God Gems are Forever — Scene 2 (TEXT) (Patreon)

In one of the more well-to-do areas of Rivergate City, in a crowded club a short walk away from Parliament Square, massive speakers thumped out a remix of a song that had been top of the charts twelve months previously.

The dance floor was packed — a hundred bodies booping and bopping to the beat, dressed in various states of exposure on a scale of ‘tasteful’ to ‘might as well be naked’.

With some effort, one of the more tastefully dressed women broke free of the throng, pulling a man behind her dressed in casual slacks and a button-up shirt. The moment they’d cleared the press, the man drew the arm holding his around his neck and brought her body close to his. Their breathing matched, their gaze locked, and while the rest of the club booped and bopped away, the two of them fell into their own little world, swaying to the rhythm of the beat.

“Oh, my god,” the woman said, loud enough to be heard, as they reached the bar at the end of the song. “That was amazing. You are such a good dancer. I’m Angelina. Where did you learn to dance like that?” 

“Andrew. Andrew Deep,” The man replied with a smile, signalling the barkeeper for the same pair of drinks he’d ordered three times that night already. “And lots of places. Bellarosa, Aldora, Keldor. Take your pick.”

“I come from Keldor!”

“Ah!” Andrew’s face lit up and he immediately switched to Keldorian. “You come from Keldor. I’d have never guessed.”

The woman suddenly looked flustered. “I don’t actually speak Keldor. My mother came here when I was a baby and I don’t really travel much.”

Andrew let his gaze quickly sweep over his recent dance partner, taking in all the little details. They were very attractive details, to be sure, but… Not really a traveller, despite clearly having means. In his book, that was a yellow flag.

He immediately switched back. “No worries. I’m sure you’d like to visit sometime.”

“Oh, yes! That would be amazing!”

Their drinks arrived and Andrew took a sip of his White Port & Tonic. Not too long ago, the tradition had been Vodka Martini, but the problem with traditions is that they made you easy to spot. So now everyone had to be at least somewhat unique.

“So, what do you do?” he asked the pretty woman.

“I work in marketing.”

“Nice. And what do you do outside work? Martial arts? Gym? Art? Cooking?”

The woman looked flustered again. “My work takes up a lot of time, so I guess not much?” She rallied. “I like going to bars and clubs!”

In the privacy of his head, Andrew sighed.

They continued making small talk as much as the loud environment allowed before Andrew finished his drink and let the girl down gently before returning to the booth his friends had occupied for the night.

“Bro, another one?!” Richard glared at him. The moment he sat down, his first best friend from the academy wasted no time in laying into him. “That’s the third hot girl tonight you’ve rejected. And they’re clearly into you. She was practically hanging off you! You could have left with her by now and been back at your place getting the most amazing evening of your life in under ten minutes!”

Andrew grabbed the large bottle of water from the middle of the table and started pouring himself a glass. “Look Richie, she was a lovely girl, but she wasn’t for me. I’m sure that she’ll make some lucky guy very happy. Some lucky guy who lives a predictable, stable life, and never budges from his comfort zone.”

Richard waggled a finger at him. “Andrew, it shouldn’t matter that she doesn’t live a life of adventure. We are the adventure in a woman’s life! That’s literally our job. One part of it, anyway.”

“Exactly!” Andrew shot back. “It’s our job. It’s what we’ve been trained for. And we don’t have our first missions until tomorrow. Until then, I’ll be a bit pickier about who I sleep with, thank you very much.”

Richard shook his head. “You’d think this guy hasn’t just been let off of celibacy for three years,” he said in a normal voice. In the noise of the club, he might as well have been speaking under his breath. The effect was pretty much the same.

“And I can wait some time more,” Andrew replied, still hearing the comment regardless. He looked over to his other best friend, an attractive young woman named Lucy Jones who’d been seconded to their program from the Royal Air-force six months after he’d arrived. “What about you, Lucy? You’re keeping quiet about this.”

Lucy fixed her gaze to his. “I think you should have slept with her.”

Andrew groaned. “You, too? C’mon, you’re supposed to be the voice of reason to this horndog.”

“Hey!” Richie objected.

“I believe my reasoning is sound,” Lucy said. “The academy stopped practicals in seduction beyond approach and rapport building in the year we entered. While you may have scored top marks in other skills, it was all theoretical.”

“I’m not a virgin, Lucy.”

“No, but you’ve only been in two relationships before you joined the program, and your well-known preference for ‘interesting women’, plus the program’s ‘no fraternization’ policy leads me to conclude that those two relationships constitute the only two women you’ve slept with.”

Andrew grunted and put down the glass of water he’d been drinking from. “I’m going to the bathroom.” He stood up. “And I’m not running away, before you get that idea. Seriously.” And he wasn’t. Not completely, anyway. He really did need a piss.

