The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt

Author:Tim Pratt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781915202819
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2024-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

GLENN

I texted Vivy once I was on the BART train, about twenty minutes from the Downtown Berkeley station: Coming home. Can we talk?

plz, she replied.

I walked south from the train station, past the shiny new apartment buildings that had replaced the old blocks of declining retail in recent years, making an inadequate gesture toward addressing Berkeley’s endless need for more housing. I’d only lived in the city for two years, but I used to visit the East Bay a lot with my mom, and we spent a couple of teenage summers here while she did some adjuncting in the art department at the university. Even from my perspective, some of the changes were dramatic. Weird little stores had been squeezed out to make room for branches of familiar national chains, the abandoned ice-skating rink had been transformed into a sporting goods store, there were fewer bookstores and comic shops and movie theaters than once upon a time – but the place still retained some of its quirky college town sensibility, and I was happy at the prospect of spending several years here, even if I ended up somewhere else after I finished my doctorate.

I cut a few blocks west over to our building, an up-and-down duplex on a residential street – we had the whole sprawling top floor to ourselves. I went up the brick steps and unlocked the door and stepped inside, expecting Eddie to pounce on me like a comic-strip tiger, but there was just Vivy, sitting cross-legged on the couch with her laptop open on her knees. She closed the computer, set it aside, and looked at me with an expression that mingled hope and worry and nervousness.

I went to her, leaned forward, and kissed her softly on the lips. Then I sat beside her, took her hand, and said, “Remember when we first started playing together, and we negotiated our boundaries?”

She nodded. If you’re going to do serious kink with someone, it’s important to talk about what you both like, what you hate, and what you enjoy hating (I certainly don’t like having my ass striped with a bamboo cane, but I dislike it in a hot way).

“I think we need to do that with your whole… super-spy-revolutionary-thing. We need a set of agreements that I can trust you to uphold.”

“Like what?”

I took a breath. “I am basically going to think of you like a CIA agent.” Vivy made a face like she’d sniffed expired milk, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “In terms of the whole ‘has an important and dangerous secret job,’ not, like, as a tool of imperialistic hegemony.”

“Fair enough. So… what does that mean, practically speaking?”

“It means I’ll accept that sometimes you have to leave town and do dangerous things… but I want to be close to you. I want to support you. I want to know there’s trust between us. So, talk to me. Tell me what’s going on in your secret life. Let me in, so I don’t feel like there’s a giant wall between us.

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