Wisely, I Say, I Am A Bachelor [Part 2 of 3]
.
Back to Part 1
II.
“Chrysalis Visual Alchemy Labs, Portia speaking.”
“Portia?”
“Cinna? Cinna, what’s wrong?”
“I am-” I gulp in air, and start again, “I need-”
“Come over,” she says.
-
I love Portia and Lepidus’ workshop, I always have. It’s always warm, always bright, and smells of science that hasn’t become beauty yet. I designed their lab coats three years ago, to celebrate them paying rent on time for a full year. They both still wear them, even if I’ve insisted on improving the construction. For the five year anniversary, Lepidus says. That’s fair enough, and I’ve already made a few notes.
When I get there, it’s early evening, not yet closing time. Lepidus greets me and I nod my thanks, but Portia’s in the breakroom and I go straight to her. She pulls me down onto the couch and holds me and strokes my hair and I let myself calm down.
“You didn’t sleep,” she says, and I should be offended that it’s obvious, but I just nod. “Cinna, what happened?”
I tell her. About them closing down Tantalus for Finnick and what it meant for him. About the auction. About how none of the people in the club were regulars, about how no one used the rules, how no one treated Finnick like a person. About how they would have just left him there and told him to sleep it off in the back if I hadn’t come up to the dais and taken him home.
I hate to say it, but it’s reassuring that when she speaks again, Portia is as terrified and confused as I am. “Is he all right?”
“Physically,” I say, “I made sure of that.”
“Emotionally?”
“He was himself this morning,” I say, but I still can’t believe it so the words come out uncertain. “Woke up at noon, took his coffee, was sweet to the prep team. He makes his own bed. I don’t know why he does it.”
“District thing,” she says. “Maybe.”
“Maybe. But aside my sending him off an hour late and playing traffic into the phone, we didn’t talk about last night at all.”
“Who are these people? How could something like this happen?”
“I don’t know.” I take her hand and hold on. “I only recognized one of them, There was a Gamemaker, Portia. Andrea Lobotae was there.”
Her fingers shake. “The new one? Do you remember any of the others?”
“I don’t think I could ever forget them.”
I realize her meaning at about the same time she untangles herself from me and leans over, reaching into my satchel for the sketchbook.
She puts her arms around me again once I sit up, but leaves me space to work. The first man comes to life on the paper easily, his spacious eyes and the heavy curl of his bangs. “The hair’s grey, with a gold cast to it. He’s about my height, stronger shoulders. And his eyes are blue, almost electric blue. They’re definitely enhanced but I don’t think they’re transplants.”
“Wait.” She squints, tilts her head. “Change the part of his hair to the far left.” I do, and then she nods. “That’s Tiber Richards, the actor.”
“You’re right.” I didn’t recognize him without the makeup. A chill runs down my spine, thinking of the familiarity in the way he touched Finnick’s jaw. I push it aside. “He was first, and then Lobotae went after him. Then-” The blonde who punched him. I sketch her. “The hair’s light, blond with green, but I have to shade it in because of the way it curls.” The rest of her face is easier, a tiny pug nose, kohl around her eyes. “The braid goes down to her breasts, and she dresses like she wants you to know they’re there.”
“I’ve seen her in the tabloids,” Portia says. “Someone’s daughter. I’ll keep an eye out.”
The fourth, the man with the cane, is easiest to draw. “And here’s the device on his cane. I’d say he was military if it weren’t for that hair.”
“He is military.” Portia winces. “That’s Aldus Hawksley.”
“Agrippina’s ex-husband?”
“The one and only. I guess he’s back from Two.”
I nod. “They’re the ones who paid in advance. These four.” I look at the blond girl. “Or whose parents paid, I guess.” I start on the fifth, the man who went behind the restraints. “This one doubled his bidding price. His hair’s natural, he’s letting himself go grey around the temples.”
“He looks like Trajan will when he gets older.”
Well, that’s an uncomfortable thought. “You’re right. I’ll ask him, if I can figure out how.”
“How you manage to stay on speaking terms with your exes never fails to astound me.”
“It’s different, when you both know from the start neither of you is going to stick around.” Thinking of Trajan and looking at my sketch of this man, it’s easy to see the differences. I shade in the man’s cheekbones, try to recapture his smile. Portia can’t come up with more than that for him, though, and neither can I, so I start on the next. “I’m pretty sure this person is presenting female, but I wouldn’t put money on it. She’s not like Atia, though.” It takes me a couple of tries to get the particular curl of the black hair on her shoulder. “Up to Finnick’s eyes, so she’s at least six feet tall. The hair’s black, and her eyes don’t have pupils, they’re grey all through. Like slate.”
Portia shakes her head, and pulls her lab coat tighter around her shoulders.
“Wait.” The white tunic. She might be a doctor or a scientist. Some of them wear the color like a status symbol. I hand her the sketchbook and go to the breakroom door. “Lepidus? Do you have a minute?”
“Yes, let me wash my hands.” I sit back down and start on the seventh’s sketch, get the shape of the young blond man’s face before Lepidus comes in.
“What’s going on in here?”
“Composite sketching,” Portia says, and I guess it’s fair for her to be amused. The idea of me turning life drawing into identification is surreal enough to be funny. She turns my sketchbook around for me, holds it up to him. “Know her?”
“Dr. Jameson,” he says without missing a beat. “She gave a guest lecture for my class when I was in training. Biochemist. Where did you see her?”
I lie. “We hailed the same cab yesterday. I let her take the first turn.” I can feel Portia glaring at me for it, but I go on. “She’s a great tipper.”
“Ha, she would be. Did you see the owl mutts in last year’s Games? The ones that spoke like jabberjays? She was on that project.” He nods, impressed. “I wish I could’ve been there.”
No, Lepidus, you really don’t. “Thanks.”
“Not a problem. Anything else I can help with?”
I shake my head, no, and he asks Portia if he should check the spectrometer, and she tells him, yes, and I work the sketch of the young blond man out. Once Lepidus is gone and the door is shut again I turn to Portia and start, “Last one, he’s about your height-”
“Cinna, that’s Gallus Heavensbee.”
“Who?” I almost don’t want to know, looking at her face, how wide her eyes are blown.
“Gallus Heavensbee. Picked up on assault charges last year, there was a huge scandal.” She shivers. “How could they let someone like him into Tantalus?”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“I don’t know, his father bought him out? Cinna, this is a real problem.” She shuts the sketchbook on my fingers, like she doesn’t want to look at him. “Finnick can’t have known.”
“No, he can’t. He doesn’t screen his clients, I’ve known that for a while.”
“Who does?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if he doesn’t screen them, he didn’t buy out Tantalus. Who did?”
“I don’t know.” And Finnick calling last night a fundraiser echoes in my head, in his voice, overlapping like sirens on the street.
Portia puts her hands on the sketchbook’s cover, then on mine. Either she’s cold, or the blood in my hands is starting to run warm even when the rest of me is frozen all over. “I’ll look into it,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I know a guy who knows everyone in the banks. And don’t you dare say no, because if I do it, no one will trace it back to you, all right?”
I shut my eyes and hold my sketchbook close. “All right. You do that. I’ll talk to Ari and Atia. I have to see them about references anyway. And Finnick’s not back until late tomorrow night.”
“Oh, Cinna.” She sighs, and tilts me on to her shoulder, the way she’s held me through design blocks and stolen patterns and men who I pushed too far, the way I’ve held her through lost grants and abusive partners and embarrassing color combinations. “No one’s taken care of you.”
“It’s no one’s job.” I turn my face into her thigh and hope my makeup doesn’t smear. “And I shouldn’t need it.”
“Bullshit,” she says, and I don’t argue.
-
“Cinna, honey!” Atia looks more like herself every year, natural-colored wigs in outlandish peaked styles, skin blushing hard against age. I stand on tiptoe and kiss her on the cheek before she hands me off to Ari. “New necklace?”
“Not new, it’s one of mine,” Ari says, and twirls it around his finger. “Sentimental but stylish, Cinna. I adore it.”
“Thank you,” I say, of course, and they sit me down on their couch, pour tea and set out chocolate, nestle close together opposite me. All these years together and they’re still partners in everything. I’ve envied them that as long as I knew. I know who my creative match is, and we’re not sexually interested in each other, let alone sexually compatible. Then again, for every man I drive away because I’ll always be closer in mind to Portia, I draw in another man who knows he won’t have to suffer or compete with me artistically. So it’s a fair trade.
