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“Nile, habibti, can you come in here for a minute?”
Nile pauses in the hallway, one hand on the light switch outside the bathroom. They’re in Belgium, a village so small that it’s barely on any of the maps, scarcely more than a dusty intersection and an even dustier bar. The house they’re staying in has clearly been renovated fairly recently, the rooms bright and impersonally clean, but the light switches are never where Nile expects them to be: too high, too low, the wrong shape, on the wrong side of the door. She keeps leaving the bathroom lights on by accident, the tiny exhaust fan humming irritably until somebody else notices and switches it off.
“What do you need?”
“Divine intervention?” There’s a muffled sound of flesh on flesh and Nicky yelps. “Or possibly a rescue operation, it seems?”
“Joe?”
“Just a spare hand, if you don’t mind.”
“Yeah, sure.” She slaps the light switch until it clicks off, crossing the hall and pushing the door open the rest of the way.
The room is dark, the shutters pulled, and at first Nile can’t quite make sense of what she’s seeing. It’s Joe and Nicky, of course, sitting on the bed—well. Nile stops, tilts her head, blinks. Nicky is sitting, arguably, leaning back on an actual mountain of pillows. Joe is sprawled on the bed, between Nicky’s spread legs, and he’s—he’s got—his hand is—
“Um, sorry,” Nile says, blinking her gaze away from where their bodies intersect, the elegant curve of Joe’s wrist disappearing into Nicky’s body. “You said you wanted a hand, but, uh—”
“I—oh, no, no.” Joe shakes his head, his face creasing in a smile, his teeth gleaming in the dim light of the room. “No, it’s just—if you could—”
“He knocked his fucking phone under the dresser,” Nicky says, rolling his eyes. “He always uses too much lube, it’s—oh—” He breaks off with a shudder, biting at his lip, his whole body curving in a reaction to some unseen movement of Joe’s hand.
Joe’s hand, which is inside Nicky’s body. Up his ass, specifically. Nile’s not trying to look, but her eyes keep catching on the angle of Nicky’s hips, the gleam of wet skin.
Lube, she thinks, the thought slipping into her consciousness before she can escape it. Nicky’s right, it’s everywhere: Nicky’s thighs, Joe’s forearm, the sheets. Probably a good idea, really, even if neither of them exactly have to worry about injury.
“Anyway.” Joe’s voice is cheerful and level. “I can’t reach it from here, but if you could just—” He tilts his head towards the corner.
“Oh, of course,” Nile says, politeness taking over and sending her over to crouch next to the dresser. “I’m not sure—” but there it is, all the way back by the wall: Joe’s phone. “Must have slid,” she says, shifting her weight down onto knees and elbows so that she can reach back.
“Well, old houses,” Nicky says, the shrug evident even without turning to look at him. “There’s always something.” He laughs, low and conspiratorial. “Remember that place in—fuck, was it Prague? The place with the windows that never shut right?”
“No, not Prague.” Joe hums thoughtfully, then clicks his tongue in satisfaction. “Ostrava, I think. Over the—”
“The bakery, yes,” Nicky says. “With the kolaches.” He groans, low and broken. Knowing Nicky, it might just be a reaction to the pastries—but then again, it might not. Nile blinks until her eyes clear, stretching until she can snag the phone with her fingertips, knocking it out from the corner.
“Got it.” She pushes herself to her feet slowly, wiping the dust bunnies off her hands and the phone.
“Thank you!” When she turns around, Joe’s grinning at her, easy and comfortable. “You can put it on the nightstand, that’s—”
“Oh, I see how it is.” Nicky rolls his eyes extravagantly. “‘Just leave it there, Nile,’ he says, like he thinks I’m going to forget what we were talking about.” His voice is even, but his hips shift gently, rocking down against Joe’s hand in a lazy rhythm. “I’m on to your schemes, my love.”
“I’m not scheming,” Joe says, shaking his head. “I just thought that maybe this discussion could wait until—”
“Until you could get online and hack the Wikipedia? No.” Nicky rolls his head to the side until he can meet Nile’s eyes. “Nile, right now, I need you to look up which Pope destroyed Palestrina.”
