"I'm afraid we're a package, ma'am," Sharpe says politely, and the corporate predator type laughs like the shower of glass hitting asphalt after a shockwave hits a highrise.
"I'm not offering you a job," she says, in fanged amusement.
"I'm afraid the answer stands."
"I had my people prepare a file on you," the predator type purrs. "We have something in common, Ms. Sharpe."
The control freak I saw something I want; got my private investigators straight on it for leverage ones are the worst. "What's that, ma'am?" Sharpe says, with the professional degree of asking questions as though interested.
"I understand myself." It has the air of a belief — or a self-mythology, at any rate — that's seen a lot of exposition. In the mirror, perhaps, though with this one probably the kind of sales pitch that Sharpe's receiving now. "My attentions are intense and they are temporary. I will be obsessed with you." She smiles, teeth between lipstick. "I will get bored of you. We both get bored. How many years has it been of 'Sharpe & Hendriks'? Nothing there to make you the faithful type."
"You can leave me your card," Sharpe says. It's a very practised professional tone. "In case of any changes."
Enough time later for it not to look directly like cause and effect, she leans on the sinks in the ladies' room and scans the woman's details into their potential employer blacklist. Sharpe & Hendriks offer security detail; the unstable ones looking to score are awful at taking instructions. She's not even the prettiest to try it; definitely not the one with the most accurate button-pushing read.
Sharpe's first time on the poor-little-rich-sociopath coaster was her last year of university. Dizzyingly high-frequency on again-off again, sweet and caustic, hot and toxic; smart enough to ace every class fair and square, and fucking every teacher who would for grades instead, Just Because. And that ended up with one of Daddy's cars "borrowed" to go clubbing and drunkenly fall on any old dick, and lapdog Sharpe picking it up to drop it back the next morning, as a favour kissy-kissy, when — oops! — it turned out it hadn't been personally expedient to prevent Daddy from reporting it stolen, and the glovebox turned out to be packed with enough designer pills to kill a horse.
Strings were pulled, presumably. Enough for a light sentence. Prison wasn't hell, but Sharpe gets a creeping discomfort from the feeling of enclosing walls. It's not because she lacks loyalty. And any quibbles over the relative connotations of loyal versus faithful would be too dangerously revealing to get into, because they might be equivalent if you're talking about a dog, but—
Rika is the most put-together person Sharpe's ever known. Sharpe stumbled out of the wreckage of never-graduated, right into the wasteland of poorly-employable. It's a miracle that she stumbled into a cash under the table mechanic gig before anything worse, because the place did mechs as well as cars, and that got her driving them, and competent at piloting and maintenance got her into a support personnel gig at K-Mac, and field maintenance under fire saw her slip sideways into frontline support driving, and then into scouting.
But Rika doesn't cause shit, she doesn't take shit, she has her shit together. Fleet, PMC, civilian contractor answering to nobody: a series of manoeuvres undertaken with grace and finality, eyes on the prize.
Okay, the real reason Sharpe knows she's got problems is that she finds herself with this fantasy. This fantasy that has a kind of white-knuckle, am-I-really-into-this-it's-a-bit-much edge. The dangerous kind that people do silly things for.
It goes like this:
They're busy working, and won't have time to stop to eat, so Rika casually makes her a packed lunch.
...yeah, that's kinda it.
Okay, the housewife angle maybe has some embarrassingly patriarchal vibes. But it's the domesticity that's the gut-punch. The belonging.
How much, once it occurs to Sharpe, she's hungry for it.
She spends half a year reflexively brushing up on current conflict zones, who's where and who's hiring. As if she might "been fun, see ya" any day now.
But here's the thing: for half a year before that she'd had a box sitting in the bottom of her wardrobe, where it's waiting for a birthday or an occasion and most importantly, secretly, waiting for Sharpe to approximate having her own shit together.
It's a joke gift.
It's a pair of custom-tooled cowboy boots, perfectly sized for Rika. Because Sharpe knows she thinks the boots are a little loud, a little tacky, and also she's never going to give Sharpe shit about them because they're Sharpe. It's a joke. It's an in-joke. It'll make Rika laugh, and she'll wear them (occasionally) to humour Sharpe and it'll be bonding, because it's a shared thing, and—
—and that's kinda lying. Because it's all true, but it's also a little much for just an in-joke between Sharpe & Hendriks, personal security.
Sharpe's pretty sure that's a couple in-joke.
It would be a hell of a thing to hand that over and it be too much, after all, for Rika; but the time is creeping up to either up sticks or do it, and as much as Sharpe resents that corporate asshole's read of her, she has an itchy feeling. All the other times might not, if you're sympathetic, be failings of loyalty, but this time would be different. This time would be running away.
This time would be faithless.