“Before you even ask, Cinna, I’ll just go ahead and say it.” Ari sets down his teacup and gives it a little twist. “I love what you’ve been doing with Finnick Odair this season. It’s subtle, and it’s decisive, and so mature.”
“Not just him,” Atia teases. “You. It might just be a case of knowing where to look, but I look at his photos in the tabloids and I feel like I’m watching you grow up. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this, but it’s nice to see you do minimal. Don’t get me wrong, I love your gowns, but remember what I used to tell you about limiting your palette? You don’t get more limited than a naked man.”
“Limitless, but limited,” I agree.
“Yes but that limitlessness has been messing with the heads of artists since forever.” Atia reaches over and ruffles my knees. “And you’re an artist now, Cinna. You took that heroic hunk of marble and you’ve made him move.”
“Have you slept with him?” Ari asks, bluntly.
“No.” I can’t help blushing, but it’s a conscious choice to derail that with “I can’t afford it.”
They laugh, both at that and at each other. “Tell me about it,” Atia says, but in the way that makes it clear she’d rather tell me more. “Remember when we had do drive Gloss’ suitors off with a sword?”
The first thing that comes to mind shouldn’t be where did you get a sword?
Ari laughs, though. “I couldn’t ever forget. Cashmere nearly tore them apart! I was afraid we’d have to call the Peacekeepers.”
“Honestly, we could have just told the poor men just how much it would have cost them! Cashmere didn’t have to be so cruel.” Atia pouts. “Though who can blame her? She loves her brother so much.”
“Is that sort of thing still going on for them?” I ask, and hope they just think I’m glad the conversation is no longer about me and Finnick.
“Oh no, no,” Atia says. “Cashmere’s past her time, mostly, and once they figured it out about each other, she wouldn’t have much more of it.”
Each other. I hold on to that. “So they were both-”
“Selling themselves, yes. The lucky dears. But they went about it so dutifully and discreetly from each other that they didn’t know the other was doing it! It was beautiful, honestly, like something out of the Games. Can you imagine! There’s that horrid story of the husband and wife, Cashmere used to describe it, how did it go? About how a wife sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain and he sold his watch to buy her a comb. Tragic, really.”
“A comb doesn’t cost that much,” Ari says. “But the symbol matters more than the material, in this case.”
“The fallout was awful,” Atia agrees. “I felt so horrible for them. And they haven’t been back to the Capitol almost at all since.”
“When was this?” I ask.
“Only two years ago. During the seventy-first Games. They still come to the Capitol sometimes, but it’s not the same. And Cashmere’s getting a little old for all but her most devoted.”
Cashmere is two years older than I am.
“Besides.” Atia says, “the world has Finnick now. And you’re doing a marvelous job with him.”
“We know you’re here for references,” Ari says, and opens the book on their coffee table to reveal a stack of envelopes tied with a gold ribbon. “And you can have them with our compliments.”
-
I hand Finnick his garment bag. My hand is shaking enough that the beads on his scarf and the pin of his belt chitter until I let go.
-
The door to Tigris’ shop has real chimes attached, low and clanging. They startle me, enough that I turn back, and only after do I actually hear Tigris padding toward me.
“Cinna.” Her voice gets softer every time I speak to her, and harder to find the subtleties in, but Tigris has never been one for mincing words. “You’re early.”
“I got here as fast as I could.” And I did, because I never know how long it’s going to take to walk through the kitsch quarter. The last time I tried, I ended up staring at a wax mannequin for an hour, wondering if it really was supposed to be Caesar Flickerman, if they froze him in the market square between television appearances. I avoided that entire street today and still got to Tigris’ shop before sunset. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not a bother.”
I smile, and look over some of the designs. Tigris used to do some of the best work with fur and leather I’ve ever seen, and while the patterns are a little uninspired now, the workmanship is flawless as ever. She lets me appreciate a leather vest for a while before she suggests, “There’s a better color of that one, for you. Downstairs.”
I nod and agree.
Her storage is spacious, lined wall to wall with stacks of fur. The lighting is dim and gentle, so she probably doesn’t do any work here, just means to use it to ensure us privacy. “So,” she says, curling up on one of the piles, whiskers twitching. “You suspect something.”
“I suspect, and I need to know.”
“You’re working for District Four this season.”
“And probably through the Games,” I add, thinking about Ari and Atia’s references, Finnick’s acceptance of my presence, the shimmering ocean-blue suits and gowns that are already taking shape in my sketchbook.
“Then what more is there to know?” She straightens one of her whiskers, flicks her nails dismissively. “You’ve seen what he has do to. What he is.”
“Finnick?”
She nods, her eyes lidding into shadow.
“He doesn’t do it for the money, does he.”
“He doesn’t ever see it,” Tigris corrects. “He’s not a whore, he’s a slave.”
Hearing Finnick called that-both of those, both of them equally awful-makes my chest burn and my palms sweat. “He’s a victor.”
“That just gives Snow an excuse.”
I can’t put my hands on the furs, I feel like I’ll stain them. Snow. President Snow. “But why is Snow blackmailing him? What did Finnick do to deserve that?”
All Tigris says is, contemptuously, “He won.”
-
Finnick comes home, wasted, with welts on the side of his face, and I almost fall over myself helping him to bed. Is there anything he needs, no. Wants, no. Let me fix those scratches, let me wring out your back, let me get you something to drink. Let me kiss you. Let me take on the world for you, let me go the next time you don’t want to, let them brutalize me instead because I deserve it more than you.
He laughs and calls me the most talkative Avox he’s ever heard.
I wake up in a cold sweat, with my throat too dry to scream.
-
“Lepidus, is Portia here?”
“-Cinna, you look like hell.”
Of course I do. I couldn’t look in the mirror this morning and let’s see you put on liquid eyeliner blind. “I know. I’m sorry. Is she here?”
“She hasn’t come in yet.” But Lepidus lopes an awkward arm over my shoulder and shuts the door behind me and takes me to the breakroom. “Here. Have something to drink-wait, let me get you one that hasn’t been out all night being color-matched. Pulp or no pulp, I always forget.”
“So much pulp it’s practically still an orange,” I say, sitting down on the couch. I almost wish there were a blanket, but there’s no point in making Lepidus want to know what’s wrong. “Thank you,” I say when he hands it to me. “You’re using the other one for color-matching?”
“The fire,” he explains, smiling. “We’re not exactly making leaps and bounds. Portia had a breakthrough about a week ago getting the vapor to limit itself but the consistency’s still a problem.” He goes on, and I drink the juice and listen, try to let everything fade. “But it’s easier to hold the color of a glass of orange juice than it is to keep a fire going.”
“They’re completely different colors,” I say.
“Fire doesn’t have a color.” Lepidus pours himself coffee and sits on the end of the counter. “It has a spectrum. But first, we have to get just one color. A spark.”
“You could’ve put it that way to me,” Portia says from the doorway.
“I could, but then I’d be ignoring all the hassle.” Lepidus looks up at her and smiles. “Tell you what, I’ll go tinker and let you two talk.” He passes Portia on the way out and gives a lock of her hair a twist. “Morning.”
“Morning,” she says, following him out with her eyes. That’s new.
Oh what a tangled web we weave.
She smiles warmly until the door closes, and I’m about to ask what’s going on for the two of them when I actually see the way she’s looking at me.
“I heard back from my friend at the banks,” she says. Her lower lip trembles and I realize she’s not wearing lipstick, hasn’t tweezed her eyebrows, left the house with her hair still wet. “It’s true, isn’t it.”
I hang my head. “I went to Tigris. A lot-a lot of things are true.”
She almost trips over her heels on the way to the couch and I don’t blame her. “Cinna, the order came straight from the Ministry of Finance.”
Hanging my head isn’t working. I have to hold it in my hands or else I think it’ll snap my neck.
I can’t tell her everything. I know I know too much. But I have to tell her something, and not just because I can’t hold on to this alone. “Finnick never sees the money.”
I think she sits down next to me. That’s the most likely reason for the couch to lurch. But I’m feeling everything by halves right now, at least everything external. If Portia touched me I’d probably just wonder if the window was open.
