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Nadine has something to tell her.
What it is, Chloe isn’t sure, but she’ll have time to figure it out. They can’t leave India, and with it, Meenu. Not yet. Chloe never says this, and Nadine never asks. It’s something that Chloe could love her for eventually, something that makes it clear why the haziness between them had solidified into friendship so easily. They won’t leave this girl without her father.
Chloe and Nadine occupy the small room above the shop (“I promised the best deal in all of India,” Meenu says shyly, as she pushes away the proffered money, and Chloe smiles as she drops it into the tin where the girl keeps the day’s earnings anyway). During the day, Chloe reaches out to her contacts in the government, securing the fate of the Tusk, and Nadine strides through the markets, sometimes making her way up to the city centre, ear to the ground for news of returning troops. Now that Asav’s little rebellion has breathed its last, it shouldn’t be long now.
In the evening, Nadine offers herself up as a practice dummy in the alley out back, as Meenu gleefully practices the kicks, punches, dodges and feints she’s been shown. Sometimes, Chloe teaches her a new sleight of hand, or gives her a simple lock to pick. Dinner is usually pizza, or rotis from the stall across the way. When they’re ready to bunk down, Meenu closes the stall and traipses up to the tiny house that her father owns. After ensuring that the door is locked, Nadine and Chloe head back to the room above the shop. It’s a tiny affair: cracked walls, no furnishings to speak of, one cot, but they’ve both seen worse. They go to sleep back to back, and invariably wake up plastered around or on top of each other.
On a morning such as this, six days after Asav’s train made its final stop, Chloe wakes up staring into Nadine’s eyes, and realises that her friend is finally ready to tell her… whatever she’s had to tell her for days now. Her hair is splayed across her face but she can still see Nadine through the inky blur, lying stretched out on the edge of the cot, less than a foot away from her. Nadine looks criminally alert as she’s wont to even in the early morning; a few curls slipping free of the braid she always sleeps in, cradling her cheeks, caressing the high forehead.
She’s still looking at Chloe, the flecks of green in her eyes glittering like leaves of grass.
Chloe stretches while she waits for whatever is coming, feeling calm, but suddenly, curiously, keyed up. It’s a long, bone-crackling stretch, the kind she always likes to afford herself of a morning, pointing her toes, back arched, arms up over her head. Instead of relaxing her, it makes her more aware; aware of her vest riding up on her stomach, makes her feel the tiny distance between them like one can feel the rain coming on a grey afternoon, underlines the weight of Nadine’s eyes on her.
“Morning, partner,” she says, sinking back into the cot, on her side.
“I’m sorry, Chloe,” Nadine replies.
It falls between them like a tonne.
Chloe bites her lips, thinks it over briefly, and then shakes her head.
“Right… no, I definitely think I’m missing something here. Sorry for what?”
Voices of the morning hawkers, the early risers getting their stalls ready, the precipitous housewives ready to start their shopping: they all drift up through the window from the streets below. Chloe listens to them idly as Nadine finally, finally tears her eyes away from her, and sits up on the cot, sinking her fingers into her hair.
“Eish, I’m already mucking this up,” comes the faint mutter. Nadine absently pulls her braid apart; the curls tumble and toss around the back of her neck, graze her shoulders. Perhaps absence makes her eyes go sharper; now that Nadine isn’t looking directly at her with those often brown, sometimes green, always intense eyes, she can see that her friend looks… nervous? No, the word nervous and Nadine aren’t on speaking terms. ‘Unsettled’, Chloe decides.
Curious.
“If one of your goals was to get my attention, then you’re doing swimmingly, sweetheart. I mean, an apology. From Nadine Ross. Whoa.”
Nadine huffs. “Don’t get cute.”
Chloe grins. “Aw, I don’t know. I like getting cute. Often gets me what I’m after, like answers to my questions.” She reaches across the space between them to jerk a friendly elbow into the tense muscle of her friend’s arm. “C’mon. Sorry for what?”
Down below in the alley, there’s a great clash and a clattering of wares; two carts colliding. The ruckus fills up the air between them, and Nadine seems to take the time to compose a response. When it comes, it’s twofold. She reaches across with two knuckles, once again bridging the gap between them. Chloe sees it coming and watches like a spectator, strangely uninvolved, barely feeling it as Nadine brushes the underside of her jaw, and sighs.
“For punching you.”
Days, weeks, months later, when the feel of Nadine’s bronzed skin brushing her own has become like her favourite wine (familiar, muted, always able to give her a rush of warm pleasure) she will remember this touch. They’d had contact enough in the Ghats; leaning on each other, relying on each other, fighting together, and all the usual skims and brushes that will occur between two people thrown together, but this… it smacks of something different, if all the same. It is, Chloe will think, the physical equivalent of hanging on to that crackling ledge in Belur, seeing Nadine rush towards her, and instead of ‘Frazer’, there is a frantic cry of ‘Chloe!’
