A Good Stretch

//Author's Note: This story is about a character created by a good friend of mine. Odessa is awesome, and there's a lot of good art of her out there if you know where to look!//

"Day 21."

Odessa sat back in her chair, staring at the two words, or one word and one two-digit number, at the top of the otherwise empty page, and stared. And stared.

"Twenty one days of this," she said, wearily, though not as wearily as one might have expected. She tossed down her pen, and sighed as it bounced and rolled over the edge of the desk and onto the floor. If journaling her experience had lost its purpose, then the tool she used to do her journaling was similarly useless. She couldn't handle another night spent chronicling, or, the more she thought about it, even just another night stuck in her apartment.

Reluctantly, Odessa put her bra back on and rooted around for her boots. She hadn't planned on taking any kind of night time excursion, and was as ready for bed as she ever got anymore, so a few minutes passed before she was thumping down the stairs of her apartment building. The warm August night air hit her like a pillow, which is to say 'not hard but hard enough to know something had happened.' The humidity was so high she was surprised she hadn't started sweating on contact.

She wouldn't, though; not anymore. Sweating took a lot more than a little heat. She was so confident that she wouldn't that she didn't hesitate at pulling up the hood on her sweatshirt, which she did more for peace of mind than anything else.

Odessa had lived in New York for almost a year, the actual anniversary still weeks away. Although she liked the bustle and the energy, she was still uncomfortable with how many people stared at her, and that was before. Now?

She grunted, rolling her shoulders to get the hood to sit a bit more forward.

Didn't want to do that,

she thought.

Spend another night psychoanalyzing myself. Waste of my time.

Odessa decided, apropos of nothing, to just get lost. She just looked down, right in front of her feet, and watched the breaks in the concrete pass by for a while. She turned here, and turned there, not really paying attention, and for a little while, she got out of her head entirely watching the sidewalk roll by.

***

Four hours later, Odessa found herself in a part of the city she'd never seen before. That wasn't surprising. During her year in the Big Apple, she hadn't done much more than commute to and from her office job. Which she hated.

The style of the buildings around her at that moment was different. It was more neighborhood-like than she was used to; more like back home in the suburbs of Toronto. Her apartment building in Queens was just like the dozens of apartment buildings surrounding it. More than once, she'd gone up to the eighth floor of the wrong building and tried in vain to enter apartments with the same number as hers, jamming keys into locks they weren't made for.

She hadn't crossed any bridges, and there were a lot of brownstones. Block after block of them. Miles of them, seemingly. Odessa felt slightly out of place as she walked, hands shoved into the pockets of her hoodie. She

thought

she might have been in Brooklyn, but she

knew

she was still in New York when she heard hushed-but-urgent voices coming out of the alley across the street. It was with a heavy sigh and great reluctance that she stopped in her tracks and turned toward the sound.

"It's all right," she told another woman, who was perched at the edge of the alley, looking on with concern. "I'll handle it."

"You'll... what?" the woman replied, stunned. "Wait!"

Odessa did not wait. She strode forward, determination settling around her like a mantle a little more with each step.

There were two dumpsters on her left, and then another one a little further along on her right behind which two men had moved beyond mugging and into threats of physical violence. Odessa heard the telltale

shlick

of a switchblade knife extending from its handle just as they came into view. There were two of them, young and wearing ski masks. The further one, angled slightly toward her, noticed her first and gawked. The other one, the one with the knife, seemed to notice something amiss with his friend and whirled.

Odessa grabbed his wrist before he'd finished turning, before he could see enough to bring the knife to bear, twisting his entire arm until his left elbow was closer to his right shoulder than should have been possible. The knife slipped from his shaking fingers, clattering loudly on the concrete, and Odessa kicked it away. The other one lurched forward, possibly to save his friend and possibly to attack her, but she took the choice out of his hands completely with a short jab he wasn't expecting. It caught him clean in the nose, and his feet ran out from under him.

When she looked back at the first one, the one whose nearly-broken arm she was still holding, she saw that he was feebly trying to reach under his jacket for something, and she rolled her eyes. She used her grip to haul him toward her at the same time she was stepping into a left cross that sent him spinning.

There was a definite crunch, but she was pretty sure he wasn't dead.