“I…” Nile blinks. “Okay?”
“I’m telling you,” Joe says, his voice longsuffering, “it was one of the Benedicts.” He makes a face. “Eleven, I think. Maybe twelve?”
“Which one of us was a priest? It was Clement the Fifth.” Nicky shakes his head. “Nile, tell him.”
“Hang on, just a second.” She pulls up a browser and types which pope destroyed palestrina. “Huh.” She takes a moment to click the first link and skim through the article, just to be sure, but— “You’re both wrong, actually.”
“What?”
“Give me that!”
She holds the phone out of their reach, reading aloud. “‘Palestrina was razed to the ground, the plough driven through, and salt strewn over its ruins under the rule of Boniface VIII.’”
“Bonifaccio, shit, you’re right.” Nicky groans, dropping his head back against the pillows. “That fish-faced motherfucker.” He frowns. “Didn’t Dante put him in the Comedìa?”
“Can we focus on more important things?” Joe rests a hand on Nicky’s knee, shaking it gently back at forth. “Like how wrong you were?”
“Oh, excuse me, Mr. ‘One of the Benedicts’,” Nicky retorts. “At least I had a number.”
“Listen, it’s not my fault that they keep stealing each others’ names—”
“Do you need anything else?” The words come out too loud, too heavy, a rough interruption to the gentle back-and-forth of their bickering. “Just, I should probably, uh—” She tilts her head towards the door, her eyes flickering restlessly over the muscle of Nicky’s thigh, the comfortable curve of Joe’s free hand against his skin. “I should go, I mean.”
“Nile—”
“Shh, it’s okay,” Joe says, soothing his fingers over the bones of Nicky’s knee. “Thank you Nile, we’re fine now.”
“Great,” Nile says, her mouth on autopilot. “Great, I’m just going to, uh. I mean. Yeah.”
She catches her shoulder on the doorframe as she leaves, but it’s no big deal. The house is old, like Nicky said, and the bruises will heal quickly.
***
That’s not the first time, though, even if it’s the first time Nile really has the chance to think about it.
The first first time is back at the safehouse Andy takes her to, outside of Paris, before things go from ‘bad’ to ‘really unbelievably bad’. After dinner, Nicky leads her through a set of heavy doors to a makeshift bunk room, folding cots butting up against elaborately carved wooden pews.
“The choir,” Nicky says, catching her gaze. “Or it was, before; the church isn’t consecrated any more, so now it’s just—” He spreads his hands. “A room, I guess.”
“Why, though?” Nile tips her head back, tracing the elegant lines of stone as they rise into the darkness. “Why was it abandoned?”
“No parishioners.” Nicky shrugs. “There was a plane crash, a few years ago; most people left after that.”
“By ‘a few years ago’, he means ’73,” Booker says, ducking in the door. “Blankets,” he adds, holding a folded bundle out to Nicky.
“Like I said.” Nicky nods in agreement. “That, plus the noise from the airport—the town’s been abandoned since then.” He takes the blanket from Booker’s hands and snaps it open, spreading it over one of the neatly-made beds and gesturing Nile towards it. “The church sends people out to check up on the place sometimes, but we take care of them.”
“Take care of them?” Nile blinks, her stomach curdling. “You mean you kill them?”
“I—no, of course not!” Nicky’s look of shock seems genuine, as does Booker’s laugh. “No, we pay them off, mostly.”
“They think we’re drug runners,” Booker says, shrugging. He drops onto the cot next to Nile’s, folding his hands behind his head. “But they leave us alone, so, whatever.” He cracks one eye open, looking up at Nicky. “Joe’s talking to Andy.”
Nicky nods. “He wanted to try and—” He breaks off, glancing at Nile. “It can wait for tomorrow,” he said. “For now, we should get some rest.” He tilts his head towards the bed, his eyebrows lifting expectantly. “Just because we don’t die, doesn’t mean we don’t get tired.” Nile settles slowly onto the bed and he nods.
