Ashley Cooper's Arc

Chapter 32 of 37

At seven, Ashley came down to the kitchen. Miko waited there, the hotel owner in fox ears who had touched her bone arm and smiled. But Ashley knew nothing real about her. Not where she came from. Not what she did before running a hotel. She had said yes to dinner blind. Now she worried one wrong question might sour the only person who had ever accepted her. Miko set two bowls of noodles down. Steam curled up. "Sit, Becca. Eat before it goes cold." Ashley sat. She wound noodles on her fork and searched for something safe to ask. "How long have you run this place?" "Twelve years." Miko slurped a long noodle. "Before that, other work." "What kind of work?" Miko chewed. She studied Ashley for a moment. Then she reached behind the towel rack and drew out a thin black blade. She laid it on the table between the bowls, quiet as a spoon. "I was a ninja," Miko said. "An assassin. People paid. I did the job. Then I stopped and bought a hotel." Ashley froze with her fork half up. She waited for a laugh, a wink, the joke. None came. Miko ate her noodles like she had just named the weather. "You're serious," Ashley said. "Very." Miko slid the blade back behind the rack. "You showed me your arm. I showed you mine. Now we both know a true thing." Ashley's chest went tight, then loose. She had feared a wrong question would ruin this. Instead the truth had come out, and the connection held. She looked at Miko across the steam. The robe strained at the woman's chest as she leaned for the soy sauce. Ashley's eyes dropped there again. This time she did not look away so fast. "Better," Miko said, catching her. "You hide less now." They ate. They talked. Miko asked nothing about where Becca came from, and Ashley loved her for it. When the bowls were empty, Miko sent her up to bed with a smile. Ashley lay in the dark. She did not think about the blade. She thought about the fox robe, and what it held, and how the buttons pulled. She turned over and shut her eyes. The picture stayed. She turned again. It stayed. By morning she knew the plain truth. She would not stop thinking about Miko's chest until she touched it. There was no clever plan around it. There was only the want, sitting in her like a stone. Ashley got up and looked at herself in the mirror. For years she had hidden what she was. She had run from town to town. Now, in a strange place, a strange woman had shown her a knife and called her hiding a habit worth breaking. "Tonight," Ashley told the mirror. "I ask her." She pulled her sleeve up to the elbow and left it there.