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Inej knows the moment just before freefall intimately. The first step onto the tightrope, leaving behind the solid ground of the platform for a thin, finicky piece of wire. The release of a drop on the silks, trusting that she’s wrapped them properly to catch her at the bottom of the trick. The leap from one Ketterdam rooftop to the next.
Fear is a well-known part of the affair. It’s as Papa always told her: when it comes, something is about to happen. Something terrible or something wonderful—fear reminds her to lock into the moment, to do everything in her power to ensure it’s the latter.
That’s easier with circus tricks or scaling buildings than it is with this. Her lithe body is built for those things; her heart is not.
She arrived in Kaz’s attic room about an hour ago, and she now has more than enough intel to guide her next sea voyage in a week’s time. He’s taken his deal with her seriously—as he takes all his deals—pulling all the weight he has in this city to aid her in her mission.
With the business side of things taken care of, there’s no reason for her to linger. A bedroom waits for her on the Geldstraat, a pair of satin pajamas gifted by Wylan and Jesper laid out on the bed, warming packs tucked between the sheets to welcome her in.
And yet she’s waited, patiently, for some sort of invitation from Kaz. The entire time she’s been here, she’s searched for any indication that he remembers the terms that she left upon.
She fulfilled her promise, docked on Ketterdam’s shore, came back to him. He’d asked that of her, and she’d wanted to oblige him. But now, she can’t tell what he means to do with it.
Kaz is a master at cards, because he counts them, yes, but also because he’s impossible to read. He could have a royal flush or nothing but a pair of twos and a bluff, and not a soul could tell the difference. She’s trying, desperately, to seek out his tells.
“Pick a card,” she hears, and turns from her seat at the windowsill to see Kaz sitting at his desk, fanning out a deck of playing cards with ungloved hands.
“That one,” she answers, pointing vaguely at a spot in the middle.
“Perceptive as I might be, I cannot possibly figure out which card you meant to choose from all the way over there.”
As dryly mocking as ever. With only a slight roll of her eyes, she slips off the sill and takes the few steps to meet him, plucking a card from his grasp. The queen of clubs stares back at her.
“Now return it to the deck.”
She obliges him, then watches with no small amount of admiration as his hands flip through a complicated series of maneuvers with the cards shuffling them every which way and back again. Were she a stronger-willed woman, perhaps she’d do what Kaz has always spoken about and looked for that gap in perception, that little moment - no doubt hidden expertly by him - where she’s meant to be tricked. She possesses no such strength of will - not in this regard, at least - and instead lets her attention zero in on his hands, the flex of long fingers and that one distinguishing piece of scar tissue along the back of his right hand.
When he presents her once again with the queen of clubs, she is unsurprised and no closer to understanding the trick than when they’d first started. If anything, she’s even less focused on the cards now.
She suddenly feels deeply foolish, so dumbly besotted by something as simple as the exposed hands of someone who still hasn’t indicated he still feels the same.
“I should go,” she says. “I need to wash and get some sleep and - ”
She trails off there, unsure what third thing she was planning to finish that sentence off with, and Kaz answers before she can figure it out.
“Don’t go.”
He blurts the words out, so quickly that she almost doesn’t hear them properly. Almost .
There’s a stubborn set to Kaz’s sharp jaw, a wired determination to let the request sit. It’s everything she’s spent the last hour wanting, and she lets the moment sink in fully before speaking.
“You want me to stay?” she whispers into the new quiet of the room. There’s still noise ringing through the Slat and from the streets below, but it barely registers. What hangs in the air between them weighs far heavier.
Kaz slips the deck of cards back into a desk drawer. “I always want you to stay,” he says, a raw, unfiltered honesty in his rasping tone. “I understand it’s a far cry from the luxury of the Geldstraat, but…”
“I’ll stay.”
Somehow, he looks surprised by her response. The brief flicker of it is gone as quickly as it arrived, his features back to their neutral expression, but Inej has had years of trying to read him in which to pick up on those little minute shifts. A rare tell, she notes faintly.
He nods once, a quick thing. “There are… extra clothes for you to borrow, if you need,” he says, pointing to the small dresser in the corner of the room. “They’ll be a little big on you.”
“That’s fine,” she says, already occupied by the thought of wearing Kaz’s clothes as her own.
