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“Cheese and Crackers?” Zaxx laughed out loud; he couldn’t help it, and it didn’t occur to him to try.
Gia gave him a narrow look. “With me or at me?”
Stuff like that—rather than assume he was laughing at her, as most people would do, as he would probably do, she asked straight out. He didn’t think he knew anyone else who was simply direct, without complication or hidden agenda, and who sought clarity before reacting.
He gathered himself to answer her question. “As the proud human of a dog named Doofus,” he assured her, still chuckling, “I promise I’m laughing with you.”
Now Gia laughed. “Doofus? Is that descriptive?”
“He’s half Husky, so ...”
“Definitely descriptive.”
“Definitely,” Zaxx agreed. He caught the bottom of her leather jacket and pulled her close again. “Hey. We got distracted here. You still want me to stay?”
Her grin went through a metamorphosis, becoming both softer and deeper. “Yes, I want you to stay. But let’s both go up on our own feet, yeah?”
She slipped out of her jacket, baring a skimpy, clingy white top. It was sleeveless, with only thin straps like bra straps holding it up. Her arms showed gorgeous definition—gentle curves of muscle at her biceps and triceps, faint cording along her forearms. The ink bracelet around her right wrist caught his attention again, that Italian sentence rendered like a delicate piece of jewelry.
Everything left is lost. As a life’s motto, he loved it.
Removing her jacket had exposed more ink than that delicate piece. Over her left shoulder, down to her elbow, was an elaborate black-and-grey sleeve of beautifully worked ink: a pauldron, shoulder armor, in Norse style, with detail that seemed etched into metal. That detail was a woman warrior, complete with shield and sword, riding a chariot pulled by two cats.
Zaxx had done his time as a middle-school mythology nerd; Percy Jackson was the first fictional character he’d ever related to, though he hadn’t understood why back then. Also the Horde had a Norse thing going through its rituals and traditions. He knew Freya’s chariot when he saw it.
And there it was: every version of Gia Lunden he’d met on this night in one piece of body art: the fierce warrior, the gentle cat lady, the confidently sexual woman, all embodied by the Norse goddess of love, beauty, and, battle.
He swallowed the needy sound he felt climbing into his mouth. “Works for me.”
She took his hand and led him up to her bed.
~oOo~
If it were all laid out on the same level, this ‘tiny’ house probably wouldn’t be all that much smaller than his trailer—especially if the square footage of that covered porch were figured in. And it was leaps and bounds nicer. Her folks really had gone all out building this for her.
In terms of floor space, this loft, her bedroom, was about as big as the whole downstairs, making it a decent size for a bedroom, but the peaked roof slanted quite a bit, so there was a lot less room for someone his height (or Gia’s, for that matter) to walk around without slouching or crouching. Still, it was really nice, including a sleeping area, with a wrought-iron bed and a dresser to serve as a nightstand, and a study area, with a bookcase spanning the whole far wall and a desk and chair, and a little sitting area, with a puffy armchair and a floor lamp. There was a door near the top of the stairs he was pretty sure led to a closet, and if he understood the layout right, it might be a walk-in size.
She clearly hadn’t moved in yet; boxes, bins, and bags were stacked downstairs in the living room and up here, against the bookcase. But the bed was made.
Zaxx had not been a great student, but he was a pretty quick study; he knew better than to voice any observations of the room. Like the downstairs, the upstairs was really nice. The gesture her family had made was tremendous, and Gia knew it. But there was no compliment about the space she could accept without also taking a blow of guilt and loss.
Having been raised in haphazard almost-squalor, Zaxx liked his living space to be nice. He was naturally kind of messy; putting things away was boring as hell, and if he had too much of it to do, he got distracted quickly. He knew that about himself, and he worked at keeping on top of things so he never had too much tidying to do. He’d also decorated with some intentionality.
However, most of his housewares and decorative items came from rummage sales and clearance bins. If somebody gifted him a whole-ass house, complete with furniture, appliances, and décor, his reaction would be wholly uncomplicated elation.
He understood Gia’s ambivalence, though—or, rather, he could try to put himself in her place and conjure an image to see it the way she did. She hadn’t had to parent her parents to keep her family going; her parents nurtured and supported her. They’d made a cozy family nest, and Gia had been homesick in Chicago, hundreds of miles away. Then she’d come home to find herself kicked out of the nest.
She’d been kicked only as far as another branch of the same tree and into a carefully feathered new nest of her very own, but he still thought he got it. This house was cool, but it wasn’t the house she’d grown up in. She could see the house she’d grown up in from almost every window here. Close to home but not quite home. He could imagine why that would hurt.
She’d stepped away from him to switch on the lamp beside her bed. Her hair fell forward over her shoulders, exposing another bit of black-and-grey ink at the base of her neck. It was a word, in elegant script trailing into vines with tiny flowers that made an oval wreath around the word.
He went to her and brushed his fingers over the ink. She stood still and let him.
“Virgo? No, wait. Virago. What’s that?” He had a tickle of memory from school, not enough to actually remember what that word meant, but enough to have a sense that it was an insult of some kind.
“Virago, yeah. These days, it doesn’t get used that much, I guess. When it is, people use it to mean, like, shrew or bitch. But it’s a Latin word, and its original meaning was ‘woman warrior.’ Men did what they do and turned the idea of a powerful woman into an insult. I’m taking the word back.” She chuckled and turned to face him. “I know more than a few guys who’d say the insult describes me, too, so I guess it works both ways.”
A woman warrior’s pauldron on her shoulder, complete with fluffy cats; a reclaimed word for woman warrior on her back, rendered in flowery script. Gia carried these parts of herself both within and without.
