Mass Effect - Proxy Love

With a stir and a soft grunt, she grabbed his dangling hand and pressed it between her breasts, continuing to push her back against him, poking at him with her ass slightly.

"You're warm," She grumbled, pushing back into him even harder.

He pulled his hand out from between her breasts and circled her navel with it. He could feel the gooseflesh rising up on her skin without needing to see it. She squirmed a little, some vestiges of sleep still clinging to her, but a slight inclination in her breath.

"I was hoping we might make this a more long-term partnership," She took his hand from near her ear and kissed it.

His hand crept between her legs, prompting a deep and sudden inhale. She and him clearly had similar ideas.

"So was I," Harkin replied.

***

The centerpiece of the main banquet table was a set of polyester roses that ran in a long trough-like basket from end to end, plastic leaves draping down onto stark white tablecloth and butting out into the path of reaching hands and drooping artificially over silverware. So obviously in the way and so socially unacceptable to move. At each of the smaller dining tables a small bouquet of fake flowers sat in crystal decanters, items so clearly meant for drinks that their last-minute procurement as setpieces drew attention away from the garish pseudo flora swimming in dirty water in each of them. Perhaps in that way by intention. Water turned light chlorophyll green at first by bleeding plastic colors which gave the illusion of natural plant runoff but which had shifted almost instantly to the grimy browns and yellows of water drowning in secondhand smoke. There was even a cigarette butt floating in the one at Ashley's table. Somewhere, buried deep in all of this, there was probably something poetic. But that implied that she had any sense of humor or wonder left for this fucking horrorshow.

The other women at the event, newscasters and socialites and the like, wore these big red and white cheshire smiles. Her initial joke observation had been sharks with painted lips. That had been off the mark. Shark implied either surface or subsurface malice. Most of these girls had plasticine spines and high prissy voices good at glib platitudes. Designer dresses and as high of heels as they could wear without looking like they were wearing heels. Makeup just so to look like they'd skipped the makeup. They were there to be seen and not heard. To play the role of a bygone purer breed of woman lusted after since man was making cave paintings. They had gotten a memo she hadn't, and she was paying for it.

Of course, Shepard wasn't here and she was. A fact that only grew more belligerent in her mind as she played both the role of next best thing and the testament of what human women could accomplish in the galactic scene even if they shouldn't. Shepard was famous enough and rock-hard enough that she wouldn't have been subject to the same mixture of heavily qualified admiration and slight jabs. Shepard would have also been told that she was a credit to humanity and an aspirational figure, she wouldn't have been told that she should think about settling down.

That was probably the weirdest asterisk on the properly shitty evening this had been. Nobody had tried to pinch her ass through her skirt, nobody had leered at what modest cleavage she was showing, nobody had made any untoward comments about what they wanted to do to this particular Alliance Gunnery Sergeant. That was club behavior. This was country club behavior. As a soldier and a hero, she was a credit to humanity. As a woman in that same role, she was a bit of a malfunction.

Granted, she hadn't been completely polite the whole time. After about the hundredth time being asked if she intended to settle down with the universe saved, she'd started giving off-kilter answers for her own amusement. Increasingly bizarre or confrontational to see their faces change, just fucking anything to make something happen. It had been a short-term solution. Now she was at a table on her own nursing champagne. She'd started turning her nose up at things with this low of an ABV back in boot, but that was about the extent of what they served here unless you really fucking golfed with the guy behind the bar.

And the guy who sat down at the table with her clearly did, because he was either genuinely shitfaced or heading there fast enough for the technical details not to matter.

"Good fuckin' god you look like you could pry the rug off of Mr. Thibedeaux's bald head."

It was an awkward compliment in more ways than one, not least of all that she was pretty sure a stiff breeze would have been more than strong enough to pry away the wig in question.

"Uh... thanks..." She replied. It wasn't even an awkward situation necessarily, the opening line was just a bit hard to read.

"I'd ask what a girl like you is doing on her own but it seems like all the suits here are old enough to be your goddamn granddad."

