

And the worst part is, she thinks she means it.

Harrow doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she straightens her spine, adjusts the hem of her blouse, and clears her throat.

“For what?” she asks coolly.

She gets off Gideon’s bed, goes to the shitty cracked mirror above Gideon’s dresser, and begins to arrange her hair. She spends a long time combing through it with her fingers, then parts it methodically so it sits at the right angle. Gideon doesn’t know why she bothers. Usually, she walks into the studio with bags under her eyes and hair like she’s just blown in from the wreckage of the Titanic.

“For making you late for class?”

Harrow’s shoulders tense.

“It isn’t a problem. I’ll let Aiglamene know you were too sick to attend, and I decided that nothing worthwhile would have happened today.” Through the thin fabric of the blouse, Gideon can see the angles of her shoulder blades, twin wings hunched for defense. “You should clean yourself up,” Harrow adds. “You’re disgusting.”

With that, she slides on her shoes, retrieves her phone and wallet from Gideon’s nightstand, and sweeps out of the room, letting the door slam shut behind her.

Gideon falls back on the bed, feeling like absolute shit. Her head aches and aches and aches.

xxx

To say that the next few practices go badly would be an exaggeration. Gideon knows exactly what it’s like when something goes badly. Having sex with your worst enemy is something that happens, when things go badly. When things go badly, you might agree to help that enemy achieve her ultimate goal. Or you might have a weird heart-to-heart at a party with her, ask her to go to bed with you, and then wake up and get halfway to letting her rub one out on you before realizing it’s a terrible fucking idea.

That’s just a small selection from Gideon’s life of the ways that things can go badly, and none of these things happens during the course of the next few practices.

Practice one: Harrow won’t make eye contact. She communicates in terse, one-word sentences, touching Gideon with all the enthusiasm of a zoo handler dropping off a small rodent for the local rattlesnake to eat.

Aiglamene helps them put together a routine, though her role is more mediator than guide. Harrow insists on fouettés even though her tiny little twig ankle is giving her obvious problems. Gideon suggests that Harrow take her hand during the fouettes and is shot down immediately.

Gideon wants leaps, and Aiglamene gives her leaps. Neither one of them wants to do the lifts, but they do the lifts until Gideon’s arms are sore.

Gideon’s too hot and sweaty and annoyed to tease Harrow for shuddering the first time Gideon’s arms wrap around her middle.

Probably a shudder of revulsion. Since apparently, Harrow doesn’t need her in particular. Probably any muscular redhead with abs of steel would have gotten her motor running. Actually, the redhead bit is clearly optional, since she and Ianthe have been so cozy throughout the week.

“Nav, any input?” Aiglamene barks, and Gideon realizes she’s been staring forlornly at her own figure in the mirror. She’s wearing grey sweats and a grey tank today, which is a pretty good indication of her mood. She looks like a storm cloud on the horizon, glum and useless.

Harrow, of course, only wears one color, so Gideon can’t decode the hidden message there. There isn’t a hidden message. Or the message is that this whole ordeal is going to suck massive balls the entire time, if Harrow has anything to do with it.

Practice two: they’ve decided on a theme. Spoilers: they’ll be wearing all black. Gideon complains loudly about this until Harrow asks if she’d rather wear a tutu, and Aiglamene surreptitiously pulls up their costume budget and points out that Gideon already owns a black T-shirt, at which point, Gideon admits defeat.

She doesn’t bother mentioning that the T-shirt in question says save the planet, ride a dyke and she’s been turning it inside out for practice.

They keep all the hardest lifts, though Harrow scowls at her the moment they come into physical contact. The energy is not improving. The energy is rancid. The studio resonates with the very obvious hard feelings of two people who definitely, noticeably, have fucked each other and regret it.

After practice, Aiglamene pulls Gideon aside. Harrow follows her, but Aiglamene shoos her away. Looking abashed, Harrow retreats behind the door, but Gideon knows Harrow is listening in on her. That’s the way of the world.

Gideon refuses to look at Aiglamene. Instead, she pulls her arms into various stretches, exaggerating how sore her shoulders are from the lifts. In reality, lifting Harrow isn’t much harder than picking up a cat by the scruff of the neck, if that cat fucking hated you and didn’t want to be picked up.

“Gideon,” Aiglamene starts. Bad sign right off the bat.

“That’s my name!” Gideon says cheerfully. She knows she’s being obnoxious, but she can’t stop. It’s her whole deal from birth.

Aiglamene scowls.

“I know that you can do the steps of this routine. Your skill as a dancer isn’t being called into question here.”

“Really? Because it seems like that’s all anyone is complaining about recently.”

“Don’t get on your high horse. We both know your ability isn’t the issue. Neither is Harrow’s.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

Aiglamene sighs, massaging the place just above her knee. She sits down on her stool and looks Gideon straight in the eyes.

“What’s going on with the two of you?”

Gideon opens her mouth to protest, but Aiglamene holds up a hand.

“I don’t mean personally. I know you’ve had your disagreements. But you’ve always been able to work together.”

“Not true! She’s never worked with me a single time in her life. And I once tied her pointe shoe ribbons together in a knot so tight she had to cut them loose and sew new ones on, and then she was late for class.”

The very corner of Aiglamene’s mouth tips up, but she glances at the door.

“I’d caution you against admitting your guilt here.”

“Fine. But I’m just saying, our synergy has never been great. The morale is low. I’d describe our relationship as a seesaw where one side is a pool of stingrays, and the other side is a hive of killer wasps. Then there’s a third side that’s just, a humongous pile of dog shit from the biggest dog you’ve ever seen. Hell, we’re defying the laws of physics here.”

Aiglamene looks disgusted, tired, and vaguely amused. These are the three most common expressions Gideon typically produces in Aiglamene, so it’s difficult for Gideon to decide if she needs to end this conversation immediately or yesterday. In the end, Aiglamene just nods.

“And all of that is what I’d expect to see. I wouldn’t be worried if you were fighting. Hell, when you two were going at it the other week, it was one of the best performances I’ve seen in years.”

Gideon’s brain freezes on going at it, but Aiglamene moves on.

“You can win this thing fighting. You can win, and then you can leave. But what I’m seeing now worries me. You clearly aren’t communicating.”

“Yeah, and whose fault is that?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” says Aiglamene. “I’ve raised you both. No, don’t interrupt, I’ve seen you go from pulling each other’s pigtails to whatever you had going on a month ago. All I’m saying is, if you want to win, if you want to leave, then do this for me. Speak to her about whatever it is, work out your differences, and then do whatever you need to do to show me what you showed me that first time. You’re a good dancer. A good athlete,” she corrects, after seeing the face Gideon makes. “I’d like to think some of that is my doing, but some of it is just you. Don’t throw it away because she’s insulted you. I know what it’s like. A girl gets in your head, and it’s hard to focus.”

Gideon can feel the tips of her ears burning. She decides to ignore her embarrassment and brute force her way through the rest of the conversation.

“Oh, Aiglamene, you didn’t tell me you were having girl problems! You should have come to me—I’ve got loads of experience.”

Aiglamene raises an eyebrow.

“Some experience,” Gideon amends.

“Be that as it may. I know I’ve asked a lot of you. I know you’re putting your plans on hold for this—for the Ninth, for Harrow.”

“For you,” Gideon corrects. “I wouldn’t have done it for her.”

Aiglamene gets an expression that’s hard to interpret. It seems like she’s apprehensive, which, ouch, not the exact reaction Gideon was hoping for when she offered up her massive biceps and her college scholarship to save Aiglamene’s studio from bankruptcy, but Gideon decides not to think about it.

“She was the one who asked,” Aiglame says quietly.

Gideon wants to dispute this. Gideon has a whole list of reasons that she’d never do anything for Harrow if Harrow was the last girl alive, and she’d fight all the demons of hell for Aiglamene with only a little whining first. But then Aiglamene stands up, wincing a little at the pressure on her knee, and puts her hand on Gideon’s shoulder.

It’s a bit awkward. Aiglamene’s never been one for physical affection, even when Gideon was a kid. It feels like Aiglamene maybe doesn’t know how to clap someone on the shoulder, like it’s a complicated process that she has to focus on to get right. Nothing like Gideon’s old soccer buddies, who were always gripping her arm, patting her head, leaning against her before a game. Easy contact, meaningless.

But this isn’t meaningless.

Aiglamene looks Gideon in the eyes. She has to look up.

“I wouldn’t have let her ask if I didn’t think you could handle it.”

At this point, Gideon glances away before she has one whole feeling. Her heart swells with a sort of tired pride, the pride of having Aiglamene approve of her, even a little.

“So handle it,” Aiglamene continues. She pats Gideon once, brusquely on the shoulder. “All right, get out of here, Nav. I have Tridentarius next, and I think I need a drink first.”

She reaches over to the stand next to her stool, grabbing a tumbler with mysterious contents and taking a long swig. Gideon stifles a laugh.

“Can I have some?”

“No! Shoo!” She waves Gideon away, and reluctantly, Gideon heads for the door, where she knows Harrow will be waiting for her like the itsy bitsy spider, creeping around in corners spying on Gideon’s conversations.

But when Gideon opens the door, Harrow is nowhere in sight. The hallway is as empty as if she’d never been there at all.

Later, at the gym, she opens up a text message.

Hey, Nonagesimus, Aiglamene thinks we aren’t communicating. Bet you’d like to be communicating with these guns right now

She flexes for the mirror, snaps a picture, and sends it instantly, before she can think better of it.

No response. She sets a timer for five minutes. Does some sit-ups. Checks her phone again. No response.

Finally, after Gideon has gone home, showered, and eaten, she checks one last time. Nothing. No response the rest of the night.

