"I'm so sorry! I was held up at work, I…" you stammer.
"It was very nice meeting you, Ms Saunders," Rumi interrupts you. She squeezes past you out the door and disappears with haste. You feel an impulse to stop your profuse apologies to Clara Rose so you can run after Rumi and profusely apologise, but you check yourself and stick with the first set of apologies.
"Don't worry about it," Clara Rose's face flickers before breaking into a wide, warm smile and a laugh. "Shall we go?"
"I'll need to change out of my work clothes first," you say.
Really, you need more than a change of clothes, you need to clean up: Your fingers are dirty with gun oil and metal dust, and you have sawdust in your hair. No time. You toss your winter jacket on your bed and exchange your work kimono for a pretty one. It's in full view of Clara Rose and you hope she's not put off by you stripping down to your inner layers - but it's not like there's anywhere you could go to change. You wipe your fingers off on a rag and hope you're clean enough that you won't ruin your western-style jacket as you put it on. You should redo your hair and comb the sawdust out of it, but you just can't make Clara Rose wait any longer.
Compared to you, she's the image of beauty: Her brown hair is pulled back and up, but sleeker than a pompadour, with a lock cut daringly short flicked across her forehead. It's as smart as the rest of her: a narrow dark blue skirt and a matching jacket with a tall collar that accentuates the length of her neck, blending Albian army and navy styles.
You barely manage to lock the door (not that you have anything worth stealing) before Clara Rose has her arm hooked around yours and is dragging you down the stairs.
"Where is Rei…" you rack your mind for the name.
"Rairaiken," Clara Rose corrects you. "It's near the Naylor's shop."
"We can take the number seven line, the nearest stop is a short walk from here…"
Clara Rose looks at you like you've suggested something delightfully outré.
"We're taking a taxi, silly."
---
Rairaiken is a Cathayan restaurant, or at least the decor is: The prices are definitely Central Tokei, but Clara Rose has a table already booked and the duck ordered. Clara Rose says something to the waiter in Cathayan: you don't know the language but you've heard it often enough. The waiter replies.
"I come here a lot," Clara Rose explains. "I picked up the taste for the Cathayan food while I was working at the main office in Heung Gong. I love your jacket, by the way. It goes well with the teal kimono."
"Oh, thank you!" you say, and mirror Clara Rose in taking a sip of the wine that's been poured out for you. Spirits, it's like biting down on a lemon. She opens her lips a little and draws in some air to savour the taste.
"Your jacket is very nice too!" you manage. You idiot! Simply repeating things politely? Quick, there has to be something… "It goes very well with your skirt, which I
love."
Clara Rose makes a noncommittal shrug. "It's alright. I asked my seamstress to pull it in and make it more kimono-like but she just made it wear like a narrow tube. You Akitsukuni girls are so lucky you haven't westernised kimonos away yet: you can move about in those. Our fashions are either layering petticoats until you're too wide to move through doorways, or tying your legs together until you can't walk."
"We can't really run in them," you say apologetically. "On a day like this you need maybe three kimonos to keep warm. It's very heavy to move in. Western-style shoes help a little with the speed but…"
"You're not wearing shoes," she notes, nodding at your sandals.
You laugh awkwardly: "Well, nice ones are…" you lower your voice, "...kinda expensive. All western clothes are."
Whoops. Too much complaining. You fish a little for something else to say and hit upon a masterstroke.
"So, uh, how's Naylors'?"
Clara Rose gives you a level look across the top of your wine glass.
"This is the first question on every date. Yes, it's very nice to be a liberated woman allowed to do whatever I want."
You backpedal frantically: "Oh no, no, I was going to ask about your coworkers."
"You mean how nice it must be to be treated like one of the men, equal pay for equal work, that sort of thing?"
"No! I was going to ask about that red-haired woman who held the rapid-fire demonstration!"
"Asking about other women on the date is a novel technique. That get you far with anyone else?" She laughs, not unkindly. "You see, that's the difference here. You can ask that question when I just couldn't. I had to move halfway across the world to be able to make surreptitious inquiries about muscular women."
"I mean, you didn't really, right? There are lesbians everywhere, and almost everyone is at least a bit bi. Surely you can… You have codes, right? Like the bracelet thing?" You jangle the pair of bracelets on your left wrist by way of demonstration.
