Rika perches on a stool at the open bar of some B2B networking thing and rubs her thumb along the edge of one of their business cards: Sharpe & Hendriks, comms details, and a faint watermarked mech silhouette, on heavy cream textured cardstock. Wedding invitation paper. She watches as, across the room, some shark-eyed type in heels that cost as much as a main battle mech tinkles a strategic laugh at something Sharpe said.
Sharpe lives by that kind of every-few-years restlessness to be doing something else.
Rika has an apartment overlooking the bay, all sharp-edged minimalism, monochrome with a deliberate sparing terracotta accent. Sharpe rents one of those little machine-for-living-in residential units that feel like a little too much like living in a washing machine, inland, just by the monorail line. Shared access to a rooftop garden, clothes on the floor, posters for local bands on the walls.
They have their own spaces. They like their own spaces. Each of their own spaces has a toothbrush and some spare clothes for the other in it, and some nights they're both in one or the other bed, but that's easy. Everybody's an adult here. They like each other.
Sharpe's started watching offworld news channels.
Rika's cocktail is garnished with some tiny local fruit; fingernail-sized, jewelled carnelian, a crisp, juicy orb of soft spikes. She draws it off the end of its cocktail stick with her teeth and crunches it.
It's simple and it's easy and working with a partner is so comfortable. And when Rika found herself looking in her bathroom mirror after celebratory good-job-us drinks at the end of some other contract, she found herself swearing that when it comes time, she'll leaving present Sharpe so good it haunts her for ever, ruins sex for her, climbs into her and embroiders a little Rika was here beneath her aorta so that Sharpe feels her in her heartbeat.
...Rika is very easy and simple and adult about all this, yes.