Gideon tosses her phone on top of her pile of clean laundry, throws herself on the bed, and forces herself into a restless sleep.

xxx

Gideon keeps thinking about the party.

She thinks of Harrow telling her half-heartedly to stay put, then disappearing into the swirl of bodies, all in different gowns. One speck of perfect black in a storm of multicolored silk.

Another instance in which Gideon honestly did her best. She stood against the wall and watched people talk. For a while, Camilla popped in, and this cheered Gideon up immensely until she realized Cam was going to spend the whole time talking to some tall, handsome, broad-shouldered woman Gideon had never met before but who she’d honestly have liked to get some workout tips from under different circumstances.

Gideon had been trying to figure out what Cam’s type was for a while, and she had to say, she’d never exactly thought it would be sturdy butch women, mostly because she’d never caught Cam checking her out at the gym—not even a little!

The tall woman stepped in even closer to Cam with a confident grin, and Gideon abruptly became tired of watching other people get laid.

It was at this point that Ianthe appeared in her usual cloud of smoke to offer Gideon a beverage of mysterious contents.

And Gideon didn’t even disobey Harrow’s instructions then! It was only when Ianthe kept pestering her, and Gideon asked if she could hang out with the upgrade instead of version 1.0 and then Ianthe said that was a great idea and surely Harrow wouldn’t mind if they just went to see Coronabeth—it was only then that Gideon broke.

In the end, they didn’t meet up with Coronabeth. Gideon only beheld her from a distance, draped over Judith’s shoulder in a dress that made her look simultaneously like a princess waiting to be awakened from slumber and a knight on her way to save the princess. But despite Gideon’s protests, Ianthe took her in the opposite direction.

In the end, they found a storage closet and snuck more and more beverages in there until they were both massively drunk and Ianthe set her feet in Gideon’s lap to complain about her sister, then about Harrow.

At which point, Gideon decided the room was spinning way too quickly, and she needed to leave.

At which point, after emerging from the closet and stumbling around for a while feeling dreadful, she had to rest in an alcove. And across the room, under a spray of fake greenery, she saw Harrow gazing at some icy Lyctor bitch like she was her one true love.

In the old days–before Gideon had fucked Harrow, but long, long after she’d decided Harrow was the bane of her existence–Gideon had once hacked Harrow’s youtube account to see what kind of blackmail was in there. She’d come across Harrow’s saved videos: about one hundred different dances with the same lean, perfect girl. Sometimes blonde, sometimes a brunette, but there was always this look in her eyes like she wasn’t really there.

Like her body was dancing, but her brain was comprehending mysteries too deep for this mortal plane. Or like she didn’t have a brain at all. It was anyone’s guess.

Her muscles were toned just enough, skin just pink enough to suggest she might be alive, but there was something weirdly sterile and plastic about her all the same. When she danced, her body went through the movements with a technical perfection, even a certain appealing airiness. But her heart wasn’t in it, and it was obvious.

Gideon wasn’t sure what Harrow saw in her. Inspiration? Was she her type? Both?

Harrow could outdance this weirdo in a heartbeat. This look into Harrow’s psyche had left Gideon baffled.

So when Gideon saw this same stranger, this completely random plastic Lyctor nobody lean in and kiss Harrow on the forehead, she almost stumbled forward and put an end to it. Who was this fool to assume Harrow wanted to be kissed?

Harrow was particular about touch, always had been, and unless she was kicking Gideon’s ass, she typically found ways to avoid it. And here was this bitch just leaning right in like Harrow belonged to her!

The only thing that stopped Gideon from confronting her then and there was Ianthe's grabby hand on her arm.

“Bathroom’s this way,” she said with an unnatural amount of glee.

Then Gideon spent some time in the bathroom.

At one point, two very snippy people came up outside the door, and Gideon thought for sure she was busted. One tried the handle, then swore, then the other swore, and then Gideon heard snatches of conversation—

Long are they going to be in there—

Did you see A, she practically went against his—

No, it’s not a problem for us, she’s a distraction if anything—

Well for all you know she’s onto something!

A, onto something? Ha!

Idiot, you always make these assumptions and you’re never right, never, not once—

I’m going to the second floor, must be one of the kids who’s never had anything to drink—

Told John he’d better not invite anyone under twenty-five but does he ever listen, no he—

The conversation receded, leaving Gideon to heave a sigh of relief, then heave the rest of her dinner into the toilet. Overall, it was a shitty night! Started poorly, ended poorly, led to poor choices.

These thoughts keep her occupied throughout the next few days. Although Gideon’s body attends practice, her brain elects to stay at home. It’s not that she doesn’t try to focus. She doesn’t even consider dropping Harrow once. She’s on her best behavior for Aiglamene, agreeing with a solid sixty percent of the things that come out of Harrow’s perpetually scowling mouth.

Her body moves through the lifts, and her mouth says things like “sure,” “whatever,” and “that’s what your mom said to me last night.” But her heart isn’t in it.

Harrow barely even looks at her the whole time.

And the weeks leading up to the first competition continue in this way. Gradually, she and Harrow perfect a routine that is technically challenging, caters to both of their strengths, allows them to work around each other perfectly—and is fucking boring. If anyone else was doing these lifts, Gideon would be impressed with the coordination and the sheer amount of upper body strength. She might admire the fouettés from afar. But it’s her. And it’s Harrow. And they’re not going to win with this.

The day before they’re scheduled to leave for the competition, she texts Harrow one more time.

Would it help if I rubbed your calves for you? You seem tense

She doesn’t expect a response. Really, she doesn’t know why she tries anymore. Harrow is paying her about the same amount of attention she pays the lumps of rosin in the corner of the studio.

Gideon thinks about the way she crushes them with the tip of her toe shoe—methodical, precise, a little too aggressive. The crunch of Harrow crushing something else underfoot.

When Gideon’s phone chimes, she nearly topples the pile of old magazines on her dresser trying to get to it.

Harrow has typed:

No.

Gideon lets out a grunt of frustration. It’s like pulling teeth with this bitch.

What do I have to do to get you to tell me what the fuck your problem is this month

Harrow texts back exactly five minutes later.

Nothing, because there’s no problem. Mind your own business, Nav.

Which is a joke. Harrow’s business has always been Gideon’s business too. She made it Gideon’s business. Before a few months ago, Harrow always stopped to rub every single one of her victories in Gideon’s face. And now she decides to clam up?

A few seconds later, the typing bubble appears. Gideon feels a new flutter of irritation in her gut.

And get some sleep. We leave early tomorrow.

Gideon grins.

Aw, worried about me? When’s the last time you slept, anyway? Pot, kettle

Harrow doesn’t respond.

xxx

The competition isn’t far away, just a forty-five minute drive, but Aiglamene rents a horrible mauve colored minivan so they can all go in one vehicle. Gideon tries to convince Aiglamene that she should be the one driving, but Aiglamene refuses.

In the middle of this argument, Ianthe appears with her stage makeup already on at 6 AM and tries to claim a spot next to Harrow in the back seat, which is completely ridiculous—she’ll try to do Harrow’s makeup too, and Harrow will murder her, and then these past months will have been for nothing.

By the time the resulting spat cools, Ortus has claimed the front seat with a notebook of free verse in his hands, promising to entertain Aiglamene as she drives. Gideon immediately retreats to the back seat, far away from the oncoming poetics.

Harrow glares at her but says nothing. Well, it is 6 AM. Gideon’s not feeling amazing herself. She couldn’t sleep much last night, so she’s restless and her entire soul feels like an itch. If only she could wake herself up with a run. But all she has is a little goth gremlin to irritate.

In the seat in front of them, Babs is talking loudly on the phone to someone who is either his boyfriend or his personal assistant, and the teens are braiding each other’s hair.

By the halfway point of the drive, Gideon has tried three times to get Harrow’s attention, but Harrow continues to ignore her, staring out the window in silence. Fine. It’s not like going over their routine any more would even help. Let Harrow be this way—it won’t be Gideon’s fault when they don’t make it through round one because someone’s being a baby about the whole thing.

They arrive at the competition site, a multi story brick auditorium venue that would have been stylish fifty years ago, and navigate a series of winding hallways until they get to the dressing rooms for the competition. There, a pleasant woman wearing green tells them the rooms are first come, first serve.

“You’re free to room with us, if you can’t find anywhere unoccupied,” the woman tells Gideon cheerfully. “Magnus is out getting breakfast—he should be back in a few minutes, and there’s plenty of extra food.”

Gideon, feeling bashful from the attention, nods stupidly and tries to seem friendly, while scanning the area for any sign of Cam and Pal. They’ve been kind of preoccupied since the party for some reason, and Gideon wants to ask Cam if she’ll go on a run with her tomorrow.

“Wow, breakfast sounds great! I’d love to take you up on that, but I was just going to find some of my friends. Maybe later?”

“Of course.”

The woman smiles. She has a kind, dimpled smile and keen brown eyes behind a pair of glasses that give her the look of an owlish academic. She’s wearing some type of medieval-style garb, like a queen from one of Ortus’s poems.

Gideon vaguely recognizes her from the Lyctor party, but she was pretty drunk at the time. She hopes she didn’t say anything stupid to her.

“I like your costume,” she blurts out, trying to correct for any bad impression drunk-Gideon may or may not have made.

“Oh, thank you, dear. It’s just something we pulled together out of last year’s ren faire leftovers. We thought we’d go for an Arthurian take this time. Magnus has a real fondness for that kind of thing, taught it for several years. And you’re competing for the Ninth House? How is Harrowhark? I knew her parents back when—”

An arm shoots out to clamp around Gideon’s wrist, and Gideon jumps at the sudden contact.