"No… okay you can probably find a girl. If you're
really careful. But if you get found out that's it for you, you're in disgrace. Your life is essentially over and you will definitely be sent far away from her."
There's a wistful look in her eyes and you wonder if Clara Rose didn't come here as much as she was sent here. Though exiling a gay woman to Akitsukuni would be like exiling a fox to a henhouse...
"Better to be in possible disgrace if you're caught than be in certain disgrace for daring to do a man's job." you retort, a little more acidly than you meant to. Must be the wine. "Okay, what I mean is… I'm only here because I was forced to be. I wanted to do this job my whole life, but the only reason I have a chance is because I'm an only child and my parents need someone to take on the business. It's my shield, I'm permitted to…" you search for a metaphor "...climb over this
fortress wall between the women's role and the men's role because my parents have had the 'bad luck' of me not being a man."
You suddenly both realise that your voices have risen slightly. People at other tables are not looking at you in a way that feels like they would be looking at you if you weren't now looking at them. You continue more quietly.
"I'm not even supposed to be seeing girls because I need to find a nice man who knows about guns to do the real work for me."
Clara Rose gives a half-grin: "I see what you mean, but it's not the same. You can't really conceptualise it if you haven't been there. The constant fear. If
you see a pretty girl you can stand with your mouth open for a minute just staring and your friends will pat you on the back. If
I see a pretty girl back home I have to think about who might see me seeing. But I can't look away
too fast because that's shame, and a normal woman wouldn't feel any shame just for letting her eyes pass over a girl with a nice dress or a cute hat."
She takes a deep sip from her glass.
"And I say 'at home' but it follows me here. I can't take girls to somewhere anyone from Naylors might see them. I certainly can't take girls
from Naylors, even if they are ripped and can put thirty rounds through an RWME in a minute."
"Aha! So, what's her name?"
She sticks her tongue out: "Not telling, she's straight
and she's mine."
Plates of duck arrive. They're accompanied by rice, pancakes, vegetables, and a thick bean sauce. Clara Rose instructs you to wrap pieces of duck and green onions in a pancake and you impress her by folding a neat package using only your chopsticks. She flashes a coy smile as her left hand darts out to hold the wrap together while she gets the chopsticks around it, and in the end it falls apart in the middle of a bite, spilling pieces of duck all over her plate.
"It's OK to laugh," Clara Rose says with a smile, "I know I look ridiculous. I still haven't gotten the hang of it."
"How long have you lived in Akitsukuni?" you ask and wince internally: implying she should have learned already if she's been here for a while is incredibly impolite. Why do you always screw up like this? You reach for your glass of wine.
"Two years," she says, thinking it over. "You'd have thought I'd have gotten the hang of it by now but most of the time I have to dine with other Europans in Europan restaurants, and the waiters in those places would be struck dead on the spot if you asked them for a pair of chopsticks."
You impale your latest wrap on a chopstick and hold it up.
"Obviously the superior way to eat it," you say, and mime cutting a bit off with the other chopstick. "Huh, that really wouldn't work, would it? You'd cut a bit off and it would unwrap, spilling pieces all over." The wrap, structurally compromised by your stab, does so anyway.
"Well, for me, that wouldn't be any worse," Clara Rose retorts, and you laugh.
The rest of the dinner passes with companionable chatter. You've tried to keep up with her drinking, and you start to realise this was a mistake. When the dinner is over, you stand up and your head spins for a moment. Spirits, you have work in the morning.
The fresh air seems to kick some life back into you as Clara Rose takes you outside.
"This wasn't much of a date," Clara Rose says. "But I enjoyed it. We were snickering like schoolgirls the whole time. I don't think I've had to hold back as many laughs since that time Jeanine snuck a frog into Ms Frost-Smythe's dress at boarding school. Oh, you should have seen that!"
She laughs loudly out at the street at that memory and you realise that you're perhaps not the only one to have had too much to drink.
"You wanna hit up one of those 'new women' bars, see if we can turn this into a double date? There's one down by the docks." she asks.
"I'm so sorry, I would love to, but I have work in the morning." You wouldn't love to, they're
really not your scene, but you might as well bail out on her politely.
"
You Akitsukuni work too much," she mumbles as she turns to wave down a taxi.
With half a bottle of wine in her she's not quite up to the complex Akitsukuni words necessary to explain that she'll pay the driver now, not when you arrive, but you help her through it and she waves you off as the taxi takes you home.
-1 Stress
