“Forget it. He has no problem assuming I know everything about technology because I’m from the city. If he wasn’t a bastard who couldn’t see past your tits, he could have bothered to think the same about you.”
Noelle reached for the whiskey bottle with a laugh that felt like Rachel’s tone—edged with bitterness. “I don’t think it has anything to do with my tits. I think Dallas knows exactly what I was raised to be—decorative and helpless. Useless outside of Eden. I’m as surprised as he is to find out I’m not.”
“Hey, don’t.” Rachel grabbed Noelle’s shoulder and turned her around. “Knock it off. You’re not helpless. I never thought you were.”
That seemed impossible. If she hadn’t been helpless, she’d never have stumbled across Jasper to begin with. “I feel like I am.”
“You’re not.” Rachel’s dark eyes hardened. “Damn Dallas, and damn Jasper too. They’d let you keep thinking it if they had their way, I bet.”
Defensiveness stirred, but not for herself or Dallas. “Jasper’s not like that. Why would he want me to be useless and needy?”
Rachel relented with a shake of her head. “He wouldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m just being an asshole.”
“No, you’re not.” Noelle caught Rachel’s hands. “There are men who would. Jasper… He’s not one of them. Right?”
“No, it’s Dallas,” she muttered. “He pisses me off sometimes.”
Because he looked at Noelle and only saw her tits? Or because he looked at Rachel and didn’t seem to see hers at all? Noelle would guess the latter—there was a decidedly asexual affection in the way Dallas treated Rachel, although asexual wasn’t a word she’d ever thought to associate with Dallas O’Kane.
Smoothing her thumbs over Rachel’s hands, she lowered her voice to a whisper. “He’s a powerful man. Powerful men can be incredibly blind, and incredibly stupid. Even the smart ones.”
“Yeah.” Rachel squared her shoulders and smiled ruefully. “They can also be incredibly not worth the drama. Lex can have him.”
Lex would have him—of that, Noelle was certain. Whether the two would survive the experience was another question. “I don’t envy her that challenge.”
“Neither do I.” Rachel paused. “Not anymore.”
But she had, and Noelle couldn’t blame her. Dallas could be hypnotic. There had been times the previous night where she’d felt guilty over how strongly she responded to his laughing commands, shamed that she could find him so arousing. He was a force of nature, overpowering and irresistible.
And distant. Noelle’s attraction to Jasper was already melting into a delicious blend of craving and affection, a need that couldn’t be filled by sex alone, no matter how obscene. She was starting to want his company as much as his touch, the quiet moments where he smiled and teased her, where he held her.
Noelle squeezed Rachel’s hands in understanding. “It’s different here, isn’t it? Different than it is in Eden, yes…but different from how it was before the Flares, too. The way people come together. What you give and what you’re supposed to hold back.”
“I don’t know.” Rachel pulled free and lifted another rack of glasses onto the bar. “I try not to overthink it. Like…if I just sit back and let whatever happens happen, then it’ll make sense.”
“Does it work?”
She met Noelle’s gaze with another almost sheepish smile. “If you have to ask, I think you already know the answer.”
No. No, it couldn’t possibly work. Not in a place like this, where intimacy between lovers could be withheld as surely as it was in Eden. The O’Kanes gave their bodies freely enough, their affection. You could be family or fucking or both, but wasn’t that what Lex had tried to explain to her? That thing she wanted too fast, the thing she offered along with her body.
She didn’t have a word for it, but she knew what it was. Too much trust. A yearning for possession that went both ways. Hope that what you had would never change.
Maybe it was love.
The unsettled feeling from that afternoon hadn’t gone away.
Noelle stared unseeing at her own reflection, only vaguely aware of the rote movements as she dragged a brush through her hair. Lex’s vanity was another oddity in a room filled with oddities, beautifully restored and covered with silver-backed hairbrushes and expensive glass bottles that wouldn’t have been out of place in Eden. Some had undoubtedly been gifts from Dallas, but Noelle had yet to see Lex touch any of it. She kept her makeup, lotions, and perfumes in utilitarian containers cluttering up her bathroom sink, out of sight behind the closed door.
The vanity was a stage. A scene as carefully set as the vast bed and its lush pillows—the romanticized version of a woman’s private domain, with the messy reality tucked away.
The fact that Noelle felt more at home in the polished, empty fantasy than she did anywhere else wasn’t flattering or reassuring. If she unfocused her eyes a little and let her mind drift, she could be back in her own bedroom, a room filled with empty tokens and an empty girl being groomed as Eden’s flawless, unrealistic version of a woman.
Decorative and hollow.
What a horrible, hateful ideal.
Lex lay with her head pillowed on her arms, watching. Finally, she made a sleepy noise of amusement. “One hundred strokes before bedtime. Do they teach you that in Eden too?”
“Yes.” Blinking, Noelle shifted her gaze to Lex’s reflection in the mirror. “Do they teach you that in the sectors?”
“Mmm, Sector Two. That’s where I’m from.” She closed her eyes. “‘It’s all in the presentation, Alexa. A woman must never be herself.’”
The words could have come from her mother’s lips. “So it’s not so different from Eden, there.”
“In some ways.” Lex sat up and reached for a cigarette. “My mentor at the training house was stone cold. Makes Dallas look like a fucking saint.”
“Training house?” She wanted to snatch the words back the moment they left her mouth, because of course there was only one thing they could be training Lex to do in the sectors, and it didn’t have anything to do with hosting dinner parties.
“You haven’t heard what they do out in Two?” Lex took a deep drag off her cigarette. “They buy up pretty little things, train ’em just right. Sell ’em to all the rich old men looking to corrupt some innocent darling who isn’t too innocent to suck their balls on occasion.”
Noelle clenched the brush until she could feel each individual swirl of the handle’s carvings digging into her skin. “I’m sorry. That’s—” Horrifying. Degrading. And the fact that she could recognize that and understand it only made her craving for corruption and a little degradation at Jasper’s hands that much more twisted. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? I didn’t stick around for that shit. I ran away.”
“Good.” Noelle said it forcefully, trying to hide her confusion from Lex. She set down the brush and dragged her hair over her shoulder to braid it, watching her fingers so she wouldn’t have to meet Lex’s eyes. “Is that what men really want? Someone they can corrupt?”
“Depends on the guy.” Lex crushed her cigarette, slipped from the bed, and walked into the bathroom. The water cut on a moment later, and she ducked back out, her toothbrush in her hand. “In Sector Two, the rich men buy girls as companions—gay or straight, whether they want one or not. They have to if they want to fit in.”
Noelle had almost grown accustomed to Lex’s casual nudity, but it was different tonight. Different because she’d had her face between Lex’s thighs, because she’d felt pleasure at her touch. It was impossible to figure out the boundaries now, which was why she was still seated at the vanity, fiddling with her hair. Would it be a rejection to climb onto the couch after she’d slept tangled between Jasper and Lex? Or an invitation she didn’t understand to crawl into the vast comfort of Lex’s own bed?