“It’s not Tantalus’ fault,” Portia says, so far away. “It’s not like they can turn down a Presidential order. So. I should tell people to stop blacklisting them.”
“Right,” I say. There’s nothing else.
“And I’ll do it. You don’t mind your integrity taking a hit,” she murmurs.
“I don’t. Not for this.”
Lepidus knocks on the door. “I left my coffee, can I come in?”
“Sure,” Portia and I say. I’m more startled than she is. And so Lepidus comes in, and Portia smiles, and we give him a show.
“So you’re living in Finnick Odair’s apartment,” she says, like this is what we’ve been talking about all along.
I can feel my cheeks heating. “Yes.”
“You straddled Finnick Odair’s hips and gave him a back massage.”
“And a foot massage.”
“And a foot massage,” she corrects.
I specify, “Not at the same time, I only have two hands.” Lepidus snickers into his refreshed coffee.
Portia goes on, “You walked in on a drunken Finnick Odair playing with your eyeliner.”
“It wasn’t on my face.”
“And you cuddled with a naked Finnick Odair desperate for physical contact.”
“He wasn’t desperate for physical contact, he was desperate for aftercare, physical contact is a component of aftercare.”
She laughs. It doesn’t sound hollow, but the echo does. “And you still haven’t slept with him?”
I hang my head. I didn’t want to think about this. I don’t want to think about this. “It’s not my job. The rest of that? That’s my job.”
“Anyone else in the Capitol would have slept with him ages ago,” Lepidus says, sharing a nod of agreement and what I distinctly think are bedroom eyes with Portia.
I sigh. It might not be the right time to say it, but the words come out on their own: “No one else in the Capitol cares what Finnick Odair wants.”
-
I get back to Finnick’s apartment with about thirty-six hours before he’s supposed to walk in the door. Hours one and two I just sit on the couch with my sketchbook open and a pencil sliding out of my fingers. There’s more sweat on the page than graphite. Hour three, I take a shower, fight with the programming the whole way through. The water’s never hot enough. The exfoliants are never sharp enough. The soap doesn’t sting. Somewhere in the back of my head I know I’m being appropriative and melodramatic but it’s what I feel, and I feel childish for feeling it.
The rest of hour three, and most of hour four, I get dressed and sit at the vanity, going through the motions of taking care of my face, which is difficult when what I really want to do is rip it clean off. Hour five, six, seven, the sketchbook again, hour eight I remember I should probably eat something, hour nine I order it up, hour ten the smell stops nauseating me but by then it’s too cold. The Avoxes take it away. I tell them it’s fine, they should eat it if they want to, and they shake their heads and I feel like an asshole.
Hour eleven, and still there’s nothing on the page but the faint silver dots my pencil leaves behind when it slips out of my grip. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. I don’t know where fifteen and sixteen go. I probably sleep. So at the end of hour sixteen I haul myself off the couch and to bed. I dream, and I know it’s a dream because like hell I’m setting foot in Tantalus again even if it’s not their fault. But I dream I’m in Tantalus, and Finnick’s up there on the cross again, smiling down at me and saying it’s my turn, and of course I go up to him, of course I touch him, of course I comply when he says I should do it harder and learn him. Figure him out. Find where he ticks, where he moves, what he wants, what he is. My nails, my teeth, my fists, nothing marks him, and when I tear at his flesh new skin bubbles up instead of blood, smoothing him over, thinning him out. He comes. I don’t. I wake up.
It’s hour twenty-one and I still can’t draw. I sit in the chair instead of on the couch. An Avox brings me orange juice. I do manage to drink it, slowly, over the course of hours twenty-two and twenty-three. Twenty-four, twenty-five, I finally remember to turn the television on. He’s on it, like he’s haunting me, reminding me that whatever else he did last night, it wasn’t me. There are other programs on. I split the screen, keep Finnick in the bottom corner until he goes away because I know if I don’t I’ll just keep changing the channel, and I let Wear and Tear fill the other three quarters of the screen. Scarves are coming back in. Good, I’ve done my job.
Twenty-five, six, seven, eight. I haven’t been blocked this badly for years, maybe a decade. There are suits to design and patterns to glue and inspiration to look for somewhere and here I am, holed up in Finnick Odair’s apartment without a clue of what I should say when he gets home, let alone what to do until he gets here.
This is how we started. When we started, he was late.
He comes home two hours early, and I’m still in that chair, with my sketchbook open on my lap and nothing in it.
He hangs up his coat. He says hello. He takes one look at me and I feel it on the side of my neck, since I can’t look him in the eyes.
“Have you slept?” he asks.
I don’t want to think about sleeping. I tell him “Some,” because it’s true.
“Not much,” he teases, then comes around me to sit on the couch. He turns the television off, rolls back his shoulders. He’s not hurt, I can tell, just sore, and I should take care of him, it’s my job it’s my job it’s not his job, he never sees the money, and before I can tell he’s looking at the sketchbook I throw it down.
It startles him. I startled Finnick Odair. I guess that ranks me with the top eight tributes. “Cinna, what’s wrong?”
I say, “I know.”
I don’t look at him. He could be confused, he could be white as a sheet, he could be angry, amused, anything. “What, who I am?” he asks.
“No.” I breathe. It hurts. “But I do know what you don’t do for a living.”
For longer than I think this deserves, Finnick stares at me. It’s more like being accused by the television than anything else, like having the walls close in, like being judged. He sits across from me and I stare at the shoes I picked out for him three days ago, no longer wondering why they don’t need a shine. I should hem his pants. I should do a lot of things. I should say something.
Finnick looks over my shoulder at a place in the corner, and says, “Beetee.”
So I look up, and it’s not because I can, it’s because I’m confused. “Beetee? What does District Three have to do with this?”
“It’s a signal,” Finnick says. There’s a smile on his jaw I’ve only seen when he’s half-asleep. “The room’s bugged. If I mention Beetee it starts a feedback loop that gives us about half an hour, twenty minutes if people are actually trying to listen in. So. Say what you want to say.”
“This place is bugged?” Wonderful. That was articulate.
“There’s not much in the Capitol that isn’t,” Finnick says. “So. Go on. Please.”
It’s only appropriate that the first thing out of my mouth is “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
For a thousand things trying to race out of my mouth all at once. They clash on the way and I end up saying nothing, just forming words with tangled sounds. He comes closer, sits on the arm of my chair and laughs, “Well, that’s a waste of de-bugging,” and I have no idea what comes over me but whatever it is, it loosens my tongue.
“I’m ignorant,” I say. “I’m sorry I’m ignorant. I’m sorry I send you off every night to do something that isn’t your job, it’s something that hurts you, and I’m sorry it took someone really hurting you for me to see it, and I’m sorry that I feel like it’s about me even now that I’ve found out what you are because I can’t get over it and that’s nothing. It’s nothing to you. It’s nothing compared to you.” When he says nothing, I breathe. “And I haven’t even asked if it’s true. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“What’s true?”
“That the President is blackmailing you. That he plays victors against their families if they won’t prostitute themselves. And that a lot of people in power aren’t just turning a blind eye, they’re your-patrons.”
“It’s true,” Finnick says.
“I talked to the stylists for District 1,” I say. “Cashmere and Gloss-”
“The real sticker for Cashmere and Gloss is that they were being played against each other,” Finnick says, flat but assertive. “Gloss was the person they threatened Cashmere with, when she won her Games in the first place. She pulled for him to win his Games, made a lot of coincidences happen. And then when Gloss won, Snow told him that if he didn’t sell himself, Snow would sell Cashmere in his place, never mind that she’d already been doing that to keep Gloss alive.”
I feel like my tongue has turned to carpet. “How long?”
“Eight years, before either of them found out.” I watch his knuckles whiten on his knee. “It’s amazing what you can do when you’re trying to protect someone.”
“And you-”
“Have cousins,” he interrupts, “thirteen cousins, four aunts and four uncles, and a mother and father in District Four.” His mouth shapes, like there’s more, but he doesn’t say anything.
“And this is what he does to the victors,” I can’t help saying now. “This is what he does to the ones who win.”
“Well, it’s not like he can do it to the ones who lose,” Finnick says.
“That wasn’t funny. None of this is funny.”
“It’s easier to laugh about it.”