All this will come. For the moment, Chloe is nonplussed.
“You’re sorry… for punching me. A week ago, when we had our little tiff?”
Nadine just nods.
“I…” To say this isn’t what she expected would be woefully inadequate. She isn’t sure what she had expected, but it was something in the ‘not this’ realm of things. “Well, I mean, don’t worry about it. I kept information from you, you were mad, things happened. I put it behind me, and well… to be honest, I thought you had too.”
“I did.”
But she lies as she says it; of that, Chloe is sure. This is the thing that’s been cogitating in her mind these past few days, the thing that Chloe’s been vaguely aware of since seeing Sam off, throughout rides through the city, during dinners with Meenu. Nadine had carried this in her pocket as surely as Chloe still carries Ganesh.
Leaning back, palms flat against the cot, Chloe considers.
“I’m not mad, you know. Hell, I don’t reckon I was back then. Don’t think I was anything other than faintly dizzy.”
A joke, but perhaps the wrong one to make; lines crease in Nadine’s faintly weathered cheek as she frowns.
“Ja, I know you aren’t mad.”
“So… why the apology?”
Nadine’s frown deepens. She’s got the look of a woman who’s embroiled in a conversation that she’d thought would be long over. Chloe herself isn’t sure why she’s pushing this. After a shaky start, it no longer feels like she and Nadine are walking along a dagger’s edge, and this smacks of rocking the boat. For some reason though, she feels from a place a bit deeper than her heart that she can’t let this lie.
“You know, if I’m bad at saying sorry, then you’re even worse at saying ‘apology accepted’.”
“Hey!” Chloe protests, palms up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m very appreciative of the apology and the novelty of this entire situation. I’m just not sure it was needed, love. You punch people all the time.”
Again, Chloe gets a little swoop in her belly, the intangible feeling of missing a step while going down the stairs. It hadn’t been a bad thing to say, but it puts Nadine just a mite more on edge. Muscles curling and tensing, she lifts herself off of the cot. The motion transferred through the mattress makes Chloe shift ever so slightly, puts her just a bit more off kilter. But the trade-off is worth it: she thinks she’s starting to get it.
Nadine is pacing; a gentle, soft-footed thing. There isn’t much room for it; she eats up the width of the room with just three of her long strides.
“It didn’t feel fair,” she says finally, spinning on her heel to face Chloe. “We weren’t in a fight; I took you off guard with a cheap shot. It was…” She shrugs. “Unsportsmanlike. I felt like an apology was in order, that’s all.”
This is a perfectly acceptable explanation, and halfway through it, Chloe decides that she isn’t going to accept it anyway.
“You take cheap shots all the time,” Chloe says, and shakes her head when Nadine might protest. “I don’t mean that as an insult. God knows I do too. You take them where you can get them. The grapevine in this business is a mile and a half long, and it’s got more than a few stories about you. When people make you mad you deck them out. We were both there, and we both know why you did it, so I don’t understand why you—”
“Good Christ, Chloe, I feel bad, okay?” Nadine blurts this out almost ferociously, and then there’s that bitten lip of half regret, half impatience. Then, with bull in china shop-esque tenacity, she barrels on. “I like you.”
Chloe blinks; this almost sounds like an accusation. (Or a confession? This comes from that place deeper than her heart; she gives that voice a sound kick in the arse.)
“Er, thank you, hon, I’m pretty fond of you t—”
“I like you, you’re my friend, and this isn’t something I’m used to.” She isn’t pacing anymore; Nadine stands with her feet apart, arms crossed, looking into Chloe’s eyes like she’d been doing when they awoke. “Shit yes, I punch a lot of people. All of them deserve it, and a lot of them end up dead. I’m not some kind of animal, my father taught me better than that. I don’t swing my fists without a reason, and most times when I do it, I don’t have a single regret. Until you. You’re the first person that I’ve hit and later changed my mind about. You’re... you’re the first friend I’ve ever put a mark like that on.”
She reaches out with those two knuckles again, and then drops the hand. She’s not close enough, anyway. Chloe finds herself scooting closer to the edge of the cot. Nadine’s words take a bit to permeate, and when Chloe replies, it’s one of those weird moments where what comes out of your mouth is a surprise to even you.
“Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve been someone’s first.”
“I… what?”
“I reckon I’m privileged actually.” Chloe brandishes a finger, and then touches the spot on her jaw where the dull red mark lingers still. “First among your acquaintances to get socked on the jaw and still retain girls’ night out benefits. Take that, Nadine’s other friends!”
