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Arthur is amazing. Arthur is wonderful. He takes her into the dreamshare and shows her just what she can do, what she can become, the vast resources of untapped power lying just below her feet. His mouth claims hers, his body marks her, and if that weren't enough his teeth mark her too. She traces lines from each to each, a path disappearing under her fingertips, and wonders whether he would do this if she didn't habitually hide her skin under layers and scarves.
She draws him out, unravels every last defense he has into a pile of thread and excuses at his feet, leads him out of his carefully constructed walls and makes him feel. She makes him smile, makes the darkness in his eyes lift for a moment, counts the laughs she can evoke and starts to feel at home in his arms.
And then he leaves her. There's no fight, no finality; he just gets scared and turns tail and leaves. Worse, it's not just the figurative leave-taking: he abandons her in Auckland, a way station on their way back from Shanghai, two days before their tickets are set to go. She wakes up and the blank side of his bed is like the empty beach of Limbo.
There's no note. Why would there be?
She makes it home, she has more resources than she might have had a year ago, she is clever and smart and knows how to find her way out of anything and she will not cry. When she gets to her apartment every trace he was there is gone, but for the crumpled black sail of a pocket square under her bed. She can't decide whether to keep it or burn it and finally just opens the window one windy day and lets the air carry it away. She's no longer a child who needs a token to remember him by. If she wants to remember him.
She goes back to work. Abandons the world of extraction and looks for other options. She gets her architect's license and moves into a new place (that doesn't have memories tucked away like seashells under the sand) and leaves dreamshare behind. And if sometimes she dreams of mazes and flashing dark eyes and armor falling at her feet, well, everybody believes a dream is real while they're in it. She feels empty inside, washed clean, all her edges sanded off till she is nothing but a transparent pebble of sea glass. If it weren't for her totem she would wonder whether the dreams were more real than her waking hours.
Eames visits while she's in this semipermanent limbo, tells her she needs to hang out with more criminals. Like you, she wonders, as he drags her out of her home and into the dark night of Paris. He tells her she's boring and takes her to tiny bars and clubs and buys her drinks made of liqueurs with unpronounceable names and swirls a tumbler of whiskey as he talks.
Bluntly he tells her that she should never have given up dreamshare, that she should have found another way to do the thing she was best at, to revel in it. She asks what to use it for other than stealing and he's almost bored as he tells her to use her imagination. And then he leaves, but there's a card in the front pocket of her bag with a name of a woman who turns out to be exploring the psychiatric uses of the PASIV. Just like that she's back in the dreamworld, this time without the petty moral qualms. Now she has a purpose again, dreaming and waking, her steps down the winding streets of Paris seeming to carry her in a secret dance.
The forger keeps dropping into her life, washing up like high tide. The flotsam he leaves behind collects in her apartment: a stack of poker chips from different casinos, a tiny sketchbook with jewel-like portraits of future forgeries, receipts from wine bars and bookshops and obscure notes to himself in a back-slanting scrawl that she can't puzzle out. A pillow and blanket seem to become his, smelling of cigars and alcohol and whatever the hell it is he puts in his hair. Postcards from other cities are tacked up on the wall over her desk. And they keep going out, leaving her sleeping odd hours and waking up scrambling for sketchpads to draw out the things she's seen in visions and sleep. At least freelancers don't have to show up at nine in the morning.
He's leading her into a life of debauchery, she tells him as he pours her another glass of wine. The light catches in the belly of the glass, sending shadows of blood over his face, over his heart. He gives her a crooked smile through the light and tells her that he rather thought it was the other way around. Unspoken is the question of just how often he's been here, how regularly he cycles back to her city and her couch and her side. Her hair slips through his fingers like tangling vines as she leans in and fastens her lips to his and tastes the wine in his mouth.
When she pulls back from kissing him he cradles her face in his hands, like a pearl of great price, and just looks down at her for a long while. She wonders what he sees there, the mazes and the monsters and the empty shore behind her eyes. He kisses her forehead and her mouth like a benediction, then stands up and pulls on his coat. They're going home, he informs her. The word makes her heart twist and her lungs catch, and she runs past him into the street.
The rain catches in her hair and the streetlamps send it into sparkles, a coronet of stars flashing brightly as he chases her down the cobblestones of the crooked street that runs straight and true just up ahead.