“Griddle,” Harrow hisses. “What are you doing?”

“Socializing? We’re not on until noon. I was trying to find Cam.”

“This way.”

Harrow tugs on Gideon’s arm with surprising grip strength.

Gideon scowls, but waves goodbye to the woman.

“Uh, it was nice to meet you…”

“Abigail,” the woman says. “Abigail Pent.”

“Abigail.” Gideon smiles in a way she hopes doesn’t look too forced. “I’m Gideon. I’ll see you around, I guess.”

“Stop by any time—Magnus and I are on at one.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“You most certainly will not,” Harrow insists, dragging her down the hallway and around a corner until they reach what is surely the dimmest, most decrepit dressing room in the entire hall. Lit solely by the lights around the mirror, and containing a dressing table, a folding chair, and the world’s tiniest, most moth-eaten couch, this room certainly fits Harrow’s aesthetic.

“Come on, Nonagesimus, you couldn’t have let me stay to get breakfast? She was offering free food. She was really nice, too.”

“She was suspicious, more like.”

“Of course you would think that. Suspicious of what? That we suck? That our costumes are thrift store bullshit and our routine is about to put everyone to sleep?”

Harrow rounds on her, sticking a finger in Gideon’s face.

“She was at the party. She’s connected to the Lyctors. I’ve seen her husband dance—he’s mediocre at best. They’re not here to win, so why are they here? They must be part of the organization. They’re scoping us out, Griddle.”

Gideon laughs in her face.

“Scoping us out? As if we’ve got anything worth scoping! You’re a muppet-sized bundle of doom and I’m your dumb henchman. Seriously, you are such a bitch sometimes. Let’s say they are Lyctors. We need to make a good impression on them—which I was doing. You were the one who dragged me away from a perfectly normal conversation, making us both look like spiteful losers.”

“Perfectly normal conversation? Gideon, you were acting like a fool. Why is it that every time a woman so much as glances your direction your brain immediately melts out of your stupid ears entirely?”

“Okay, wow, that is not what was going on there. Anyway, you’re one to talk! I saw you macking on that weird plastic bimbo at the party. I know what you’re into—and you’re no better than me at talking to women, that’s for sure.”

Harrow’s cheeks darken. Her hair has grown out just enough to make her look like she’s stuck her finger into an electric socket, but not enough to pull back without the aid of a million little bobby pins. Gideon wonders how she’s planning to wrangle that for the competition.

“Don’t you dare bring Alecto into this. I am sick of hearing about the party.”

“Well, sucks for you, because you were the one who brought this on yourself. Full subscription to the Gideon Nav Times, offer valid until this whole thing is over, and let me tell you, I have some free articles to send to your inbox at the moment.”

“What are you ever even saying?”

“Okay, not the point. The point is that you can’t tell me not to talk to women and then go kiss whoever you want. That’s insane behavior. You’re making this weird. I fucked you once, and now—”

“Shut up,” Harrow says, with such ferocity that Gideon shuts up before she can think about it.

Harrow points one black-tipped finger to the couch.

“You,” she says furiously, “are going to sit right there until I get back. No movement. No speaking to our competition. Stay right there, and if I hear that you’ve gone anywhere, you’ll wish you’d never been born.”

Gideon opens her mouth to speak, but Harrow shoves her bodily back onto the couch. There’s a moment—Harrow’s hands perilously close to Gideon’s tits, Harrow stumbling forward with Gideon’s fingers hooked in the sleeves of her hoodie in defense, Harrow’s eyes, big and dark and entirely focused on Gideon—that Gideon forgets what exactly they’re supposed to be doing in here. For the space of that moment, she even forgets that she and Harrow are fighting at all.

All Gideon can think about is the way Harrow’s looking at her. It’s the same way Harrow looked at her weeks ago, when they woke up in bed together.

Startled, as though Gideon’s entire existence is a surprise to her, an event so unprecedented she doesn’t know what to do.

Nobody else has ever looked at Gideon that way before, not in her life.

Gideon’s ass hits the couch. Harrow draws a breath and steps back.

“Where are you going?” Gideon says stupidly.

“To the car,” Harrow snaps. “I left my makeup bag in there.”

When Harrow comes back with the makeup bag, it’s been far longer than Gideon would have anticipated. She’s wearing an outfit that could best be described as: emo goblin meets avant-garde art installation, but the weirdest thing is—

Gideon starts.

“Harrow! What the fuck did you do to your face?”

Harrow rounds on her with what’s presumably the same old familiar Harrow bitchface, but it’s impossible to tell, because on top of that bitchface is probably the weirdest stage makeup Gideon’s ever seen in her life. It’s all angles and dark whorls, with light highlights on her cheekbones and deep circles around her eyes that make her look exactly like a Spirit Halloween skeleton crossed with the hot girl Gideon saw at Hot Topic last month.

“Shut up! I knew you would be like this. Here.”

Harrow pushes something towards Gideon, but Gideon doesn’t take it. She’s still taken aback by the way Harrow’s eyes look like glimpses into the void, by the streaks of pale skeleton teeth across her top lip, contrasted with a dark sweep of black lipstick on the bottom that fades into the hollow of a jawless skull. And Harrow’s wearing some type of crown? A sharp, pointed diadem in glittering black that sits across her slicked-back hair, emphasizing the painted arch of her forehead.

“Griddle!”

Oh, Harrow’s talking to her. Gideon looks down at the bundle in Harrow’s hands, a paper sack of some sort. Suspiciously, she grabs it and peers inside. It appears to be the world’s saddest pig in the blanket, and three donut holes?

“Sit. Eat.”

Harrow points to the couch, and dumbfounded, Gideon sits and chews the lukewarm food Harrow’s apparently decided to bring her for some reason. She barely tastes it. As she mindlessly makes her way through the offering, she watches Harrow take off the hoodie she’s wearing and continue to put pins in her hair around the crown. Without the hoodie, Harrow’s left in a black dress unlike any costume dress Gideon’s seen before.

It's very…Harrow, which is to say, it’s got tulle in odd places, it’s got five different shades of black, badly matched, and it’s ragged at the hem in a way Gideon thinks is intentional. In the front, the corset supports Harrow’s barely-there tits in a way that Gideon can’t think about too hard or her brain will start to hemorrhage. The straps cut across bare, light brown shoulders, the sleeves falling in carefully haphazard wisps of fabric lower down Harrow’s arms.

Her black-dyed toe shoes have tiny black fake gemstones glued on that Gideon knows are going to fall off and trip someone later. The commitment to the aesthetic is intense.

“All right, come here. Your turn,” Harrow says.

Gideon gets up, but only to edge towards the exit.

“Oh no, you’re not putting any of that glittery shit on me. Don’t even think about it.”

Harrow sighs, looking very put-upon even under five billion layers of evil skeleton queen makeup.

“I’m not going to put glitter on you. Well, not any more glitter than you’ll naturally accumulate from being in this building. Have you seen Coronabeth’s getup? Ridiculous. I’m only going to paint your face.”

“Ha, that’s a good one! If you think I’m going to let you, the girl literally dressed up like the villain of a Tim Burton movie, get anywhere near my face with your witchcraft, you’re out of your mind.”

“Don’t be such a baby, we’re not going out there mismatched. Just stand in front of the light, and—”

She grabs hold of Gideon’s wrist, maneuvering her in front of the mirror. Gideon lets herself be arranged right up until Harrow gets out a long black stick, at which point, Gideon bats it out of her hand.

“No eyeliner,” she says firmly.

“I was only—”

“You were only going to poke out my eye so I’ll have to stay and dance with you until I can afford a new robotic one, which is never, by the way, because we aren’t going to win the prize looking like Gomez and Morticia. I’ll be broke until I’m ninety. Then I’ll die, eyeless, and what will you do after that, huh?”

During the course of this spiel, Harrow’s hand had slowly inched towards another black stick sitting on the table, but Gideon grabs her wrist, forcing her to drop it and pinning her hand behind her back.

Wow, from this close, Harrow smells of five different hairsprays and something floral that must have come with the dress or something, because usually she smells of—

Harrow stomps on her foot, and Gideon howls in pain, releasing her.

“I said, hold still, you imbecile.”

“And I said you’re not getting near me with that thing. Use your fingers if you have to, but no sticks!”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, she regrets them for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that she left herself right open for that one (use your fingers? Really?), continuing to the fact that instead of mocking her, Harrow is looking away and sorting through little pots of makeup, and ending with the fact that she’s just given Harrow permission to put her hands all over her face.

Which Harrow does. Harrow opens a pot of dark makeup, jams her slender fingers inside, crooks them and twists them around in a way that does things to Gideon’s stomach, and then puts them on the arch just underneath Gideon’s eyebrow.

Gideon holds back an inhale and forces herself to breathe evenly as Harrow’s hands smooth makeup against Gideon’s orbital bones, the top of her eyelids, the tip of her nose. Gideon leaves her eyes closed. Harrow’s fingertips feel cool as they press into her cheekbones, her jaw. After a long moment in which Gideon is tempted to open her eyes again, she feels the shock of pressure against her mouth, a quick sweep over top and bottom lip, a hurried smudging of paint underneath. This part ends abruptly when Gideon finally lets herself breath out against Harrow’s fingers, and the fingers remove themselves at once.

Gideon opens her eyes to find Harrow glancing at her, embarrassed.

“So do you want to jump me, now that I’m more your type? You know, dead-looking?” Gideon blurts out before her brain has had a chance to catch up with her mouth.

Harrow whirls away from Gideon, clenching her fists.