Nadine laughs, and as always it’s a sweet sight and sound. The entirety of her face lights up when she laughs; her mouth, so often unsmiling, becomes so wide and full she resembles a different person altogether.
“You realise that your theoretical gloating would be aimed at a mostly empty room right? Not a lot of people out there who’d consider themselves my friend.”
Chloe smiles softly.
“Like I said. Guess that makes me special.”
No real response to that, just briefly rolled eyes and a ducked head. Chloe scoots closer to the edge of the bed, at first with the intention of standing up, reaching out, touching Nadine’s arm or shoulder like she’s gotten used to doing over the past several days, but before she can align thought with deed, Nadine trains those eyes on her again. Her eyes are the softest things about her, and they hold Chloe in place a while yet, content to smile up at her friend.
“And hey, apology accepted. Not that, again, it was needed. Water, bridge, all that.” She uses a hand to mime waves. “But, ah...” (“Good Christ, Chloe, I feel bad, okay?”) “...I appreciate you explaining why you felt the need to give it.”
Arms folded, cheeks still creased with a little smile, Nadine rocks back on the balls of her bare feet. The tense, unsettled look is all but gone, Chloe is pleased to note.
“Are you going to make a comment about how soft I am on the inside?”
Chloe pouts. “Well, now that you’ve brought it up, no I’m not. Your nougaty centre will be the topic of discussion for another day, when I can catch you off-guard, make you blush.”
“You’re literally insufferable,” Nadine says, laughing, and makes it sound like a compliment. Casually, like it takes no effort or conscious thought at all, she drops forward onto the floor to begin her morning push-ups. She looks as relaxed and concentrated as ever, and that’s all Chloe can hope for.
“Thank you,” she says. “If it makes you feel better about the whole thing, I’ll let you come over here and kiss it better.”
She taps her chin lightly as she says it, and ignores the way her stomach flips. Nadine’s push-ups are almost soundless, her body cleaving up and down perfectly, her muscles coiling and straightening in symphonic coordination. The only sound that intrudes is that of her snort. Chloe is watching her closely, so she gets a good eyeful of her arched brow too, and an early preview of the blush that she’d threatened to induce. That makes her smile, and makes the somersaults that her stomach had previously been performing look like kindergarten gymnastics.
“Or,” Chloe drawls, because she never did learn when to leave well enough alone, “I could pay you back in kind, sock you one on that most noble chin. Tit for tat!”
Nadine grunts again.
“I feel like I should be insulted at how quickly we went from kissing to punching,” she says, never missing a beat. “But all right.”
A laugh tickles her throat; she should have expected no less.
“‘All right’?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t mind. If you want a free swing, it’s all yours.”
Chloe hasn’t been keeping count, but apparently Nadine’s set of push-ups are done; she moves seamlessly into sit-ups: feet flat on the floor, torso taut, curls bouncing each times she crests. Chloe is used to the sight; she usually watches idly during her morning routine. Sometimes she’ll offer to spot her, and Nadine will accept, even though she clearly doesn’t need the help. That’s the kind of people they’ve become: one selfish dickhead offering help, one stubborn dickhead accepting it. A thief and a mercenary in concord. Two people who know nothing about apologies muddling their way through one that probably hadn’t needed to exist, but the fact that it did exist... (“I like you.”) well... it probably bodes well.
The sounds from the streets below are growing louder, more animated, more plentiful. Meenu will be arriving soon. Chloe and Nadine will want to head down soon, help her open up. But before that...
Chloe slips from the cot, and squats down in front of Nadine as she does her sit-ups. One moment, she can’t see her face, and in the next, it appears just above her knees: curious but unbothered, perfectly willing to be clipped on the chin. Chloe waits it out for a few more seconds. Nadine disappears, and when she reappears, Chloe halts her movement with a hand on her shoulder. So new, so familiar. Making a fist, Chloe gives it a brief kiss, and then bounces it gently off of Nadine’s jaw. Mostly brown, a little green, and terribly intense, Nadine’s eyes never leave her own.
“There. We square, china?”
Nadine nods, shoulders rounding down with understanding and a great amount of fondness. Her hands are still interlocked behind her head; she should look silly, but to Chloe she impossibly noble. A uselessly romantic thing to say, perhaps, but the only other phrase that comes to Chloe’s mind is that... she looks like her friend.
“We’re square,” Nadine agrees, smiling beautifully.
Chloe pats her on the knee, feeling lighter, feeling right, feeling as if the morning has come in more ways than the literal. She gets to her feet and crosses to the sink to get ready to start the day. Nadine will be right behind her.