“Easier for you.” What do I sound like? Damn it. “But this is about you, it’s not about me, it can’t be about me. You’re worse off. I’m just an idiot.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Yes, you did. When you knew what to ask.”
“But I should have known from the start. All this talk, all this want I have, about transcending the Games and making people feel and notice and being subversive and I never once thought to ask, why. What am I subverting? What am I preventing? Because it was all power to me, all about the opportunity to change people and I don’t have the right to change them if I’m just like them, if I’m just as ignorant as they are, and Finnick this still isn’t supposed to be about me, it’s you, you’re the one that’s being hurt, and I’m part of the thing that’s hurting you so what I feel doesn’t matter.”
Finnick Odair smiles at me, without the little searchlights of the cameras to make his teeth shine, and looks like he’s trying to hold back a laugh.
I refuse to cry. If he’s laughing at this (and I deserve it), crying will probably put him in hysterics.
“It has to stop,” I say.
He blinks, but doesn’t drop the smile. “What has to stop?”
I breathe. “This. The Games. Everything.” I can’t look at him, but my head’s too heavy to turn, so it ends up sinking. “I can’t believe that I-want-I still want-”
“How would you stop it?”
The change in Finnick’s tone, softer, closer, chills me up to my shoulders. “I’d make them see. I’d make everyone in the Capitol see that we’re monsters. Us, not them. Not you.”
“How?”
“By showing them that the tributes are humans. By showing them who the tributes are. Like I saw with you. Like you let me find, with you.” I shut my eyes, try to piece it together. My hands are shaking, too slick to hold a pencil, like they’ve been for the last thirty-six hours. “Make them see. Make them choose. Look at what it’s done to me, Finnick, what just knowing has done to me, and there are better people out there. If the Capitol knew what it was doing, it would stop. It would have to. We’d have to.”
Something touches my cheek, and I panic before I realize that it’s his hand. I look, try to fill my peripheral vision with his fingertips, because there’s no way I can look him in the eye.
“But how would you show them?” he asks.
“Through the Games. I’d have to go through the Games. Find a tribute, find someone who they can’t ignore. Someone like you.”
“But that wouldn’t stop him from turning out like me,” Finnick says.
“Then two. Two people the Capitol needs to live. Or three. Or all of them. If the Capitol cared about every single one of the tributes, knew them and cared and thought of them as people-”
“Can you do that?” he asks before I can say anything more. “Can you, would you do that?”
“If it was the last thing I ever did,” I say, and don’t take it back.
His fingertips slide down my cheek, fall away to the arm of the couch. I have no idea how my breathing’s gotten so ragged but it has, I can hear it, feel it straining the cushions. He stands up, and I think he’s leaving, but he sits on the coffee table instead, his knees framing mine.
“I’ll give you the chance to prove that,” he says, low enough that I don’t think the bugs would have picked it up, if they were still on.
I have to look at him. I have to make sure it’s Finnick saying that, the Finnick I’ve been trying to find for the past five weeks.
It is.
But I never expected the first thing I’d hear the real Finnick Odair say to be “Welcome to the resistance, Cinna Ward.”
My mouth is hanging open, so I close it.
He puts his hand on my knee and leans in, looks me in the eyes. “We do need someone on the inside. But you’re wrong. It’s not the Capitol you need to convince, it’s the Districts. It’s not about shifting power, it’s about taking it.”
“I’m in,” I say. I breathe, and say it again to make sure. “I’m in. I can’t let this go on.”
“Do you have anyone they could use against you?”
I think of Portia and Lepidus, of my parents, my brother, his kids. Finnick has cousins, he said, cousins and family and more, and Cashmere and Gloss had each other. Portia would be like that for me, but not if she knew why, and she’d trust why. It would hurt. It would be awful.
But she’d know. They’ll all know, as soon as I do what I’ve promised, what I’ve set out for.
And it’s design. It’s me. I’ve always said all my power is in my work, all my emotion, all my anger and sadness and fear and hate, and as long as it’s there, it only hurts me.
Whatever I do for Finnick, for the victors, for the tributes, for this, will only hurt me.
“No,” I say, and believe it as much as I can. “As long as I leave something behind, I don’t care what happens to me. They can’t use someone like that.”
“No,” Finnick agrees, his eyes clouding over. “They can’t.”
I hear a faint scrape from the corners, a turn of the screws. Finnick turns away, looks over his shoulder, and then back to me. “The bugs are going to come back on soon. I’ll just say this quickly. I don’t want the victors to know about you yet. Haymitch knows, but not who you are. I’ll see if I can get you to meet him, during the Games maybe, or after.”
“All right,” I say. It doesn’t surprise me that Haymitch Abernathy’s at the center of this-well, it doesn’t surprise me any more than that there’s a this at all. I actually think I’m just wrung out of revelations.
“And Cinna?”
“Yes?”
He puts his hands on my knees, leans in, and kisses me.
My eyes don’t close. Neither does my mouth. I swear I must have flatlined. But then my breathing and tasting and everything but thinking starts all at once and I kiss him back, push off the back of the couch and take, the way I always take. His hands are on my thighs, I cover them; his tongue is against my lips, I meet it; he draws back and I reach after, strain off the back of the chair to follow him.
“Thank you for finding me,” he says. It’s him.
I hold on to his hands, keep them where they are, touching me. It takes three breaths for me to speak because the air just won’t go down far enough. “Please tell me you wanted that.”
“I wouldn’t have challenged you to if I didn’t want it.”
“No,” I say, and then realize what it must sound like. “I mean-”
He kisses me again, just short, like he’s asking if that’s what I mean, and it is what I mean, so I tell him “Don’t you dare stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
Neither do I. I don’t stop kissing him, I don’t stop surging up out of the chair to bend him over the table. He laughs, and I laugh, probably because this is the end of anything resembling professional courtesy, and we kiss until I feel the table start to protest our combined weights and Finnick says, “Couch,” and wriggles out from under me to sit on it. I get to my knees before he can tell me otherwise, before I can spare a thought to what I’m doing, and I undo his pants and take care of him the way I’ve wanted to for weeks, months, years maybe even though that wasn’t really Finnick, this is Finnick, Finnick against my cheek and down my throat and everywhere I look, everywhere I touch. And he wants me. He wants me enough to hold me by the hair and roll his hips and call me by name when he comes, and that’s more than I could ever have hoped for.
I wipe my jaw on his thigh, and that makes his breath catch. “Lie down,” he says, and it takes him pulling me up from the floor to kiss me for me to realize that’s not something he wants to do, that’s something he wants me to do. Oh. Yes.
“Back or front?” I breathe. I can still taste him.
“On your back,” he says, reaching over the edge of the couch for his garment bag.
I know what he’s going for. “I am so glad I packed that.”
He grins. “You’ll be gladder to pack this,” he says, reaching behind himself and straddling my hips.
Everything behind my eyes goes white at the thought, the image, the sight of him. This is real. This is happening. Finnick Odair is sliding down around me, scalding and tight and slow, too slow, but then if it were any faster I couldn’t watch him. I watch him. I watch us. I drive my hips up again and again so I can see everything and get more, so much more than that. He rides hard and I don’t make it easy trying to touch him and watch him and have all I can, but it’s good, so good, burning through me and wringing me dry.
He tells me how it feels. I give him more and more until I can’t.
After, after, I sink into the couch cushions, and it’s like swimming in sweat. I can’t help asking again, “Please tell me you wanted that.”
He laughs, and I can feel it across my thighs. “Showing you wasn’t enough?”
“It’s never enough,” I say, but I hope the way I’m smiling tells him just what I mean.
I know at some point I’ll have to come down. I have a world to face, a world I’m learning to fear but can’t bring myself to hate. I have promises to answer for and keep. I have games and Games to play, and change to spark, and so much more to learn.
On the other hand, I have Finnick Odair, and his apartment.
“I should shower,” he says.
“Yes,” I correct, “we should.”
-
I do truss him up and send him off, the afternoon after, as his schedule demands. Knowing doesn’t make it any easier. But the look he gives me as he takes the garment bag out of my hand, and his jokes about having a few new tricks to turn since last night (which are funny even though I don’t believe them for a second), those calm me down enough that at least my hands don’t shake.
All evening, I draw. My sketchbook is a torrent, a flood, an uprising.
-
-
On to Part 3
.
Back to Part 1
II.