Okay, playful, cocky. That's what he'd been going with. She responded in kind.

"I don't think you're that far off either, tiger."

He scoffed and gestured emptily with his hand, sloshing the glassful of hard liquor and ice he seemed to have forgotten about. She'd have danced ballet naked on one of the tables for it an hour ago, even now she'd at least have twirled for it.

"Yeah but the way I sees it, I'm not the one trying to take one of these stepford wifes home with me."

She smiled a little in spite of herself.

"Is your approach usually to badmouth everybody else in the room to the girl you're sweet talking?"

He looked up and to the right showily like he was trying to come up with a response, usually a sign that she'd said something the other person had played out in their head and had something they thought was clever to respond with.

"Only when she seems to be just as fed up with them as I am."

Not terrible, not great either. There was a certain naked honesty in somebody flirting with you as tamely but as drunkenly and openly as this guy was. Both the behaviors that were charming and the candor of mimicking them went mostly out the window in equal measure. She crossed her hands under her chin.

"Alright, let's go off of your script for a moment, if you think you're the most interesting person here, what do you think makes you that way?"

He rubbed his chin a moment, "I'm an honest horndog instead of a pervert pretending to be a Sunday school teacher."

"Oh yeah?" She rolled her eyes showily in response, "Finally, an asshole instead of a scumbag."

"And that kind of shit is why I sat down," He responded smugly and sipped his drink.

"You sure you weren't just starstruck?"

"Well, maybe by the way you fill out your dress. I'm afraid everybody in this room knows who you are and most of us are random assholes to you."

"Slow down for a minute, chief. If you want me to start asking you about who you are, it's going to cost you."

He threw his arms out slightly, spilling his drink. She winced.

"Name your price."

She pointed to his drink.

"That glass, and then a couple more. That or get the asshole behind the bar to start serving me actual alcohol."

***

The blessing of fresh air on the balcony came with two asterisks. One that the ballroom was deep in the financial district of an Alliance station, meaning that tired and shitfaced officers alike puttered underneath them on the street on their way to and from work, home, and the bar. The other was that everybody else making their way out here was smoking. Fresh air always came with a few asterisks. Not like this shit wasn't recycled anyway, but sometimes the artificial smell of green was enough to trick you, and you noticed it when it was gone.

After the first guy with a watch that could buy her apartment had a drink land on him, they had started to avoid walking under Ashley's balcony. That made the noise pollution a little better at least. Roger had finally kowtowed the poor bartender into giving one of the "ladies of the establishment" something a little harder by just ordering a pair or drinks and handing one to her in plain sight. It had been like being the first person to make an off-color joke among strangers in a bar. There were never as many monocles to be popped and pearls to be clutched as it initially seemed, and after that it just became part of the conversation. A couple of the other women had looked at her funny, not like she had any credibility with these people to lose.

For what it's worth, Roger wasn't interested in talking much about himself. He wasn't flashing status or rank at least. Expectations of earnest, blathering drunkenness had faded. If anything he seemed more contemplative, he let her talk as much as she wanted to, but she was a little talked out anyway. He didn't have a problem sitting in companionable silence with her, and she didn't mind it either. When the noise pollution was more of a soft backdrop than an active oppression, the city almost took on a sleepy nightlife. Granted, what little of it you could hear and smell based purely on the tragedy triangle of work, bars, and apartments.

When he did talk about himself, it was in bits and pieces.

"Officially? My job is to be a man that wears a lot of hats."

"That's... vague."

"Needs to be. Not out here trying to be a household name, but doing my part same as anybody."

"Hopefully me doing my part doesn't involve arresting you doing yours any time soon."

He smiled slightly, "More likely you wind up taking a case I turn into the Alliance."

"You an informant?"

"Can't act for shit. More like an assistant lawyer with a badge. Sometimes people need me to come in and say why they can arrest somebody, sometimes they need me to come in and say how to do it."

"So you're one of the ones giving marching orders to the people with the guns."

