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Maria Gorey is smiling, which is never a good sign.
It’s an odd little smile that, combined with Gorey’s big, glass-doll eyes, has a tendency to make her look like she’s gone half-mad. The first time Gina saw it she was sure it meant Gorey had finally decided to open Gina up and take a look at her insides, the fact that she was still living be damned.
But Gina won’t lie, at least not about this: it’s a nice smile, once you get used to it.
“Mornin’, doc,” Gina greets her as she ducks through the door, her cap and coat still dripping with rain. She’s glad she has the money for something thicker now, made of wool, or else the files tucked into her inner pocket would be as soaked as she is. She pulls them out now, and holds them out to Gorey. “Brought ya somefin’.”
Gorey takes the packet from her hand with a brief glance, but seems less than interested in its contents. “Thank you, detective,” she acknowledges, and then looks back at Gina with that same wide-eyed smile and asks: “Would you like to see a human heart?”
“Uh,” Gina starts. She’s not sure she does, actually, but when Gorey looks like that it’s hard to say no. “I s’pose?”
Gorey somehow smiles even wider.
They’ve known each other for six months now, and although time means nothing in the grand scheme of knowing a person, Gina likes to think that makes them friends. She’s had very few friends in her eighteen years, and even less of them true, but Gorey at least always seems happy to see Gina, in her own way. Maybe it’s a simple matter of like attracting like-- Gorey is the only girl Gina sees most days that isn’t a body or a witness. She’s young, too, although she’s seen just enough of the world for Gina to like her.
And this, too: she comes into work each day wearing trousers. Gina’s never asked Gorey why; maybe that’s just the way they do things in her world. But maybe not. For Gina it means running faster through alleyways, and more pockets for hiding knickknacks, and—other things. The sort of thing no one talks about, so Gina never asks. She can’t dare to let herself hope, so she doesn’t.
“Come look,” Gorey says, and ushers Gina in and over to her desk. There is not, to Gina’s relief, a bloody, still-beating heart laying there, staining the dark wood. Rather, there is a glass jar, much like the other ones that decorate the shelves of Gorey’s office, but this one doesn’t have a speck of dust on it. Inside, suspended in some sort of clear fluid—form-something, Gorey once called it—is, well, something. A strangely shaped hunk of what is probably meat, dark and greyish with strange yellow-white tubes sticking out in places. It looks less like what Gina has always imagined beating in her chest and more like a bundle of cloth, tightly bound into a knot and left in the laundry for too long.
“I just bought it yesterday,” Gorey is explaining, in a way that for her is practically gushing. “An old friend of Mama’s works on preserving organs for medical research. They’re quite expensive, but I’ve been saving up, and he gave me a discount—”
“Wot’s wrong wiv it?” Gina blurts.
Gorey cocks her head, looking between Gina and the so-called heart. “Nothing at all, other than the fact that its owner no longer has much use for it. But he died of strangulation, or so I’m told. Or—hanging, that is. But he was otherwise perfectly healthy at the time of his death.”
“It’s just…. I ain’t never seen a heart that looks like that before.”
“Have you seen many?” Gorey asks with some spark of genuine interest, like Gina’s been holding out on her all this time.
“Well, I s’pose not.” She’s seen plenty of corpses, but their hearts usually remained in their bodies, even when the blood had all spilled out. “Just thought it’d look more…heart-shaped, is all.”
Gina thinks of playing cards, valentines, children drawing shapes in the dirt. She’s always thought of a heart as a red thing, symmetrical like a dagger, round at its top like a lady’s bosom in her corset. But perhaps that just made her a fool. Hadn’t she seen chicken and fish hearts all her life, pulled them apart with her teeth? Why had she thought the heart in her own chest would be any different?
Gorey’s face has twisted, like she’s eaten something sour. “It’s a false name, ‘heart-shaped,’” she pronounces with disdain, although Gina doesn’t think she’s its target. Gorey speaks like the inaccuracy itself disgusts her. “That shape looks nothing like a real heart. It’s a very pretty lie created by someone who failed to see the beauty in the genuine article.”
Gina squints at the heart. Beauty, huh. “Just looks like meat to me, if I’m honest.”
“It is meat,” Gorey explains, her eyes all alight. “It’s muscle, and one of the strongest and most complex we have. Just look at it—no bigger than your fist and yet it can pump blood throughout your whole body. It’s the measure of life itself—you don’t find that beautiful, detective?”
Gina shrugs, pulls at a curl. She doesn’t know what to say to that. “Why ain’t it red?”