“Chrysalis Visual Alchemy Labs, Portia speaking.”
“Portia?”
“Cinna? Cinna, what’s wrong?”
“I am-” I gulp in air, and start again, “I need-”
“Come over,” she says.
-
I love Portia and Lepidus’ workshop, I always have. It’s always warm, always bright, and smells of science that hasn’t become beauty yet. I designed their lab coats three years ago, to celebrate them paying rent on time for a full year. They both still wear them, even if I’ve insisted on improving the construction. For the five year anniversary, Lepidus says. That’s fair enough, and I’ve already made a few notes.
When I get there, it’s early evening, not yet closing time. Lepidus greets me and I nod my thanks, but Portia’s in the breakroom and I go straight to her. She pulls me down onto the couch and holds me and strokes my hair and I let myself calm down.
“You didn’t sleep,” she says, and I should be offended that it’s obvious, but I just nod. “Cinna, what happened?”
I tell her. About them closing down Tantalus for Finnick and what it meant for him. About the auction. About how none of the people in the club were regulars, about how no one used the rules, how no one treated Finnick like a person. About how they would have just left him there and told him to sleep it off in the back if I hadn’t come up to the dais and taken him home.
I hate to say it, but it’s reassuring that when she speaks again, Portia is as terrified and confused as I am. “Is he all right?”
“Physically,” I say, “I made sure of that.”
“Emotionally?”
“He was himself this morning,” I say, but I still can’t believe it so the words come out uncertain. “Woke up at noon, took his coffee, was sweet to the prep team. He makes his own bed. I don’t know why he does it.”
“District thing,” she says. “Maybe.”
“Maybe. But aside my sending him off an hour late and playing traffic into the phone, we didn’t talk about last night at all.”
“Who are these people? How could something like this happen?”
“I don’t know.” I take her hand and hold on. “I only recognized one of them, There was a Gamemaker, Portia. Andrea Lobotae was there.”
Her fingers shake. “The new one? Do you remember any of the others?”
“I don’t think I could ever forget them.”
I realize her meaning at about the same time she untangles herself from me and leans over, reaching into my satchel for the sketchbook.
She puts her arms around me again once I sit up, but leaves me space to work. The first man comes to life on the paper easily, his spacious eyes and the heavy curl of his bangs. “The hair’s grey, with a gold cast to it. He’s about my height, stronger shoulders. And his eyes are blue, almost electric blue. They’re definitely enhanced but I don’t think they’re transplants.”
“Wait.” She squints, tilts her head. “Change the part of his hair to the far left.” I do, and then she nods. “That’s Tiber Richards, the actor.”
“You’re right.” I didn’t recognize him without the makeup. A chill runs down my spine, thinking of the familiarity in the way he touched Finnick’s jaw. I push it aside. “He was first, and then Lobotae went after him. Then-” The blonde who punched him. I sketch her. “The hair’s light, blond with green, but I have to shade it in because of the way it curls.” The rest of her face is easier, a tiny pug nose, kohl around her eyes. “The braid goes down to her breasts, and she dresses like she wants you to know they’re there.”
“I’ve seen her in the tabloids,” Portia says. “Someone’s daughter. I’ll keep an eye out.”
The fourth, the man with the cane, is easiest to draw. “And here’s the device on his cane. I’d say he was military if it weren’t for that hair.”
“He is military.” Portia winces. “That’s Aldus Hawksley.”
“Agrippina’s ex-husband?”
“The one and only. I guess he’s back from Two.”
I nod. “They’re the ones who paid in advance. These four.” I look at the blond girl. “Or whose parents paid, I guess.” I start on the fifth, the man who went behind the restraints. “This one doubled his bidding price. His hair’s natural, he’s letting himself go grey around the temples.”
“He looks like Trajan will when he gets older.”
Well, that’s an uncomfortable thought. “You’re right. I’ll ask him, if I can figure out how.”
“How you manage to stay on speaking terms with your exes never fails to astound me.”
“It’s different, when you both know from the start neither of you is going to stick around.” Thinking of Trajan and looking at my sketch of this man, it’s easy to see the differences. I shade in the man’s cheekbones, try to recapture his smile. Portia can’t come up with more than that for him, though, and neither can I, so I start on the next. “I’m pretty sure this person is presenting female, but I wouldn’t put money on it. She’s not like Atia, though.” It takes me a couple of tries to get the particular curl of the black hair on her shoulder. “Up to Finnick’s eyes, so she’s at least six feet tall. The hair’s black, and her eyes don’t have pupils, they’re grey all through. Like slate.”
Portia shakes her head, and pulls her lab coat tighter around her shoulders.
“Wait.” The white tunic. She might be a doctor or a scientist. Some of them wear the color like a status symbol. I hand her the sketchbook and go to the breakroom door. “Lepidus? Do you have a minute?”
“Yes, let me wash my hands.” I sit back down and start on the seventh’s sketch, get the shape of the young blond man’s face before Lepidus comes in.
“What’s going on in here?”
“Composite sketching,” Portia says, and I guess it’s fair for her to be amused. The idea of me turning life drawing into identification is surreal enough to be funny. She turns my sketchbook around for me, holds it up to him. “Know her?”
“Dr. Jameson,” he says without missing a beat. “She gave a guest lecture for my class when I was in training. Biochemist. Where did you see her?”
I lie. “We hailed the same cab yesterday. I let her take the first turn.” I can feel Portia glaring at me for it, but I go on. “She’s a great tipper.”
“Ha, she would be. Did you see the owl mutts in last year’s Games? The ones that spoke like jabberjays? She was on that project.” He nods, impressed. “I wish I could’ve been there.”
No, Lepidus, you really don’t. “Thanks.”
“Not a problem. Anything else I can help with?”
I shake my head, no, and he asks Portia if he should check the spectrometer, and she tells him, yes, and I work the sketch of the young blond man out. Once Lepidus is gone and the door is shut again I turn to Portia and start, “Last one, he’s about your height-”
“Cinna, that’s Gallus Heavensbee.”
“Who?” I almost don’t want to know, looking at her face, how wide her eyes are blown.
“Gallus Heavensbee. Picked up on assault charges last year, there was a huge scandal.” She shivers. “How could they let someone like him into Tantalus?”
“Why isn’t he in jail?”
“I don’t know, his father bought him out? Cinna, this is a real problem.” She shuts the sketchbook on my fingers, like she doesn’t want to look at him. “Finnick can’t have known.”
“No, he can’t. He doesn’t screen his clients, I’ve known that for a while.”
“Who does?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, if he doesn’t screen them, he didn’t buy out Tantalus. Who did?”
“I don’t know.” And Finnick calling last night a fundraiser echoes in my head, in his voice, overlapping like sirens on the street.
Portia puts her hands on the sketchbook’s cover, then on mine. Either she’s cold, or the blood in my hands is starting to run warm even when the rest of me is frozen all over. “I’ll look into it,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I know a guy who knows everyone in the banks. And don’t you dare say no, because if I do it, no one will trace it back to you, all right?”
I shut my eyes and hold my sketchbook close. “All right. You do that. I’ll talk to Ari and Atia. I have to see them about references anyway. And Finnick’s not back until late tomorrow night.”
“Oh, Cinna.” She sighs, and tilts me on to her shoulder, the way she’s held me through design blocks and stolen patterns and men who I pushed too far, the way I’ve held her through lost grants and abusive partners and embarrassing color combinations. “No one’s taken care of you.”
“It’s no one’s job.” I turn my face into her thigh and hope my makeup doesn’t smear. “And I shouldn’t need it.”
“Bullshit,” she says, and I don’t argue.
-
“Cinna, honey!” Atia looks more like herself every year, natural-colored wigs in outlandish peaked styles, skin blushing hard against age. I stand on tiptoe and kiss her on the cheek before she hands me off to Ari. “New necklace?”
“Not new, it’s one of mine,” Ari says, and twirls it around his finger. “Sentimental but stylish, Cinna. I adore it.”
“Thank you,” I say, of course, and they sit me down on their couch, pour tea and set out chocolate, nestle close together opposite me. All these years together and they’re still partners in everything. I’ve envied them that as long as I knew. I know who my creative match is, and we’re not sexually interested in each other, let alone sexually compatible. Then again, for every man I drive away because I’ll always be closer in mind to Portia, I draw in another man who knows he won’t have to suffer or compete with me artistically. So it’s a fair trade.