But first, she really does need to wash. She can feel the grime of the city settled in a layer on her skin and wants to at least scrub that off the upper half of her body. Fortunately, the Slat has hot running water now - one of Kaz’s first improvements to the space post-Auction - and the basin in Kaz’s attic room is one of the recipients of it.
There isn’t much privacy in the space, and at first, that gives Inej pause. While her crew may have no qualms about changing in front of one another and little modesty when it comes to revealing their bodies, Inej has only ever undressed or changed clothes in the privacy of her captain’s quarters. In the aftermath of night after night of having silks unceremoniously ripped from her body by whoever paid Heleen to take her to bed that night, she’s not yet been able to emulate her crew’s casualness.
And yet, that initial reticence gives way here. Her only company in this space is Kaz, and she finds that the idea of shedding clothing in front of him doesn’t give her the same sort of pause. The first reason is the obvious one: she knows that he won’t touch her the way those men at the Menagerie did. He can’t - though he’d worked up to holding her hand for minutes at a time before she’d left Ketterdam, he’d never be able to grab her, to hold her down the way those men did. He can’t, and he wouldn’t - because for all that Kaz may hold himself out as the worst that the Barrel has to offer, he’s shown plenty of decency where it matters. She trusts him with this.
And then, the second reason. She wants him to see her. That desire surprises her now just as much as it did the first time it had roared to life within her, the fact that after everything she could still want that intimacy with someone. But that want thrums under her skin, strengthened now in the wake of Kaz’s confirmation of his own desires, and she decides to let it win out.
She crosses the room to the basin and turns the water on, giving it time to warm up. Kaz is behind her somewhere, either shuffling cards or dealing with the papers strewn across his desk. When the water warms, she runs the cloth under it, taking it first along her face and neck.
And then she takes her tunic off, leaving her in just her wrappings, and sets about cleaning her exposed arms.
A sound somewhere between a cough and a splutter echoes from behind her. She turns toward it, still dragging the wet cloth along her right shoulder.
Whatever was in Kaz’s hands before is gone now. He’s looking away from her, but even in profile, she can see the bright splashes of red spreading along the tops of his cheekbones.
“Saints, Kaz, are you blushing ?”
“Absolutely not,” he answers, but he knows that’s a lie just as well as she does.
He’s never shown any prudishness before, never feverishly averted his eyes from those taking their physical pleasure in the public spaces of the Barrel the way that Matthias once had. He’d even stripped before her on occasions almost too numerous for her to count, modesty never stopping him from taking his shirt off and running a wet cloth along the sharp planes of his body.
“You are ,” she declares, a hint of triumph in her voice. She watches the scowl on his face deepen.
“You can’t even look me in the eyes,” she teases, oddly giddy. “I mean, really, you stripped your shirt off in front of me for months.”
“That was different,” he insists, but he does at least start to return his gaze to her.
“Different how?”
The blush on his pale cheeks deepens. “You didn’t… want me… like that.” She can tell that the words take effort, that laying his cards out flat on the table still doesn’t come naturally, but she’s somehow even more appreciative of them that way. He’s trying , for her.
“Didn’t I?” she arches a brow. “The first time you did it I almost fell from the windowsill, and I don’t fall . I wanted you, even when I didn’t want to want you, even when it confused the hell out of me.”
She takes two tentative steps towards him, the wet cloth still in her hands. “And now, I want you to look at me, Kaz.”
And he does, his eyes skating along the arch of her neck and the divots of her collarbones, over the wrappings at her chest and down the slight curve of her waist, alighting briefly on the jagged white scar from Oomen’s dagger, then back up to her face. In the lamplight, she spots another tell: his tea-colored eyes blown wide with wanting, as if his very pupils are desperate to absorb as much of the sight before him as they can. And though she might have made fun of Kaz mere moments ago for blushing, she feels a heat creep into her face as well.
Is this what it feels like? To want and to be wanted, simultaneously?
It’s the moment of stepping onto a tightrope, precarious yet sure-footed. Of twirling through the air on the silks, the joyous freefall and catch. A risk well worth the reward.
She could get used to this, she thinks.
“Can I come closer?” she asks. Even in this synchronized desire, she knows that any steps they take will need to be part of a calculated dance, a slow-moving series of agreed-upon steps to keep the worst of their demons at bay.
After a moment of consideration, he nods.
“Even if I drip on the desk?”
He shrugs. “Fuck the desk.”