Late-night assignment

[Noémi Jourdain]

Noémi watched him, thoughts of work laid carefully aside for now. The first time she’d seen him flow through the consulate he’d been effortlessly charismatic, and she reminded herself often that she was one of many drawn by a magnetism which had laid almost an entire world at his feet. In a room full of people he had made them feel like the only two there, but now they really were. There were no eyes here but hers, and whoever he chose to be was for her alone. She wanted to remember the moment, innocuous or not. To arm herself against a baseless infactuation, else to fall deeper under its spell. Her fingers brushed the inside of her wrist, where her pulse still thrummed in his presence, and the soft scent of wood, spice, and decadence lingered.

"I’m surprised you did not see her on your way in.” Her lips softened into a quiet smile, and if there was some hint of humour, it was of course not an accusation.

He swept passed, and it felt like the shadows moved too, rippled almost like water, but it proved difficult to focus on. Like phasing and soft blurring, a shadow on the lens. She’d never seen evidence of the power in person, but it was not simply that which parted her lips into a softness of surprise, it was the ebbings of memory it decanted like her first scent of Les Larmes Sacrées de Thèbes. Melancholy haunted her since childhood, like ghosts of an old life, but it was the first time memory overwhelmed so strongly. The skeletal reeds of a riverbed. A mantle of darkness. A home. Her chest ached with a devastating nostalgia - and for something she could not even name, but felt only as a piercing loss.

Only seconds had trickled by, but she felt them like ancient weight. The certainty.

"I think I would always know you, whether I could see you or not," she said, knowing it sounded odd, but also knowing it sounded true. Surprise had reigned into thoughtfulness, but whatever epiphany waited, it vanished when she realised by the intensity of his attention that he was examining her reaction. A little late to wonder what reflections passed freely across her expression, let alone what he was actually looking to see there. The world realigned, as it so often did, into a world into which she was not so sure she belonged. Had he just been testing a new trick? A fear simmered; that she was wrong, and she factored no part of this strange after-hours errand; that as quickly as he’d arrived he’d leave.