It feels impossible to sleep, but Nile closes her eyes, and when she opens them again the room is dark, lit only by a thin shard of light from the other room. For a moment, she’s back in the tent, back with her squad; then she blinks and the world reorients itself around her. This is Paris, not Afghanistan, Booker’s snores softer than Dizzy’s. And that sound from the corner, that’s—
Nile’s not an innocent, is the thing. There’s not a lot of privacy in the Marines, and everybody knew who was slipping into whose cot for a little stress relief. Nile’s felt it herself, a time or two, the way that adrenaline shimmers on the edge of arousal, nerves singing, muscles tensed and ready for action: fight or flight sublimated into a third option.
Back in Afghanistan, Nile would have rolled over, turned up the volume on her headphones, and pretended to ignore it, just like everybody else.
Andy has her phone, though, and her headphones are who knows where, so instead Nile just stays where she is, blinking up into the darkness, rough gasps and murmured words filling up her ears.
It’s not like it’s a surprise, really. Nicky called Joe the love of his life during dinner, matter-of-fact, a fact as obvious and indisputable as his name. Nile, her whole body still thrumming with the need to understand, noted the fact, slotted into her quickly-growing mental map of this—team?—and moved on to more pressing matters.
It comes back to her now, though: the quiet ferocity of Nicky’s face, when he looked at Joe, full of an emotion that feels so much broader and deeper than words can describe. The answering gleam in Joe’s eyes, warm and affectionate even as he described the two of them killing each other more than once.
It’s the memory of that look, not the sounds behind her, that makes Nile’s ears flush in the half-dark of the church. She thinks of that flicker of humor, that deep well of devotion, and wonders: how much love does it take, how much history, to turn murder into a topic for gentle teasing?
The sounds don’t stop, and she doesn’t stop wondering, but eventually she falls back asleep anyways.
***
Nile dreams of Quynh, hurtles her way into consciousness gasping and choking, drowning on dry land. They explain, but it’s all so much, too much, and she stumbles outside for air, pacing restlessly between the overgrown graves.
“Me and those three men in there, we’ll keep you safe.” Andy’s voice is the kind of careful calm that Nile recognizes from de-escalation trainings. Use nonthreatening nonverbals, Nile thinks, a poorly-designed powerpoint flickering across her memory. Be empathetic and non-judgemental.
Yeah fucking right.
“Like Quynh?” she asks, acid dripping from her words. Andy swallows, her gaze dropping away for a split second, acknowledging the hit, and it doesn’t feel right but it feels good, making her hurt, like the fight on the plane, like picking at a scab.
“We’re all you’ve got,” Andy says, meeting Nile’s gaze, and then it’s Nile’s turn to wince.
They both crouch when they hear the gunshots, training honed into the instinctive edge of muscle memory, and it’s horrible, but at least it’s not this fucking conversation.
It’s a goddamn SWAT team, because of course it is. Joe and Andy get kidnapped and Andy murders like, a ton of dudes, and there’s Copley and Booker and Merrick and really just an astonishing amount of bullshit. Nile barely has the time to think about the choices she’s making, much less decide how she feels about hearing her teammates fuck.
Belgium is pretty unmistakable, though. Even when Nile tries not to think about it, to focus on her book or her breathing or the viciously multilingual game of Scrabble that’s taken over the kitchen—even then, bits and pieces intrude. The spare curve of Joe’s spine, curling forward between Nicky’s spread thighs; the familiar grace of their bodies together; the mindless, unselfconscious hitch of Nicky’s hips whenever Joe does—something.
It’s none of Nile’s business, obviously, but it sticks with her, a mental hangnail, a thought she can’t help picking at. There’s more, too once she starts letting herself think about it:
—Joe emerging from the back room in response to Andy’s shout, tugging his sweatpants up around his hips as he goes; Nicky following half a minute later, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand—
—A sudden silence over the comms, in Cairo, followed by a low, aching noise and Nicky’s chuckle—
—Nicky’s insistence that Joe needed to come with him to stake out the office complex in São Paulo, and Joe’s bizarre lack of complaint—
—that stain on the couch in Istanbul—
—The two of them curled together in the backseat of a battered Hyundai somewhere outside of Nanjing, Joe curled into Nicky’s chest, Nicky’s lips moving gently against Joe’s forehead and his hand moving gently in Joe’s lap—
—Joe, sprawled across a deck chair in Monaco, tugging his shirt up to prod at a lingering bruise over his hip, dark and vivid; Nicky leaning against the balcony, mouth curled in a smirk—
It’s everything and it’s nothing, a hundred significant pauses and lingering glances, things that don’t mean anything in particular until you start to fit the edges together.
