Mavrek came to her then, slower now, and brushed a streak of shell-white from her jaw with the back of two knuckles.
"You are still right about the patch," he said.
It was absurd that this nearly undid her more than the sex had.
She swallowed once. "You are very bad at losing well."
"Aye." His mouth moved, almost a smile. "And worse at wanting you quietly."
The line lodged under everything else.
She gathered her pack from the chair, acutely aware of the blue smear on the strap where her hand had transferred it, of the grit falling from her hair onto her shoulders, of the wet soreness between her thighs and the glow of certainty still moving through her like a second pulse. He had wanted her most when she was most certain. He had said so by body if not by tidy statement.
And it had cost him something to say it at all.
At the door she glanced back once.
Mavrek stood in the studio amid fallen strips and salvaged boards, lamp light catching the two halves of the green sample where he had set them on the discard stack. Brief irritation gone. Cost acknowledged. Work already being re-sorted into what could be kept and what could not.
He looked up and caught her watching.
"Tomorrow," he said, "we finish the panel."
No romance in it. No softening.
Just the next truthful thing.
Iva opened the door and stepped out into dusk with paint dust on her clothes, mineral grit in her hair, her body sore and satisfied and lit through by the deeply inconvenient knowledge that he found her most attractive when she refused to be wrong for his comfort. Tomorrow the repaired panel would dry in daylight with her judgment visible all over it.
14
THE NAME ON THE COMMISSION
The attribution clause was in small text in the subcontractor appendix, which was where she had apparently been living for three years.
Iva found it because Dema, in a fit of administrative generosity or temporary overwork, left the full commission packet open on the desk while going to shout at a ferry supplier about lantern wax. The festival organizer's workspace was a narrow side room off the covered market, stacked with ledgers and tied document rolls and smelling of damp paper, brine, and the sort of ink bought by people who assumed writing things down made them true.
Iva had come there to confirm scaffold restrictions against the revised ceremony schedule. Pure logistics.
Dema had said, "The wall timing is in the third folio. Do not reorganize my ledgers," and vanished out the side door like an approaching storm front with one clouded eye.
So Iva stood alone in a room full of paper and found her own name missing.
Not at first. At first she found only the ordinary administrative language all contracts preferred when theymeant to drag labor around by the ankle. Commission restoration. Festival preparation support. Conservation oversight. Her eyes moved over them with the efficient dullness of someone who had long ago stopped expecting documents to contain kindness.
Then the line in the appendix caught.
Attribution and recording authority shall remain with the Marsh Conservators' Guild under festival archival designation. Contracted restoration labor performed on site under guild conservation oversight. Subcontracting specialist: I. Sorrel.
She read it once and did not understand it.
That was not quite right. She understood every word. What failed on the first pass was belief. Her mouth went dry so suddenly she had to swallow twice before air and spit remembered their arrangement.
Subcontracting specialist: I. Sorrel.
The wall would go public under that language in a matter of days.
The work itself named to the guild. Her labor tucked into an appendix like a tool requisition. Initial and surname only, as if even there the full self might prove embarrassingly specific.