Chapter Text
Three days after she finally RSVPs yes to Yasmin’s wedding (late, so late, late enough to know that she’d been accounted for months prior, a fact that sends a thrill all over her skin; a fact she files into her mental rolodex under ammo), Harper books a hair appointment. She doesn’t interrogate the impulse. It’s just there. Has been for months. A low-voltage burn she’s gotten used to.
Months ago, she’d hung up the phone and bought the two magazines just to tear out those pages and hang Lady Muck alongside the ridiculous caricature of herself on the blank slate of her apartment wall. She’d stared at them, and felt oceans away, worlds away. She’d stared at them and tried to fit the silhouettes of the children who’d once occupied those bodies onto the pages. She still isn’t sure if she should have been disappointed when they slid into place like magnets, inevitable. The chips were always going to fall this way. Her own twenty-two-year-old self blends into the magazine cover as if it were nothing. Yasmin at twenty-two was closer to the clippings than Yas at twenty-three, twenty-four, even twenty-five-
Harper doesn’t have the upbringing to really, truly understand it. She doubts anyone does, except for Yas and the couple hundred other women born to her position in the world. Still, she knows that Yas’ Halloween outfit wasn’t really tongue in cheek. Yas doesn’t do tongue in cheek. She’s terribly literal. She’s terribly simple, really, if you dare to peel back the outer layers of defiance.
And who would it benefit, really, to admit that Yasmin Kara-Hanani was her own personal Iphigenia, her own Isaac, her lamb led to the slaughter? That the engagement could be traced back to the moment Harper had held Yasmin and promised to make it all better, then proceeded to move her supposed best friend about like a chess piece? All for a bit of money. If she were older, more experienced, more male, she’d shout it from the rooftops. But she isn’t. Harper thinks of Bloom. Of his son. Of not learning from history, not bothering to read, not bothering to understand. Truth: admitting this particular form of treason would be tantamount to suicide. Worse truth: Yas admitting her own foolishness would have even graver consequences.
While it burns like salt and acid on a wound, the spoils of war speak for themselves. Yas understood. She understands. She’s taken it upon herself to transform into a harmless doe, has she not? She’s looked down the barrel of the tunnel and said not today, motherfucker.
To anyone who really watches, ease seems to orbit Yasmin, the never-setting sun forever circling her; the happy, unaware planet drifting just at her event horizon, forever barely out of reach. Yas called her a black hole once, which was enough for Harper to know that was exactly how she viewed herself. They’re still twin funhouse mirrors, after all. To someone else, ease and happiness seem to be firmly within Yas’s grasp. To those on the outside, her life’s been picture fucking perfect from the outset. They’ve got no goddamn fucking clue who Charles was. They’ve got no idea how unattainable happiness is.
But Harper knows. Not only because of the thing that seems so apparent, the truth about Charles that sits in her gut but that she will not voice (she knows the cost - there are only so many lines that can be crossed without burning the bridge at its foundations, and Harper covets those lines, knows them better than she knows the ink embedded in her skin, better than the growing lines at the corners of her own eyes, knows them better than the tube map or the growth trend of every tech company listed on the Big Board) but also because she knows that the thing that smarts Yasmin most of all is that she’s just not that good at trading, that falling short of quantifiable fucking perfection is the unacceptable, and goddamn painful.
The wound: Lady Yasmin Muck is exactly the ending Charles (and the rest of the world) had predicted. No one except Harper and Robert and maybe, peripherally Eric, had ever seen just how deep and bloody the tear in Yas’ skin is. But Harper’s far from ready to admit that she’d stood back and watched her own false father play the role of replacement for Charles. She’s even further from admitting she enjoyed watching their house of cards fall apart.
The salt: that simple and undeniable truth, that the desire to bring back her braids had come on the moment she’d heard about Yasmin’s engagement. Upon reading it, she’d felt small. Vulnerable. But only for a flash. She’d allowed herself the loss so briefly that it should barely register - if it weren’t for the fact that it’s the only unbeatable loss she’s known since she was a child. An incalculable risk to both her pride and her career. The risk was, is, will always be, simply too large. It’s unquantifiable: how many millions of pounds could be worth the taste of Yasmin’s neck? What exactly was the share price of the softly gasped Harp as her teeth dragged over Yasmin’s collarbone?