“Every time I speak to you! It’s every time. Why do you insist on making everything so difficult?”

Harrow sounds genuinely angry, and Gideon isn’t sure exactly why; it’s all feeling a little nebulous and confusing, but hell if she’s going to resist the chance to dunk on Harrow some more. Hey, as long as she’s dunking on Harrow, things are normal. It’s the weird periods of time she’s not dunking on Harrow that get her into so much trouble.

Gideon doesn’t even look in the mirror. She gives Harrow her cockiest grin and stretches her arms lazily behind her head, leaning back against the dressing room table.

“Hey, if I’m such a pain, go find Ianthe. I heard Babs outside in the corridor threatening to quit just now. You don’t even have to do this with me—she'd love to dance with you! She’s practically begging for it.”

“Be serious, Griddle.”

“I am being serious. You said it yourself—you don’t need me. Any old stiff will do.”

Harrow’s chewing on the corner of her mouth with such ferocity that there’s a distinct indentation in her black lipstick. A tiny bit of warm brown lip peeks out. Someone should really do something about that.

“I was obviously lying,” Harrow says, as though that makes any sense.

Gideon scoffs.

“Oh right, obviously! It was completely obvious from the way you didn’t look me in the eyes for weeks and you avoid me at every opportunity. You wanted Ianthe, right? But she said no? I'm your second choice, but Harrow, you’re not even on my list.”

Harrow steps forward into Gideon's space and grabs a fistful of her shirt. Gideon’s pulse accelerates so quickly she wonders if Harrow can feel it too.

“I didn’t want Ianthe. I didn’t want anyone else. I won’t win with anyone else.”

“Yeah right. Try again, bitch. I don’t believe a single word you say.”

Harrow takes a deep breath—Gideon can see her chest rise and fall, and wow, there really is a lot more of her chest to see than normal; the costume exposes a full inch of her sharp little collarbones, stark against the midnight black fabric.

Today is the closest they’ve been in weeks. The lifts don’t even count, Harrow wasn’t even looking at her then, but now her eyes bore into Gideon like she wants to rip out her heart and devour it.

Gideon’s hands hover in midair, halfway to doing something absolutely stupid like grabbing Harrow by the hips and dragging her closer.

“Ianthe Tridentarius asked me to compete with her three months ago. And I turned her down,” Harrow says crisply.

Which—what? Gideon is momentarily thrown off her game, which is surely the reason that the next question out of her mouth isn’t what the fuck, then why did you trap me here, you skanky conniving crossroads demon? but instead,

“And when she asked you to go to the party with her, and you turned her down then too—what was that all about?”

“I don’t want,” Harrow says, vicious, hands tangled in the collar of Gideon’s T-shirt, “Ianthe. You idiot.”

It’s hard to breathe suddenly, with Harrow’s eyes on her like this. Probably some medical condition heretofore unknown by Gideon that will kill her months from now after she’s helped Harrow ascend to Lyctorhood and conquer the world.

“Right. You want the plastic milf.”

It’s Gideon’s absolute last line of defense.

Harrow very nearly growls. Her face is inches away from Gideon’s when she says with perfect ringing clarity, “Gideon, do you think it’s her mouth that’s haunting me, every hour of every day? Do you think it’s her that’s making it impossible to focus for a single moment?”

“Yes?” Gideon tries.

“Wrong answer. Oh my god you’re so fucking stupid!”

She shoves Gideon away, back against the dressing room table, which normally wouldn’t work, except that Gideon’s legs are doing something funny at the moment. She feels a little dizzy. Harrow’s poisoned her, or something.

When Harrow whirls away to leave the room, Gideon’s body reacts before her brain has anything to say about it. She steps forward, catches Harrow by the wrist, and pulls her back around to look Gideon in the eyes again.

It’s only been a few steps, but Harrow is breathing hard. Gideon reaches forward—what the fuck—and brushes Harrow’s lip, right where the lipstick is ruined. Her whole brain stutters to a halt and all she can think about is Harrow’s breath on the tips of her fingers, how warm and soft Harrow’s bottom lip is.

She’s going to die. Harrow is going to kill her.

But Harrow doesn’t kill her. She looks up at Gideon, wide-eyed, frozen.

“You, uh. You had something, right there.”

Was that the best she could do? Godamn. Gideon is losing her touch.

“Thank you,” says Harrow. Because the world’s inverted. Gideon sways forward, just a little. Any further, and she’d be able to feel the press of Harrow’s firm body against hers, the tight little abdominal muscles.

“We go on stage three routines from now,” Gideon says. “You’d better do your warmups. You’ll need them.”

She can feel Harrow’s intake of breath, feel her pulse pounding in her wrist. Harrow hesitates for a long moment. She looks at Gideon’s hand on her wrist, then Gideon’s face. Her eyes drop to Gideon’s lips—Gideon is sure she’s not imagining it.

Gideon releases Harrow’s wrist, and Harrow snaps out of the trance. She turns on her heel and sweeps toward the door, skirt swishing with the force of her retreat.

But at the door, she stops again. She pauses for a long moment. And she turns and looks back at Gideon. Her eyes are pinpoint stars, and the intensity of the expression in them nearly bowls Gideon over. If she’d thought Harrow was hungry before, now she looks ravenous. Gideon has seen cats play with their food before eating it, like half the fun is watching the bird struggle.

But if Harrow wanted to watch Gideon struggle, she could have picked any moment within the past month. Now Harrow looks like she’s done batting Gideon around and she’s ready to take a bite.

And then she snaps her eyes away and strides off down the hall until Gideon can’t see her anymore. Gideon lets out a breath and sinks to a sitting position, right there against the wall.

It’s at this point, ten minutes from going on stage with Harrow, that she realizes it’s going to happen again. Deep within her brain, a final protest rises. Does she really have to fuck Harrow? They can wait this one out, just stay away from each other after the curtain call, maybe avoid being in the same room with each other, delete each other’s number, and—

No, she’s going to.

Fuck.

xxx

Harrow can tell from the moment she steps on stage across from Gideon that this time is different. She feels it in the air between them, she sees it in the way Gideon’s body is held tense, like the moment before a crash, when you feel the swoop of your stomach, and for one instant, there’s a chance it won’t really happen. There’s a moment when you still don’t quite believe.

It’s that feeling, but in reverse. It’s like spending all your life believing you’ll crash, and then, for one second, knowing that you won’t.

It’s Gideon turning to her at the first hum of the violin, the first beat of the drums.

Gideon looks like the prince of death, finally come to call her home. It’s not the makeup, not just the makeup—Harrow can admit that was a rushed job, hindered by the unsteadiness of her hands, the moment when she’d touched Gideon’s mouth and known, for the third time, that she was lost. It’s the way Gideon stands, it’s the power in her arms, tightly bound in a black dance shirt that Harrow and Aiglamene had embellished with golden rhinestones in a pattern down her chest. It had taken extra time, but as Harrow’s eyes wander from the strong angle of Gideon’s jaw, emphasized with strokes of dark paint, to the width of her torso, to the simple black leggings that hug her thighs, back to the gleam of her bright hair, still maddeningly messy at the top despite a recent haircut, she can recognize that Gideon makes a striking picture.

Harrow knows she should be looking at the judges, gauging which ones are there and what they’ll be looking for, but all she can see is the rise and fall of Gideon’s chest, the way her arms tense like she’s ready for a fight, the gleam of her eyes as they sweep over Harrow, the corner of her black-painted mouth turning up in the hint of an arrogant smile.

Harrow begins her pirouettes, listening for the hum of the violin that brings her back into Gideon’s orbit. She dances into Gideon’s arms and then falls over Gideon’s forearm with her leg in a passe, almost to the ground, Gideon the only thing that spins her back up again.

They twist away from each other, hands grasping just a moment too long. The fouettés—Harrow’s barely thinking of them; she lets them spin out almost unaware, one too many. Gideon’s hand catches on her arm and spins her back around. A leap, up onto Gideon’s shoulder, caught there a moment with legs perfectly posed, dropping back into Gideon’s arms, breathing hard, locking eyes, holding each other until they’re almost late for Gideon’s leaps and Harrow’s développés.

She turns back to Gideon and starts her arabesque as Gideon drops to her knees and holds an arm out for her. As she bends lower and lower, approaching Gideon, she can feel the racing of her heart. This is where the routine really starts to go to pieces, because with hands wrapped firm around Harrow’s waist, Gideon grins at her. It’s the cousin of the cocky grin from before, but it’s better. It’s bright and uncalculated, pure joy in the challenge of meeting Harrow where she stands. For one second, Harrow forgets everything that led up to this moment and believes, with her whole stupid heart, that Gideon wants to choose this too. That she wants to be here.

And in that moment, Harrow falters. She doesn’t move. She’s so caught up in it that she holds her arabesque a full three seconds past her beat. It’s only when Gideon raises an eyebrow and starts to stand up that she realizes her mistake.

She curses herself. Spinning away from Gideon, she skips the bourres and goes right into her final steps, a series of attitude turns that are supposed to slow as they approach the end of the piece, but she’s not slowing, she doesn’t have time, it’s falling apart—

Gideon’s hand on her arm reels her back in.

Manon, Gideon mouths. Her back is turned to the audience, so she’s speaking just for Harrow. They won’t land that one, not before the music ends, but Harrow takes a breath and nods ever so slightly, using what feels like the last of her energy to bound forward and leap into Gideon’s arms again—

She’s being spun, legs in Gideon’s grasp, fingers wound around Gideon’s neck, looking down at Gideon. She crumples on cue just as the last of the music fades, and Gideon catches her, holds her tight, and guides them to the ground.

