Best Left Unfinished

by Sara Jamieson

  ~~~~~

  “I asked you if you have a problem with me,” Eris repeated leaning forward in what can only be assumed was an attempt to seem menacing. As the woman in the chair looking up at her neither moved in response nor even shifted, we can hazard a guess that it wasn’t a successful endeavor. She merely blinked at the blond in front of her as if she wasn’t quite sure what she was doing standing so close to her personal space. The blond didn’t appear to appreciate the lack of response that she was pushing for and decided to up the ante.

  “Getting bored over here by yourself?” She asked in a tone that was decidedly nasty in its inflection. “Waiting for Caleb to be finished and ready to come cuddle with his security blanket?” This got a reaction, but whether or not it was the reaction that Eris had been hoping to bring about may be considered answered by the fact that Eris did some rapid blinking herself and actually took a half step back before a self-satisfied smirk plastered itself across her face. The brunette who still kept her arms wrapped around her knees didn’t rise from her chair. She didn’t even hold eye contact with the other woman. She simply began to laugh.

  It was a strange sort of a sound -- it wasn’t harsh or ill-tempered, but it didn’t sound particularly amused either. It went on for a few moments with no other interruptions of sound; the others in the room still seemed to be in an odd state of frozen fascination as the scene that was about to erupt began to play out in front of them.

  “Oh,” she stated as the laughter began to subside. She lifted her eyes up and caught Eris’s gaze. “You did not just go there.”

  “Kady . . .,” came Caleb’s voice from his place still standing motionless across the room. It was so soft that it was debatable whether the sound would actually reach its target. The fact that she responded, however, seemed to indicate that it had.

  “No, Cale,” she said shaking her head slightly while glancing in his direction. The glance was short and seemed to be attempting to convey something, but she broke it quickly to return to what was devolving into a staring contest between her and Eris. “I’ll handle this. If Barbie has something to say to me, then she just needs to go on and say it.”

  The whole scene looked odd -- as if someone had stumbled into a group of people running lines for a play that they hadn’t taken the time to work out the blocking for as yet. It could look like whatever it wanted to, however, because the confrontation was very real despite the seemingly nonchalant way in which Kady was handling it. That something was off (from her expectations anyway) seemed to dawn on Eris because she took another half step back and tilted her head as if she was studying the other woman.

  “I have nothing to say to you,” she informed her with a small scoffing noise added as if to convey that such an idea was so ridiculous that she didn’t even know why it was that she was bothering to acknowledge it with a response. Katherine responded with a nonverbal challenge -- she raised an eyebrow as if to remind Eris that her most recent statement was a direct contradiction of the fact that she was the one who had started this little back and forth by coming over and talking to her first.

  Either Eris didn’t pick up on Katherine’s nonverbal challenge, or she found it expedient to pretend that she had no idea that that was being conveyed. She just stood and waited as if her “I have nothing to say to you” was some sort of a crushing blow that would prevent any sort of sensible response from being formulated by the brunette who still hadn’t bothered to raise her chin off the top of her knees. Katherine did lift her head then -- she picked it up and shook her head back and forth slowly before returning her eyes to her challenger and giving her an intrigued look with a small shrug of her shoulders to accompany it.

  “Really? Why?” She asked sounding genuinely curious and very calm (in the same way that someone sounds calm when they are speaking to a small child on the verge of a temper tantrum). “Because I’m so far beneath you? Because you’re so much better than I am?” She paused after the last and gave a moment for any sort of a response to be offered. Eris was too busy looking surprised that she was speaking to her at all to take advantage of the pause in her questions. “Because someone designed you to be better?” Her eyebrows lifted in challenge again as if she was scoffing at the implication of those words even as she spoke them. “Here’s a question for you to ponder -- all those superior genetics of yours? What, exactly, have you bothered to do with them? All the gifts and talents in the world are worthless in the grand scheme of things -- it’s how you choose to use them that matters.”

  “You know nothing about me,” Eris responded beginning to turn her back on Katherine.

  “Well, I guess we’re even then,” Katherine stated with another small shrug of her shoulders -- not visible to Eris, of course, as she had already turned away. David’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head as if he was wondering what in the world she was doing prolonging their interaction when Eris appeared willing to drop the matter. Caleb started to take another step forward, but he was brought to heel by a small head shake from Katherine. He looked at her in confusion, but he followed the directive that she had conveyed with that head shake and didn’t attempt to intervene. Devon’s expression and posture did not change. She still stayed back and watched without giving any indication of shock, dismay, or even concern about what she was seeing and hearing.

  “Hardly,” Eris spat spinning back around with narrowed eyes and looking as if she had just decided that she was going to forget what she had expected to happen from picking at Katherine in the first place and jump in the current altercation with every intention of tearing the other woman to pieces. “I know everything I need to know about your kind.” The emphasis on the word your somehow managed to be dismissive, disgusted, and a direct challenge all at the same time.