The loud thumping of the club’s music faded as Andrew entered the room at the back with the stalls, though the bass could still be felt vibrating through every extremity. After concluding his business there, he checked his watch and found it to be not long before midnight.

Tomorrow was going to be his first mission as a foreign intelligence operative working for the New Anglia Government. A spy. And despite what Richie might suggest, seducing beautiful women was not often a part of the job. No, normally all one did was sit in an office in some far-flung country’s New Anglian embassy, making friends with locals, and trying to weasel interesting tidbits out of them. Especially for agents so new to the job.

If you wanted a sex life, you had to make it yourself.

And he did want a sex life.

He loved women.

He just had ‘specific tastes’ as Lucy might say.

Truly, it was a shame he hadn’t found anyone here tonight. He’d already promised himself that if no one caught his interest by midnight then he’d be heading home alone. He needed at least some sleep before getting the call tomorrow. It had been a long shot, given the short period they’d had between graduation and deployment. But that was life.

As he exited the men’s bathroom, he was surprised to find Lucy waiting for him, looking good in her short red dress and done-up hair. “I said I wasn’t running,” he said with some exasperation. 

Lucy gave him a cute little smile. “I know, but Richie wandered off with that girl you just turned down and I didn’t want to be sitting in that booth all by myself.”

“Well, it was about time we wound up for the night anyway.”

Lucy frowned. “Are you sure you shouldn’t take one of the other girls home?”

Andrew shook his head. “No.”

Lucy sighed. “Fine, but I believe you are making a mistake. Our profession is dangerous, and you should take every opportunity to train and practice. I worry for you.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Andrew replied drolly.

He was already half of the way back through the club with Lucy on his heels when the blindingly obvious struck him. 

It was so blindingly obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t made the mental adjustment the moment he saw the girl immediately after graduation. Let alone when she’d turned up for this night out wearing the sexiest little red dress imaginable.

He stopped and looked back at the beautiful woman who worried for him, just in time to catch said beautiful woman as she failed to adapt in time and collided straight into him. 

“Oof!”

Using the momentum, Andrew spun them out of the way of the general stream of people coming and going and into an empty corner.

“Andrew, what—?”

Andrew put a finger to Lucy’s lips. 

Lucy’s eyes widened.

He leaned in. “I’ve got a much better idea,” he said, not in a whisper, because a whisper would never have been heard, but quiet enough to get the same effect. “One that will assuage all your worries.”

He leaned in and kissed her. Lucy’s lips were not resistant, but they were clearly surprised.

When their lips parted after a few moments, Lucy had changed. Her usual logical, almost clinical, demeanour had vanished, replaced by a young woman very uncertain of herself. “I thought we said when we met you weren’t going to practice seduction skills on me?”

In Andrew’s mind, two and a half years of repressed interest, bottled down by academy rules written by brainless bureaucrats with no common sense, was bubbling up to the surface all at once.

“We’re not students anymore,” he said in a husky voice. “And I don’t want to practice.”

He kissed her again. Her lips opened for his. They were soft — her breath, warm, and sweet smelling.

“I’m not your type,” Lucy gasped out when the kiss ended.

“You think you’re not interesting?” Andrew leaned back to stare into her eyes from a foot away. “You’re a spy who just went through spy-training school. Before that, you were a strategic analyst working with the Royal Air-force.”

“But you know everything about me,” she countered. “Interesting women are mysterious. We go through our own seduction training courses, too.”

“Why do you think I was so resistant to bed any of the girls here? I want relationships with meaning. And you, Lucy, are beautiful, intelligent, and brave. Being mysterious is just a crutch for women who don’t actually have anything going for them. Being interesting means I do know everything about you, and I’m still fascinated.”

He leaned in to kiss her again, and this time, Lucy didn’t hesitate to kiss him back.

When they finally broke off, Andrew smiled a roguish grin at her. “Though, having said that, there are a few things I don’t know about you that I really want to.” He started trailing a hand up the smooth skin of her thigh, pushing her dress up as he went.

Lucy bit her lip. “Andrew, I—”

A distinctive beeping noise interrupted them.

Even though the club was still very loud, to the man and woman stood pressed up against each other in the dark corner, the sound of that beeping might as well have been as loud as a nuclear explosion.

Andrew snatched at his belt where his traitorous pager was hooked. He read the message, then checked his watch. It had just gone midnight. It was technically ‘tomorrow’. He cursed. “I just got the call in,” he said. “They must be quite eager if they’re doing this now.”

Lucy was quickly fixing her dress, straightening it back down with little tugs where Andrew had pushed it up. Her face was flush. “Come back safely, okay?” she said in a soft voice. She hesitated, but then firmly added. “And if you are going to sleep with anyone, make sure to take her so hard that the bed breaks.”

Andrew smiled and pecked her on the lips. “I will.”