Berries and Greed

I’d actually been thinking about it after Beryl went to bed. Until she sent me that text and my brain turned to horny goo. Her mention of wanting to learn how to cook had given me an idea that I thought she’d enjoy, but also wasn’t too nerve-wracking for me to consider.

“I was thinking, um, on Sunday mornings there’s this artisan market that’s mostly demiurgus sellers. There are all kinds of stalls there. Fresh produce, jewellery, clothes, furniture…” I trailed off and shrugged self-consciously, suddenly wondering if this was a lame idea. “Could be fun to just walk around and have a look. And there are food stalls there. And coffee. We could get breakfast. If you want to. But if you’d rather do something else—”

“That sounds perfect, Greid.” Beryl wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me closer, burying her nose in my hair. “I’d love to. Thank you.”

“Okay.” I ducked my head to hide my grin. “Great. Um, the only thing is that we’d have to get up pretty early…”

“That’s okay. I was actually thinking about texting Corva and seeing if she wanted to go for a drink on Saturday evening. This gives me a good excuse to go home early if I hate it.”

I frowned, twisting to look up at her. “Why would you hate it?”

“I don’t mean I’d hate Corva’s company. I like her. But…” Beryl squirmed behind me. “If it gets too weird and she’s asking me about stuff I can’t answer, I just… you know.”

I pursed my lips and smoothed my hand up and down her calf. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, Beryl.”

“Mm. The documentary’s starting,” she said quickly. “Can we lie down?”

“Sure.”

I shoved all the empty wrappers into the bag and leaned over to dump it on the floor. I knew Beryl had intentionally changed the subject, but I wasn’t going to force her to talk about stuff that made her uncomfortable. I wasn’t a pusher, and I didn’t think it was my place to try and tell her how she should handle her past around new people. I wanted to be the person she could tell anything to, who would just listen without constantly trying to offer unsolicited advice or tell her what to do.

Agma had been the opposite. If I’d ever vented about a difficult client, just wanting to get it off my chest, she’d gotten righteously indignant and started demanding that I march upstairs and send them a scathing email, or cancel their order, or jack up the price of their commission just to be a dick. I knew she’d thought she was helping—in her own very bossy way—but it hadn’t helped. At all. I may have acted like a big kid sometimes, according to her at least, but I’d started and grown my business on my own. I was actually capable of doing adult shit when I needed to.

As long as it didn’t require, like, meeting people in person or being interviewed for indie artisan magazines or—god forbid—networking. I’d turned down many, many invitations to conferences and networking events, as well as many, many requests for interviews. In doing so, I’d accidentally created a weird mysterious air around myself in certain circles. I was pretty sure that was why Agma had been interested in me to begin with.

As soon as I lay down, Beryl was shifting onto her side and resting her head on my chest, angling it so she could still see the TV. I wrapped my arm around her and slid my hand down her side to her hip, absently tracing the very faint furrows I could feel stretching to the top of her backside. Once she’d finished wriggling to get comfortable, I settled my hand on her ass, unable to stop myself from giving it a light squeeze.

The TV screen went dark, before a human-sounding voice started speaking. “You hear all these rumours about what it’s like down there, but the demiurgus themselves are so secretive about their homeland.”

“What?” I snorted. “No, we’re not. All you need to do is look at a freaking tapestry or painting.”

“Well, I wanted to find out for myself,” the woman’s voice continued before she appeared on the screen, addressing someone just beside the camera against a plain backdrop. “So I did it. I went down there. And I saw.”

“We don’t believe you, lady,” Beryl told the woman on the screen, making me huff with amusement.

The documentary started playing ominous music over a reel of ‘artsy’ shots of things like a demiurgus hand sweeping over a tree trunk, a pair of big yellow eyes staring directly into the camera and black-and-white drone footage of those looming checkpoint guards holding their guns as they ushered people through the trees and into the big, heavily guarded hole that led to Deep Earth. The screen went black, before the words What I Saw Beneath the Surface faded in.

“Conspiracy nuts,” I muttered as Beryl shifted again, slinging her leg over my thigh.