“It was drained of its blood before preservation. This is what remains—a perfect specimen, really.” Gorey is staring at the organ with barely disguised awe, the sort normally reserved for kings, or coin, or pretty girls giving you a smile. Gorey’s never looked at her like that. “It’s really remarkable how similar it is to some of the medical illustrations I’ve seen—look, I’ll show you.”
Gorey sets down the file that had been in her hands and reaches right behind where Gina is leaning against the desk, up to the heavy tomes on the top shelf, half-hidden behind that velvet-y pink curtain. At some point she pulls back and opens up the book, but Gina doesn’t know exactly when. She’s stopped paying attention to everything but the half-inch of space between her and Gorey’s body. She swears she can feel the heat coming off of her, the whisper of her breath in her ear. It sparks off something hot and sharp inside Gina, rising like a back-alley bonfire, choking her with the smoke.
The thing is—Gina already knows these things about herself. She knows what she feels watching a pretty girl walking down the street, where her mind wanders when she drinks a bit too much, what she dreams of at night with a hand between her thighs. And she knows just as well it’s not what she ought to be feeling, but Gina’s never been good at being what she ought. She’s always been best at wanting what she can’t have.
(She still thinks about Sooze sometimes. Soo-sah-toe, she’ll try under her breath, strange and pretty on her tongue. Her round face and white hands, every inch of her a lady. She was beautiful, and utterly untouchable, and that was why Gina still dreamed of her sometimes—of those dark eyes, sweet and clever and craving something she had no words to name, of reaching out and showing her exactly what she wanted to know. What it might be like, to press a kiss to those pink lips, sneak a hand up those pretty silk skirts--)
“Here, I’ll show you,” Gorey is saying. “It’s—oh. Are you nervous?”
She’s looking at Gina now, really looking. Her gaze carves into Gina like the edge of a knife.
“I ain’t.” Her face feels hot. It itches, like glass under the skin. She doesn’t move; she can’t.
Gorey presses two fingers below Gina’s chin, holding her steady. “Your pupils are dilated,” she says, “and your face is flushed. And—” her fingers travel down to Gina’s throat, dipping right below her collar, where the blood flows quick in her veins. “Your pulse is accelerated, too. There’s no need, really. I promise the illustrations are no more graphic than anything you see in your day-to-day work, detective. And I can explain any words you find unfamiliar.”
(Sometimes, she thinks of Gorey. She imagines her long legs and sure fingers, the shape of her mouth around her fancy words, her pretty blue eyes staring down at Gina and thinking of no one, nothing else.)
Gina swallows. “Wot are ya on about? I ain’t afraid of no bleedin’ book.”
Gorey hums. Her fingers haven’t moved from Gina’s throat. She’s still staring. “If you say so,” she says. “I suppose your symptoms could indicate any number of emotional responses—fear, excitement, arousal…”
The thing that Gina keeps coming back to about Gorey is—those eyes. Impossibly pale, sky-on-a-bright-winter-day blue surrounding pinpoints of deep black, only made darker by the contrast. Something in her gaze tugs at Gina, like a hook under the skin, and she’s the poor eel that decided to bite. Gorey looks at her, sometimes, like she wants to reach inside her just to see what’s there, and it’s just a matter of deciding where to make the first cut.
Gina would probably let her.
It’s not love, really. Gina doesn’t believe in that sort of thing. Love is something they made up for fairytales, to convince silly girls to marry shithead boys and pop out their shithead babies, to put up with the bruises they leave on their jaws. Love is a word that posh church ladies use to make you feel guilty because some cove you never met loved you so much he died for you, like you ever asked him to do that in the first place. Love is just something pretty actresses sing about in the music halls. It’s not for girls like Gina.
But this isn’t about love, no—this is about want. And the truth is that Gina Lestrade never stopped being a thief; she still knows pretty when she sees it, and she still knows how to take it for herself.
So she does.
Maria Gorey’s lips are soft, warmer than Gina expected, as if she’d somehow be just as cold as the bodies on her table. But she’s not—she’s a living, breathing thing, and she gasps against Gina when Gina’s mouth meets hers, makes some little noise that Gina’s never heard before but wants to hear again. She wants so badly to kiss her again, lick into her pretty mouth, bite her lip—
But she’s not kissing back.
Gina pulls back with a shock. She doesn’t look the other girl in the eye. She doesn’t think she could, even if she wanted to. “Cor, I’m sorry,” she begins to babble, “I shouldn’t’ve—just forget about all this, yeah? I’ll just—I’ll be on me way and—yeah.”
She tries to slip away, scarper like the petty crook she’s always been, but—she can’t. The hand on her neck is still there, holding firm.