***
They’re in Yaoundé when Nile finally broaches it, holed up in a rental apartment while Copley tries to get them access to the tech genius he wants them to protect. The apartment is small but well-kept, with a lovely courtyard, all brick tile and luxuriant greenery around a gleaming blue swimming pool.
“September’s the rainy season, huh?” Nile leans against the doorframe and stares out at the courtyard, tapping her fingers idly against her thigh.
“Mm.” Andy is sprawled across the couch, stripped down to a sports bra and a tiny pair of shorts, fanning herself lazily with a takeout menu. “Spring and fall.”
“Shame.” The rain is almost loud enough to drown out the noises coming from the second bedroom: grunts and groans, muffled gasps, quiet laughter.
Almost loud enough, but not quite.
Nile pushes off the wall and drops into an armchair, hooking her knees over the side. The pleather squeaks against her skin, sticky and awkward; she grimaces, and Andy doesn’t try to hide her smile.
“Oh, oh.” Suddenly, Nicky’s voice is crystal clear, echoing against the tile floors in 3-D surround sound. “Joe, tesoro, fuck, yes, yes—” The rest of the sentence is beyond Nile’s grasp of Italian, but the gist is pretty unmistakable.
“So they, uh.” Andy cocks her head to the side without moving the rest of her body, conserving energy; Nile swallows. “They do that a lot.”
“They do.” Andy’s eyes are dark and unreadable, her face pillowed on the back of one hand as she watches Nile. After a long moment, she raises a single eyebrow, like, go on?
“They aren’t—I mean.” Nile chews on her lip. “They don’t really try to hide it.”
“No,” Andy agrees. “Should they?”
“I—” There’s no judgement in Andy’s level stare, but Nile sighs anyways, tipping her head back. “No?” Andy doesn’t react, just keeps watching her, implacably non-judgemental in a way that gets right under Nile’s skin. “Fuck, I don’t know, it’s just—” She rolls her head against the back of the chair, groaning quietly. “I don’t know.”
“If it bothers you,” Andy says slowly. “The two of them, I mean—two men—”
“If it bothers me?” The laugh goes through Nile like a lightning bolt, immediate and irresistible, leaves her feeling scoured clean in its wake.
“No?”
“Fuck no.” Nile shakes her head, squeezing out a last lingering chuckle at the idea. “I—no.” She toys with the idea of explaining, laying out her queer bona fides under Andy’s unflinching stare, but shrugs instead. “Definitely not, trust me.”
“Good.” Andy pushes herself up, swinging her knees around and hugging them close. “Because I wouldn’t have a problem with killing you until you got done being an idiot, but it would probably make a mess.” She wrinkles her nose. “And a lot of noise.”
“Well.” Nile rolls her eyes, tilting her head towards the second bedroom. “We certainly can’t have that.”
Andy doesn’t laugh, but her eyes dance and she flutters her makeshift fan in Nile’s direction in a sloppy salute. The moment stretches out, quiet but not silent, rain pattering on the tile in a steady counterpoint to the rise and fall of voices from the other side of the wall.
“It’s just—” Nile shrugs. “I don’t know, I guess I’m just not used to people being that open about it,” she says. “Anybody, I mean.”
“And by ‘it’, you mean...sex.” Nile drags her thumbnail along the stitching of the chair and nods, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Oh,” Andy says, her tone one of sudden understanding. “Oh, I get it.”
“You do?” Nile can’t keep the disbelief out of her voice, doesn’t try: tilts her chin up and quirks an eyebrow at Andy. “You gonna share with the class?”
“No, it’s just—” Andy chuckles, shaking her head. “You’re so young.”
“Okay, listen—”
Andy has a hand out before Nile can wrap words around her outrage, apologetic, placating. “Not you personally, I mean, just—” She shakes her head, rueful and affectionate. “Americans.”