"More like giving marching orders to the ones giving marching orders. It's a gray market. C-Sec and the Alliance can't legally work with people like the Shadow Broker, so sometimes I'm an intermediary there. And sometimes the case files from C-Sec wind up in Alliance hands, you know how it is with Citadel police."

She drained a drink and dug her fingernails into her palm for a moment.

"Galaxy's biggest strip mall needs its mall cops," She scoffed.

"It's a racket. All I'm saying is that if you start seeking out cases named after Roman emperors, you probably won't wind up on desk duty for a while."

"That your calling card?" She half-teased.

"I don't stick with any one for too long, you just run out more than anything. Was song titles for a while, but I started running into the problem that some of the ones I liked didn't make for good case names."

A lone gear turned in her head, there had been one she'd taken a few months ago. It had been her cleanest break and best payout in the past year.

"You're not the guy that wrote up... the one with the dog name, what was it?"

"Bloodhound?"

She turned suddenly, her head reeling more than she'd expected. How many drinks ago had that kowtowing been? Somewhere in the back of her mind she registered that she'd probably more than a little been trying to work up the... whatever it was she needed to go home with somebody.

"You were the asshole that wrote up Bloodhound?"

For a second, something of a facade slipped in his face, then he laughed.

"Asshole?"

She laughed back, "Yeah! You got the layout of that place completely wrong. If I were less quick on my feet I would have been gunned down by about a dozen angry drug traffickers."

"Sorry to hear that, I thought my intel was accurate."

"I mean, it probably was at one point, but they had knocked down one of the fuckin walls to connect two of the rooms. I went into this one room in the dark with my back pressed to what I thought was the wall, and I only realized when I heard one of them basically shit his pants in fear that there wasn't a wall there any more."

"Huh," He grunted mostly to himself, then after a moment "For all the planning in the world, you can't know how things are going to go until you get there."

She registered a change that had come over his face. Something that had been shifting about his expression for a while. She worried at some level that she might be even drunker than she thought, and that she was putting him off. At the same time, he just seemed to have a sort of kicked puppy attitude about him at all times.

For the first time since they'd stepped out, the silence between them was a little more stiff, a little more walled off. Just as she was formulating some sort of joke or something else in her head, his omni-tool pinged him. He scowled, more than a little performatively.

"It's been wonderful talking to you, Ms. Williams, but I'm needed elsewhere. I'm sure you are too."

"Just... call me Ash." She started, then suddenly felt like she was ignoring most of what he'd said. She tried to smile in a friendly, inviting war. "Are you sure you have to go? We could get out of here and get a real drink."

He gave a sad sort of smile, kissed her hand when she offered it, and was gone almost before she could think of what to say next.

She leaned back over the balcony and sulked for a moment, then got up to leave as well.

***

The next month, comparatively, was a series of successes from start to finish, minus one day in bed with a hangover.

Hadrian had been a couple of kids who had stumbled onto a huge shipment of narcotics and ran out of things to spend the money they were making on before they'd run out of demand. Even only taking a bit off the top on civil forfeiture, the department paid her well for it since they collected the rest. Commodus had been a local drug pusher who'd started punching up when he thought he'd started seeing undercover agents everywhere. Been good at it too, almost succeeded in forming a cult of personality. Ultimately he'd turned too many around him scared he might single them out next and her agents had gone in with the blessing and direction of the local gangs. Valerian was a local star athlete who had picked up enough debts with some hustlers to be stuck peddling snake oil and doing favors. Constantine had been a Salarian tech group setting up a bunch of diverters in the local economic systems, trying to create a new currency by astroturfing it into every transaction.

There were two distinctions about these cases. First, not a single one of them went cold. You expected half of the ones you took to peter out or take long enough to look like it. These were snappy, get the intel, plan the move, and go in. They all paid well too.

Second, they were all going right to her desk.

At least after the first one. She'd nudged the first case out of general and into her wheelhouse, then after that she made sure they didn't make it half that far. If anybody else had put together a trend with her assignment names, they had to figure it was just an odd coincidence and a streak of immense luck.

But most people's good luck didn't get them publicly commended, didn't get them monthly honors, and didn't get them the kind of raise you called your family about.

