Chapter 3 - Secrets and Lies
Saliah had seen better stables. Jack's apartment wasn't fit for one of the Khan's horses, much less a person. She almost felt sorry for herself that she would have to spend time in the dimly lit, dank, cheap, sad, rental apartment.
There was an irony to it, in a way. She had spent centuries living in stone castles with floors that were swept, and scrubbed, constantly yet never clean. Castles that lacked electricity, running water, heating or air conditioning (not that Jack's apartment had the latter). The amount of human effort needed to get her a goblet of water was best measured in days.
Servants had to be educated on basic hygiene for months. Wells had to be dug - not by Saliah of course, but by others over the course of unending weeks, because the rivers were nothing but communal toilets and baths for all humanity. Then special copper boilers were cast. Lead, a common component in most cookware of the age, prohibited. Finally hours upon hours to cut endless cords of wood needed to bring the water to a boil for long enough to be clean. And even then water only came in one temperature: boring. Of course she could use her powers to manifest a goblet of water into existence. But if she started down that road it would be an endless task and bother. Not to mention a horrific waste of power, though that thought hadn't occurred to her at the time. Had centuries in waiting made her stingy?
In Jack's apartment a glass of cool water could be had with the twist of a knob. Yet the water smelled of chemicals, it tasted of something deep and foul, and the entire wall vibrated whenever the water flowed. She would have preferred the well.
There was something exquisite about sleeping on a pile of silk pillows and knowing that they were the softest, smoothest, the most luxurious in the world. And there was something pathetic about sleeping on a stained, squealing, mattress with threadbare sheets. Objectively the perfectly flat and consistent surface might have been better than the pile of silk pillows she had enjoyed with the Khan, but it did not feel that way.
Even the noises were cheap and depressing. In the middle of an army camp the Khan's tent was never silent. Yet the loudest noises were in the far distance, for a hundred yards in every direction no one had dared to raise their voice for fear of disturbing Saliah. Within ten yards of the tent the servants crept instead of walked.
The sound of Jack's neighbor's radio might have been softer than the sound of iron being hammered into swords at the camp's forge, but it was far more noxious, it sounded of a cheapness, of humanity packed closely together because of its unimportance.
Setting this to rights would be a priority. But for the moment there were several priorities.
She smiled to herself as she clicked through Jack's computer. She had played her part well, "oh Jack, while you're out I've head of an entertainment on the computer. You Too? Your Tool? Oh yes, YouTube. Would you show me how to use it?" She'd tortured him for a minute pretending not to understand the difference between play and skip, until she was satisfied he thought she had the computer skills of a septuagenarian.
Once he had gone, it had only taken fifteen minutes to find his porn folder.
Bad sex is defined as two partners, each with their own likes, attempting to use the other in service of their individual goals. It's a dinner where one person wants spaghetti, the other wants cereal, and neither will compromise so one fills a bowl with spaghetti and then the other drowns it in cold milk.
Good sex involves harmony. Both people working towards a common goal.
Great sex requires understanding. Knowing not just what your partner likes, but also why, and playing into their desires in ways they never expressed, perhaps never even thought of.
At some point Jack might trust her enough to tell her what he really enjoyed. Until then... she licked her lips as she scrolled through pictures, and videos. Nipples hardened through the white silk of her dress, and she brought a finger between her legs, stroking herself absent-mindedly as she planned. The gentle tingles of pleasure the action brought helped her think.
On the computer screen women in collars sat kneeling. Large breasted women smiled into the camera as a penis slipped between their breasts. Cum drenched faces forced their eyes open as other women licked them clean.
After centuries of terrible luck, she had finally found some good. This was the next best thing to reading Jack's mind.
Arousal washed over her and Saliah steadied herself with a slow breath of the apartment's dank air. The temptation to rush had already gotten the better of her once. Impatience was a luxury she couldn't afford.
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"This is remarkable," Amanda Carpenter almost glowed as she held Jack's phone, zooming in on the urn's carvings. She pulled her flowing, chestnut, hair back behind her head, pulling a hairband off her wrist and tying it without seeming to think about the motion. Her large eyes matched her hair and glistened with excitement and she tapped the screen with one finger, "you see this character? That's ancient Sumerian and this one," she tapped the character beside it, "this I don't recognize but you can almost taste the influences of Hebrew on it."
"Can you tell what it says?" Jack asked, leaning close enough that the woman's perfume warmed his mind. Professor Carpenter could have been a model had she wanted to. There was nothing overtly sexy about her pencil skirt and jacket, but it was superbly tailored and for some women that was enough.
She exhaled slowly and set the phone down on the desk of her immaculate office. No stacks of papers waited to be graded, no boxes of artifacts begged to be categorized. Even her own collection of true antiques was kept to a minimum, a handful of coins carefully displayed on the wall opposite one of the best views on campus.
"What grade did you get in my class Jack?" she asked, her elbows resting on the surface of her table, gentle hands interlocking their fingers almost to surround the phone.
"B+," Jack said, a note of question in his voice. It had been a while and he wasn't sure why it mattered.
"And where, exactly, did you find this?" There was a sharpness in her soft features, an inquisitive flame that Jack hadn't seen on her before.
"An estate sale in New York. I like to go to stuff like that. I saw the urn, noticed it wasn't oxidized, and thought those carvings had to be hand done, so for fifty bucks it seemed like a good roll of the dice on it being gold."