This is the part where she dies. Their characters are supposed to be locked together in rigid imitation of decaying skeletons, immobile. But as she looks up at Gideon in the hush after the last note of the violin, she doesn’t feel like death. She feels alive from her fingers to her toes. Energy courses through her veins, and her heart keeps pounding even though her body has stilled. Gideon blinks at her slowly. And Harrow raises one hand to trace a path from Gideon’s heart to her neck, where her pulse pounds in time with Harrow’s.

When Gideon smiles down at her again, it’s with teeth.

And Harrow knows—they aren’t going to make it another competition without fucking. They aren’t going to make it another day.

Distantly, she hears clapping and notices the stage lights shifting in preparation for the next routine.

Gideon holds out a hand. Harrow takes it. And together, they get up and take their bow.

They’re going to win this whole thing.

But as Harrow looks into Gideon’s eyes, flashing golden and victorious in the light—settled on her, not the audience—she gets the terrible idea that it doesn’t even matter.

xxx

Harrow still hasn’t stopped holding her hand. They’re backstage now, trying to navigate past people in tutus and crowns all doing last-minute warm ups in the same five feet of space.

She thinks Ianthe might be here somewhere, because she catches a glimpse of a lot of sequins and skin so pale it practically reflects the stage lights even from back here, but again, she is not paying much attention to any of this, because Harrow hasn’t let go of her hand.

Harrow’s slender fingers wrapped around Gideon’s. Harrow’s palm against Gideon’s palm. There’s a lot going on here, and Gideon doesn’t feel equipped to deal with any of it.

All she knows is that they killed it out there, that they’re going to make it through the round, and that Harrow is touching her willingly.

“Gideon?” Harrow’s looking up at her now. Oh yeah, because she’s stopped moving.

Gideon tries to summon the confidence from on stage. “Yeah, what’s up? Should we get food now?” She winces. Not her best work.

Harrow stares up at her for a long moment, black eyes locked on her face. After a few seconds, they wander down to take in the rest of her too. Well, this shirt hugs her biceps pretty tightly, she’s hit a new weight target recently, and Harrow’s only human.

Harrow steps closer to her in order to avoid an oncoming gaggle of younger dancers heading for the stage, and as she does so, her hand runs all the way up Gideon’s arm. Gideon is starting to think that Harrow can read her mind now. A shiver runs down Gideon’s spine. Imagine what Harrow could do with telepathy.

“Gideon,” Harrow says slowly, “I don’t want to go get food right now.”

“Okay, yeah, you’re right. Aiglamene wouldn’t want us leaving until Ianthe’s done. I can just order something and we could eat in.”

“Eat in.”

“Uh, yeah. We could just stay here and—” Gideon’s brain runs out of ideas after that. She kind of can’t get past the fact that Harrow’s hand is still on her bicep, and her other hand has found its way to Gideon’s hip for stability. Gideon hadn’t thought the dance took that much out of Harrow, but—okay, fine, it’s getting past plausible deniability. Gideon’s pulse starts pounding like she’s still out there on stage.

But Harrow just nods.

“I’m going back to the dressing room. Come with me. I mean, I’d like it if you came with me, please. You don’t have to, I just—I want you to.”

“Oh! Huh,” Gideon finds herself saying. It’s too weird, Harrow asking her what she wants.

Abruptly, Harrow takes her hands off Gideon and turns around, making a swift retreat in the direction of the dressing rooms.

Gideon stands there for a long moment. What the fuck is wrong with Harrow? Should she check her for alien parasites? Is she possessed by a particularly horny demon? Not that Gideon doesn’t understand that one, but—

Well, better follow her back there to make sure she’s all right, anyway. That’s what she tells herself as she heads for the hallway, hoping she can find their room without getting turned around again. This place is set up with a wildly counterintuitive floor plan.

As she stumbles out past a few bickering kids dressed up to look like angels with multicolor wings, she follows the direction she’s pretty sure she came from originally. A hand clamps around her arm—she whirls around, on the defensive by instinct. At Ninth House, it was never a good sign when someone wanted your attention that badly.

But the woman in front of her is surprisingly small, delicate in a flimsy gauze dress that would normally have Gideon’s full attention. At the moment though, she just wants to find Harrow and figure out what the hell is happening.

“Uh, sorry, can I help you?” Gideon asks, very much hoping that the answer is no. What did Harrow mean, do you think it’s her mouth that’s haunting me?

It all seems simple. Harrow wants her. But it has to be a trap. Because if Harrow had wanted her the way Gideon’s been wanting Harrow ever since they kissed for the very first time, she’d have broken on day two. Harrow doesn’t even have practice being horny.

The woman in the flimsy dress smiles up at her—okay, a lot of her chest is on display, and it’s heaving like she’s out of breath, and look, Gideon isn’t immune.

“I don’t know if we’ve ever met. But you’re Gideon Nav, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Gideon says suspiciously.

The woman smiles, a lovely smile that spreads across her face with all the tenderness of a sunrise. Totally unlike Harrow, who only smiles in an evil way, when she’s gotten one over on Gideon.

“I’m Dulcinea,” says the woman, holding out her hand. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Gideon blinks at her. If she squints her eyes, the woman kind of does look like Dulcie’s profile picture—she’s never met her in person, but they’ve been casual friends online for a little while. Palamedes introduced them through one of his nerd hobbies. Making costumes, or watching 90s science fiction, or collecting cool rocks or something.

Except—Dulcie hasn’t been messaging her recently. Gideon assumed it was because of her health.

Another thought strikes Gideon, and because she’s an idiot, it comes right out of her mouth.

“Are you here to see Sex Pal? Didn’t you guys just break up?”

The woman’s mouth opens, then closes, then forms itself into a laugh. “I’m sorry?” she says, amused.

Gideon holds her hands up, wincing. “Sorry,” she says. “I mean, it’s none of my business. It’s just, if you’re looking for him and Cam, good luck. I’ve barely been able to track them down recently. I think they’re on at three though! I was planning to go see them, after–” she glances in the direction of her dressing room.

“Of course. You have a previous engagement.” Dulcie smiles again. “Don’t let me keep you. Wouldn’t want to keep a girl waiting, would you?”

Gideon immediately flushes. “It’s not—I wasn’t—uh, it’s good to meet you. Sorry I didn’t say that first thing. You just caught me at a weird moment, is all.”

She holds out her hand, and Dulcie takes it, shaking it in both of her own. Dulcie’s hands feel unnaturally cold, and she holds onto Gideon’s hand for a moment before letting it go with a wink.

“It’s perfectly understandable. You seem like you have somewhere to be. And you might be right—” she sighs wistfully. “I was looking for Palama—Pal. I thought it might not be the right time to meet in person, but I was in town for an appointment, and I heard he was competing, and, well, I couldn’t resist. Then I saw you dance, and I had to meet you too. You were quite arresting out there, you know. You and your partner. Harrowhark, is it?”

Something about the way Dulcie says Harrow’s name feels weird. Hearing it from someone else’s mouth with such cautiousness, it sounds like the name of a stranger, nothing like the menace who's been stomping on Gideon’s toes since they were two.

Come to think of it, hasn’t she told Dulcie about Harrow? It feels like all she’s been complaining about recently is Harrow’s bad mood. But maybe Dulcie missed that bit by way of being sick at the time. Still, it’s weird Dulcie is acting so formal, like they barely know each other at all. This whole encounter is just awkward, and Gideon knows she should be giving it more of her attention, but can you blame her for having a lot on her mind? Besides, Pal has been her friend for ages. Even if the breakup was amicable, she’s bound to feel weird about socializing with his ex.

“Yeah, Harrow,” she says absently.

“Harrow, right.”

Gideon shifts from one foot to the other. “I’d love to catch up,” she says. “But I kind of—uh. I told someone I’d be there. And I think you should talk to Pal. He’s missed you, you know. If you feel the same way, I’m sure he’d be willing to talk it out with you. I mean, you guys were friends first. That’s the most important thing.”

“Yes,” Dulcie says. “I suppose we were. Well, goodbye Gideon. I hope we meet again soon.”

“Right, yeah. I hope so too.”

Dulcie gives her one more perfect smile, then actually curtsies and brushes past Gideon with a pat to her arm.

Huh. Weird encounter, but Gideon’s glad to have met Dulcie in person, even if she’s kind of different from the way she acts online. Gideon guesses a lot of people are different from their online personas.

For example, Gideon’s social media is full of training videos and carefully angled photos of her abs. She has to admit that she flaunts her body for likes—and why shouldn’t she? She’s worked hard on it.

But then when it turns out a hot girl wants to touch her abs, she gets all weird about it! Yes, that girl is Harrow, who makes everything weird, so it’s not entirely her fault. But still, what’s with her total inability to think every time Harrow looks at her? It’s getting inconvenient, considering that they’re around each other constantly.

Maybe if they just fuck it out one more time, she’ll get it all out of her system and they can go back to hating each other like before. Then Gideon can get her focus back. It will work this time, guaranteed.

Gideon’s gut churns, and she’d like to say it’s in horror, but as she turns the corner to the hallway where Harrow waits for her, she has to admit it’s anticipation. She reaches the door. She can hear some kind of rustling behind it. She takes a deep breath, adjusts her sleeves and hair, smells underneath her armpit and makes a face. That’s unfortunate. Well, nothing for it. She raps lightly against the wood.

Harrow opens it immediately, still in costume. Her eyes blaze in anger—oh great, so Gideon’s just walked into another fight. Why does she have to be so susceptible to Harrow’s stupid little traps? It’s like all Harrow has to do is grope her bicep a tiny bit and Gideon immediately does exactly what she wants. This is not how the afternoon was supposed to go.

