Beyond Shame

Lex spoke sharply from the doorway. “That’s probably older than anything you’ve ever owned. You might want to stop pawing it.”

Noelle stumbled, shoving her hands behind her back as if that would change what was already done. “I’m sorry. I’ve never seen anything like it outside of textbooks. I was just—” What? Snooping? No explanation was adequate.

“Having a look around. I get it.” Lex dropped her black knapsack in the corner and began to peel off the high- collared jacket she wore. “It was a gift. The Renoir, I mean.”

Noelle tugged at the hem of her borrowed T-shirt, self-conscious about her bare legs. “It’s beautiful. Priceless. Someone must think very highly of you.”

The woman snorted and turned toward a small sliding door on the far wall. “It cost money. Some people have more of that than they know what to do with.”

Lex seemed to be one of them. Noelle tried not to be nosy, but the open closet door revealed tangled piles of jewelry and sculptures mixed with electronics that must have been smuggled from the city at great cost. She even saw one or two sleek weapons—guns, honest-to-God guns, something she’d rarely seen within the walls of Eden, and never anywhere but in the hands of the military police.

Noelle turned her attention back to the painting, back to Lex’s words. People—men—with more money than they knew what to do with. Eden had its share of those. More than its share. “I’m familiar with people like that. They think they can buy anything. Or anyone.” And in her experience, they usually could.

“No, not—” Lex stowed her bag and faced Noelle. “You can’t buy people here with money, especially women. You buy them with security, safety, all the things that have always been true in societies where men hold the power. But we hold power, too. Remember that—there are things we have, things we can offer. Things they need.”

Noelle couldn’t imagine that any of the men here gave a damn about the things she’d been raised and trained to do. Organizing and managing a household, hosting elaborate dinner parties where she smiled at important city leaders and used her mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of their foibles and vanities to flatter them into agreeable moods.

Noelle gripped the hem of her shirt again. “I don’t have much to offer the men here. Except…” If she couldn’t even choke out the word, how was she supposed to offer them sex?

“Fucking is the least of it,” Lex muttered. “Everyone has a couple of holes a guy can stick his dick in. The important stuff is all above the neck.”

It felt like her entire body had flushed, but Noelle fought past self-consciousness. “What’s the important stuff?”

“Using your brain, baby girl. There’s nothing you need to know about anyone that you can’t figure out in ten seconds flat.” She beckoned. “Follow me.”

Lex walked into the bedroom, flicked on another lamp on the nightstand and sat on the bed, crossing her legs. “Now—how do you get under my skin? What do I like?”

During the course of their acquaintance, Lex had shouted at Jasper, whose formidable presence weakened Noelle’s knees, and had snapped just as viciously at Dallas O’Kane, a figure of criminal legend. Everyone in Sector Four lived or died by Dallas’s whim—Lex had admitted as much when she’d said he made the laws here.

But she’d yelled at him, and she hadn’t shown fear. Noelle sank to the edge of the bed and rubbed her fingers over the expensive duvet. She thought about the priceless art, the silken sheets and the closet full of valuables hidden away like a treasure instead of displayed proudly, the way her father’s friends showed off the things they bought with their vast wealth.

“You like beautiful things, but you don’t need them to make you feel important.” She smiled a little shyly. “Maybe you have a soft spot for things that get thrown away.”

Lex laughed. “The last part’s true.” Her amusement faded. “Dallas gave me the paintings.”

Noelle wet her lips. “Are you and Dallas—” Did people marry in the sectors? In Eden, marriage was a sacrament, but nothing sacred was likely to survive in the slums. “—together?”

“What do you think? If he had me already, would he be dropping thousands on pretty presents to catch my eye?”

“Perhaps not.” She tilted her head and regarded Lex, searching for the meaning beneath the words. “Is that the only power we have? Not being caught?” The thought turned Lex’s blithe freedom into its own sort of cage.

“No. It’s your first lesson.” Lex brushed Noelle’s hair back behind her ear. “It’s not like in the city. Belonging to someone isn’t the endgame, the point where they’re allowed to get lazy. It’s a beginning, one you have to be damn sure you want.”

Her skin prickled under the other woman’s touch. Not sexual arousal, not exactly, but a sensual pleasure she’d only begun to crave when she’d started spending time with people who violated the social taboo forbidding unnecessary physical contact.

“Thank you,” she blurted out, leaning in to Lex’s touch. “For convincing Dallas to give me a chance. I’ll learn anything I need to learn. I can’t go to the communes—they’re even worse than Eden.”

“You’d go if you had to, and you’d be all right. Trust me, honey. That is the important thing.”

To Noelle’s everlasting humiliation, her eyes burned. She blinked them twice before realizing there was no stopping it, then squeezed them shut as the first tear slipped free. “I didn’t really think my family would throw me away. I only wanted to feel something. I know I was privileged, that I must seem like a spoiled city brat…” Her chest felt tight, as if all the weight of Eden’s claustrophobic expectations were closing in on her again.

“Are you kidding me?” Lex pulled her into a hug and made soothing noises. “No offense, baby girl, but I wouldn’t have had your life there for anything.”

Her tears soaked Lex’s shirt, but the answer was there, just beyond reach. “Why?” Noelle didn’t even know what she was asking. Why wouldn’t Lex want her life? Why hadn’t it been enough for her? Why had she thrown it all away?

Lex answered them all with three words. “You weren’t free,” she said. “You can be here, you know. Dallas talks big about shit, but he’s never forced a woman to do anything she didn’t want. Remember that too, Noelle.”

“I don’t know what I want. I don’t know anything.”

“That’s why you try things. Eventually, you stumble across the ones that make you happy.” Lex kissed her cheek. “And you learn. Everything anyone tells you, file it away in that brain of yours.”

She could do that. She’d always been mind-hungry, devouring everything in her parents’ digital library before going so far as to learn how to circumvent tablet security to gain access to the more restricted titles, old books from a time before fear and morality had swallowed everything. “I’m good at remembering things.”

Lex patted her back. “Go crawl in bed, honey. I’d let you stay in mine, but I don’t think you really want to.”

She rather did, and not just because the sheets would feel heavenly against her skin. Touching Lex meant having an anchor instead of being cast adrift in the darkness that would soon envelop the room.

But she’d already cried and laid her soul bare. Enough humiliation for one lifetime, let alone a single evening. She slipped from Lex’s enormous bed and crawled back onto the lumpy mattress that folded out of the couch. “Can you help me find a job tomorrow?”

“We’ll see, all right?”

It was as close to a promise as she was likely to get. Noelle settled her head against the pillow and closed her eyes, feeling more hopeful than she had in…forever, maybe. “Thank you, Lex.”

The lamp clicked off, followed by the overhead lights. Clothing rustled in the darkness, and a light flared, illuminating the space closest to the couch. “Here,” Lex murmured, setting the tiny round lamp on the end table near Noelle’s head.

The glow was just enough to paint Lex’s features in intriguing shadows, but not so bright that it would give Noelle trouble sleeping. “I guess you only needed ten seconds to figure me out,” she said, trying to turn the words into a joke.

“Maybe a little more. Get me drunk sometime, and I’ll tell you what I figured out.”