Vexa Rill's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The sailor sat on the deck and waited for her to speak. Vexa still held the rail. She had watched men from below the waterline for fifty years, but she had never talked to one. She did not know what a woman was supposed to say to a man she wanted. Her sisters had taught her the song and nothing else. She opened her mouth and closed it. He waited. The lantern between them made a small yellow circle on the wet boards. She saw him glance at the bait bucket, where the blue squid coiled its ivory tentacles against the tin. He almost smiled. She took that as a door and pushed on it. "Do you always keep what a stranger gives you?" she asked. He said only when the stranger looked hungrier than he was. She did not understand the joke, and she said so. He laughed, short and surprised, and told her it was not a good joke. Something in her chest loosened. She tried again. She asked what sailors did with a squid like the one in his bucket. He told her about ink, about frying the rings in oil, about a stew his mother made. Vexa listened and asked more. Each question was a stone she set down to test her weight. None of them broke. She did not sing. She did not lean forward and show her teeth the way she had been taught. She only asked, and he answered, and the night went on. When the sky began to gray, he stood and said he had to sleep before his crew woke. He did not invite her aboard. He did not promise anything. But he told her to come back the next night, and to bring nothing this time, because gifts were for strangers. Vexa slid down the hull into the black water and did not feel the cold. She had kept a man talking until dawn. She had learned that a question was a kind of hook too, and that this one did not kill.