But she brushes past Harrow coolly, holding her hands up in surrender. The easiest way to piss Harrow off.

“All right, all right, what is it now, gloom empress? Got your panties in a twist because we missed our cue on stage? That wasn’t my fault, I might add.”

Harrow whirls on her. “You know very well that doesn’t matter. We made it to the next round, it’s guaranteed.”

“Okay. Then what are you mad about? Don’t make me play twenty questions.”

“It isn’t—I’m not mad!” Harrow bites out, looking furious. Her fingers twitch at her sides, and she’s biting the corner of her lip again unconsciously. “I thought you weren’t going to show up.”

Gideon regards her for a long moment, understanding slow to dawn on her fuzzy brain. In the low light from the bulbs around the dressing room table, Gideon can see all the shadows clinging to Harrow—under her eyes, at her jawline, under her collarbones.“Well, I’m here now.” And then, taking a breath, aiming a grin down at Harrow that feels insanely risky, but oh hell, she has to just go for it—”What are you going to do with me?”

Gideon knows she’s done it now as soon as Harrow registers her words. Harrow’s expression goes wide-eyed and hungry, making her look a little like a ferocious bat—her hair’s starting to escape the pins and fall down around her face in tufts, although the crown still adorns the top of her head.

Harrow grunts in frustration. “Oh my god, do you ever stop?”

But Gideon doesn’t get the chance to figure out what she’s meant to stop doing, because in the next moment, Harrow slams her against the door with a loud thump.

And then Harrow kisses her.

Harrow devours her, finally, finally, consumes her like Gideon’s wanted this entire time. Her mouth is insistent, demanding, pressing against Gideon’s with hunger. Gideon groans into the kiss, and Harrow chases her, unable even to let Gideon get away long enough to breathe, wrapping her arms around Gideon’s neck and running her fingers through the short, buzzed hair at the back of Gideon’s scalp, which makes Gideon absolutely brainless with want. She’s pressing so close there’s hardly any space between them, but Gideon slides her hands around Harrow’s hips and pulls her closer still.

Harrow’s whole body goes soft. She melts into Gideon like she’s never done before— Gideon thinks of all the ways they have to tense and shove against each other when they dance, muscles always tight against the risk of falling.

But this—this feels like letting it all go. Letting everything crash to the floor in one glorious rush. Gideon runs a hand up Harrow’s spine just to feel the way she shivers and gasps against her mouth.

“God, Gideon,” Harrow breathes.

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Gideon doesn’t even know what she’s agreeing to, just yes to all of it. Everything. She slides her hands under Harrow’s thighs with the intent to pick her up and set her somewhere. Maybe on top of the table, it looks like a good place to put Harrow until Gideon can figure out what she wants to do with her first, now that she’s allowed to touch, to press into Harrow. She’s dizzy thinking about all of the different options.

Harrow grunts. “Put me down, idiot.”

Fuck.

It’s just like Gideon to misread the moment. It’s only happened a million times this month alone.

Gideon puts her down, goes to remove her hands from Harrow’s thighs too, but Harrow wraps her own fingers around Gideon’s wrists to keep her there.

“I didn’t say to stop. I just—this time, I wanted—” She pauses to kiss Gideon again, loses her train of thought. Gideon’s hand is slowly inching its way up to Harrow’s ass. Sue her, she hardly got to touch it the last time. Harrow pulls back with effort. Her makeup is a ruin at this point, dark smudges more than anything. She looks up at Gideon, considering. “Stand against the door,” she commands.

Gideon is already standing there, but she has to fight not to chase Harrow instinctively when she steps back. For a second, Gideon thinks she’s in trouble again because Harrow’s eyes go sharp and calculating the way they always do when she’s about to figure out exactly where Gideon’s weaknesses are and destroy her.

“Harrow,” Gideon whines.

And then Harrow drops to her knees.

“Oh, wow, okay, so did you drop something down there or—”

But Harrow’s still looking up at her with huge dark eyes in what Gideon is starting to realize is the expression she gets when she wants to fuck Gideon, a strange new Harrowism Gideon has only seen on a select few occasions but that’s already featured in her wet dreams twice this week. Well, three times, if you count the one that was also a nightmare.

She runs one slim hand up Gideon’s thigh, warm even through the thin fabric of the cheap dance pants, and Gideon forgets how to think at all.

“Thank you,” Harrow says.

“What for?” Gideon says stupidly.

Harrow looks as though she’s trying to put something very complicated into words and only coming up with thighs. This is a predicament Gideon is fairly sympathetic to. Harrow presses an open-mouthed kiss to the inside of Gideon’s knee, then another an inch higher. Gideon’s brain is threatening to whitescreen, and Harrow hasn’t even taken her pants off yet. Gideon’s fingers twitch towards Harrow, but she’s not sure she’s allowed–what are the rules here?

“We were so good out there,” Harrow murmurs. “You were so good.”

Gideon’s head lolls back against the wall, and she struggles to think as Harrow’s thumbs sweep up her thighs, higher and higher until they’re almost—

“If this is the way you treat a girl after she dances for you,” she grits out, “you should have told me sooner. I’d have been way more invested.”

Harrow pulls away for a moment, and Gideon holds back a groan. Somehow, all the brain cells that she was using on stage—the ones that told her to take Harrow to a dark corner after this was all over and fuck her until she couldn’t stand—those brain cells have turned on Gideon like the traitors they are, and now all she can do is look down helplessly while Harrow blinks up at her with eyes like burning galaxies.

“Gideon,” she orders. “Take your pants off. I need to—” here she makes a charmingly awkward gesture, and Gideon takes pity on both of them and shoves her dark pants down her thighs.

“Underwear too,” Harrow says impatiently, and she’s still on her knees, and it’s a lot for Gideon’s brain to handle, so she slides her underwear down—horrible compression shorts that Gideon knows say Cheeks For Weeks on the back but that Harrow hopefully won’t notice because she’s only looking at Gideon’s front. Staring at it, actually.

Gideon’s so soaked she’s probably dripping at this point, and they haven’t even done anything, and if Gideon’s being honest, she's been wet since about thirty seconds into their routine, not that she plans on being honest with Harrow anytime soon.

But Harrow doesn’t tease her. Harrow just looks up at her in wonder, as though Gideon’s cunt is some kind of spiritual revelation. In fact, Gideon wonders if Harrow’s been transported to an alternate realm and she’d better wake her up, when Harrow finally shakes herself out of it and moves.

Not to where Gideon hopes she’ll move. No, the universe is never that kind. Harrow rakes her horrible little fingers up Gideon’s hips to the abs that yes, she’s been working a little harder on lately. She lets her fingertips sweep over them as though she’s memorizing them, hiking up Gideon’s shirt to get a closer look. The feeling of those warm, eager hands on Gideon's stomach makes her shiver and shift her hips against the door.

“Uh, Harrow?” Gideon finally says. “Getting lost there?”

“No,” Harrow says decisively—and bites her, right on the fleshiest bit of her stomach, the little freak. Unfortunately, Gideon’s cunt decides she likes this. It clenches helplessly around nothing, and Gideon lets out a staggered breath. Involuntarily, her legs slide a little farther apart.

Harrow presses kisses on the spot, almost an apology, except that she then immediately gets her mouth on Gideon’s hipbone and sucks at it, biting down there too after a moment of pressing long, open-mouthed kisses to the crest of it, to the bit of extra fat there. Gideon can see the dark marks Harrow’s leaving behind, her makeup smudged and splotched all over Gideon like a map to all the places she’s been.

Gideon’s making some kind of horribly high-pitched sound in the back of her throat, and Harrow pulls away to study her again. Her eyes wander in fascination from Gideon’s face down to the trail of dark paint she’s left. Then they alight on Gideon’s cunt again, which is no doubt flushed and gleaming even in the dim light.

“Do you think I really do this with any girl who dances for me?” she asks conversationally, even though her cheeks are dark, and her mouth is a mess.

Gideon whines. “Harrow,” she says. It feels like the only word she can say at the moment. One of Harrow’s hands is making its way back up her thigh again, but it stops when Gideon says nothing more. Gideon is gripping the door frame for dear life, trying to come up with the words to make Harrow move.

“Answer me,” Harrow commands. “Do you think it’s just anyone?”

“Well, not anyone,” Gideon manages. “Ianthe—”

“Shut up about Ianthe.”

And Harrow taps the pad of her finger to Gideon’s clit twice without warning, like Gideon’s a tabletop she’s taking out her impatience on. Gideon jolts. For a horrible second, she thinks she might come just like this, that Harrow might treat her like an Ikea coffee table and she might get off to it, and then she’ll never live it down.

But Harrow’s fingers brush lower, to Gideon’s entrance. She circles it a few times with that same open fascination.

“Harr—oh!” Gideon breaks off as Harrow slides two fingers in at once. “Fuck,” Gideon pants, overwhelmed, out of her mind, “You can’t just stick everything in at once, idiot, it doesn’t work that way!”

Except that Gideon’s so slick and ready that it does work, and now Harrow’s slender fingers are stretching her open, pressing up and in, over and over in a rhythm that makes Gideon’s hips drive down onto her, that makes her bite her bottom lip hard so she doesn’t moan out loud. She grips the door frame tight as though she can ground herself to the planet through force of will. As though she can keep herself from reaching for Harrow, even as she goes taut and mindless with need.

“For months, you made me suffer,” Harrow says.

“I didn’t—fuck, I didn’t do anything, dick.”

“You know what you did. I couldn’t go five minutes without you appearing out of nowhere with half your ridiculous body exposed, mocking me.”