“Excuse me?”
“No, you’re right, that’s not fair.” Andy shifts into a marginally more vertical position, grimacing as her skin sticks to the couch. “Europe’s almost as bad, these days.” She wrinkles her nose. “I blame Calvin, personally.” She pauses, then adds, “the philosopher, not the cartoon character.”
“Okay,” Nile says. “This is me, not engaging with the part where you probably actually met John Calvin and gave him a swirly.” Andy opens her mouth and Nile shakes her head. “Or whatever the pre-indoor plumbing equivalent was; please don’t tell me.” Andy shrugs, and Nile narrows her eyes. “You’re not going to argue?”
“Joe tells the story better.” Andy tilts her head. “Anyway, all I was saying is that it doesn’t have to be so—” She makes a face. “So separate.”
“How so?” A thought occurs to her, and Nile startles, blinking at Andy. “You don’t mean that you—with them—”
“No.” A reassuringly unambiguous response, which Andy promptly spoils by shrugging and adding, “not the way you’re thinking about it, at least.”
Nile raises an eyebrow. “And how am I thinking about it, exactly?”
“Like it’s all or nothing,” Andy says. “Like you’re either having sex with someone or you aren’t.”
“Um.” Nile trails, off, staring.
Andy sighs explosively, sagging back into the couch cushions with a muffled squeak. “Fuck, I knew I should have made Nicky do it this time.”
Neither of them say Booker’s name, but it lingers in the air anyways, the silent soreness that they’re all still learning to live with. Nile swallows hard, working her jaw like she can pop her ears, equalizing that phantom pressure, and they sit in silence for a while.
“It’s like your elbow,” Andy says, eventually.
Nile twists in her seat, looking dubiously down the line of her upper arm. “...Yeah, I’m gonna need a little more than that.”
Andy taps her fingers against her knee. “It’s not part of your sex life,” she says, “but when you have sex, it’s still there, you know? It’s still a part of you.” Her mouth quirks in a sudden smile, weathered and tired and beautiful for all that. “It’s a good thing,” she continues, quiet. “Means they trust you.”
Nile turns the thought over in her mind, considering it. “Because I’m the elbow.”
“For now.” Andy shrugs. “Maybe you’ll meet someone, and then they’ll be the elbow.” She tips her head backward, gesturing towards the bedroom, and snickers. “Elbows, I guess.”
“Huh,” Nile says. “I—yeah, okay.” She meets Andy’s eyes, feeling somehow steadier, and nods. “I can see it.”
***
It’s not as easy as that, of course; a lifetime of habit and culture can’t be overwritten with just one conversation. Nile still flushes sometimes at the noises coming from the next bedroom, still has a hard time carrying on a coherent conversation when she knows exactly where Nicky’s hands are.
But so what, really? So she blushes, sometimes, or forgets what she was saying and trails off into flustered silence. Nicky smiles, sweet and apologetic, and waits for her to gather her scattered thoughts; Joe laughs, but always with Nile, never at her, his smile an invitation to the joke.
Andy shakes her head and grumbles about the foolishness of the young, but her eyes are warm even as she rolls them extravagantly.
It’s a little awkward, maybe, but that’s okay. There are worse things than being a little awkward.
Time passes. They travel together for a few years, then apart, then together again, looping around the planet and each other in shaky, irregular orbits. Nile goes places she never dreamed she’d see in real life: Machu Picchu, the Forbidden City, Santorini, Antarctica. She sneaks into the Vatican with Joe, the two of them cackling up their sleeves as Nicky grumbles at them over the comms; twenty years later, she wanders through Chicago with Andy, playing tourist, pointing out all the things that have changed and all of the things that haven’t.
It hurts, sometimes, but Andy’s hand is warm in hers, reducing the pain to a quiet ache: a flower pressed between the pages of a beloved book, rediscovered after years of forgetting and all the sweeter for the wait.
***
“Oh,” Andy gasps, her hands tight on the headboard. “Oh, Nile, fuck, fuck—” She drops her head back to the pillow, panting. Her hair is falling out of its braid—she wears it long, these days—and sweat plasters it to the side of her face.
