Page 2 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“My amazing body, yes, obviously,” said Pearl, whose lips were now trailing along the sensitive shell of Esther’s ear.

Esther reached up and helped herself to a handful of Pearl’s blond hair, which somehow always looked sunkissed despite the utter lack of sun.Australians.So indefatigably beachy and up-for-it. She wove her fingers through those tangled strands and tugged Pearl down to kiss her, feeling her smile against her mouth as Esther pulled her closer.

For the past decade, since she was eighteen, Esther had moved every November—moved cities, states, countries. She made friends and lovers breezily, picking them up like other people picked up takeout and going through them as quickly. Everybody liked her, and like many well-liked people, she worried that if peoplereallygot to know her, if they managed to penetrate that glancing shield of likability, they wouldn’t actually like her one bit. This was a benefit of never staying in one place.

The other, vastly more important benefit: not being found.

Esther slipped a hand beneath the hem of Pearl’s sweater, fingers finding the smooth dip of her waist as Pearl nudged one of her long legs between Esther’s thighs. But even as she moved her hips in friction-seeking instinct, her father’s long-ago words began to echo unbidden in her head—a cold glass of water thrown in the face of her subconscious.

“November 2 by eleven o’clock p.m., Eastern Standard Time,” Abe had said on the last day she’d seen him, ten years ago at their home inVermont. “Wherever you are, you must leave on November 2 and keep moving for twenty-four hours, or the people who killed your mother will come for you, too.”

The summer season had officially begun a couple days ago: November5. Three days after Esther, according to her father’s urgent edict, should have been long gone.

But she wasn’t. She was still here.

Abe had been dead two years now, and for the first time since she’d started running a decade before, Esther had a reason to stay. A reason that was warm and solid and currently kissing her neck.

Technically, Esther had first met Pearl at the Christchurch airport, as part of a big group of workers waiting for their flight into the Antarctic. They’d both been hidden in the many layers required to board the plane—wool hat, huge orange parka, gloves, clompy insulated boots, dark-lensed goggles pushed up on their heads—and Esther had gotten only the briefest impression of sparkly eyes and a full-throated laugh before the group was ushered onto the plane and she and Pearl were seated on opposite ends of the cargo hold.

Because of their different duties and different schedules, their paths hadn’t really crossed again until the end of the first month, when Esther had hung a sign in the gym looking for sparring buddies.Boxing, Muy Thai, BJJ, MMA, Krav Maga, let’s fight! :) :) :)She’d added the smiley faces to counteract the aggression of “fight,” but had immediately regretted it when another electrician—an obnoxiously tall white guy from Washington who insisted everyone call him “J-Dog”—saw it and began giving her endless shit.

“The Smiley Face Killer!” he’d crow when she walked into their shift meeting. If they crossed paths in the galley at lunch, he’d pretend to cower. “You gonna hit me over the head with that big ol’ smile?” But the final straw came when he started loudly telling everyone about his black belt in karate, and how he’d love to find a sparring partner who was “really serious about the sport.”

Honestly, he gave Esther no choice. After a week of this, he approached her one day in the galley and planted himself in her path so she couldn’t get to the pizza, grinning at her so widely she could see his molars.

“What are you doing,” she said.

“Fighting you!” he said.

“No,” she said, and put down her tray. “Thisis fighting me.”

A few minutes later she had J-Dog on the floor in a headlock, one of his arms trapped in her hold, the other swatting at her face, his long legs kicking ineffectually at the tiled floor as onlookers hooted and cheered. “Not gonna let you go until you smile,” she said, and he whimpered, pulling his lips up in a forced approximation of his earlier grin. As soon as she released him, he bounced to his feet, brushing himself off and saying, “Not cool, dude, not cool!”

When Esther turned back toward her abandoned lunch tray, suppressing her own very real smile, she found herself face to face—give or take a few inches—with Pearl. Shucked from her plane layers, Pearl was tall and tough, with a pile of sun-streaked hair wadded into a precarious knot that seemed in danger of sliding off her head. Her brown eyes were as sparkling as Esther remembered. More so, because now they were sparkling right at Esther.

“That was the most magical thing I have ever seen,” Pearl said, and rested a slender, long-fingered hand on Esther’s arm. “You wouldn’t consider giving lessons, would you?”

Pearl was terrible at self-defense. She had no killer instinct and always second-guessed herself, pulling her punches and dropping her kicks and making herself laugh so hard she went weak in Esther’s grip. Within three lessons, the “training sessions” had turned into make-out sessions, and they’d moved from the gym to the bedroom. The first time they’d slept together, Pearl had asked, hitching her hips as Esther began to slide her jeans down, “Have you ever been with a woman before?”

Esther looked up from between Pearl’s legs, affronted. “Yes, plenty! Why?”

“Calm down, Don Juan,” Pearl said, laughing. “I’m not questioning your technique. You just seem a little nervous.”

This was when Esther had realized she might be in trouble. Because not only was it true, shewasnervous, butterfly-stomached in a way she hadn’t felt for years... but Pearl had noticed. Had read it somehow on Esther’s well-trained face or in her well-trained body. Esther wasn’t used to people seeing what she didn’t want them to see, and the way Pearl looked at her,sawher, was unsettling. In response, she’d given Pearl her most confident, reassuring smile, then set her teeth very gently to the inside of Pearl’s bare thigh, which had been enough of a distraction that the conversation ended there. But even then, at the very start, she had suspected how difficult Pearl might be to leave.

Now, a whole season later, thinking about this—about leaving, about staying, about the lasting echo of her father’s warning—had the unfortunate effect of breaking her current mood. She rolled Pearl over onto her side and carefully ended the kiss, lying back against the pillows, and Pearl settled against Esther’s shoulder.

“I’m going to get so drunk tonight,” said Pearl.

“Before or after we play?”

“Before, after, during.”

“Me too,” Esther decided.

Esther and Pearl were in a Pat Benatar cover band that was scheduled to play at the party that evening. The whole long winter they’d been practicing and putting on shows exclusively for the same wearily supportive thirty-five people, and by this point it was like playing the recorder in front of a parent whose pride couldn’t outweigh how tired they were of hearing “Hot Cross Buns.” Performing for new ears and eyes felt as nerve-racking as climbing the stage of Madison Square Garden.

“We should drink water in preparation,” Pearl said, “so we don’t end up puking like beakers.”

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