“You didn’t think it was that ridiculous when you were going all Dracula on my abs just now,” Gideon manages.

Harrow pulls her fingers out. Gideon wants to scream—her cunt aches with emptiness.

“No, Harrow, please, I’ll do whatever you fucking want if you just put your fingers back inside me,” she breathes out in a rush.

“Whatever I want?” Harrow raises an eyebrow. Somehow, she manages to look serene even with half her hair falling down and a costume that’s seen better days.

Gideon nods, frantic, as Harrow’s other hand finds her hip, fingers gripping it as though for a better handhold.

“I want to make you suffer too. I want you to think about this every day, Griddle. I want to watch you die.” She tilts her head to the side, gaze sharpening as she sees how Gideon’s cunt twitches, practically begging for attention. “But I can settle,” she says, and puts her mouth to Gideon’s clit and sucks.

Gideon’s head knocks back against the door. Her brain is quickly leaking out her pussy as Harrow presses swift, precise fingers in and does something with her tongue that she should not know how to do, is Harrow studying this shit in her spare time—holy shit, now Harrow is fucking her in earnest, long strokes that turn Gideon’s stomach to jello.

Gideon’s resolve breaks. She twines the fingers of her right hand in Harrow’s hair and tilts her hips to Harrow’s mouth, grasping futilely at Harrow’s shoulder with the left. Harrow sighs into it. When Gideon looks down, Harrow’s eyes are closed as though in prayer, reverent and lovely as she sucks Gideon within an inch of her fucking life.

Gideon’s fingers tighten in Harrow’s hair, and shit—the crown escapes its last pins and clatters to the floor. Harrow doesn’t even notice, doesn’t let up, doesn’t give Gideon a moment of mercy. Gideon can’t help it, she grips the back of Harrow’s neck with her left hand, fingers digging in harder than she means to. Oh fuck, she can feel Harrow’s pulse pounding nearly as hard as her own. But at the touch of Gideon’s hand, Harrow moans in relief—her shoulders releasing the last bit of tension, warm breath on Gideon’s clit.

Gideon comes so hard she feels concussed, head knocking back against the door again as fireworks burst in her belly and bright spots burst in her eyes.

Harrow works her through it until her body feels like the sparking remains of a live wire. She shudders as Harrow pulls away and wipes her mouth. Gideon can see most of Harrow’s rose brown lips now, and it makes her feel funny.

For a moment, Harrow just looks at her. Then, she smiles. It’s only a little smile—it’s a bit cruel and sharp-edged, the way all Harrow’s smiles are. But Gideon wants—

“Get up here,” she says. “You don’t think we’re finished now, do you, Nonagesimus?”

“Oh, I think you’ve finished,” Harrow says primly, but she gets up off her knees and stands in front of Gideon, examining her in satisfaction.

“Fuck off,” says Gideon. She pulls Harrow closer to her, and for a moment, she just revels in it—the hairspray and sweat and dark warm scent of Harrow, Harrow with her warm body and soft mouth always twisted in sarcasm and the sharp bones of her hips and the cage of her ribs underneath the corset, a perfect place for Gideon’s hands.

One day, Gideon will put her hands on every inch of Harrow. But today—

“I’m going to fuck you until you can’t stand,” she says.

It’s not exactly the most sophisticated come-on she’s ever tried—not even the most sophisticated one she’s tried on Harrow—but it doesn’t need to be, apparently, because Harrow takes in a sharp breath. Gideon can feel it pass through her lungs and out again, as much as she tries to keep it subtle.

Damn, if Gideon had known it was this easy to get in Harrow’s head, she’d have used it as a weapon ages ago. She pictures Harrow, doing whatever Gideon says, too far sunk into the pit of her own desire to protest.

Gideon doesn’t exactly have room to talk, but she chooses not to think about it.

She slides her hands down to grip Harrow’s waist and turns her around until her back is pressed up against Gideon’s front. From this angle, she can feel Harrow shudder as Gideon slides one palm down her belly and uses the other to shove the stupid corset down enough to get her hand on Harrow’s tit.

Oh, this is where her hand was made to be—Harrow pants quick as a rabbit as Gideon feels the perfect softness of it, runs a thumb over the nipple and spreads her fingers out.

Wow, Gideon thinks. Her brain goes completely and blissfully blank while she ponders the fact that she can hold all of it at once.

She’s thinking about trying to get at the other one too, but Harrow’s hips are shifting against her hand now—whoops, Gideon’s gone and slid her fingers right between Harrow’s legs over the unbearable layers of the dress. She’d meant to draw this out for ages, have Harrow begging for it.

“Go on,” says Harrow haughtily, although she’s practically squirming now. “Do your worst. You’ll have to try a lot harder than that.”

Gideon isn’t sure she would have to try a lot harder than this. She circles her thumb against Harrow’s tit and slides her hand up under the skirt. Damn, there are a lot of layers to this thing.

In the mirror on the opposite side of the room, she can see a glimpse of Harrow’s tights-clad thighs. Harrow’s head falls back against Gideon’s shoulder as Gideon reaches up and—

“It isn’t a full leotard,” Gideon says in a prayer of thanksgiving to each and every deity. “You’ve just got tights on under here.”

“I—oh.”

Harrow can’t seem to speak. That’s all right. Gideon lets her fingers wander, down to the crevice of Harrow’s legs, lingering there for a moment not long enough to give Harrow any friction, but enough to make her groan in frustration and drive her hips down on Gideon’s hand. Then back up her stomach to the top hem of the tights. Another thought strikes her.

“Were you flashing the audience the entire time? Guess that’s one way to get votes.”

Harrow kicks her in the shin half-heartedly. “Modifying a dress was cheaper. They’re thick tights, you dolt.”

“Huh. I can see that.” Gideon tugs at the firm, stretchy fabric, holding it away from Harrow’s skin for a moment, then letting it snap back with a satisfying smack.

Harrow lets out a high-pitched sound that Gideon immediately needs to hear again on a loop forever. She leaves her hand there on Harrow’s belly while Harrow shifts in her grasp, trying to get her to move.

“Are you going to fuck me at any point this afternoon?” Harrow snaps.

“Hmm,” says Gideon, whose brain stopped functioning around about the time Harrow woke up in her bed last month. She does want to fuck Harrow, that much she knows. But she wants something else, too.

“Well?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if you do exactly what I say.” Quite honestly, Gideon’s not sure why it comes out of her mouth, but it feels right.

Harrow seems to draw on the last of her dignity to stop squirming against Gideon’s hand.

“Ungrateful! And after I—”

“Sucked me off? Yeah. Thanks for that. But now we’re going to do things my way.” Gideon grins. “Or…we could just stop. You know, I’ve been meaning to catch up with Cam and Pal anyway.”

“Don’t you dare talk about Palamedes right now. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to not be such a bitch.”

Harrow turns to glare at Gideon over her shoulder.

“Yeah, fine, that one’s pretty much impossible.” She steps back, savoring the way Harrow’s whole body seems to want to lean back towards her. “Take off your tights.”

Harrow scrambles to remove the tights by just shoving them down, but Gideon sees the potential problem there. She’s not navigating the toe shoe situation again.

“Nope. Shoes first.”

Harrow sighs in frustration and bends down to untie the shoes. Her fingers fumble with the knot. Gideon can see a long stretch of firm, lean thigh and calf. Well, relatively long. Compared to the rest of Harrow. Compared to Gideon’s own thighs, they’re basically miniscule twigs. Gideon wants to put her hands on them. It is taking Harrow forever to accomplish what should be a relatively simple task.

“Need some help there?”

“No!” Harrow finally gets the shoes off, shoves the tights down and steps out of them, and then. Gideon lets herself draw close again and run a hand up the outside of one thigh. Harrow shivers.

“Now, Gideon,” she says.

“Now,” says Gideon softly, letting her fingers trail up where they want to go, not all the way, just far enough to make Harrow bite back a curse, “You get to go bend over that table, and I’m going to decide if I feel like finishing the job.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. Maybe I’ve changed my mind.”

Gideon hasn’t changed her mind, but Harrow doesn’t need to know that.

Harrow stumbles over to face the table, a dusty wooden thing that looks about as ancient as the rest of this place, but which more importantly sits right underneath a large mirror. Gideon can see Harrow’s fingers press against the top of the table so hard her knuckles go white, but she bends over, leaning just enough to pretend she’s obeyed and not an inch more. Later, there will be hell to pay for this. But for now..

“How bad do you want me?” Gideon says, relishing the way Harrow’s eyes flash with fury in the reflection.

“Fuck you.”

Gideon can’t help it—she steps up behind Harrow again. When she looks at them both together, she’s struck again by how small Harrow is, her sharp bare shoulders barely coming up to Gideon’s tits. She’s scowling at Gideon, as per usual, but her breath is coming short, like she can’t remember the right rhythm for it.

And Gideon did that.

Gideon slides her hand up beneath Harrow’s skirt again just to watch her squirm. Harrow bites her lip as Gideon’s other hand comes to rest on her belly, pressing her up against Gideon on the one side and the table on the other.

As slowly as she can manage, which isn’t that slowly because holy shit Harrow is wet, Gideon circles her fingers around Harrow’s entrance. Harrow shudders and grabs at Gideon’s forearm. Gideon lets that one slide. She brushes Harrow’s clit lightly with her thumb and watches Harrow’s mouth open in a silent gasp.

That won’t do.

“You think I’ll just give it to you, huh? You think you can just stand there gawking at me and I’ll give you whatever you want. You think you don’t have to ask for it.”

She slides her fingers down to tease at Harrow’s cunt, stopping just short of where she really, really wants to go.

Harrow groans in frustration.

