Page 2 of Her Ice Queen

She picked up her drink and crossed the room.

The woman saw her coming from ten feet out and didn't pretend otherwise. Green eyes, sharp, doing an appraisal of their own and taking their time about it.

"The seat's not taken," the woman said, before Carla could ask. Low voice, even, a thread of dry amusement running under it.

"I hadn't decided if I wanted it."

"Yes, you had." She turned back to her wine. "You decided from the corner. I watched you do it."

Carla sat down. Up close the green dress was silk, and the woman smelled of juniper and clean skin. A small scar ran through her left eyebrow, turned silver by the dim light.

"Carla," she said.

"Indra."

No last names. Indra offered nothing further and asked for nothing further, and the absence sat between them like a gift both of them recognized.

"Bad day?" Indra said.

"Why would you think that?"

"You drank the first one like medicine." She shrugged, one shoulder, economical. "And you've got the posture of a woman who spent today not hitting anyone."

Carla laughed, surprising herself, a short low sound she hadn't planned. "Expensive day," she said. "I lost a thing I wanted. I'm told my grip's too tight."

"Told by the thing you lost?"

"By everyone, eventually."

Indra considered her over the rim of the wineglass. "I spent two years being told my grip was too loose," she said. "Grip on myself, that is. I kept handing pieces over. So." She tipped the glass a centimeter, a toast to nothing. "Maybe there's no correct setting."

"There is," Carla said. "Mine. Applied selectively."

"Confident."

"Correct. It's frequently confused for confidence."

That earned her a real smile, slow, arriving in the eyes first, and it dropped straight through Carla's stomach, a pull she hadn't felt this cleanly in months. The conversation went on and it was easy in the manner that only fully anonymous conversation was easy: no stakes, no résumé, no future to negotiate. Indra was funny in a dry, sparing style, each line placed and left alone to work. She'd just moved back to the city. She didn't say from where. She was starting over in some unspecified fashion. She didn't say from what.

"You're not going to ask what I do," Indra observed, at one point.

"No. Are you going to ask what I do?"

"I already know what you do." Indra turned her wineglass by the stem. "You run things. It's all over you. The question you keep almost asking and then not asking, the ordering-off-menu voice." She lifted one hand before Carla could answer. "I don't want the details. Tonight I'm not anyone's anything, and I'd rather you weren't either."

"Agreed," Carla said, and meant it down to the studs.

Ollie replaced Indra's wine unasked, and Indra thanked her by name, which meant she'd asked for it at some point, which meant she paid attention. She sat with her spine long and easy and let silences run their full length instead of chasing them, and every time Carla said a true thing she caught it, weighed it, and set it back down without making it a conversation. Carla learned the shape of her and none of the facts, and it was exactly, exactly right.

Somewhere in the second hour, Indra's knee came to rest against hers and stayed.

Carla looked down at the point of contact, then up, and let the silence do the asking.

"You have a place," Indra said. Not a question.

"I have a very good place."

"Then finish your drink, Carla."