Work Text:
It’s Booker who sounds the alarm.
The email arrives in Nile’s inbox labeled URGENT: SCUBA DEAL ENDING SOON!! from [email protected]. It had one attachment, a picture of a blurry right hand with a scar running down the middle of the palm caught mid-motion as it reached for a can of soda.
*
Andy sets up the cabin herself.
She chooses light, wooden furniture with gaudy fabric upholstery for the kitchen. She puts secondhand wicker chairs in the sitting room, their varnish tired but dignified, and a single TV and DVD player on a low cabinet facing the seats.
From one of her many hidden caches, she unearths warm tapestries and old trinkets and brings them all back to the cabin in a single trip, unable to bear the thought of returning any later.
There is only one bed on a frame low to the ground. The designated linen closet is well stocked with clean cotton sheets and extra pillow covers. The thread count is not very high, but Andy thinks it will do.
She isn’t subtle about where she is. She uses familiar aliases to make purchases online, and the names on the cards she uses are all anagrams of her name.
*
“I’m just saying, a salad wouldn’t traditionally be paired with what we’re eating tonight.”
“Now, Andromache,” Quynh says, “a healthy human diet involves fiber and fresh greens.”
Andy’s conception predates the cabin they’re staying in, the invention of the stainless steel blade of the pairing knife Quynh is using to cut tomatoes, and even perhaps the very development of the ecological region that forms the forest that surrounds them, and yet all the weight of her years and all the gravitas it lends her only just prevents her from making a face at Quynh’s back.
“Dig in,” Quynh says once they’re both seated.
Dinner is an intimate affair only because of the lack of space. Andy bumps her elbow against Quynh’s too many times to count, but they don’t speak.
The rice is fragrant and fluffy as Andy scoops some into her bowl. The steamed fish Quynh prepares is almost too pretty to eat. Green onion and red pepper garnish form tiny topographical forms on the fish’s flank, which is itself a small island in a lake of savory, light broth. The remaining dishes were a plate of thinly cut spam that had been cooked in a pan until golden brown and a bowl of caprese salad with strong representation from its arugula, basil, and tomato factions.
“Can you believe that we’re together again?” Quynh asks. She closes her eyes before her next bite. Her teeth are very white where they cut through the red flesh of the tomato slice. Juice drips down her hand to trace the sweet bones of Quynh’s wrist like a lover or a river trying to escape to the sea.
“Not at all,” Andy answers.
*
Andy does the dishes while Quynh channel surfs.
Quynh spends only a few seconds on each channel, and the wall of sound all the satellite channels generate is almost enough to cause Andy a headache. Maybe it would eventually. She was more susceptible to minor aches and pains now.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Andy asks.
“Andromache,” Quynh says overly light, “you have no idea.”
Andy mulls those words over as she finishes rinsing the last dish. It clatters when she sets it down into the drying rack.
Quynh has settled on a nature documentary. On screen, a giraffe lips around the branches of a tree, its black tongue slithering out now and then to make an appearance.
Andy settles in her own wicker chair to read a book she’s been meaning to finish. The scribbles in the margin are familiar, but she no longer remembers making them.
The funny thing about having an immeasurable and unknowable amount of time left was long term goals stretched from days into months then years. Memory became a less like a long reel of film, a strip of highway rolling back and back and back, and more like spotty and poorly lit rooms in a big house.
Andy is so old that when she dreams about the woman who taught her archery, she can no longer remember the language they shared as her instructor pulled her fingers to her cheek and straightened her arms. The gist of that lesson had been about compensating. An archer is not always aiming at their target even if they intend to hit it. Sometimes you have to compensate for the give of the bow, the shape of the land, the wind and your own features, tricking you into thinking things about the target that weren’t true.
It was so easy to miss things, and so hard to cherish things as they were happening. It’s only in the remembering that events truly become precious and it was a bitter sweet exercise.
*
Andy always brushes her teeth first. Quynh likes to putter around the bedroom and fluff the pillows, turn off all the other lights in the cabin and double check all potential points of egress.
She always puts a tape into the little tape player on her bedstand that Andy fished out of a bargain bin. The tapes are never anything specific. Every night Quynh listens to something a different. Sometimes there’s music, perhaps someone’s old school mixtape. On other nights, it’s the soothing and measured voices of audio books, the passages severed from its siblings and drained of context.
Today, Andy listens to a garage band cover eighties hair metal as Quynh washes her face.
When Quynh crawls into bed, she also turns off the last light in the cabin, plunging them into darkness.
As Andy’s eyes adjust, she looks up through the skylight she’d installed above their bed and thinks about camping out under the stars thousands of years ago. Sleeping on rocks. Listening to the same way Quynh breathed for nights on end.
*
At night, they shed their skin. The veneer of civility they maintain during the day pools at the foot of their bed.
Quynh’s kisses are like cool sips of water after going days without, but her hands are mean. They wander and grasp, pinch and pull, but Andy pushes in it. She doesn’t soften her mouth and her nails scratch hard against Quynh’s back as they move against each other.
“Was this the best you could do?” Quynh whispers. “You, Andromache, great warrior and hunter unparalleled.” She punctuates her sentence with a slow sigh.
Andy almost wants to correct her, but sucks a bruise into the soft skin of Quynh’s collarbone instead just to hear Quynh sigh like that again. See, you can teach a very, very old dog new tricks sometimes. She tried to sear the shape of Quynh’s open mouth into her memory. “You’re free to leave whenever you want,” she whispers back.
“A trap with an open door is still a trap.”
With a shake of her head, Andy slid down the length of Quynh’s body, taking her time to kiss her shoulders, each rung of her ribs, and the sweet curves of her belly. Unforgettable, she told herself.
*
The sun rises over their bed.
In the morning, Quynh tries to follow along as an infant flattens slices of white bread, spreads Nutella over the slices, puts the whole thing in egg and fries it.
They pass the day making dessert recipes they find online and eating their horrific creations. Crepes, mug brownies, and fruity hand pies, egg custards and microwave-Turkish delight fill their kitchen with dirty dishes and competing smells. Everything is sugar as they giggle helplessly at each of their experiments.
At the end of the day, they do the dishes side by side. Quynh scrubs and Andy rinses. The drying rack is overflowing when they settle into their places in front of the TV.
Quynh settles on a news channel. After a few minutes of low mumbling from the TV, Quynh says, “They do it to themselves.”
“We,” Andy corrects, “we do this.”
Quynh grins, but all the sweetness from the day seems to have drained from her body as she turns her attention from the screen fully onto Andy. “I know what you’re doing.” Here, Quynh pauses as if to make space for a rebuttal but Andy stays silent. “But I can wait you out. What was a few hundred years drowning under the sea to a few decades playing house with you?”
Quynh slices through the air with her hand to show how little the time meant to her.
The scar on Quynh's palm caught the light, a slender rope slipped just under the skin. Andy has long forgotten its origin, but she knew the shape of it under her fingertips, against her skin, and she feels longing stir under her breastbone, for Quynh now, for the Quynh of before, and for a future where Quynh somehow changes her mind. Because of Andy. For her. For Andromache of Scythian, the greatest warrior. For Andy, who can’t leave whenever she wants either, and not for the lack of trying.