“Before you even ask, Cinna, I’ll just go ahead and say it.” Ari sets down his teacup and gives it a little twist. “I love what you’ve been doing with Finnick Odair this season. It’s subtle, and it’s decisive, and so mature.”
“Not just him,” Atia teases. “You. It might just be a case of knowing where to look, but I look at his photos in the tabloids and I feel like I’m watching you grow up. Honestly, I never thought I’d say this, but it’s nice to see you do minimal. Don’t get me wrong, I love your gowns, but remember what I used to tell you about limiting your palette? You don’t get more limited than a naked man.”
“Limitless, but limited,” I agree.
“Yes but that limitlessness has been messing with the heads of artists since forever.” Atia reaches over and ruffles my knees. “And you’re an artist now, Cinna. You took that heroic hunk of marble and you’ve made him move.”
“Have you slept with him?” Ari asks, bluntly.
“No.” I can’t help blushing, but it’s a conscious choice to derail that with “I can’t afford it.”
They laugh, both at that and at each other. “Tell me about it,” Atia says, but in the way that makes it clear she’d rather tell me more. “Remember when we had do drive Gloss’ suitors off with a sword?”
The first thing that comes to mind shouldn’t be where did you get a sword?
Ari laughs, though. “I couldn’t ever forget. Cashmere nearly tore them apart! I was afraid we’d have to call the Peacekeepers.”
“Honestly, we could have just told the poor men just how much it would have cost them! Cashmere didn’t have to be so cruel.” Atia pouts. “Though who can blame her? She loves her brother so much.”
“Is that sort of thing still going on for them?” I ask, and hope they just think I’m glad the conversation is no longer about me and Finnick.
“Oh no, no,” Atia says. “Cashmere’s past her time, mostly, and once they figured it out about each other, she wouldn’t have much more of it.”
Each other. I hold on to that. “So they were both-”
“Selling themselves, yes. The lucky dears. But they went about it so dutifully and discreetly from each other that they didn’t know the other was doing it! It was beautiful, honestly, like something out of the Games. Can you imagine! There’s that horrid story of the husband and wife, Cashmere used to describe it, how did it go? About how a wife sold her hair to buy her husband a watch chain and he sold his watch to buy her a comb. Tragic, really.”
“A comb doesn’t cost that much,” Ari says. “But the symbol matters more than the material, in this case.”
“The fallout was awful,” Atia agrees. “I felt so horrible for them. And they haven’t been back to the Capitol almost at all since.”
“When was this?” I ask.
“Only two years ago. During the seventy-first Games. They still come to the Capitol sometimes, but it’s not the same. And Cashmere’s getting a little old for all but her most devoted.”
Cashmere is two years older than I am.
“Besides.” Atia says, “the world has Finnick now. And you’re doing a marvelous job with him.”
“We know you’re here for references,” Ari says, and opens the book on their coffee table to reveal a stack of envelopes tied with a gold ribbon. “And you can have them with our compliments.”
-
I hand Finnick his garment bag. My hand is shaking enough that the beads on his scarf and the pin of his belt chitter until I let go.
-
The door to Tigris’ shop has real chimes attached, low and clanging. They startle me, enough that I turn back, and only after do I actually hear Tigris padding toward me.
“Cinna.” Her voice gets softer every time I speak to her, and harder to find the subtleties in, but Tigris has never been one for mincing words. “You’re early.”
“I got here as fast as I could.” And I did, because I never know how long it’s going to take to walk through the kitsch quarter. The last time I tried, I ended up staring at a wax mannequin for an hour, wondering if it really was supposed to be Caesar Flickerman, if they froze him in the market square between television appearances. I avoided that entire street today and still got to Tigris’ shop before sunset. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not a bother.”
I smile, and look over some of the designs. Tigris used to do some of the best work with fur and leather I’ve ever seen, and while the patterns are a little uninspired now, the workmanship is flawless as ever. She lets me appreciate a leather vest for a while before she suggests, “There’s a better color of that one, for you. Downstairs.”
I nod and agree.
Her storage is spacious, lined wall to wall with stacks of fur. The lighting is dim and gentle, so she probably doesn’t do any work here, just means to use it to ensure us privacy. “So,” she says, curling up on one of the piles, whiskers twitching. “You suspect something.”
“I suspect, and I need to know.”
“You’re working for District Four this season.”
“And probably through the Games,” I add, thinking about Ari and Atia’s references, Finnick’s acceptance of my presence, the shimmering ocean-blue suits and gowns that are already taking shape in my sketchbook.
“Then what more is there to know?” She straightens one of her whiskers, flicks her nails dismissively. “You’ve seen what he has do to. What he is.”
“Finnick?”
She nods, her eyes lidding into shadow.
“He doesn’t do it for the money, does he.”
“He doesn’t ever see it,” Tigris corrects. “He’s not a whore, he’s a slave.”
Hearing Finnick called that-both of those, both of them equally awful-makes my chest burn and my palms sweat. “He’s a victor.”
“That just gives Snow an excuse.”
I can’t put my hands on the furs, I feel like I’ll stain them. Snow. President Snow. “But why is Snow blackmailing him? What did Finnick do to deserve that?”
All Tigris says is, contemptuously, “He won.”
-
Finnick comes home, wasted, with welts on the side of his face, and I almost fall over myself helping him to bed. Is there anything he needs, no. Wants, no. Let me fix those scratches, let me wring out your back, let me get you something to drink. Let me kiss you. Let me take on the world for you, let me go the next time you don’t want to, let them brutalize me instead because I deserve it more than you.
He laughs and calls me the most talkative Avox he’s ever heard.
I wake up in a cold sweat, with my throat too dry to scream.
-
“Lepidus, is Portia here?”
“-Cinna, you look like hell.”
Of course I do. I couldn’t look in the mirror this morning and let’s see you put on liquid eyeliner blind. “I know. I’m sorry. Is she here?”
“She hasn’t come in yet.” But Lepidus lopes an awkward arm over my shoulder and shuts the door behind me and takes me to the breakroom. “Here. Have something to drink-wait, let me get you one that hasn’t been out all night being color-matched. Pulp or no pulp, I always forget.”
“So much pulp it’s practically still an orange,” I say, sitting down on the couch. I almost wish there were a blanket, but there’s no point in making Lepidus want to know what’s wrong. “Thank you,” I say when he hands it to me. “You’re using the other one for color-matching?”
“The fire,” he explains, smiling. “We’re not exactly making leaps and bounds. Portia had a breakthrough about a week ago getting the vapor to limit itself but the consistency’s still a problem.” He goes on, and I drink the juice and listen, try to let everything fade. “But it’s easier to hold the color of a glass of orange juice than it is to keep a fire going.”
“They’re completely different colors,” I say.
“Fire doesn’t have a color.” Lepidus pours himself coffee and sits on the end of the counter. “It has a spectrum. But first, we have to get just one color. A spark.”
“You could’ve put it that way to me,” Portia says from the doorway.
“I could, but then I’d be ignoring all the hassle.” Lepidus looks up at her and smiles. “Tell you what, I’ll go tinker and let you two talk.” He passes Portia on the way out and gives a lock of her hair a twist. “Morning.”
“Morning,” she says, following him out with her eyes. That’s new.
Oh what a tangled web we weave.
She smiles warmly until the door closes, and I’m about to ask what’s going on for the two of them when I actually see the way she’s looking at me.
“I heard back from my friend at the banks,” she says. Her lower lip trembles and I realize she’s not wearing lipstick, hasn’t tweezed her eyebrows, left the house with her hair still wet. “It’s true, isn’t it.”
I hang my head. “I went to Tigris. A lot-a lot of things are true.”
She almost trips over her heels on the way to the couch and I don’t blame her. “Cinna, the order came straight from the Ministry of Finance.”
Hanging my head isn’t working. I have to hold it in my hands or else I think it’ll snap my neck.
I can’t tell her everything. I know I know too much. But I have to tell her something, and not just because I can’t hold on to this alone. “Finnick never sees the money.”
I think she sits down next to me. That’s the most likely reason for the couch to lurch. But I’m feeling everything by halves right now, at least everything external. If Portia touched me I’d probably just wonder if the window was open.