It wasn't until both of them were on the ground and, for the most part, immobile, when she noticed the older man cowering in the corner where the dumpster met the brick wall. He seemed almost as afraid of her as he did of the muggers, and with another very poorly concealed roll of her eyes she pointed to the mouth of the alley. He yelled something on his way out that might have been

thank you

and and might have been

fuck you

, and might have been both.

"You're welcome," she mumbled, as she glared at his retreating backside.

The sleeves of her hoodie felt very tight around her upper arms, and she grunted in frustration as she shook them out and tugged on them a little, very very gently. It would really annoy her if she ripped these sleeves open too. She was too far from home to get another hoodie quickly, and it was too late to be able to buy one.

Not that she had the money for that.

She flipped up the top of one of the dumpsters, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and grabbed a length of frayed nylon twine peeking out from under God only knew what. Once the two would-be muggers were tied up, back to back, she finally made her way out to the street where the woman from earlier was still looking on.

"It's okay," Odessa said, holding up her hand. "I've got them subdued."

"You do?" the woman said, her brow furrowing. "That's... impressive."

Odessa said, "I need to call the police. Have you got a quarter?"

The woman patted her shoulder, and her eyes went a little blank when she realized there was no purse there. Then she patted at her waist, as if there should have been pockets in her skirt, and shook her head. Odessa harrumphed as she looked around on the ground, and bent over to grab a quarter that glimmered in the streetlight.

"Are they coming?" the woman asked, two minutes later, after Odessa hung up the receiver on the payphone.

She was surprised the woman was still there. She said, "I... Yeah. I think so."

"You

think

so?"

Odessa didn't squint at her, but she did look more closely. "Why are you still here?"

Without missing a beat, the woman said, "I saw the whole thing. I thought that maybe, if the police needed, I could testify? Or something? I don't know how that works."

Odessa shook her head. "That guy ran. Without a victim, the most they'll do is hold these idiots for twenty-four hours. They don't have the capacity to do much more right now."

The woman cocked her head, birdlike, and said, "If you know that, then... why did you call them at all?"

Odessa took a long breath and stared back into the alley. "Maybe it was their first time. Maybe this scares 'em. Maybe, next time they need some quick cash, they'll try something different."

"That's a lot of maybes."

"Maybe," Odessa said, nodding.

The woman smiled at her, a smile that winked without involving the eyes at all. "Alright then."

"Alright then," Odessa said, nodding, and turned. And then paused, when the woman moved to walk right alongside her. "Are you... Do you live this way?"

"Do you?"

This response made her head spin, and Odessa blinked a few times before she responded. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"It's Alex," she said. "And you are?"

"Odessa," she replied, and started down the street again. And then stopped when Alex continued to move in lock step. "Can I help you?"

"Actually," the woman said, "You can." She put her hand beside her mouth, as if to whisper, and then at full volume said, "I heard a rumor that there's some muggers out tonight. Could you be a 'lil cabbage and walk me home?"

"Where is home?" Odessa asked.

Alex turned around and pointed back in the opposite direction with a smirk that said... something. Odessa wasn't sure what, but it was something. Like Alex was making a joke, and that also maybe Alex was the only one who got it.

"Fine," she said, with a sigh, and the two of them turned around to walk back past the alley. Then she said, "Are we in Brooklyn?"

Alex just gave her a look.

***

Alex was pretty. She had a patch of white hair right in the front of her otherwise pitch black hair; Odessa was sure it was the first thing anyone saw about her. She also had striking features that seemed too... mature for her. Or maybe it was the way she wore them. The way she held her chin. It was a kind of confidence Odessa wasn't used to seeing on someone her own age. Her pale skin, so much lighter than Odessa's own, looked porcelain in the moonlight.

Alex was also very talkative. She filled the quiet with opinions, random facts, anecdotes, and stories about her childhood. Odessa wasn't used to that either, so she limited herself to nodding and the occasional grunt when it seemed like some commiserate agreement was in order, but the truth was that Odessa was still very much in her own head. She had handled two men, one of them armed with a knife,

like it was nothing

. Yes, it was maybe a little generous to call them men; she'd have been surprised if they could legally buy their own cigarettes, but that was beside the point. She herself was only in her early twenties.

