Page 39 of Tidal Creatures

She stops outside the locker-room door, looking to Anna. “I can go see which of the coaches is in the office,” she says. “I know about half of them from around campus, and I’m sure they’ll find David for me if I tell them it’s an emergency. You wait—”

Anna is already walking into the locker room, ignoring her utterly. Judy stares at her back, wondering briefly whether it’s worth the risk of following, then groans and pursues the other woman, only a few steps behind by the time Anna rounds the first bank of lockers and confronts the practice team.

“Hey, guys,” she says, voice bright and airy, like a whole group of burly men aren’t staring at her, half of them trying to step behind each other. She’s keeping her eyes up, which is possibly the only reason Judy isn’t trying to drag her physically out of the room. This is beyond inappropriate.

At least they all seem to be wearing pants, or at least underwear. That makes her feel a little better. They still shouldn’t be here. It’s rude and it’s inappropriate and it feels like something out of a mid-eighties comedy, one where nudity is treated as a funny joke that’s never harassment or cruel.

Anna is still beaming at them, seeming to share none of Judy’s discomfort. She puts her hands on her hips, looking around at the team. “David here?” she asks.

The men shuffle around, none of them demanding to know what she thinks she’s doing, although several of them clearly want to. Finally, two men are pushed to the front, one wearing sweatpants and a UC Berkeley hoodie, the other wearing nothing but jeans and the dark tattoos that circle his upper arms and spread across his chest in harsh, tangled shapes. Both men look at Anna, apparently waiting for her to narrow the field further than a fairly common masculine name.

Anna, for her part, turns to Judy, raising her eyebrows. “Well?” she asks. “Either one of these our boy?”

“Hey, David,” says Judy to the shirtless man, keeping her eyes as firmly above shoulder level as she can. The temptation to look lower is as strong as it is inappropriate. “You done with practice?”

“What the living fuck are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, dude,” says the other David, elbowing him lightly in the side, grinning like he, too, thinks he’s fallen into one of those mid-eighties films, and feels much better about it than Judy does. “Didn’t you hear her?”

“I heard her,” admits David. He hunches his shoulders. “Yeah, we’re done. Let me get my shirt on and I’ll meet you outside?”

He doesn’t directly tell them to leave, but then, he doesn’t need to. The rest of the team is glaring and shuffling, viewing their presence as the intrusion that it is, and their patience is running out.

“Sounds good,” says Judy, grabbing Anna’s arm and dragging her away. Anna is taller and sturdier, arms ropy with muscle that Judy, as a linguist, has never needed to work on developing, but she’s also not resisting, and Judy is able to pull her out of the locker room, back into the hall.

“What?” asks Anna, sounding baffled.

Judy stares at her. “You cannot be that oblivious,” she says.

“We needed to find David, we found David,” says Anna. “He was our target, and our hunt was successful.”

Judy eyes her for a moment. Anna blinks.

“What?”

“I’m just trying to figure out how serious you are, because that’s going to inform how annoyed I am,” she says. “He was our target, yes. He’s also a person, and ask yourself how you’d like it if he’d barged into the track-team locker room while you were all changing.”

Anna frowns. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. If swapping the genders on something makes it creepy, then it was always creepy, and you just didn’t want to admit it.” She takes Anna’s arm again. “Come on. We’re going to wait outside, like he asked us to.”

“He didn’t ask.”

“He said he’d meet us outside when he was trying to defuse an uncomfortable situation and keep it from getting even worse,” says Judy. “He asked. Some forms of question aren’t as direct as we might like them to be, much as there are forms of both consent and refusal that aren’t always completely clear. Haven’t you ever signaled yes or no at someone without saying the word? He asked. We’re going outside.”

Anna is quieter as they exit the building, more subdued, and Judy can’t shake the feeling that the odd sensation of the other woman still being partially stepped up into Artemis has faded without going entirely away. With the immediate hunt concluded, the goddess is more willing to rest.

“I’m sorry,” says Anna, once they’re outside. “When I have an active hunt, if I can see what I’m trying to find … it can be overwhelming. I don’t always have full control of myself.”

“Are you stepped up right now?” asks Judy. “You need to tell me if you are.”

Anna blinks, eyes flashing momentarily green again. “You can tell, huh?”

“I can tell.” It’s tempting to add some sort of boast, like “I can always tell,” but she doesn’t know yet whether that’s true, and if she claims a skill she doesn’t have, she’s sure it’ll come back to bite them in the ass. That’s how lying usually works.

“I can’t fully step down when I’m actively hunting,” says Anna. “Artemis is always with me. And I don’t sleep.”

“I don’t sleep much,” says Judy. “I don’t think any of us do.”