The line attached to them was a business one. You ran through filter after filter to get in touch with a person, try to get in touch with the man in charge and you got bounced to another buffer and another round of filters. She could probably have been calling for the rest of her natural life without actually reaching who she wanted. Soft blocking was what most people called it. A brick wall mortared with elastic.

Not that she wasn't used to one-way chains of command. You sat, you waited for directions, you did what you were told. Unless you found some latitude-less land where you needed serve no master, you lived with it at least a little. It had been that way with Shepard until they had run a few missions, shared a couple of beers. She'd found out that the glimmer in the XO's eye really had just been her natural charm and she wasn't running pursuit on the new girl. After that, she'd felt a little more comfortable asking for work and speaking her piece in planning. An important part of team building; separation of comrades from middle managers and establishing where the sensitive toes did and didn't cross the footpath.

All to say that Roger's face-heel middle-manager turn was more than a little shaken in her mind when she got a line from him directly.

***

She almost hadn't taken the communications request. It was a risky proposition either way. He could have asked her at the event, set up a line then, but it would have made it harder to cleanly set up and operate the next month. She'd been interested, but at that point he was a curiosity more than anything else. Do it the way he had, he risked her turning down comms from accounts she didn't know. Either way, for all the planning in the world, there was a risk.

Ultimately, the most attractive quality in human relations is usefulness.

He was more than a curiosity now. After a month of set-up battles that paid dividends, he was starting to look like her own personal golden goose. That, in a way, also presented a danger. So he was curt with his message, reminding her the kind of man he was playing. Of course, some characters required less acting than others.

"Ms. Williams, I've enjoyed watching your efforts to keep the galaxy clean. Been working on a bigger bust for a while now, don't want to get into details over text, especially if you don't want to play. If you do, let's talk it out over dinner this time. Dress and tie affair, if you're so inclined."

He signed it Roger. He hadn't given her a last name so far and she hadn't asked. Even that small chance it would ring a bell made the risk too high. Chances were, she'd know who it was and he'd be on her mind. Keep it professional, but obvious.

And after a few tense hours of it sitting unopened, she replied.

***

It couldn't have been more obvious of a date if he'd called it one.

That had been her first reaction at least. At this point, she was used to certain things. Men tended not to ask a woman in uniform out to coffee directly. Either they were badge chasers or they got cute. Like the rules changed. Badge chasers usually tried to bump into you "on accident" out in the wild. With the line between cop and soldier blurred, most of them started fishing for tickets or lurking at the restaurants and bars around bases. They didn't ask for a dress and tie affair, they wanted to catch a girl on her lunch break. Problem was, most of the time nobody wanted to get hit on during a lunch break. That and the idea of being more of a badge and less of a person only appealed to a few people. The kinds that usually didn't make it through training, or the kinds you didn't want to chase.

All to say that he'd gotten cute, this wasn't a badge thing... or at least it probably wasn't.

They'd met at a tie and dress affair, but he'd also known who she was. Didn't seem like a starfucker thing, people went after Shepard for that, not Williams or Lawson. At a certain point, it really just seemed like he might be genuinely interested. Of course, the human notion to distrust seemingly good things was ever present.

Not that it wasn't "beneficial" for him, if you wanted to be gross about it. He was an older guy. In good shape, in control of his life, not creeping on super young women, but she was still a minimum of twenty years his junior. Willaims would still be a "trophy" for him, even if it wasn't as shiny as a Shepard. Wasn't like she wasn't in demand either. Man his age, the toned, successful, minor celebrity law officer commanded a bit of prestige. There were a hundred ways to make this him playing her if she squinted hard enough.

She'd also said yes before she'd let those voices win.

Wasn't like the attraction hadn't been there before. She'd probably been ready to go home with him then. She hadn't been shitfaced, it had been a rational decision if a tipsy one. Older wasn't a dealbreaker, at least not a certain kind of older. He wasn't ugly, he wasn't a slob, he'd been a bit of a lech, but it was an honest lechery. Prudish wasn't her type anyway.