(There’s a gray streak in it, now, too. Andy complains about it making her more conspicuous, but she also refuses to dye it, probably because she knows that it’s fucking hot. Andromache the Scythian is many things, but she has never been anything less than excruciatingly aware of her own attractiveness.)
“Sorry,” Nile says, widening her eyes performatively. “Did you want something?” She slides her thumb over Andy’s clit in slow, slick circles, just enough friction to tease but not enough to satisfy. Andy narrows her eyes and frowns, biting her lip and tightening against Nile’s fingers.
“Brat.” Andy’s hips twitch and Nile pushes them back, tapping her fingers against the arch of Andy’s hipbone in warning.
“Behave,” she says. “Or I’ll leave you here.” It’s an empty threat and they both know it, but Andy shivers even as she bares her teeth, rising to the challenge.
“Or,” she says, her eyes gleaming, “you could come up here and—”
“Nile, sweetheart, could I trouble you for some lube?” Nicky tumbles in through the open doorway, careening to a rest against the rickety dresser in the corner. “I swear I bought some when we got here, but I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Sure.” Nile nods towards her nightstand. “Second drawer.”
“Grazie mille.” Nicky digs through the drawer for a moment before pulling back with a quiet hah of satisfaction and a familiar pump bottle. “Ah, you stopped at the same place we did?”
“Uh, maybe?” Nile squints at the bottle, then shakes her head. “No, not me.” Her last bottle of lube is probably in the lost and found in some Warsaw train depot, along with her second best knife and her favorite scarf. “Andy?”
“Uh—” Andy blinks her eyes open. “Show me?”
“From that shop down the block, right?” Nicky holds out the bottle for her inspection. “With the clerk who’s always reading those true crime books?”
“Yeah.” Andy shifts her weight, grinding down onto Nile’s fingers, a whine caught in the back of her throat. “I guess so?” Her voice is low and rough and the curve of her spine is very distracting, especially when she rolls her hips down and says, “Nile, please—”
“You stole it from their room, didn’t you?” Nile glances over at Nicky and shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Enh.” Nicky shrugs. “At least she didn’t use it all this time.”
“Oh, for—” The roll of Andy’s eyes is all exasperation. “That was in 1986! And it was gun oil!”
“Gun oil’s no good,” Joe says, appearing over Nicky’s shoulder. “Nicky, if they don’t have lube, I’d rather use olive oil.”
“Oh, they have lube,” Nicky says. “Our lube, to be specific.”
“From Mónica’s shop?” Joe nods approvingly. “She’s a sweet lady.”
“No, no.” Nicky shakes his head. “Our lube, Joe. From our room.”
“Oh!” Joe takes the bottle from Nicky’s accusing fingers, tips it from side to side with an evaluating frown. “Well, as long as they didn’t use it all, like that time with my beard oil.”
Nicky frowns. “It wasn’t your beard oil, it was my gun oil.”
“Nicky, don’t be ridiculous,” Joe says. “Gun oil is terrible for sex, why on earth would Andy have taken your gun oil?”
“She didn’t take it for sex, she took it for her gun!”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I—of course I’m sure,” Nicky snaps, throwing up his hands. “It was my gun!”
“Oh, well, if you’re sure,” Joe drawls, and then they’re off to the races, falling into the back-and-forth bickering that’s kept Nile awake through endless stakeouts, long car drives, and more than one field surgery.
“You okay?” She looks down at Andy, still sprawled across the bed.
“Oh, you know, just—” Andy’s words trail off, her attempt at lazy unconcern is obliterated with a strategic flutter of Nile’s fingers. Nile smirks in triumph, then cracks an actual grin as a memory rises to the surface of her mind, churned up by this creaky house, the rise and fall of a familiar argument.
“Hey, Andy,” she says. “Who’s the elbow now?”’ Andy frowns, wrongfooted, and Nile tips her head towards Joe and Andy, who seem to have moved on from The Great Lube Debacle of ’86 to an incident involving several Swiss Guards and a miniature Schnauzer. “Remember?”
Nile’s seen a lot of things, but this—Andy’s face, creased with genuine laughter, open and helpless and delighted—
—it never gets old.