  “Yep,” Katherine stated as she finally rose from her seat -- not as if she was standing to bring herself onto an even footing with the still towering over her Eris but as if she was tired of sitting and needed to pop her back. She stretched her arms above her head, and Eris took a hasty step back and just barely missed being struck by Katherine’s arm as it came down by doing so. “Just keep talking, Eris. You’re kind of winning my argument for me.” She told the other woman as she renewed their eye contact and offered a small smile that could only be quantified as pitying in nature. Eris didn’t look as though she cared much for the possibility of being pitied. She bristled under Katherine’s look and appeared much as a cat would somewhere after the stage where it started hissing in indignation and before it launched itself at whatever it was that it had decided needed to be the target of its pouncing.

  “They are weakened by their attachments to inferior beings,” Eris responded with a small inclination of her head in the direction of the others in the room (her implication being that the audience for their argument was irrelevant as they were too deluded or too lacking in understanding for it to matter what they might think about either the exchange of words between the two of them or the situation as a whole). “Dr. Sutton will help them to understand,” she touted with a level of certainty that implied that she couldn’t conceive of any alternative. “We’ll see if you can find anyone to hide behind then.”

  Katherine made an expansive gesture with both arms as if to indicate to Eris that she wasn’t currently hiding behind anyone. She even went so far as to turn her head from side to side as if looking for the presence of those figurative people that she was supposedly hiding behind. It was a deliberately provocative action, and she followed it up with a deliberately provocative (to Eris anyway) statement.

  “You know,” she drawled reflectively as that same pitying smile stayed firmly attached to her face. “For someone with such distaste for ‘inferior beings,’ you follow what Randall Sutton says pretty blindly.”

  If Eris had been bristling like a cat before, then she was now coiling like a snake that was about to strike.

  “You dare . . .,” she practically screeched in Katheri
ne’s face as she pushed herself further into the other woman’s personal space. She was standing so close that Katherine’s neck was tilted at an unnatural angle in her attempt to keep eye contact with the much taller Eris.

  The unnatural angle (and what had to be the resulting uncomfortableness) was something that Katherine was apparently not allowing to interfere with the continuation of their back and forth. That pitying smile never wavered even as a small (and not overly pleasant) laugh escaped from the back of her throat. Her eyes shifted to an expression that could be interpreted as darkly amused.

  “Do you even realize that you sound like a brainwashed minion in a comic book?” She asked the other woman ignoring the flash of rage that appeared on her face. What she didn’t ignore was the fact that Eris’s hands clenched into fists at her sides for a moment before one hand opened as she raised it as though she intended to smack Katherine across her face. Whether she would have gone through with it or not remains an unanswerable question as the action was interrupted before it could be completed.

  “Okay, that’s enough.” A voice (louder than the voices that even the two women in the midst of their spat were using and seemingly even louder because of that difference) commanded. “Separate corners.”

  It was obvious that that particular voice was unexpected by three of the other four parties in the room (and Devon’s expression as per usual gave away nothing of her thoughts on the matter). Eris’s hand dropped back down to her side. Caleb looked as though he didn’t quite believe that he had actually heard that. Katherine turned her head away from her stare down with Eris and blinked at David in surprise before a pleased smile spread itself across her face (it made for a nice change from the pitying expression that she had been sporting).

  David didn’t look as if he had been spending most of his time lounging on the rug or staring at the others incredulously. He looked like he had been in the midst of things from the beginning and had finally lost his patience with the way in which it was unraveling. He also looked nothing short of livid.

  “But we’re having so much fun,” Katherine told him still beaming at him as she said it.

  He didn’t smile back, but any response that he might have made was redirected by Eris opening her mouth.

  “Don’t you have a nap to be taking?” She huffed at him with an added eye roll to display how much she wasn’t taking his interruption seriously. “Or did you decide that you were missing your own pet and needed to adopt someone else’s?” She finished with a derisive snort. If she thought that it would provoke David into responding directly to her accusation or make him back off, then she had miscalculated.

  “And she wonders why I don’t bother to speak to her,” he directed at Devon who made no indication of replying or otherwise inserting herself into the newly unfolding confrontation. “Does she ever listen to herself for long enough to know how petty and worthless the things that come out of her mouth are?”

  “You don’t . . .,” Eris never finished the thought. Katherine had stepped on her foot (not particularly hard but with enough pressure to ensure that she noticed the movement), and her attention redirected so quickly it was enough to give anyone watching whiplash. Katherine didn’t retreat any in her stance directly under Eris’s nose -- she only made a small clicking sound in her throat before commenting.

  “Personal. Space. Bubble.” She said to the other woman with careful enunciation of each of the words. “You encroach on that and stuff happens,” she said with a small emphasis on the word stuff as if she was going to leave it up to interpretation what kind of “stuff” might be entailed. “Or did your superior genetics not predispose you with an ability to comprehend basic social skills and a grasp of how to employ manners?”

  “I said that was enough and that you should go to separate corners,” David repeated still in that tone of command (enough of a tone of command that Katherine and Eris both stopped their altercation again and turned their heads to look at him). “Did you not understand those words?”

