Work Text:
(Sometimes, it’s all about sex.)
For the past five hours, Arthur has been watching the mark. For the last twenty-five minutes, Eames has been watching Arthur.
Arthur, being a professional on the clock, is discreet about it.
He's sitting on the steps beneath the boathouse in Prospect Park, dressed down for the afternoon in a pair of worn Levis and a white button-down shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled up, topped off with the vest that goes with one of his less expensive three-piece suits (a Sunday in Brooklyn is not a business day on Manhattan), and he's got The Times open to the crossword puzzle in his lap for verisimilitude. He knows he looks younger without the full armor of his customary perfect tailoring, his hair a bit less strict - a kid whiling away a few summer hours sprawled in the sun, sometimes making an effort at the crossword, but mostly just soaking up the fresh air, the ripples of light on the water, his eyes half-closed as his head tips back against the green copper of the antique lamppost behind him.
Across the lake, the mark is fishing. Arthur is personally doubtful about eating anything pulled out of any body of water within the Five Boroughs, but he supposes as a meditative exercise to cut your mind loose from the hectic rush of a stressful life, fishing as an activity might have something to be said for it, regardless of whether it has a practical goal. At least the mark seems to think so. In another couple of weeks, Arthur will step into his mind, unlock its strongholds, and appropriate the advances his research team have made in nanotechnology, but for now, Dr. Jadhav is having a leisurely Sunday in the park, and Arthur is having a leisurely Sunday following him.
Or he was, until Eames showed up.
They're due to change shifts soon – twenty-four-hour surveillance is not a one-man job – but Eames is early. And while Arthur approves of this as a general rule – the presence of two strangers on your periphery is less likely to register if they're over-lapping rather than always coming and going at the same time – Eames is very early. He's settled himself on the bridge crossing the water off to Arthur's left, leaning his bare forearms against the railing, and though the sun is behind him, there's no mistaking the direction of his gaze. Arthur can feel the weight of it, blatant and unapologetic and not discreet in the slightest, slowly, insistently sinking through to his bones, seeping into the deeper places where the sunlight can't reach. It's making him restless, unfocused, his warm skin itching with the thought of touch there to be sought, and he doesn't like having his attention divided.
He clips his pen to the paper and sticks it under his arm, pushing himself upright, brushing any dust from his pants, and sets out along the path that winds around the lake. For a couple of minutes, the trees at the waterline obscure his view of both Eames and the mark, but when required to, Eames always does do his job, and he isn't surprised when he reaches the bridge to find Eames still leaning on the railing, his face now turned away towards the person he's getting paid to be watching. Arthur should walk straight by him, should really not have come this way at all, but they're at the mark's five o'clock here, and Jadhav can't see them unless he turns around. It's safe enough to lean against the railing next to Eames, at a distance appropriate for strangers, just pausing on his stroll to take in the view of the pool, of the boathouse, its white facade reflected in the water, the reflection mirrored back in the high arched windows of the building, a perfect, picturesque infinity loop.
“Was there something you wanted?” he asks, his tone clipped, severe.
“Oh, darling,” Eames says, his voice dipping into a low chuckle that drifts away with the cool breeze across the water. “Too many things to enumerate. One thing, though...” And he turns, closer when he shifts than Arthur had quite realized, leaning forward, his hand reaching along the railing to grip Arthur's wrist where it rests against the curve of the metal bar. His fingers are large, wide around the narrow bones of Arthur's arm, and Arthur can smell him, the clear, warm sweat on his skin, like the scent of sunlight clinging to his body. He is aware, suddenly, of how Eames's t-shirt, proclaiming the 1999 tour dates of a band he's never heard of, stretches tight over the breadth of his shoulders, his chest, of how the short sleeves reveal the tattooed thickness of his biceps. “Tonight,” Eames says, “when you fuck me, I want to be a woman. I want to undo the buttons on these tempting,bloody jeans of yours, and take you out, and quite simply sink down on you, wet and tight and greedy.”
Arthur's hands clench down around the newspaper he's holding, the pages rustling between his fingers, and his eyes fall shut, close around the vivid image flaring in his mind. But it's a challenge, it's always a challenge, although he isn't sure what game they're playing, what Eames wants to prove, wants him to prove, so he looks up, eyes steady as he meets Eames's, and he lets Eames hear the roughness in his voice, the jagged edge of want around the terseness of his words.
“Tonight. I'll bring the PASIV to your hotel.”
Something drifts through Eames's gaze, then, something he can't quite parse, and it occurs to him that Eames must know by now, must have known for years, probably, that this is home, that New York is where Arthur lives. But there are some things he doesn't do, some things he knows better than to do, considering his line of work. And Eames doesn't ask.
Instead he smiles, heavy and suggestive, letting his eyes rake over Arthur's body, his thumb stroking gently at the skin of his wrist with just a hint of a scraping nail, and says,
“Don't make me wait, love. Or I might have to come get you.”
If there is anything in his voice but sexual innuendo, Arthur doesn't know how to respond to it.
He takes the newspaper and whacks Eames across the back of the hand.
“Eyes on the mark, Mr. Eames.”
Eames snatches his fingers away, and laughs. It's a delighted laugh, easy as the day is easy, as easy as it would be for Arthur to push him up against the railing and lick the taste of that sunlight-warm sweat off his lips, from the stubbled edge of his jaw. He wonders if the female Eames will laugh like that, naked in his arms down below tonight, if he'll be able to find the traces of that taste in the creases of her body, beneath the slide of his tongue.
“Constantly and tirelessly,” Eames declares, and though Arthur is already walking away, down the slope of the bridge towards the shore, he is very certain that in that moment Eames's gaze is not on the mark at all.
It's unsettling, the fact that he doesn't mind.
(Or no, that’s not accurate.)
The Eames who caught his eye in the mirror over the bar, who turned and made him follow through the crowd of men in top hats, women in bustle gowns, who led him through cobbled Montmartre streets, always just within sight and out of reach, slipping around corners, ducking in front of a passing horse-drawn carriage, that Eames was male. But the Eames he catches up with here, at the top of a narrow wooden staircase, behind a door left ajar like an invitation engraved with light spilling pale in a streak across the landing, this Eames is a woman.
He's used to the fluidity of dreams, to the quicksilver mutability of Eames within them, but it still shifts something inside his chest, to be chasing one person and finding another, to know that they are both the same. It's a Penrose staircase he's walked a thousand times, and yet every time there is a moment when he falls headlong off the paradox's edge.
He steps into the room and closes the door behind him.
If the bar was an obvious Monet, and the city streets were rich with the bold sweeps and vibrant colors of a Toulouse-Lautrec, then this is something else. Quiet and closed away, and for a moment he thinks Degas, but that's not it. The light is different; clearer, sharper, so fucking undiluted, and if the palette is familiar, it's not from a painting.
They're in an artist's studio, the light filtering down through small, square skylights in the slanted ceiling onto a table spread with tubes of colors, onto canvases stacked against the walls. In the center of the room, there is an easel, carrying a painting half-done in oils still wet. From this angle, the motif eludes him. He can't make it out.