“It’s not Tantalus’ fault,” Portia says, so far away. “It’s not like they can turn down a Presidential order. So. I should tell people to stop blacklisting them.”
“Right,” I say. There’s nothing else.
“And I’ll do it. You don’t mind your integrity taking a hit,” she murmurs.
“I don’t. Not for this.”
Lepidus knocks on the door. “I left my coffee, can I come in?”
“Sure,” Portia and I say. I’m more startled than she is. And so Lepidus comes in, and Portia smiles, and we give him a show.
“So you’re living in Finnick Odair’s apartment,” she says, like this is what we’ve been talking about all along.
I can feel my cheeks heating. “Yes.”
“You straddled Finnick Odair’s hips and gave him a back massage.”
“And a foot massage.”
“And a foot massage,” she corrects.
I specify, “Not at the same time, I only have two hands.” Lepidus snickers into his refreshed coffee.
Portia goes on, “You walked in on a drunken Finnick Odair playing with your eyeliner.”
“It wasn’t on my face.”
“And you cuddled with a naked Finnick Odair desperate for physical contact.”
“He wasn’t desperate for physical contact, he was desperate for aftercare, physical contact is a component of aftercare.”
She laughs. It doesn’t sound hollow, but the echo does. “And you still haven’t slept with him?”
I hang my head. I didn’t want to think about this. I don’t want to think about this. “It’s not my job. The rest of that? That’s my job.”
“Anyone else in the Capitol would have slept with him ages ago,” Lepidus says, sharing a nod of agreement and what I distinctly think are bedroom eyes with Portia.
I sigh. It might not be the right time to say it, but the words come out on their own: “No one else in the Capitol cares what Finnick Odair wants.”
-
I get back to Finnick’s apartment with about thirty-six hours before he’s supposed to walk in the door. Hours one and two I just sit on the couch with my sketchbook open and a pencil sliding out of my fingers. There’s more sweat on the page than graphite. Hour three, I take a shower, fight with the programming the whole way through. The water’s never hot enough. The exfoliants are never sharp enough. The soap doesn’t sting. Somewhere in the back of my head I know I’m being appropriative and melodramatic but it’s what I feel, and I feel childish for feeling it.
The rest of hour three, and most of hour four, I get dressed and sit at the vanity, going through the motions of taking care of my face, which is difficult when what I really want to do is rip it clean off. Hour five, six, seven, the sketchbook again, hour eight I remember I should probably eat something, hour nine I order it up, hour ten the smell stops nauseating me but by then it’s too cold. The Avoxes take it away. I tell them it’s fine, they should eat it if they want to, and they shake their heads and I feel like an asshole.
Hour eleven, and still there’s nothing on the page but the faint silver dots my pencil leaves behind when it slips out of my grip. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. I don’t know where fifteen and sixteen go. I probably sleep. So at the end of hour sixteen I haul myself off the couch and to bed. I dream, and I know it’s a dream because like hell I’m setting foot in Tantalus again even if it’s not their fault. But I dream I’m in Tantalus, and Finnick’s up there on the cross again, smiling down at me and saying it’s my turn, and of course I go up to him, of course I touch him, of course I comply when he says I should do it harder and learn him. Figure him out. Find where he ticks, where he moves, what he wants, what he is. My nails, my teeth, my fists, nothing marks him, and when I tear at his flesh new skin bubbles up instead of blood, smoothing him over, thinning him out. He comes. I don’t. I wake up.
It’s hour twenty-one and I still can’t draw. I sit in the chair instead of on the couch. An Avox brings me orange juice. I do manage to drink it, slowly, over the course of hours twenty-two and twenty-three. Twenty-four, twenty-five, I finally remember to turn the television on. He’s on it, like he’s haunting me, reminding me that whatever else he did last night, it wasn’t me. There are other programs on. I split the screen, keep Finnick in the bottom corner until he goes away because I know if I don’t I’ll just keep changing the channel, and I let Wear and Tear fill the other three quarters of the screen. Scarves are coming back in. Good, I’ve done my job.
Twenty-five, six, seven, eight. I haven’t been blocked this badly for years, maybe a decade. There are suits to design and patterns to glue and inspiration to look for somewhere and here I am, holed up in Finnick Odair’s apartment without a clue of what I should say when he gets home, let alone what to do until he gets here.
This is how we started. When we started, he was late.
He comes home two hours early, and I’m still in that chair, with my sketchbook open on my lap and nothing in it.
He hangs up his coat. He says hello. He takes one look at me and I feel it on the side of my neck, since I can’t look him in the eyes.
“Have you slept?” he asks.
I don’t want to think about sleeping. I tell him “Some,” because it’s true.
“Not much,” he teases, then comes around me to sit on the couch. He turns the television off, rolls back his shoulders. He’s not hurt, I can tell, just sore, and I should take care of him, it’s my job it’s my job it’s not his job, he never sees the money, and before I can tell he’s looking at the sketchbook I throw it down.
It startles him. I startled Finnick Odair. I guess that ranks me with the top eight tributes. “Cinna, what’s wrong?”
I say, “I know.”
I don’t look at him. He could be confused, he could be white as a sheet, he could be angry, amused, anything. “What, who I am?” he asks.
“No.” I breathe. It hurts. “But I do know what you don’t do for a living.”
For longer than I think this deserves, Finnick stares at me. It’s more like being accused by the television than anything else, like having the walls close in, like being judged. He sits across from me and I stare at the shoes I picked out for him three days ago, no longer wondering why they don’t need a shine. I should hem his pants. I should do a lot of things. I should say something.
Finnick looks over my shoulder at a place in the corner, and says, “Beetee.”
So I look up, and it’s not because I can, it’s because I’m confused. “Beetee? What does District Three have to do with this?”
“It’s a signal,” Finnick says. There’s a smile on his jaw I’ve only seen when he’s half-asleep. “The room’s bugged. If I mention Beetee it starts a feedback loop that gives us about half an hour, twenty minutes if people are actually trying to listen in. So. Say what you want to say.”
“This place is bugged?” Wonderful. That was articulate.
“There’s not much in the Capitol that isn’t,” Finnick says. “So. Go on. Please.”
It’s only appropriate that the first thing out of my mouth is “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
For a thousand things trying to race out of my mouth all at once. They clash on the way and I end up saying nothing, just forming words with tangled sounds. He comes closer, sits on the arm of my chair and laughs, “Well, that’s a waste of de-bugging,” and I have no idea what comes over me but whatever it is, it loosens my tongue.
“I’m ignorant,” I say. “I’m sorry I’m ignorant. I’m sorry I send you off every night to do something that isn’t your job, it’s something that hurts you, and I’m sorry it took someone really hurting you for me to see it, and I’m sorry that I feel like it’s about me even now that I’ve found out what you are because I can’t get over it and that’s nothing. It’s nothing to you. It’s nothing compared to you.” When he says nothing, I breathe. “And I haven’t even asked if it’s true. It’s true, isn’t it?”
“What’s true?”
“That the President is blackmailing you. That he plays victors against their families if they won’t prostitute themselves. And that a lot of people in power aren’t just turning a blind eye, they’re your-patrons.”
“It’s true,” Finnick says.
“I talked to the stylists for District 1,” I say. “Cashmere and Gloss-”
“The real sticker for Cashmere and Gloss is that they were being played against each other,” Finnick says, flat but assertive. “Gloss was the person they threatened Cashmere with, when she won her Games in the first place. She pulled for him to win his Games, made a lot of coincidences happen. And then when Gloss won, Snow told him that if he didn’t sell himself, Snow would sell Cashmere in his place, never mind that she’d already been doing that to keep Gloss alive.”
I feel like my tongue has turned to carpet. “How long?”
“Eight years, before either of them found out.” I watch his knuckles whiten on his knee. “It’s amazing what you can do when you’re trying to protect someone.”
“And you-”
“Have cousins,” he interrupts, “thirteen cousins, four aunts and four uncles, and a mother and father in District Four.” His mouth shapes, like there’s more, but he doesn’t say anything.
“And this is what he does to the victors,” I can’t help saying now. “This is what he does to the ones who win.”
“Well, it’s not like he can do it to the ones who lose,” Finnick says.
“That wasn’t funny. None of this is funny.”
“It’s easier to laugh about it.”
“Easier for you.” What do I sound like? Damn it. “But this is about you, it’s not about me, it can’t be about me. You’re worse off. I’m just an idiot.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Yes, you did. When you knew what to ask.”
“But I should have known from the start. All this talk, all this want I have, about transcending the Games and making people feel and notice and being subversive and I never once thought to ask, why. What am I subverting? What am I preventing? Because it was all power to me, all about the opportunity to change people and I don’t have the right to change them if I’m just like them, if I’m just as ignorant as they are, and Finnick this still isn’t supposed to be about me, it’s you, you’re the one that’s being hurt, and I’m part of the thing that’s hurting you so what I feel doesn’t matter.”
Finnick Odair smiles at me, without the little searchlights of the cameras to make his teeth shine, and looks like he’s trying to hold back a laugh.
I refuse to cry. If he’s laughing at this (and I deserve it), crying will probably put him in hysterics.
“It has to stop,” I say.
He blinks, but doesn’t drop the smile. “What has to stop?”
I breathe. “This. The Games. Everything.” I can’t look at him, but my head’s too heavy to turn, so it ends up sinking. “I can’t believe that I-want-I still want-”
“How would you stop it?”
The change in Finnick’s tone, softer, closer, chills me up to my shoulders. “I’d make them see. I’d make everyone in the Capitol see that we’re monsters. Us, not them. Not you.”
“How?”
“By showing them that the tributes are humans. By showing them who the tributes are. Like I saw with you. Like you let me find, with you.” I shut my eyes, try to piece it together. My hands are shaking, too slick to hold a pencil, like they’ve been for the last thirty-six hours. “Make them see. Make them choose. Look at what it’s done to me, Finnick, what just knowing has done to me, and there are better people out there. If the Capitol knew what it was doing, it would stop. It would have to. We’d have to.”
Something touches my cheek, and I panic before I realize that it’s his hand. I look, try to fill my peripheral vision with his fingertips, because there’s no way I can look him in the eye.
“But how would you show them?” he asks.
“Through the Games. I’d have to go through the Games. Find a tribute, find someone who they can’t ignore. Someone like you.”
“But that wouldn’t stop him from turning out like me,” Finnick says.
“Then two. Two people the Capitol needs to live. Or three. Or all of them. If the Capitol cared about every single one of the tributes, knew them and cared and thought of them as people-”
“Can you do that?” he asks before I can say anything more. “Can you, would you do that?”
“If it was the last thing I ever did,” I say, and don’t take it back.
His fingertips slide down my cheek, fall away to the arm of the couch. I have no idea how my breathing’s gotten so ragged but it has, I can hear it, feel it straining the cushions. He stands up, and I think he’s leaving, but he sits on the coffee table instead, his knees framing mine.
“I’ll give you the chance to prove that,” he says, low enough that I don’t think the bugs would have picked it up, if they were still on.
I have to look at him. I have to make sure it’s Finnick saying that, the Finnick I’ve been trying to find for the past five weeks.
It is.
But I never expected the first thing I’d hear the real Finnick Odair say to be “Welcome to the resistance, Cinna Ward.”
My mouth is hanging open, so I close it.
He puts his hand on my knee and leans in, looks me in the eyes. “We do need someone on the inside. But you’re wrong. It’s not the Capitol you need to convince, it’s the Districts. It’s not about shifting power, it’s about taking it.”
“I’m in,” I say. I breathe, and say it again to make sure. “I’m in. I can’t let this go on.”
“Do you have anyone they could use against you?”
I think of Portia and Lepidus, of my parents, my brother, his kids. Finnick has cousins, he said, cousins and family and more, and Cashmere and Gloss had each other. Portia would be like that for me, but not if she knew why, and she’d trust why. It would hurt. It would be awful.
But she’d know. They’ll all know, as soon as I do what I’ve promised, what I’ve set out for.
And it’s design. It’s me. I’ve always said all my power is in my work, all my emotion, all my anger and sadness and fear and hate, and as long as it’s there, it only hurts me.
Whatever I do for Finnick, for the victors, for the tributes, for this, will only hurt me.
“No,” I say, and believe it as much as I can. “As long as I leave something behind, I don’t care what happens to me. They can’t use someone like that.”
“No,” Finnick agrees, his eyes clouding over. “They can’t.”
I hear a faint scrape from the corners, a turn of the screws. Finnick turns away, looks over his shoulder, and then back to me. “The bugs are going to come back on soon. I’ll just say this quickly. I don’t want the victors to know about you yet. Haymitch knows, but not who you are. I’ll see if I can get you to meet him, during the Games maybe, or after.”
“All right,” I say. It doesn’t surprise me that Haymitch Abernathy’s at the center of this-well, it doesn’t surprise me any more than that there’s a this at all. I actually think I’m just wrung out of revelations.
“And Cinna?”
“Yes?”
He puts his hands on my knees, leans in, and kisses me.
My eyes don’t close. Neither does my mouth. I swear I must have flatlined. But then my breathing and tasting and everything but thinking starts all at once and I kiss him back, push off the back of the couch and take, the way I always take. His hands are on my thighs, I cover them; his tongue is against my lips, I meet it; he draws back and I reach after, strain off the back of the chair to follow him.
“Thank you for finding me,” he says. It’s him.
I hold on to his hands, keep them where they are, touching me. It takes three breaths for me to speak because the air just won’t go down far enough. “Please tell me you wanted that.”
“I wouldn’t have challenged you to if I didn’t want it.”
“No,” I say, and then realize what it must sound like. “I mean-”
He kisses me again, just short, like he’s asking if that’s what I mean, and it is what I mean, so I tell him “Don’t you dare stop.”
He doesn’t stop.
Neither do I. I don’t stop kissing him, I don’t stop surging up out of the chair to bend him over the table. He laughs, and I laugh, probably because this is the end of anything resembling professional courtesy, and we kiss until I feel the table start to protest our combined weights and Finnick says, “Couch,” and wriggles out from under me to sit on it. I get to my knees before he can tell me otherwise, before I can spare a thought to what I’m doing, and I undo his pants and take care of him the way I’ve wanted to for weeks, months, years maybe even though that wasn’t really Finnick, this is Finnick, Finnick against my cheek and down my throat and everywhere I look, everywhere I touch. And he wants me. He wants me enough to hold me by the hair and roll his hips and call me by name when he comes, and that’s more than I could ever have hoped for.
I wipe my jaw on his thigh, and that makes his breath catch. “Lie down,” he says, and it takes him pulling me up from the floor to kiss me for me to realize that’s not something he wants to do, that’s something he wants me to do. Oh. Yes.
“Back or front?” I breathe. I can still taste him.
“On your back,” he says, reaching over the edge of the couch for his garment bag.
I know what he’s going for. “I am so glad I packed that.”
He grins. “You’ll be gladder to pack this,” he says, reaching behind himself and straddling my hips.
Everything behind my eyes goes white at the thought, the image, the sight of him. This is real. This is happening. Finnick Odair is sliding down around me, scalding and tight and slow, too slow, but then if it were any faster I couldn’t watch him. I watch him. I watch us. I drive my hips up again and again so I can see everything and get more, so much more than that. He rides hard and I don’t make it easy trying to touch him and watch him and have all I can, but it’s good, so good, burning through me and wringing me dry.
He tells me how it feels. I give him more and more until I can’t.
After, after, I sink into the couch cushions, and it’s like swimming in sweat. I can’t help asking again, “Please tell me you wanted that.”
He laughs, and I can feel it across my thighs. “Showing you wasn’t enough?”
“It’s never enough,” I say, but I hope the way I’m smiling tells him just what I mean.
I know at some point I’ll have to come down. I have a world to face, a world I’m learning to fear but can’t bring myself to hate. I have promises to answer for and keep. I have games and Games to play, and change to spark, and so much more to learn.
On the other hand, I have Finnick Odair, and his apartment.
“I should shower,” he says.
“Yes,” I correct, “we should.”
-
I do truss him up and send him off, the afternoon after, as his schedule demands. Knowing doesn’t make it any easier. But the look he gives me as he takes the garment bag out of my hand, and his jokes about having a few new tricks to turn since last night (which are funny even though I don’t believe them for a second), those calm me down enough that at least my hands don’t shake.
All evening, I draw. My sketchbook is a torrent, a flood, an uprising.
-
-
On to Part 3
.