What really bothered her, though, was how much stronger than them she was. Odessa had always had some curves to her, and there was certainly a level of strength that came with moving a body like hers around day in and day out, but in the past three weeks her body had started changing. She'd felt compelled to work out --driven, even-- and the progress she'd made had been both immediate and consistent; she'd gone up five pounds, every day, in her free weights workouts, and had been able to keep up the same number of reps.

She was pretty sure that wasn't normal.

She was also pretty sure she could do a lot more, of both reps and weight, but she was nervous about making too large of a jump too quickly. On the one hand, she might injure herself. On the other hand, if she pulled it off, it would attract even more attention than she'd already gotten, which was too much to begin with. There was at least one gym rat who had noticed her, but so far his interest was purely selfish and, unless her senses had completely abandoned her as well, completely sexual.

She could not have been less interested in him.

"Why were you still there?" she said, abruptly, interrupting Alex's monologue, which she was pretty sure had been about the strange ways that the moon had been behaving in the last three weeks.

Alex blinked. "Still where?"

"Afterwards. That guy

ran

out of there. He was afraid for his life. They had knives and weren't afraid to use them."

"I was trying to get a good look at them," she said.

"So you could report it to the police," Odessa said, narrowing her eyes slightly as she stared into the distance.

"Yes."

"Because you were going to call the police."

"

Yes.

"

She took a chance. "What would you say if I told you I saw you talking to those two muggers. Beforehand."

"You... what?"

Odessa counted in her head. One one thousand. Two one thousand. Three one--

"No, you... I... I didn't..."

Odessa just turned and looked at her, giving her a very unimpressed stare.

"But how? You couldn't have! We--" This time, she cut herself off. She glared at Odessa, and said, "That was a

trick.

You didn't see me do anything."

"Nope," Odessa replied, "but the way you responded told me enough."

"How." More demand than question.

This time, the look Odessa gave her was one of smug satisfaction. "Do you really want to know, or do you want to try to figure it out yourself?"

Alex folded her arms, bit her lip, and continued to stride in silence.

"It's gonna bug you, isn't it?"

"Shut up," Alex said. "I'm thinking."

She wasn't making any attempt to get away, which Odessa thought was curious. She hadn't adjusted her course or sped up or slowed down. If she was worried about Odessa, she hadn't tried to do anything Odessa could see that might indicate she was leading her into a trap. It also didn't seem like she'd done anything to notify anyone that circumstances had changed... unless she had always planned to lead her into a trap, which seemed unlikely. Not impossible. Unlikely.

All of this strategizing happened in her head in a moment. Thinking through different potential outcomes. This had been happening to her a lot too recently. She didn't know what it meant.

Alex turned and glared at her. "You don't

want

to tell me. I have a tell of some kind. If you tell me what it is, I'll correct it, and then you'll lose whatever meager leverage you have now."

"Nope," Odessa said, smug satisfaction getting exactly one iota smugger. "I could tell you, and it still wouldn't stop me from being able to spot you lying to me next time any more than it did tonight."

"You're bluffing."

"And you're stalling," she replied. "You're trying to distract me from the fact that you paid those two to mug that guy, for whatever reason."

"Ah ha!" she laughed. "I didn't

pay

them anything!"

Odessa rolled her eyes. "Paid them, convinced them, brainwashed them, whatever. You were behind that. What the hell?"

"You have no proof!"

Odessa said, "Do I look like a court of law to you? It's just the two of us here, and we both know you're lying."

"

Fine,

" Alex said, throwing up her hands. "I talked to them. I

talked

them into it. I told them that he was someone I'd known previously, and that he'd wronged me, and when that wasn't enough, I suggested that he was worth a lot of money. Pretty sure that was the only thing that mattered, in the end."

Odessa grunted and nodded, and looked down. Another educated guess. "Is that why you're wearing heels, when you don't normally wear heels?"

"How did you know I don't wear heels?" the other woman said, gait immediately shifting to a stride more befitting her couture footwear.

Odessa just smirked.

"So?" Alex asked, a minute later.

"So what?" Odessa asked.

"What are you going to do with me?"

Odessa said, "Do I look like a court of law to you?"