“Please, Gideon.” She’s started to rock her hips back and forth as though she can fuck herself on Gideon’s hand if she just tries hard enough.

“Okay, that’s a start. Good job, Nonagesimus. I thought you’d never be reasonable.”

“Shut up, you don’t–oh!”

Gideon slides a finger in—it’s so easy, Harrow’s practically dripping. She starts fucking her slow, spurred on by Harrow’s wounded little sounds, by the way she bears down against Gideon over and over, shameless. By the time Gideon’s worked her way up to two fingers, Harrow is moaning openly, fingers clutching at Gideon’s wrists.

“I need—” she tries to articulate, fails.

“Say you want me.”

“I want you, please—Gideon!” She breaks off as Gideon drives her fingers in further, seeking the spot that will break Harrow, wanting viciously to make her as stupid as she’s made Gideon these past months, wanting her to ache for it, cry for it.

Gideon reaches a hand to Harrow’s hair, already mussed beyond hope of flattening it down again, grabs a handful from the back of her neck, and tugs. Harrow actually shrieks.

“Careful, honey, everyone will hear you.”

Far from discouraging Harrow, this makes her moan and drive her hips down harder onto Gideon’s fingers, soaking her palm. Interesting.

Gideon doesn’t let up, fucking into Harrow steadily as she bucks against the table.

“Look at us,” Gideon says. Harrow tries to look, but she seems to have lost control of the movement of her hips, the arch of her back, panting open-mouthed, makeup absolutely wrecked in the glow of the lightbulbs around the mirror.

“No, look,” Gideon says again. For her part, she’s unable to look away—Harrow’s dress pulled down to expose half her tits, tugged up to expose the tops of her thighs, Gideon’s hand in her hair, Gideon’s other hand still pressing in and back out again, in and out.

Harrow looks. She immediately flushes darker, letting out a gasp.

“I did this,” Gideon says. She doesn’t know where it comes from, probably from her cunt if she’s being honest, some place deep inside her that feels as dark and cavernous as a wound. “You want me. I did this to you.”

“Yes, Gideon, I want—ah, I want—”

Gideon uses her grip on Harrow’s hair to tug her head to the side and press a gentle kiss to Harrow’s neck, the graceful arc of it tempting and lovely.

She knows why Harrow wins all their fights.

Well, all their fights, except for this one.

Gideon bites down. Harrow keens.

“Try to cover that one up at practice.”

Harrow comes, hard. Her muscles clench down on Gideon’s fingers with force, fluttering in helpless little spasms as she arches her back and moans and rides it out. It’s all she can do, with Gideon still fucking her relentlessly. Finally, she goes limp against the table, letting it hold her up more than her own legs, and Gideon stills. For a second, Harrow is so quiet that Gideon’s afraid she’s broken her, nothing but the sound of her breath heaving in the dim, humid room.

“Harrow?”

“Mmm,” Harrow says.

“You good?”

For a long second, Harrow doesn’t reply. When she finally lifts herself from the table and squirms out from under Gideon, her face has that open, startled expression again. Not exactly deer in the headlights. More…nocturnal creature crawling out of the depths to blink at the sun in disbelief. Gideon just wishes she knew if that was a good thing or a bad thing. She’s tempted to ask for a rating out of ten.

“Gideon,” Harrow says slowly. “I want you on the couch. Now.”

Gideon’s heartbeat picks up again. She goes to the tiny mothball-infested couch and lies there, hoping Harrow won’t grab her stuff and walk out of the room.

Harrow doesn’t walk out of the room. She walks right to the couch and climbs on top of Gideon, tangling her fingers in Gideon’s hair and tugging her up to kiss her again. Oh. Gideon could get used to this. Now that she’s fucked all the fight out of Harrow, Harrow seems to be operating on some buried instinct underneath, one they’d never made it to on any of their previous tries at this.

Harrow presses her whole torso to Gideon’s torso like she wants them to merge into each other—they’re both sweaty, fever-hot, Harrow’s mouth warm and liquid against Gideon’s as she mindlessly grinds down again.

“Harrow,” Gideon says. “Get this off. We don’t need this.” She tugs clumsily at the hem of the dress. Harrow sits back, and to Gideon’s astonishment, she reaches back to unhook some things, and then she’s wriggling out of the costume like a moth struggling to get free of its cocoon.

Gideon has to help her—they get stuck for a moment in fluttering sleeves—but then Harrow’s sitting there completely naked, and oh. So it’s just going to be like this every time, then.

Gideon trails her fingers up Harrow’s ribs and back down, not sure where to even look. She wants to just look at all of it at the same time. Harrow’s firm stomach and Harrow’s bare, vulnerable shoulders and Harrow’s slender hips and Harrow’s little tits and the dark trail of hair leading to Harrow’s perfect cunt.

The armrest is really digging into her back. This couch clearly wasn’t intended for the purposes they’re putting it to, though Gideon doubts anything short of the apocalypse could make her want to stop touching Harrow at this point.

She shifts, and Harrow shifts with her. She puts her knee down for support between Gideon’s thighs.

Gideon lets out a breath, unthinkingly pressing against Harrow’s leg, suddenly ready to agree with anything Harrow says.

Harrow isn’t saying anything, though. Gideon had probably better just make sure—

“Is this—I mean, can I—”

“Get off on my leg like an animal? You can. Or…”

Harrow slides her hand down between them. There’s hardly room. When she brushes against Gideon again, her knuckles have to brush her own clit too, and it makes her shudder with oversensitive shock. Gideon shudders too, still unprepared for the reality of Harrow touching her like this. Still desperate, even after the first time.

Gideon watches Harrow’s face as Harrow rubs her clit. The determination is a little funny—as though if she doesn’t focus, she might lose the hang of it. She’s clumsier now than before, and Gideon is so spent that she’s not sure she’ll be able to come again anyway—but in a few moments, she’s gasping into Harrow’s neck, near breaking point again.

“Oh, that’s good.” It comes out of her mouth without her brain’s approval. She hadn’t meant to inflate Harrow’s ego. It’s clear that for all Harrow’s mask of confidence, she’s never had anyone before Gideon. God, the thought makes Gideon shiver with the last dregs of the pride she’d felt when she’d looked at Harrow and known Harrow would only win with her. No one else.

“It’s good,” Gideon says again, babbling. “Keep doing that and I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll stay here until I’m 90. Fuck. We can do Nutcracker when we’re shriveled old nuts, bet you’d like that, huh, Harrow? I could give you everything you ever wanted.”

Harrow doesn’t reply. It’s weird, having Harrow in her lap and quiet this way. Gideon has seen Harrow go quiet in a way sort of similar to this—after dress rehearsal that one time when they’d had to combine forces with the Second and rent a huge studio and everyone’s music was competing with everyone else’s. Or sometimes, late at night, when they’re the only two people left and she’s waiting for her bus home. Those nights, Gideon likes to lie on the coolest spot of the studio floor and watch Harrow tap her fingers against her thigh, over and over in the exact rhythm of her routine. Recreating the whole thing in her head, lost to the world.

Is Harrow lost to the world now?

Harrow picks up the pace, and Gideon forgets to wonder about any of that. She feels Harrow’s mouth press hot against the side of her jaw, feels Harrow’s lashes flutter against her cheek—most of all, she feels Harrow’s fingertips, relentless against her clit, and—

When Gideon comes, her mind goes so blank she has to take a minute to breathe and nothing else. They aren’t Gideon and Harrow, in that moment. Nothing bad has ever happened to them. Nothing has ever happened at all.

Harrow lies there on top of her with her heart beating right against Gideon’s heart.

Okay. This is all right. Isn’t it?

And then Harrow says, very softly, “But you can’t.”

Gideon has the vague idea she should be offended, but her brain won’t quite produce that emotion. The main emotion at the moment is a sort of deep satiation that feels like it goes all the way down to her gut. Like she’s been hungry for a million years and someone’s just given her a five-course meal.

But underneath that, confusion is slowly beginning to rise to the surface.

“What are you even talking about?”

Harrow slowly sits up. She looks at Gideon with an unreadable expression on her face. Then she gets off Gideon’s lap and stands up, which is basically the worst thing that’s ever happened. Gideon feels cold from her torso to her legs.

“Come back,” she says. “Look, no one we know is on for another—” she looks around the room for a clock, and seeing none, shrugs and gives up—"a while.”

But Harrow purses her lips and begins to collect some clothing from around the room. She puts on a pair of sweatpants, not bothering with the underwear, which, okay, that’s going to live a long and happy life in Gideon’s brain. Then she puts on a hoodie, which is much too big for her.

In fact, it’s not her hoodie. It’s the hoodie Gideon was planning on wearing out of this thing when she goes to see Pal and Cam. Harrow’s putting back on clothing and it’s not even her own clothing, which seems unfair.

“What are you doing?”

Harrow refuses to look Gideon right in the eyes. What, is she embarrassed now?

“I’m leaving,” Harrow says. “I need to get a look at the competition. If you see Aiglamene, tell her I’ll be back by four for the drive home.”

Gideon’s whole body feels like the 20-pound weights at the gym, gathering dust on their rack uselessly while the yoga moms head for the 15s and the jocks grab the heavier stuff.

“You know, if you don’t want this, you could just say so.”

Harrow’s shoulders tense like a little bird about to take flight, and that’s when Gideon knows for sure that she’s lost this one. That she never should have believed any different. But Harrow’s voice isn’t angry when she responds. She looks over her shoulder, and she says, quite calmly,

“I can still stand.”

And then she collects her bag and her phone and walks out the door. Gideon lies there on the cramped couch for a long time in absolute, brain-numbing bewilderment.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean?