Elise sees the strangers before they see her. She's just stepped out onto the balcony after the shower, reveling in the way the wind caresses her scalp where her long dark hair has been cropped down to the stubble on one side and the far naughtier way it blows up under the towel that's wrapped around her pale body, and she happens to notice two people working their way door to door down the narrow Rue Aubriot. They hold something up every time someone answers, a flyer or a photo or something Elise can't make out from this distance, and the people who respond all point in Elise's general direction. Uncomfortable, she darts quickly back inside.
She decides to get dressed--it's a shame, really, she has the whole day to herself and she was looking forward to spending the morning in bed with nothing but her favorite vibrator and the edging file Maitresse made for her last week. But she has an odd, inexplicable conviction that the strangers won't go away just because she's hiding in her room; they'll wait outside the front door until they get a response no matter how long it takes. She wishes Maitresse was here. Her lover... her owner, if Elise is being perfectly honest with herself... is so much better at dealing with the unexpected little challenges that always leave Elise so timid and overwhelmed.
She manages to wriggle into a pair of leggings and a loose bulky sweater, the kind that won't show her nipples too prominently through her clothing. Elise has a few bras remaining, and a couple pairs of panties shoved away in a drawer somewhere, but her shapely breasts don't really need support and anyway, it's rare these days that she can muster up the focus to cope with the complicated straps and fasteners and, um... holes. Elise blushes, admitting to herself that her inability to put on underwear has very little to do with the item itself and everything to do with the delicious, sensual way that Maitresse makes being ditzy and dizzy so very attractive.
They're already knocking by the time she reaches the staircase, and Elise freezes in a momentary anxiety she hasn't felt in months at the sound of their insistent presence outside. She knows she didn't recognize them, but something about the way they looked up at her in the instant before she ducked back into the safety of the apartment gave Elise a sense of familiar dread, as though some long-prophesied doom had finally arrived for her. That feeling hasn't gone away. It still clings to her. Some part of her is utterly certain that answering that knock will destroy the wonderful life she and Maitresse have made together.
But she can't not answer it. Elise steps hesitantly down the stairs into the foyer, and opens the front door.
* * * * *
"I can't." Nikki really hoped Marie could hear the sincere regret in her voice; her friend's English wasn't always the best, but usually Nikki could get tone across even if she did have to stick to short, simple sentences without any idioms. "I want to, I really do, but... there's just no way. I have classes, I have work, I have bills, I'm having dinner with my parents on Wednesday, I--it's just not possible. C'est, um, impossible." Nikki's crude French made Marie's English sound fluent, she knew, but sometimes it got the point across in ways that her native language couldn't.
But this time Marie only chuckled. "Eet, uh, eet ees somezink you say beecauz you want too beeleeve eet, ma cherie," she drawled, her voice coming through Nikki's gaming headset like she was a French maid in a 60s sex farce. It was almost inconveniently hot when Nikki was trying to keep her mind on taking out enemy gunnery platforms, especially since she was stuck in bed for the next fifteen minutes with an uncomfortably large medical-grade phallus dilating her vagina. Not that she'd ever really done anything more than a few sessions of phone sex with the beautiful young Parisienne with the long blonde hair and wide blue eyes, but Marie had made it clear that she would welcome anything Nikki had to offer.
That was what this whole conversation was about, in fact. "You have, uh, how ees zey say? Spreeng Break. In, qu'est-ce que c'est, a week? Zat ees half ze time right zere. And ze professeurs, zey accept remote learning at your school. You can log een from my, uh, my... c'est dit appartement?" Nikki gave another private prayer of gratitude to whatever Norman conquerors mashed Old English and medieval French together. Half the time they could make a random stab at a word and have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right in both languages.
"Yes, apartment," she confirmed, shifting position slightly as she respawned after an ugly death at the hands of an enemy sniper. "But it's not just class, I have two jobs to go to. They won't, I mean I can't... I can't just pack up and leave on a trip to Paris with just a week's notice, even if I could afford to go. They'd, I'd, it would...." She heard herself trailing off into stammering silence, anxiety and stress bubbling up and catastrophizing everything into a single sticky mass of panic in the back of her mind, and wished it wasn't such a familiar sensation.
But Marie continued to politely but firmly steamroller over all Nikki's objections. "Eet ees ze Great Renonciation, ees eet not?" she said pointedly, a chuckle in her voice that Nikki could hear even from across the Atlantic Ocean. Everee one needs employees. Even eef zey dared to fire you, you could find anuzzer job like zat." Nikki heard Marie snap her fingers, just as her character momentarily wheeled awkwardly to the right into the side of a wall. She couldn't hold back a tiny giggle at the sight.
"And your parents, well...." Marie's voice turned serious for a moment. "I cannot lie, ma cherie. Zey are part of what you need to geet away from." Nikki winced, feeling momentarily seen despite their voice-only connection--she'd been hanging out with Marie for the better part of a year now, gaming with her at odd hours of the morning when stress left her an insomniac wreck, and they'd gotten a little too close for Nikki to pretend she didn't know what her friend was talking about. Half the reason she hadn't dropped out of grad school six months ago was the sickening dread she felt every time she pictured breaking the news to her family. Two weeks without any calls, any texts, any awkward questions from Marge and Mason Sheppard at family dinner about when her bachelor's degree was going to get her a real job instead of just some make-work position at Chase Manhattan and a side hustle at Starbucks on the weekends... it sounded kind of like heaven.
But heaven could wait. It had to. "Even so, Marie, I can't just... that's over a thousand dollars just for the tickets, I couldn't possibly expect you to drop that kind of money on me. I'd, it's, I'm...." Nikki trailed off again, knowing what Marie would say if she told her she wasn't worth it. And that was her ultimate argument, the one all the others were merely smokescreens for. She didn't feel like she deserved a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to France, even if her apparently very wealthy friend could drop that kind of cash without batting an eye. And Marie felt differently.