"

No,

" she said, sharply, "but that didn't stop you from kicking the crap out of those two idiots."

"I was reasonably sure they were gonna hurt an innocent man. Idiots like them, it's not a matter of if but who. Near as I can tell, all you did was point them in his direction."

Alex smiled. "And you aren't worried that I'll use my wiles on you? Point

you

at someone innocent and enjoy the havok from afar?"

Odessa chuckled. "Not even a little."

This made the other woman even more sullen. "Why not?"

"Pretty sure it's not about wiles," she said. "Pretty sure you're just smart. Like,

real

smart."

To this, Alex said nothing, and for another minute, while they walked in silence, Odessa tried to prepare herself for anything. The moment balanced on the edge of a knife. There were any number of ways it could go wrong, and Odessa wasn't even really sure how everything had suddenly become so tense. It didn't matter, though. She didn't spend a lot of time on why, as a rule.

Eventually, Alex said, curtly, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Odessa replied, easily. "So, how smart are you?"

This caused Alex's eyes to narrow to slits. She kept that up for a minute before groaning, adding, "I don't know. Somewhere over two hundred, though whether that's two-oh-one or four hundred, I have no idea."

"Two hundred what?" Odessa asked.

"I..." Alex smirked and shook her head. "It doesn't matter. Somewhere off the charts."

Odessa nodded at this. "And this... off the charts-ness. This is new? Like, in the last three weeks? And here you are, out late at night because you can't sleep, and maybe you're trying to figure out what the hell is happening to you?"

Alex said nothing, but to Odessa it seemed like a very conspicuous nothing. Then she said, "And what's your thing? Is it that people can't lie to you?"

Odessa frowned in thought. "No," she said, "I don't think so. I've always been pretty good at sorting that kind of thing out. Most of it's just common sense, and the rest is when very smart people aren't as clever as they think they are." Then she curled her arm, flexing the biceps, and winced when the seams along the underside of the sleeve made a couple of popping sounds. "No, this is the new thing."

Alex reached over, eyes lighting up as her fingers danced over the knot of muscle. "Choke me, mommy," she mumbled.

For a moment, just the slightest, shortest moment, Odessa was struck mute. Alex was beautiful in a statuesque kind of way. She was an inch or two taller than herself, but in heels she was a goddess, and it wasn't hard to imagine her only needing to use a little bit of charm to turn the hearts of a couple men.

It was a bad fantasy; she knew that. The other woman couldn't be trusted, and any kind of romantic entanglement would be like handing her a knife and telling her exactly where all of Odessa's weak spots are.

Not that Alex was her type, by any means, but...

Ohhh, but it was tempting, especially given how lonely she was, and how long Alex's legs were in those heels, and--

"You know I could break your neck, right?"

Alex's stride changed to be a bit less flashy, and a bit less exaggerated. A bit more perfunctory. "Yes."

Maybe it was

a little bit

about wiles, but Odessa wasn't going to give her that kind of credit. Instead, she continued down an alternate interpretation. "You know you couldn't get away either, right?"

"Not in these heels," Alex said, "and they were

very

expensive."

Odessa grunted sourly.

"And what is it that

you're

doing?"

"Walking you home," Odessa replied.

"And then... your plan is..." Alex peered at her, and smiled. "You don't have one. You're trying to figure one out right now. Oh, we are quite a pair."

Odessa, who did

not

have a plan but

was

trying to figure one out as fast as she could, said nothing. This was her default strategy when she wasn't sure of something; give nothing away, and wait for someone else to make a mistake.

"There," Alex said, pointing to the unassuming end of a row of homes. "That's me there."

"Hmm," Odessa grunted.

They continued walking, covering the short distance, and the closer they got the more Alex smirked sideways at her. "So now what?" Odessa's

say nothing

strategy was about to backfire, and she knew it, but just as her lip was starting to quiver from the frustration of knowing she'd been outmaneuvered, Alex laughed and said, "Well come on, then."

Odessa paused at the start of the steps, brow furrowed, but following her felt like the right thing to do. Alex pulled a key from under a ceramic frog, in stride, and unlocked the door. Surely, if it was the lair of some kind of burgeoning villain, she would be able to sense that very quickly.