There is only one room, for working and sleeping, and Eames is waiting on a narrow bed with a cast iron frame, stretched out on white sheets. She is dressed down to underwear appropriate to the period setting – a linen camisole and knee-length drawers and a black corset on top that emphasizes the curves of her hips and her slender waist and pushes her breasts up in a way that makes Arthur's mouth water. When he steps towards her, the wet canvas on the easel glistens in the shifting light. For a second he wonders if Eames is the model, here, or the artist, the painter or the painting. Perhaps it's all at once.
“Ah, darling, there you are,” she says, as if he's tardy, as if she were expecting him to find his way here ages ago. She rises up on her knees to meet him, her camisole slipping off her shoulder, her blond hair falling in a braid over her bare collarbone, tied with a black silk ribbon. “How do you like my Paris?”
“A tad derivative, don't you think?”
Eames smiles, tilts her head back as Arthur comes closer, to still be looking him in the eye. The bed frame is high, and she isn't much further down like this than if she were standing in front of him.
“Don't you know that forgery is the greatest form of flattery?” she says.
Arthur shakes his head.
“I'm really not sure that paraphrase is true to the spirit of the original quote. Besides, nothing in here is a replica.”
Eames raises a hand, trails it down the row of buttons on the vest beneath Arthur's 19th century suit. Tantalizing.
“How do you know?”
He touches her, then, fingertips brushing back strands of pale hair from her forehead, the pad of his thumb tracing the arc of her eyebrow, the rise of her cheekbone. So familiar.
“I know,” he says. Eames swallows; he can see her throat moving, the long lines of it exposed with the angle of her chin. The moment feels suddenly too heavy, weighted down against his chest. “And I would hope you haven't dragged me through half of Paris for cheap imitations.”
Eames's lips twist, and, just like that, they are back on easy ground.
“You don't enjoy chasing me?” she asks. And then, shifting up to press herself towards him, “I wonder what your feelings may be in regards to catching me?”
Given the proximity of their bodies, that question can be nothing but rhetorical, and Arthur doesn't dignify it with an answer.
“You want to be caught?” he asks, instead, trailing his fingers down the length of her braid, letting it slide across his palm. He can feel her braced against the moment when he'll snatch hold and yank back, but all he does is grasp the end of the ribbon that keeps her hair tied and pull it loose, the bow falling open for him like a promise.
“Always, dear,” Eames says, mouth quirked with irony and desire, and it's so patently false and so blatantly true that he has to kiss her before he does anything else, lick the contradictions out of her mouth until all he can taste is the humming sound of her pleasure.
He finds her hands where they're tangled in the lapels of his coat, pulls back a little to give Eames room to speak as he rubs his thumbs over the delicate skin on the insides of her wrists.
“Oh, please do,” Eames says, and it's amused challenge more than permission. Equal parts arousing and exasperating.
Arthur tugs her hands down with more force than necessary, yanking them behind her back, and she pants against the side of his neck as he holds them there, tying the ribbon tight around her wrists as she mixes his name with bites to his jugular. The position bends her torso up against him, presses the hard boning of the corset against his chest, so close that he can feel her breasts caught inside, squeezed and held and rubbing against him and he wants her so much that for a moment he goes dizzy with it, his mind reeling against the edges of the dream.
He lets her go, stepping away to round the foot of the mattress, stripping his suit coat off as he goes, draping it over an iron bed post. There is a mirror standing at an angle to the bed, a full-length oval on a free-standing frame, and when he crawls onto the mattress, he sees the movement reflected in the glass, sees Eames bite her lip and lean towards him, her chest rising and falling above the rim of the corset.
Her back is a tangle of laces, and Arthur lets his hand trail over them as he settles on the bed behind her, fingertips stroking along the crisscross pattern of strings that holds the corset together, over the tight knot at her waist, down to the silk tie that binds her wrists at the top of her ass. He tugs just a little there, two digits hooked in the black ribbon, and she arcs for him, curving her head back to throw him a look of impatience.
"All you have to do is pull the string, love," she says, voice crisp with condescension, "and everything will come unraveled. No mystery to it. Or did your mother never teach you to tie your own laces?"
He shifts, one knee on either side of her, bringing his arms up around her. Grabbing the upper edges of the corset in his hands and yanking it tighter, giving the busk hooks at the front room to come undone. Eames gasps at the sudden constriction, her body a warm surge of instinctive resistance in his grip. He bites at her earlobe, tells her,
“I think we can make you unravel perfectly well just like this.”
He can feel her heart pound against his lips where they touch the pulse point behind her ear, but all she says is,
“Oh, you would be too cautious to unwrap your presents without a bomb detector, of course you would.”
He smiles against her skin, amused, and there is a thought in the back of his head about layers within layers over layers he isn’t sure how far to peel back, about forgeries laced up with realities, fakes wrapped in the paper of truths he could too easily ball up and throw away, but then the top few hooks on the corset come open under his fingers and he’s watching over Eames’s shoulder as her breasts, unconstrained now, fall and shift to fill the wider space, and all he cares about is touching her, feeling her. He dips his hands into the bowl of her corset, sinks his fingers beneath the fine linen of the camisole underneath, scoops her breasts up in the cups of his palms. Softness that overflows his hands, yielding where the boning of the corset is hard against his knuckles, and she makes the most beautiful noise when his thumbs rub across her nipples, hungry and greedy like the clenching in his balls.
“Fuck,” he breathes, not thinking, “I love your tits.”
Eames laughs, a breathless sound that hitches on the twist of her nipple between Arthur’s finger and thumb, roughens into a moan.
“And to think you were hiding it so well,” she says.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Arthur says, dry as he can make it. “I thought I was talking to this thieving hustler I know who for some reason seems to thrive off forcibly driving me out of my wits with wanting them. My mistake.”
Another huff of laughter, but quieter now, as if the joke is a private one that Arthur isn’t quite let in on.
“My reasons are excellent reasons,” Eames says, “although admittedly not entirely reasonable. Pascal did rather get it right on that score.” She’s silent for a moment, her eyes half closed as she rocks into Arthur’s touch, bites her lip around the raggedness of her breaths. Arthur licks a trail along the curve of her neck, waits for her to say whatever comes next. With Eames, it’s never what he expects. “You know,” she starts, her tone dismissively light in that way that means now is the time to pay attention or be conned, “I briefly considered making them bigger for you once, my tits, but I rather thought it was something of a toss-up whether your surprisingly pedestrian male faiblesse for an ample bosom outweighed your uniquely Arthurian attachment to strictly balanced proportions, and, well, I really couldn’t be arsed to care one way or the other.”
Arthur has seen Eames wear the bodies of dozens of women - the wives and daughters and mistresses and confidantes of their marks as well as the women of men’s dreams, flawless ideals stepped out of fantasy to lay irresistible traps. But here, between the two of them, in this dreamspace that they share alone, there is only ever this body, this shape that is her, and Arthur knows the heft of her breasts in the palms of his hands like he knows the weight of Eames’s cock on his tongue in the real world.
He lifts his gaze, seeking her reflection in the mirror, her face in the glass next to his own. Traces her features there: her broad mouth and the fullness of her lips; her high cheeks and the too-long slope of her nose, the sharp tip of it; the angle of her brows above her narrow eyes. She isn’t the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, nothing he used to imagine, but she’s Eames.
“If you’re trying to disabuse me of the notion that any of this is for my sake,” he says, stroking his thumb along the outer silhouette of her breast, indicating not that, but the fact of her, the fact of what Eames keeps doing, “you can rest assured I was never abused.”
The words come out softer than intended, arch, but so gentle it startles him.
Eames’s eyelids flutter open, lashes strumming black against her flushed skin. Her eyes are a familiar green beneath, too sharp in the mirror as they meet his. Studying him, as if he’s a secret she can extract simply by watching. He almost says something else, something more, but then she tilts her head, and smiles; a dirty, speculative twist of her lips that makes his mouth dry with desire.
“Darling, really?” she says, mock-scandalized, reaching back with her bound hands to find his erection, squeezing down unerringly through the wool of his pants. “That seems like such inexcusable waste.”
His head drops forward into her braided hair, and for a long moment, all he knows how to do is press into her grip and breathe.
(Sometimes, it mostly seems to be about kicking Arthur’s ass.)
Eames’s wrist twists in his grip, fast, but not quite fast enough. There’s sufficient time for Arthur to shift his hold and dig his thumb into the bundle of nerves that makes pain shoot up, incapacitating, along the length of Eames’s arm. For just a fraction of a second, Eames’s muscles go limp, and that’s all Arthur needs, all the advantage necessary for him to use the momentum of their bodies to pull Eames around, bend his hand up between his shoulder blades, pinning it there, getting his own free arm up to lock Eames’s head in a chokehold, forearm against jugular.
There is a long minute of scrabbling, their bodies locked together in an awkward dance, Eames’s fingers digging for purchase on Arthur’s arm where it presses on his throat, his bare feet looking for the angle of attack to snare one of Arthur’s ankles, hoping to pull him off balance and tip them both backwards onto the wooden floor with Eames’s greater bulk on top, Arthur trying to predict and sidestep his moves without letting up on his hold. Over Eames’s shoulder, he sees the sunlight bright on the strict patterns in the gravel of the zen garden outside the open sliding doors of the dojo, the view of the courtyard swaying as they shift and move. The only sound is their breathing, the muted shuffle of their feet on the floor, twining with the distant song of a single bird, the moment suffused with the violent stillness of forces balanced, the concentrated calm at the edge of the blade.
He could crush Eames’s larynx like this, break his neck, certainly would if they’d been under longer, like they’ve each broken just about every bone in the other’s body at one time or another, slit each other’s throats, blown each other’s brains out, but the dream is still young and victory is just a by-product here, much as it pleases him to gain the upper hand, secondary to the aim of honing his skills against an opponent as ruthlessly competent as he is. Ariadne is coming along in leaps and bounds under their tutelage, and Yusuf when pressed has quite a few moves Arthur would never have credited him with at first sight, but for hand-to-hand to be the kind of all out combat that pushes him, forces him to excel, to learn, among the people he’s willing to go under with no questions asked now that Cobb has left the game, there is really only Eames to match him. They always drag their fights out until staying upright is a struggle in itself, shoving their bodies to the breaking point and beyond, the way they can’t without actually breaking when they’re sparring up above. He’s never known either of them to go for the kick of the kill before they’ve both drawn blood.
Eames changes his tactic, pushing for enough leverage to pitch forward and throw Arthur over his head. The way Arthur is holding him, though, there is nearly no room for him to maneuver, no way for him to gain enough momentum to drag Arthur up when Arthur is anchoring them both to the ground. Although it’s not for lack of trying. Arthur is dressed in black keikogi appropriate to this training space he has drawn and dreamt them into, but Eames, probably in an effort to annoy him, is wearing an army green tank top and a pair of worn grey sweatpants Arthur is familiar with from early morning runs in the real world. And Arthur can feel his bare skin where his hand is lodged against the crook of his neck, can see the thick muscles in his shoulder bunch and strain as he struggles, can almost taste the beads of sweat running down the center of his spine. When Eames’s ass presses back against him, solid and firm beneath the slide of cotton over cotton, for a moment he is painfully aware of how the threadbare pants are hanging low beneath the jut of Eames’s hip bones, remembers with sudden clarity pushing Eames up against the tiled wall of a hotel bathroom, the water already running in the shower, both of them slippery with sweat, pulling the drawstring open to shove his hand inside. He bites the memory off and makes room for air between them, tightens his arm around Eames’s throat, keeping him in place.
Topside, this would be about the time when he would let go and step back, when Eames might tell him to, knowing the risks of constrained blood flow and pinched nerves, of restricted breathing, knowing the kind of injury Eames might have to cause to escape a gridlock like this, both of them chalking up a point to Arthur on their mental scoreboard and moving on to round two. Down here, though, there is always a way out, always a way to step it up if your mind is willing to see the possibilities, if you can release your own instinctive psychological safeties and follow through.
He turns Eames’s arm in his grip a little further, bends it just a bit more in the tight space between their bodies, the angle steadily closing in on the unsustainable. Far enough and a bone will snap or a joint dislocate, depending on where he applies the pressure, but before that happens, the pain will become debilitating, enough so that it should short-circuit Eames’s system, punch the fight out of him and send him to the floor. Arthur presses harder, feels the bones in Eames’s wrist grind together in his fingers with a scrunching he can almost hear.
That’s when Eames changes. From man to woman in the sharpness of an instant, and for the merest fraction of a second Arthur’s hold is not quite tight enough, the force he’s exerting to counter-balance Eames’s weight too great, and he’s unsteady, correcting his stance, moving the wrong way out of pure necessity, Eames’s elbow driving rough and unhesitating into his exposed flank, the pain blunt and sudden and bright. She drops out of his hold as he’s gasping for air, twisting through his fingers, slipping beneath the arm he had around her neck, folding into a crouch, a spinning turn, one leg striking out in a low, sweeping kick, and Arthur’s feet are gone from under him, his back hitting the floor with a resounding smack. The back of his head bounces off the floorboards, and he has to fight the blackness encroaching on his vision.
When he’s blinked the ceiling into focus, he turns his head to find Eames. There was a kill to be made here, and they both know it, most likely with her foot bearing down on his windpipe, but if she intends to leave him alive, moving into his reach would just be handing him the opportunity to drag her down and take the fight to the ground. She’s several feet away, circling him, her guard still up, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she waits for his move. Her hair is pulled back in a messy knot, a few long strands of it falling wild across her cheek, catching the gold of the sun when she moves through the shaft of light from the open doors. She’s wearing a gray sports bra, the straps and edge of it visible above the green of her top, but otherwise her clothes are the same, the worn sweatpants precariously caught on the widest points of her hips, an accent to the inward sweep of the curves above.
“I could call that cheating,” Arthur remarks, nodding at the new shape of her.
Eames tilts her head, giving him a look of amused consideration.
“You could,” she says. “If you weren’t the bloke who pulled a 9 mm on me in 14th century Rome. And that hand grenade at Versailles… That was just gauche, darling. Inspired, but gauche.”
“I must have been spending too much time with you.”
“Yes, creativity is surprisingly contagious, isn’t it?”
“I hope the same can’t be said for an over-inflated sense of self-importance.”
Eames laughs at that, the sound quick and easy. She hasn’t stopped circling, watching him like a predator, light and fluid on her feet. A kick-boxer’s rapid footwork; all of Eames’s training and technique, carrying half the body weight. The speed and agility which are Arthur’s natural advantages against the male Eames aren’t his advantages against this incarnation at all. He loves fighting her.
“If you’re intending to get up some time within the nearest decade, love,” Eames says, “I couldn’t help but notice an aggressively soothing koi pond on the grounds that is practically begging to have you thrown into it face first.” She grins, feral and challenging beneath the calm civility of her voice. “If you’re amenable.”
“Of course,” Arthur says, rolling to his feet in one smooth motion. “But I think we may have to discuss the terms.”
The look of joy and hunger on Eames’s face as he comes at her, as she parries his first kick, is heart-stopping. He suspects it’s mirrored in his own eyes.
(It isn't their secret.)
They find each other on the second floor of the railway station, according to plan, Eames and Yusuf already waiting in the assigned spot when Arthur and Ariadne round the corner. Yusuf has his back propped against the brickwork of a pillar, hands in the pockets of his coat; his head is turned away, looking out over the main hall below, scanning the milling crowd for their cue. Eames is in front of him, leaning back against the cast iron railing, elbows resting on the top bar, dangling fingers absently tracing the winding metal leaves of Ariadne's detailed design – an image of bored relaxation, belied by sharp eyes sweeping the floor for threats.
Arthur blinks at the sight, his forward momentum stalling out between one step and the next. Not enough that he comes to a halt, but enough to let Ariadne overtake him, her sleeve brushing his as she slips past. Eames quirks an eyebrow at him over her shoulder, gaze unreadable before it moves on.
Arthur's hand clenches at his side, unclenches. This isn't in the plan.
There is nothing about this mission that requires Eames to be female – no one to impersonate, no seduction to be made, no gambit to be played that would seem more convincing coming from a woman; just a safe to be cracked and documents to steal and perhaps a couple of dozen militarized projections to dispose of. And, no, that set of tasks doesn't require Eames to be male, either, Arthur knows that better than anyone, but it still takes him by surprise, to see her standing there in her skin-tight jeans and high-heeled boots, her blond curls falling loose over the collar of a tan leather jacket. Makes something tighten in his chest, a weight like fear or apprehension or the whetted steel of watchman's caution that keeps him balanced against the sudden possibility of battles unforeseen.
“Eames,” Ariadne says, her voice a little too harsh. Incredulous. The two of them are standing face to face now. Arthur can hear the thickness of his own breath in the spaces between a thousand footfalls echoing around them. “Seriously, are those the boots I was looking at yesterday in that shop by the piazza? God, they are, aren't they?”
Eames glances down at herself, lifts one leg out in front of her, tilting her foot from side to side as if paying attention to the expensive-looking leather and the complex row of buckles for the first time.
“Well,” she says. “I may have added an extra inch of heel? Or possibly two.”
But of course she did. She's fucking Eames.
And any other day, Arthur would find the most scathing way to say that out loud, but right now this is all just too surreal. He can't wrangle words out of the dryness in his throat.
He takes a deep breath. Turns away to lean his forearms against the railing next to Eames, keeping a lookout for the scheduled appearance of their mark through the station doors. Half his attention remains with his team, though, tracking their interaction out of the corner of his eye.
“You do know I was going to buy those, right?” Ariadne says.
Yusuf laughs.
“Ah, the unfortunate drawbacks of consorting with thieves.” He claps his hand on Eames's back, lets it linger there. Arthur's muscles tense beneath the smooth lines of his suit. “They tend to steal all your favorite things before you've even had the chance to make them yours. Take that gold watch of mine, whatever happened to that?”
Eames looks up at him.
“That was a loan,” she says, and Arthur can hear the teasing smile, even if he can't see it from this angle. “For a business meeting. Perfectly above board.” Which means costume or prop in a con and anything but. Arthur shakes his head to himself.
Yusuf squeezes Eames's shoulder, and the touch is warm and easy with the familiarity of years. No different from how he touches the male Eames up above.
“It was a loan in 2005, my friend. Now I'm afraid it's merely lost property. Unless you want to pay interest, of course?”
The sound of Eames's laughter is clear and careless. She turns back to Ariadne, says,
“And that, my dear, is what's commonly referred to as honor among thieves. It's not quite what it's cracked up to be, more's the pity. But you do have a most excellent taste in footwear.”
Ariadne leans forward, whacks Eames on the arm. But her face is breaking into a grin.
“Seriously, Eames,” she says, “if you were any other girl...”
This time, Arthur does see Eames's smile. He has to close his eyes for a second, rein back the rush of warmth that floods his body, spreading outwards from the place where the weight of tension no longer is. When he opens them again, he's looking right at their mark, a tall, graying man dragging a wheeled suitcase through the hall below.
“Time, everyone,” he says, straightening, and the others do the same, following the line of his gaze. “You know what to do.”
“See you on board,” Ariadne says, and Yusuf's hand pats Eames's shoulder as it drops away, and then they're both gone into the throng.
Eames reaches back beneath her leather jacket, pulls a Sig P230 automatic from the waistline of her pants. She checks the magazine with quick, practiced movements, the metal sliding home with a low click between her thin fingers when she pushes it back in place. The gun is light and compact, near invisible in its hiding place when she returns it there, pulling her jacket carefully down to cover it, but Arthur knows her well enough not to doubt the presence of at least one heavier handgun beneath the zipped-up leather: another Sig, or quite likely a Browning; Eames still favors the standard issue weaponry of the SAS like Arthur keeps a preference for the Glocks nestled in their twin holsters against his ribcage.
He watches her, trying to find words for what he wants to say, but then the voice on the PA system announces the 3.15 to Milan, and they're on. All he does say is,
“That's us. All set?”
Eames nods, and Arthur starts to move past her towards the stairs. He's held back by her hand on his arm.
“You shouldn't be so paranoid, darling,” she says, gracing him with one of her more infuriating smiles. “It gives you frown lines.” He's about to retort, pulling his arm away, but she holds on tighter, leans closer, leans up to let her words stroke across his jaw line. Her voice when it touches him is so soft he almost shies away from it, as from the brush of a flying bullet. “But I do appreciate the sentiment.”
He wants to touch her, then, wants to press his lips to her skin, but she's slipping away from him, and of course they don't have any time. She walks the first few steps backwards, her hand sliding down the length of his sleeve as she moves.
“Shall we?” she asks. Mischievous, suggestive.
Whatever the question is, Arthur really only has one answer.
(But some things are meant for him.)
The dress is the first thing he sees. A glimpse of white chiffon swaying light as air in among the press of people getting ready to leave the theater, a beckoning flicker of brightness between the dark of men's suits, and he knows what it is already from across the lobby, recognizes it already before he's close enough to see her whole.
For a second, his palms go clammy, his heart beating rabbit-quick in the hollow of his throat, and he's paranoid enough after all this time in their profession to think extraction, to think you knew better than to let someone waltz around at will in your subconscious for years, why weren't you careful? before he remembers a night in Malmö in the dead of winter, nine months ago, ten, sprawling on a hotel room couch with his legs in Eames's lap, well fucked and finally warm after a day of stalking their mark through the wet, wind-beaten cold, watching Hitchcock's Rear Window with Swedish subtitles on some random cable channel while Eames read up on local soccer teams, fine-tuning his part. Remembers turning more fully to the screen when Grace Kelly's character began to light the lamps in James Stewart's apartment, floating from one circle of light to the next as if fluttering between dreams, as if calling the dreams into being. Remembers saying, with the surprising honesty of being safe and dry and comfortable and still raw inside with the drag of Eames's cock, “You know, I've had a crush on that dress since I was eight,” and Eames, looking up from his computer print-outs at the tv, asking, with absent-minded curiosity, “The dress, not the girl?”
Remembers; and, fuck, this isn't Eames getting at his stupid, unshared memories in some kind of illicit way and using them as leverage against him – Eames doesn't know, of course Eames doesn't know. This is Eames paying attention, this is Eames listening to random, ridiculous things he says, Eames storing information away like it matters and retrieving it to do something that he thinks Arthur might like. And that's unsettling, too, but it's all right, it's more than all right when he comes close enough to really see her, when the crowd of projections parts and Eames is there, turning on one sandaled foot, her eyes lighting up as they land on him, and it's just Eames, wearing a perfect dress.
And it is perfect, of course; Eames always makes sure to get the details right. The tight black bodice and the wide, flowing white skirt, the layers upon layers of tulle and chiffon, a wealth and excess of fabric that moves as though there isn't a speck of yardage gone into it that doesn't belong, that isn't necessary. The spray pattern of black branches at her hips; the twist of pearls on her wrist and the short pearl necklace at her throat; the narrow black belt marking the curve of her waist. It's all exact, recreated with a precision that would be startling if he didn't know to expect it.
And yet it's all different.
Partly, it's simply physique, the deep v of the dress's neckline more revealing, more risqué, when filled out with Eames's generous curves. Or no, that's not it. The gown is filled with Eames, period. The short, black sleeves hanging off the edges of her pale shoulders as though all that holds them there is the fact that she has yet to decide to let them fall, the skirt brushing her calves as if it knows the strength of the muscles there, the featherlight softness of the fabric emphasizing the sharpness and force of her rather than obscuring it, the clean lines and the immaculate whiteness underlining, not blotting out, the dirty edges of her charm. It's Eames in Arthur's favorite dress, not Arthur's favorite dress on Eames, and she's more gorgeous than he could have imagined.
He knows he's staring, knows that he's giving away more than he probably should. In the back of his mind, he can hear Mal laughing at him, fond and entirely too amused.
Eames looks him up and down as he approaches, her gaze sweeping down the length of his body, back up to linger on his face. Her smile is broad and self-satisfied, the one reserved for when events bear out her conjectures.
"I see you approve of the outfit," she says.
Arthur forces down the echo of Mal's voice in his head from that drunken night all those years ago, blinks away the unbidden flash of her smile, too easy to picture here, pleased and smug and teasing, along with that spark in her eyes that would tell him See? Mal always was insufferable when she was right.
He almost stumbles over his own feet when he realizes what that last thought translates to. But then he's there, standing in front of Eames, and so he says,
"It's the 'fresh-off-the-Paris-plane' gown Edith Head designed for Grace Kelly to wear in Rear Window. There is nothing not to approve of. It..."
"It foreshadowed the New Look a whole year before Dior's Ligne Corolle," Eames finishes for him, in a disturbingly good imitation of his voice. "I know, I got the speech, love. Sometimes it truly baffles the mind to think that I'm the occasional woman in this relationship."
"I can hardly be blamed if your questionable taste level persists regardless of gender."
"Yes, it is rather unfortunate, isn't it, how I always seem to end up wanting you of all people to fuck me."
Arthur raises a skeptical eyebrow.
"Unfortunate?"
“Well...” Eames leans close, the tip of her tongue darting out to lick at her full lip as she touches the back of his hand with one silk-gloved finger. “You could try to persuade me to use another word.” She smiles at his intake of breath, and shifts away a little. Her question when she presses the chiffon shoulder wrap she's been holding into his hands is at least double edged: “Would you be so kind?”
“Of course,” he says, keeping up this game where she's a lady and he's the perfect gentleman he was raised to be. It's a game he enjoys, that sometimes doesn't even feel like a game.
She turns, a graceful twist to present him with the bare expanse of her back, and he unfolds the length of fabric. The white chiffon is sheer and weightless in his fingers as he wraps it around her shoulders, and he can't help but think about the matching layers of her skirt falling against her thighs, about the space of soft warmth there, between fabric and skin.
He runs his thumb along the upper edge of the shawl, over the bump of the vertebra at the top of her spine, tracing an invisible line beneath the single row of pearls embracing her neck.
“You look stunning,” he says. It's a type of compliment he never gives – he's not a mark to be dazzled by the sex appeal Eames is only too aware of possessing, to be swept off his feet by Eames's charm – and it sits oddly in his mouth, but he wants her to know, tonight, wants to say something to make up for that first paranoid moment of panic, even if it isn't the thing he could be saying, the startled thought he can't quite shake, that is turning over and over in the back of his mind. The words come out low and awed, too honest.
“Why, Arthur, darling,” Eames says, a sarcastic performance of being flattered that may or may not cover for the real thing. It's always hard to tell. “Your stating the obvious falls like sweet, honeyed nothings in my ear.” She turns her head to look at him over her shoulder, and her voice drops to something deep and suggestive, curling warm in his groin. “Take me home?”
It's the kind of outré flirtation Eames delights in, never shying away from the playfully, shamelessly blatant, from the simultaneously most direct and most complex games of seduction. Going for the jugular, playing to win. But beneath the theatrical flutter of her lashes, between one sweep of her eyelid and the next, this time there is something Arthur could swear looks almost like hesitation.
It's gone before he has a chance to pin it down.
The city outside is a London built to fit the dress, the streets sparsely filled with mid-twentieth century cars and the skyline pared down to something older than what he's familiar with, protruding edges of glass and steel stripped away to leave a softer silhouette of brick and mortar stretching low against the evening sky. Arthur wouldn't know if it's historically accurate to any given year, and he doubts that Eames would care; Eames is not an architect, and the dreams she builds for personal use tend to be strokes of a brush rather than lines of a ruler – the forgeries are always flawless, but everything else comes with artistic license.
The weather, too, is made to match: a mild summer night to go with bare legs and bare arms and shoulders shifting beneath fabric so thin as to be transparent. A perfect night for a walk, and Eames takes his arm and leads him down the sidewalk at a leisurely stroll, her swaying skirt brushing the leg of his tuxedo pants in time with the clicking of her heels against the pavement. It feels like the tail end of a really good date, that nebulous in-between part after dinner and entertainment and before the completion that hangs around you like a promise, a moment like the silence between movements in a concert, everything still, but heightened by your senses, your body vibrant with the memory and anticipation of sound. It doesn't actually make any difference that dinner tonight was in a dingy hotel in Valparaiso, that his date was a man, then – laying a heavy hand over his where it cupped the foot of his wine glass, saying Come under with me, Arthur, stroking the bone at his wrist like a question – this is still the natural continuation of the evening, as organic as it is impossible, and he wonders briefly when his life became this thing made up of contradictions, wonders when he stopped seeing them as mutually exclusive. Wonders if he ever did.
As they walk, more than one projection turn their heads, and when they pass a group of men lounging outside a pub, there is the distinct sound of a low, appreciative whistle.
“Darling,” Eames says, with a wry, knowing smile. “Your subconscious really does know how to to make a girl feel appreciated.”
Arthur throws a look over his shoulder at the guys they've just passed, frowning.
“I'm pretty sure at least half of those are yours,” he says.
Eames flicks her purse open to fish out a cigarette and lighter.
“Well, you are a horrible influence,” she says, pausing to light her smoke, making him wait as she takes the first drag. They've reached what must be the Victoria Embankment, and across the street behind her, the black waters of the Thames are washed silver with moonlight. When she takes the cigarette from her mouth, between her gloved fingers, it's ringed dark with the color of her lipstick. The corner of her mouth quirks. “And I always did enjoy you in formal wear.”
He reaches for her, then, and kisses her, because he can't not, her body molding to his in the breeze from the river, her bare throat warm and delicate beneath his fingertips. Her mouth under his tastes of nicotine and paint and the ache at the bottom of his heart.
Her smile when they pull apart is bemused, her fingers lingering for a moment on the lapel of his jacket.
“Bad influence, indeed,” she says, and there is something in her voice he can't read, something thoughtful and sombre.
“Home?” he asks, almost worried, running his fingers along the edge of her jaw.
She seems to shake herself, pull her thoughts together, the edges of the dreamscape sharpening around them.
“Yes,” she says, nodding. Taking his arm again and tugging him with her along the river. “This way.”
Home in this dream, it turns out, is another studio, like the one in Eames's impressionist Paris, a single large room with high windows along the right-hand wall, giving a view of the Embankment and the Thames below, letting the moonlight in to cast a pattern of shadows across the floor, across the opposite wall, the imprint of square window panes thrown like a checkered rug over the white sheets of the bed waiting at the far end. Light flooding the room; the clear, white light that is there at the edges of everything Eames dreams, every color saturated into one, the whole wheel and spectrum co-existing, each nuance loud and bright and all of them blended into something uncompromising and gentle. It's so familiar he can taste it, the basic flavor of Eames's mind like the salt of Eames's skin, and it strikes him, looking at that bed, that it's been a long time now since he slept with someone and didn't know the color of their dreams, since he closed his eyes next to someone outside of a job and they didn't know the color of his. It should be easier, he supposes, to let himself be vulnerable with a person who has already been to the intimate spaces inside his head, but in practice it never seems to work that way. Another paradox among all the rest.
The artist who works here is not a painter – there are no canvases, this time, no partially squeezed-out tubes of oils or smell of turpentine. Instead there are pads of paper and sticks of charcoal, a desk against the windows littered with pencils of every thickness, the air laced with the dryness of graphite and the faint chemical scent of fixative spray. And there are drawings. Sketches. Everywhere.
The finished paintings in Paris were stacked against the walls, their backs to the room, the one canvas on the easel still in progress, angled half away from Arthur's line of sight. He could have chosen to go over and look, of course, and he did wonder, but he focused on Eames herself and let the questions lie, and Eames didn't invite him to see, even if she'd dreamt the pictures there, even if they stayed there in the room with them.
Here, everything is finished, everything is left out to be viewed. Sketch upon sketch pinned to the wall in a haphazard pattern, corners and edges overlapping, more sitting on the coffee table, on the desk, some still not torn from their pads. Like the room is a mind-map of artwork, and when he steps closer to the wall, he feels Eames fall away from his side, stepping back as if giving him space.
The first drawing that catches his eye, the gray of smudged pencil glistening with reflected moonlight, is a nude. A woman stretched on her back on rumpled sheets, arcing upwards, her large breasts flattened by gravity into soft, round cushions, and, oh, that's Eames, her lips parted in pleasure, and the man kneeling above her, the ends of a bow-tie hanging open around his unbuttoned collar, his fingers trailing down the center of her sternum in the valley between those beautiful breasts, that's Arthur, oh, fuck, that's him, and the Eames in the picture is looking at his face, and he is looking at her, and he can feel the moment, remember it, the rush of everything in it.
Just below and partly stuck on top, there is another image of Eames in the nude, male this time, on all fours, speared on Arthur's cock, and Arthur is wearing that same untied bow-tie, bending over Eames's back, and his tongue is stroking over the tattoo on Eames's shoulder blade, gentle and reverent like the press of their bodies is not, and, God, that was the same night, only minutes of dreamtime between one snap-shot and the next, and the expression on Eames's face...
He sweeps his gaze away, taking in the surrounding sketches. The people in them are all fully clothed, and he can't but smile and shake his head at how typically Eames it is to arrange the light to make the few erotic pictures grab his attention first. Eames who is in every drawing, in all of them. Sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, with Arthur, with the team, in the real world and in dreams; moments out of time, collected, and some of them Arthur can place, and others he can't.
Eames, female, pressing her spare Browning into Arthur's hand, bullets flying over their ducked heads as they run. Eames, male, forging a letter in the low light of a desk lamp, Arthur perched on the corner of the table beside him, reading a book as he waits. Eames with his arm around Yusuf's shoulders, laughing; Eames with her hands clasped around Ariadne's, encouraging. Eames with Cobb, two men sharing a drink from a hip flask; Eames with Mal, two women walking side by side along the ocean. Eames lying on a hotel room floor, Arthur crouching above him, and he knows that one, the second level of the Fischer job (Go to sleep, Mr. Eames), but he doesn't remember that depth of worry on Eames's face, doesn't remember himself like this at all, the calm center of a crumbling world, crisp and solid and clear while everything else in the drawing is blurring out, dissolving at the edges. As if he were the touchstone, the totem.
He fists his hands in his pockets against the sudden drumming of his heart.
Further back – the drawings arranged roughly by period and by association, not in precise chronology but still further into the past with every step he takes into the room – and there are people Arthur knows by reputation or from the odd job worked together; people in the dream-sharing business that Eames used to run with, before. There is more violence in these pictures, less laughter. When Eames is a woman, the look in her eyes is guarded, calculating – the observant gaze of someone expecting trouble, always reading the room to be one step ahead. Arthur can relate.
Swaths of deeper shadow fall across the next section of the wall, the details of the drawings harder to make out without moving close enough to touch, without finding the right angle, fewer and fewer of them held up in clear shafts of light to pop out at him. This must be the early days of dreaming, though, on the government's dime, and their history is similar enough here that Arthur doesn't feel compelled to look any deeper than he has to. He can live without adding Eames's memories of military dream experimentation to his own.
There is one drawing among these, though, caught out clean in the moonlight, and if his hands weren't tucked away in the pockets of his pants, he might reach up and trail his fingers over it, to reach through the years and feel that moment shared. A naked woman standing by herself in front of a mirror, her face only visible in the glass, her expression not quite possible to make out. But there is something about how her hands, reflected, trace the contours of her own shape, and he knows that this is the first try, the first change. The first time she has seen herself, the first time she has felt her own body. He wonders if she was scared, if she was happy, if she would have let him touch her, then, if there was anyone else who could. It's funny, how much he wants her to not have been alone.
Further in, and the Eames in the drawings is wearing fatigues, is wearing the dress uniform of the SAS. A man among only men, no women allowed, the images thick with the kind of masculine camaraderie bred through danger and discipline and physical hardship. And then, pinned so far down he has to bend his back to see it, the uniform laid out across the foot of a narrow army cot, Eames sitting in the center of the mattress, on top of the regulation tucked-in sheets, looking at it; a naked girl with her legs pressed against her chest, her arms around her knees, toes curled in the scratchy blanket, and her hair is falling over her face, but somehow he knows she's crying, and he's never seen Eames cry. The room is visible straight through her.
The last sketch his eyes fall on is one among many in shadow, but he's looking now, really looking and this one stands out. The Eames in it is so young, a teenager in ridiculous school uniform (Harrow, something says in the back of his mind; passive knowledge left over from some bout of research or other), head tilted back to kiss another kid the same age, wearing the same clothes. The unknown boy has his arms around Eames, his hand in Eames's hair. It would be a sweet picture – it makes him think of kissing Sara Feingold behind someone's van in the Temple parking lot at fifteen, that sense of clumsy eagerness and exploration – except that no matter how long he looks at it, he can't tell if Eames is a boy or a girl, can't get a grip on Eames's features, on the person behind them, as if Eames is too much at once and caught in between and lost in the shuffle, locked into too narrow a space with nowhere to go, and it looks painful, looks wrong in a way that turns his stomach, makes the hairs stand out at the back of his neck.
He's turned around before he's aware of deciding to do so, needing to see the Eames of here and now, the Eames he knows. She's sitting on the desk by the window, feet crossed at the ankles where they dangle a foot from the floor, her hands curved around the edge of the desk top, fingers mostly covered by the full width of her skirt. Settled into her own skin, owning it completely like no one else he's ever met, like the male Eames owns his skin up top.
He goes to her, lays his hands next to hers on the desk, strokes his thumbs over her fingers. While his back's been turned, she's lost the gloves.
He doesn't know what to say.
There is a sketching pad lying next to her, the corner of it protruding over the edge of the desk. He picks it up, because it's there, because she lets him.
The top leaf is a sketch of a summer garden, and this one is done with colored pencils – green grass and deep green bushes and a sheer blue summer sky. Off in the background, there is a house large and old enough to be a manor, a country estate. In the foreground, a small boy, maybe five or six, is lying on his stomach in the grass, drawing with crayons in an open book. He is completely absorbed in his artwork.
Arthur turns the page. The sketch beneath is the same. The same house, the same garden, the same bushes and flowers on the ground. Only the angle of the shadows and the pattern of the clouds set the time as slightly different. The child drawing in the grass is a girl.
“This is you,” Arthur says, sliding his finger along the edge of the sketch. It's not quite a question.
“Yes,” Eames says.
Arthur turns the page back.
“And this is also you.”
“Yes,” Eames says.
When he looks up, her face is turned to him, watching him.
“Eames,” he starts, and his voice comes out broken, raw.
She lays her fingers to his lips.
“You don't need to say anything,” she says. “You just need to know.”
There is a small smile waiting at the corner of her mouth. He lifts her hand from his lips and kisses her there, feels it spread beneath the tip of his tongue. Her legs uncross and close around him, pulling him in.
They make love that night in the crisscross pattern of shadows and moonlight thrown across the bed, in the black-and-white ocean richness of Eames's dress, wave upon wave of fabric flowing around both their hips as Arthur sinks into her, slow and deep and breathless with the solidity of her body beneath him, with the reality of her skin under his lips.
Afterwards, they lie there, facing each other across a few inches of pillow, Arthur's hand still beneath Eames's skirt, stroking the bare curve of her thigh. In the pale, white light, her hair is almost silver, the flush of exertion on her cheekbone a warm contrast against the muted pearl of her skin. Her fingers are toying with the half-open buttons on his shirt. He thinks: This woman is Eames and she knows the color of my mind.
He doesn't realize he's about to do this until he's already started talking.
“There was an exhibition a few years ago at the Victoria & Albert,” he says, looking down at the dress, away from Eames's face. “Grace Kelly: Fashion Icon, or something along those lines. I was in Shanghai with Dom and Mal when I read a review in The Times. And I told Mal... We were both pretty drunk by then, the job had gone well and the client had payed up – those were the days when we were still excited by just how much the clients were willing to pay – and Dom was off somewhere arranging our passage out of there, leaving us to break into the good champagne. And I told Mal, maybe I should stage a museum heist, steal this gown for her to wear. She said, if I wanted to steal her a dress, I should pick something she would be less likely to spill red wine down the front of within the first five minutes of wearing it. Quelque chose d'un peu moins immaculé, chéri, tu ne crois pas? And could it please be Chanel.”
Eames laughs, the fond warmth in it reminding him that she knew Mal, too, if only for a short time, that she has memories of her own to put the joke in context.
“You're lucky this isn't the actual dress, love,” she says, her voice amused and deep, rolling her hips beneath the chiffon, beneath Arthur's hand, rubbing her legs together around herself, languid and sated, as if reveling in what she's feeling there. “Because I'm quite sure it isn't immaculate any longer.”
He makes himself push away the thought of her, wet and filthy and dripping with him under the pristine folds of that skirt, and forces himself to stay on track.
“Then she went very serious. That was the spring Dom asked her to marry him, and she was obnoxiously happy and unbearably serious about these things. And she said, with that heartfelt gravity drunk people get when they think they're imparting something truly profound: 'It would be a waste for you to steal that dress now, Arthur. You should wait until you have a girl of your own, a special girl worth stealing it for.' She...”
Eames sits suddenly upright, pulling away from his hand. And the dress is gone, the girl is gone, replaced by the male Eames in a loud shirt and khaki slacks.
“Bugger all!” he says, and the easy flirting of a moment ago is gone, too, replaced by a pained earnestness Arthur can't remember ever hearing. “I didn't mean...” He runs his fingers through his hair, as if upset with himself. “Arthur, you have to believe that I didn't know any of that, or I would have never...”
Arthur leans up on his elbow, pursuing.
“Eames, of course you didn't know. Since when do I ever give briefings about facts I think people are already aware of?”
But Eames is still moving away, one foot already on the floor.
“Arthur, if I've inadvertently stumbled in and stepped all over something I had no business disturbing, I am truly...”
Oh. Eames really isn't getting what he's trying to say at all. Well, when it comes down to the crunch, he's never known how to do this.
He reaches out, grabs hold of Eames's wrist, a hard grip to keep him in place. Eames freezes, poised with one knee on the edge of the bed, staring at Arthur's hand on his arm.
“Eames,” Arthur says, demanding his attention, and Eames's eyes snap up to his. Arthur swallows, tries to find the words he actually needs. “The thing is... If I go and fall for a forger and a thief, I shouldn't be surprised if she does the stealing herself, should I?”
There is a long moment when they're caught there, looking at each other, Eames searching his face for something Arthur doesn't know whether it's there to be found. He's aware that he might be leaving bruises on Eames's wrist, but he isn't about to let go.
Then Eames's lips soften into a smile. His free hand comes up to touch Arthur's cheek, a callused thumb dragging light along his cheekbone.
“No, you really shouldn't, should you, darling?” he says, and Arthur's chest clenches tight in something like pain, something like the freefall of fearlessness.
“To be honest, though,” he says, because his heart is beating far too loudly, and Eames is a woman again, crawling back into bed with him in a rustle of tulle and chiffon, “I would have pegged your Hitchcock movie as To Catch a Thief.”
Eames laughs, pushing him down to settle her head on his chest.
“How very literal of you, pet.” There is a pause, her fingers slipping inside his shirt to rest against skin. “You do realize that I'd be Cary Grant in that film, of course?”
Arthur lifts his gaze above the top of her head, looking out over the room, over the sketches pinned on the wall.
“Goes without saying,” he says.
When he wakes up in the morning in his room in Valparaiso, Eames is gone (Santiago, his mind supplies, almost fast enough to keep the knot of worry from forming in his gut. The plan requires Eames to be on the first, pre-dawn flight to Santiago.), but on the pillow where he slept, still dented with the weight of his head, creased with the smell of him, there is a piece of paper. Not a note, but a drawing, done in black ballpoint pen on cheap hotel stationary. It shows a woman in evening dress, sitting perched on a desk, her feet dangling off the floor. In front of her, there is a man in black tie, bending to kiss her. He's holding her hand in his, pressed to his chest.
When Arthur gets dressed for the day, after he's pulled on the jacket of his dove gray Oscar de la Renta suit over the carefully buttoned vest beneath and tugged the sleeves down just so over the cuffs of his white Oxford shirt, he folds the sketch neatly in quarters and sticks it in his wallet. All the documents in there are forgeries. He can't remember when he last carried something genuine.
(Sometimes, it’s just about being.)
He dips the sponge into the tub again and drags the soft, dripping wetness of it up the inside of her other thigh, over the angle of her knee, back down the way it came. His hand sinks from the cool air into the heat of the water, slides all the way down over her softest skin, cupping her sex through the sponge, squeezing gently.
Eames gives a deep, satisfied moan, her legs falling wider, pressing Arthur's knees against the enamel of the tub, her head dropping forward in a loose curve that leaves strands of hair plastered damp across the exposed nape of her neck. He thinks about chasing the arc of her pleasure, about pressing his fingers down with intent, about stroking the sponge like an insistent whisper over her clit, but there is no urgency in the shift of her body, just the boneless lassitude of afterwards, and his own cock lies limp and buoyant in the water, spent and spent again and far beyond another round. He brushes the clinging hair from her nape and kisses her there, his body curved around the curve of her back, simply holding her, hearing a smile slip from her throat in the shape of a purr, and all he wants is this moment of stillness, this sense of contentment thick like molten sunlight through his veins.
“If I should fall asleep,” Eames says, her voice languid, drifting, “I'm counting on you not being above pushing me under to kick me back up.”
Arthur smiles, stroking his hand over her shoulder, down the length of her arm, tracing the pattern of droplets on her skin.
“Eames,” he says, haughty, mock offended, “have I ever failed to give you a good kick when you need it?”
“Hmmm,” Eames says. “I suppose that is true, darling.” A beat of silence, tilting her head as if in consideration. “Maybe then you will also not fail to wash my back for me?”
He does kick her at that, his heel against hers where their feet are tangled in the water, and she returns the sentiment, quite a bit harder, the water splashing around them with a sound that bounces lush and simple off the bathroom tiles. But he still shifts back a little, making space between them, and slips the sponge up from between her legs, along the crease of her groin and around her hip, until he can stroke it up the strong line of her spine. Rivulets are squeezed from it when it's pressed against her skin, clear streams snaking down the slope of her back, reflecting the warm glow of the candles burning on the counter by the sink.
They're in a dream version of Arthur's apartment on the Upper East Side, and though he knows better than to create it an identical copy, somehow the small touchstone alterations – the pattern of the floor tiles, the number of claws on the lion-footed tub – make the space not less intimate, only differently so. He never dreamt Eames here before that day at the airport in Madrid when he swallowed his heart down, anchored in place against running away by the weight of the sketch in his wallet, and held out the extra ticket to New York; before Eames took it, and looked at him, and all Arthur could think to say was Take me home, Mr. Eames? - the question like an echo, returned as a certainty in Eames's eyes. Never dreamt Eames here before he could remember every step of the way in reality; unlocking the door, that first time, holding it open.
There is a row of Eames's reprehensible slacks and shirts now in one of his closets up above. If he opened the same door down here, he has no doubt he would find her dresses; fitted black silk, and maybe a tan leather jacket. Further in, a flutter of white chiffon that would try to get caught in the door when he closed it again, a subconscious excuse for him to touch it. Dream or reality, he's bound to stumble on a pair of ratty gray sweatpants dropped somewhere on the floor. Some things are just immutable.
Then again, other things aren't.
The logic isn't always readily apparent.
He runs the sponge over Eames's shoulder blade, over pale glistening skin, clean and smooth and untouched under the scattering of drops.
“Have you never thought of having tattoos?” Arthur asks. It's not the first time he's wondered, but it's the first time his idle curiosity has spilled over into a question.
Eames shrugs, the muscles of her shoulders rippling beneath the golden sheen of water.
“Some of them would look at bit ludicrous on a woman's body,” she says.
“That would be a step up, then, considering that they all look ludicrous on a man's body,” Arthur retorts, keeping it dry. Eames's answer is not an answer, though – feels more like a misdirection – so he adds: “You could always make them different ones.”
Eames heaves a theatrically put-upon sigh.
“Arthur, I am not having your name tattooed across my left tit. Or in more private places, for that matter.”
Arthur drops his hands from her back in sheer horror.
“Eames, honestly. Only you could manage to come up with something so appallingly tacky.”
Eames turns her head and actually winks at him over her shoulder. There are droplets caught in the long fringes of her eyelashes.
“And to think that's only one of my many and considerable charms.”
“That is a thoroughly depressing thought. You may not want to remind me again unless you're willing to forge a prescription for SSRIs.”
“No joy, there, pet, I'm afraid,” Eames says, sinking back against him with the full weight of her body, making him lean back, too, until his shoulder blades are resting against the edge of the tub and the top of her head is tucked beneath his chin, the mounds of her breasts just breaking the surface of the water. “You see, I happen to be uniquely placed to state without equivocation that, contrary to popular opinion, the inside of your head is not actually a dark and sinister place.” She pats his thigh with her hand, consolingly, as if she were breaking bad news. “I'm sorry, but there it is.”
Arthur doesn't really have anything to say to that, so he keeps quiet, letting the sponge drop into the tub and wrapping his arms around her, listening to her breathing, to the sounds of the New York summer night drifting in from a window somewhere beyond the open bathroom door. He's almost forgotten the conversation when Eames speaks again.
“When I was younger...” she starts, and her voice is serious in a way that makes his pulse jump, suddenly ragged against the inside of his soaking skin. He can't see her face at all like this, and he isn't sure he wants to. “Before there was the dreaming. Before there was the forging. There were so many pieces that didn't fit, that wanted to peel off in different directions. And sometimes it felt as though the ink helped hold it all together, helped to keep me inside my skin without it ripping at the seems. Needlework like sutures, tying me together, the different mes. Or ink like wrappings, perhaps, to cover the cracks I wanted to hide. Or hide from. In any case, what I'm trying to say is, that was a long time ago, and this skin, this body...” She pauses, runs her hand along the length of his thigh. He can't tell whether she's feeling him, or feeling herself in the places where they meet. “This body is just truth.”
And then the water ripples, rises, displaced by a greater mass, and the Eames resting against Arthur's chest is wider and heavier and male and entirely different and entirely the same.
“This one, too, now,” Eames says, and his voice is naked, but it isn't vulnerable. It just is.
Arthur squeezes him tight, palms spread over skin and ink, over the treasured scars of stitches no longer needed. He is still holding on when the countdown pulls them awake.
He keeps holding on for a long time after.
(Make that always.)