She looks up. Maria is looking down at her, lips parted, eyes wide and pretty as anything.
“Do that again,” she says.
“Wot?”
“I liked that,” Maria murmurs. She brings her hand up to cup the line of Gina’s jaw, holding her perfectly still, like she’s trying to replicate that first kiss exactly, down to the tilt of Gina’s chin. “Do it again. Please.”
“Right.” So Gina does.
Gina’s only been kissed a few times in her life, and she doesn’t think Maria’s been kissed at all. It’s clear from the just-off way she tilts her head, how she kisses a little too hard and then a little too soft—she’s experimenting. Gina lets her.
They start slow, easy, just another press of lips to lips. And that—that’s good, so they do it again, and again. They kiss until their jaws begin to slack and there’s enough room between Maria’s parted lips to lick a tentative tongue along the seam of her mouth. That makes her gasp, and she draws Gina’s face nearer, presses her back into the desk, and the edge of it digs into Gina’s backside but Gina hardly notices, because they’re so close, pressed together front-to-front and Gina can feel the heat of Maria’s body through the too-many layers of clothes separating them. She tucks one hand into Maria’s coat, spreads a palm out over the span of her waist—she’s a lithe, wiry thing, Gina is finding, and can’t help but imagine the whole shape of her under her hands—and pulls Maria somehow even closer. Maria slips a bony knee between Gina’s legs, and Gina pulls on Maria’s bottom lip with her teeth. Gina feels the sound she makes all the way down to her toes.
And—Christ almighty. Gina didn’t know it could feel this good.
Their teeth cut against each other then, but that’s alright. It startles something out of Maria that sounds almost like a laugh, and Gina feels that too. She smiles into the kiss, and then another, and another.
They’re brought apart by the sound of a clock striking the half-hour. Gina pulls back, breathless and dazed, hands on Maria’s bony hips. She doesn’t want to let them go.
Maria, cheeks flushed and makeup smudged, is still looking at Gina’s mouth like it’s the most fascinating thing she’s ever seen. She takes one half-trembling hand from where it’s cupping the back of Gina’s head (she can feel stray wisps of hair at her neck, she’ll have to pin it up again) and trails it back down to the crook of her neck, pressing her fingers where the pulse beats strongest. It’s a miracle Gina’s heart hasn’t jumped from her ribcage—she feels the thrum of it with her whole body, all blood and muscle and so much better than some pretty little shape, so much more real. Maria drags a thumb over her pulse point; Gina hopes she feels it.
With her other hand, Maria draws Gina’s fingers up to her own throat, to that same place, and Gina feels it too, the drumbeat of her own heart mirrored in Maria’s body, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. She sees now in Maria what she must have seen in Gina before—her face aflame, breath coming quick, eyes all dark with wanting. Fear, excitement, arousal, she thinks. It’s beautiful.
“I…ought to return to my work now,” Maria says, almost a whisper.
Gina nods. “Me too, prob’ly.”
“We should continue. At a future time. I have many things I’d like to…” she trails off, still dazedly eyeing Gina’s mouth.
“Right. Yeah.” If she ever had any fancy words for Maria, they’re all lost to her now.
Maria extricates her legs from Gina’s, straightens her clothes best she can. With the back of one hand, Gina wipes away the dark paint from Maria’s lips that now must be staining her own. She’s leaned back against the desk, in case her legs give out.
Maria reaches for that tome of a book that at some point seems to have ended up on the desk beside Gina. She turns it in her hands, flips through the pages, and then—holds it out to Gina. “Take this with you. So you can look at the diagrams I told you about. I can answer any questions you have next time we see each other, if you’d like.”
Even now, Gina isn’t much good at reading. This might be the biggest book she’s ever laid eyes on, heavy and leatherbound and thick as her forearm. The title is etched in gilded letters: Anatomy of the Human Body. She sounds the words out under her breath. “Ta,” she says. When she looks up, Maria is smiling at her. “I’ll have a butcher’s later.”
Maria nods and, seemingly satisfied, takes another step back, opening a path to the door. Gina readjusts her hat and tucks the book beneath her coat for safe keeping. It’s heavy and solid against her chest; she can feel her heart beating against it.
“Right then, I’m off,” she says. “Be seein’ ya?”
“Soon,” Maria replies. It sounds like a promise.
Gina falls asleep that night with the book open on her bed, tracing a diagram of a human heart with her forefinger. She wonders at the strange words that surround it, words she’ll have to ask Maria to pronounce. When she dreams, she dreams of hearts beating, loud as drums, alive as anything: ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.