  Eris glared, and Katherine gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

  “You,” David directed at Katherine. “Explain.”

  It might have been a somewhat cryptic thing to say, but Katherine seemed to follow what he meant because her eyes shot for a moment to Eris and then back to David conveying some sort of a message that he also seemed to comprehend.

  “We’ll go elsewhere,” he told her. This time her eyes darted from him to Caleb and back, but David shook his head.

  “No,” he told her. “Not this time.”

  “No,” she responded in turn with her arms crossing across her chest. “I don’t leave him out.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” he replied as Caleb (and Eris as well strangely enough) were looking back and forth between the two of them as if they were speaking some sort of a strange code that needed to be cracked. Devon was looking only at David as though she was perusing some sort of an interesting novel.

  “Impasse then,” Katherine told him in turn.

  “Fine,” he told her shaking his head and starting to move.

  David strode across the space between him and the two women whose altercation had drawn him out of his reverie by the unlit fireplace. He didn’t stop until he had wedged himself in the space between Eris and Katherine (during which process Eris may or may not have been forced to move lest she found herself unceremoniously shoved out of the way) and said nothing when he arrived there. He scooped Katherine up and tossed her over his shoulder as she flailed and made protesting noises and turned back around and marched to one of the doors opening out of the room, went through it, and slammed it shut behind him.

  Both Eris and Caleb started to follow, but Devon stopped the both of them -- Caleb with a hand on his arm as he blinked at her as if wondering when she had managed to get close enough to him to do that. She stopped Eris by calling out to her.

  “Don’t.” She commanded, and she took no notice of the glare that Eris gave her even as the other woman stopped walking toward the now closed door.

  “You are wasting our preparation time with your petty squabbling. Stop it at once; you won’t be the only one making reports about certain people’s unfitness to carry out their directives without letting distractions get in the way. Are we clear?”

  Eris did not choose to verbally respond, but she didn’t move to follow Katherine and David again. She made her way to the stack of papers on the end table and scooped up a section of the pile before going through the other available door and shutting it behind her with perhaps a little more force than was actually needed to ensure that it closed.

  That left Devon with her hand still resting on Caleb’s arm standing alone in the living area of the cabin. Caleb shook it off and gave a brief look at the woman beside him with a mixture of disappointment and confusion.

  “What?” He asked her -- willing enough to stay for an explanation even as his eyes focused on the door that Katherine had disappeared through as if trying hard enough would enable him to see what it was that was happening behind it.

  “You don’t help,” Devon told him as if she was making an observation rather than an accusation (and given the manner in which Devon had stayed mostly in the background during all of the previous proceedings, she likely was). “Do you not claim to trust her?”

  “Of course I trust her,” Caleb turned from his perusal of the door in order to frown at her.

  “But not to take care of herself or fight her own battles,” Devon responded. “Your actions belie your words.”

  “Am I supposed to understand what that means?” He asked her as his hand came up and ran through his hair in frustration.

  “You claim to not believe Dr. Sutton’s philosophy. You and Eris slide into disagreements often over your fundamental disagreement over whether or not the Society is correct in its theories and practices. Yet, whenever the occasion arises, you attempt to come rushing to Katherine’s aid as though she is incapable
of coping without your assistance. Such actions would indicate that while you say otherwise, deep down you believe that the assessment of your friend which you insist is flawed is actually one that you share.”

  Caleb looked at her as if he was having trouble trying to follow what she was saying for a moment before understanding rushed across his features.

  “It isn’t like that,” he insisted. “It’s not that I think . . .,” he was cut off by Devon speaking over him.

  “Your thought processes are of little interest to me,” she stated still in that carefully controlled tone that made it feel as if she was some sort of an outside observer taking notes about the proceedings and people in front of her instead of an active participant in the middle of it all.

  “And they are of no interest at all to Eris or those with more direct control of your situation than her,” she continued. “They see your actions, and they draw the conclusions that they choose to draw through their own mental parameters. You cannot change that. You can only choose to govern your own actions. You may choose to hear my words or not. But know how not allowing her to fight her own battles reflects to those who are observing.”

  Devon chose that point to follow after Eris leaving Caleb standing alone in the middle of the room. His gaze immediately returned to the door behind which his best friend could be found. He stared at it for a long moment and even took three steps in that direction before he paused and his gaze shifted to the door behind which Devon had disappeared. His head shook slowly, and he bit his lip as if he didn’t want to give any credence to her words but found that he could not dismiss them. Indecisiveness was painted clearly across his features as he looked longingly at the first door before shifting an angry glance at the other one. In the end, he didn’t choose to go to either of the doors. He, instead, walked slowly over to the sofa and sank down into the cushions with an exhausted sigh. His head fell forward and was caught in his hands as his elbows braced themselves against his knees.

  He looked lost, and he looked hurt. Mostly, he looked as though his tiredness was so pervasive that it was seeping from his pores and infecting his surroundings. Exhaustion, separation, and personal turmoil rolled off the man slumped on the sofa in waves that would pummel anyone observing with their inescapable reality.