The rub: they both know they’ll never get it. And that’s the game. Upon this particular realisation, Harper had finished a bag and texted her guy for another to distract from the fact that the braids were just another calculated push, just another move in the chess game. She knew the next time Yasmin set eyes on her would decide exactly how they were to proceed in this not-courtship, this doomed fucking thing.
When Harper fucked Robert and came around his cock, she hadn’t seen him. All she’d seen was the memory of half fucking him and half fucking Yasmin, the forgotten third in that little tryst, the look on Robert’s face as he’d realised right there, with Yas looking only at him, hovering over him, but with one hand white-knuckled behind her, clutching Harper’s wrist, that it wasn’t about him, the way he’d still gotten off on it. She’d seen the soft line of Yasmin’s spine, the careful way she held her head in place, perfectly straight and forward-facing, resisting the urge Harper knew was there to turn around and look into her eyes, instead.
All those years ago, she’d tried again and known exactly why he couldn’t get hard. She’d spared him only a half-glance as her hand slipped into her panties on the cold and unforgiving tiles of the bathroom, and known they’d both been thinking of Yasmin then. She’d taken pride in the fact that she’d still managed to get there, and he couldn’t keep up.
To bring it all to its head, its terrible glory: Harper remembers looking up at those pictures and wanting to burn down her entire building. The terrible separation between them was – is – hard won and perfect. Were it not for the fact that she remembers with perfect clarity the sound of Yasmin sighing, the goddamn intentional way Yas had turned away, determined to deny both Harper and herself what is was they’d earned and give it to Robert, to let him hold her as she came, leaving Harper only the taste of sweat on her skin, Harper might be able to leave it be. But Harper’s memory is a steel trap. She remembers it all.
So she gets braids again. And when she looks in the mirror, they’re perfect. Just close enough to serve as a terrible, calculated reminder, just different enough to showcase just how much she’s changed. Close enough to be read as a provocation. Different enough to be read as an apology.
And then, sudden as a car crash, she’s in London. It's presumptuous, of course, to fly in a full two weeks before the wedding for effectively no reason - but there are people to see, secrets to weed out. She’s used up every avenue she can to draw up a rough estimate of both Yasmin and Henry’s appointments leading up to the day of their nuptials. Assistants, clients, client’s assistants, contact’s assistants, assistant’s assistants, they’ve all been squeezed drier than a pile of sad limes.
Sweetpea had seemed appalled that this was what Harper was content using up the single favour she was owed on, but to her credit, she never asked. If she had, Harper’s not sure what she’d have said in reply, and that’s a terrifying fact. Chance and whim are not things Harper Stern ever leaves anything up to. Friends are not things that Harper Stern has. Harper Stern does not waste valuable favours on trying to run into people she could just as easily fucking call.
And yet. She’s walking through the hideous, outright gauche foyer of the fucking Deloitte building, the last place she expects to encounter the soon-to-be-aristocracy, when the elevator opens, and Yasmin steps out.
Harper doesn’t believe in chance. She doesn’t believe in coincidence. She busies herself thinking about that, about the idiot of an associate she’s there to meet who she’s pretty sure has taken her cordiality to be flirtation, whose only use is that he might slip up and mention something useful about someone else, hopefully one of the banks, so that she doesn’t become aware of the frantic itch that is working its way across her skin. She keeps moving forwards. Her chin doesn’t move: still lifted just high enough to project her belonging, her importance. Still just high enough that her gaze is fixed perfectly at Yasmin’s eye level.
Neither of them will cede ground here. They march towards and past one another without a word. Harper forces her eyes to slide carelessly over Yasmin’s face without blinking. Yasmin blinks just once, slow and lazy, and she looks at Harper as if she were a light fixing, a tasteless sofa adorning the tasteless foyer. As she passes, Harper can smell the saffron, dark rose, and truffle of Tom Ford Noir Extreme. Harper enters the elevator and presses the button a second too quickly, not quite trusting herself not to do something stupid, like prostrate herself on the floor of that ugly fucking lobby in front of the unimportant, badly dressed sheep parading as people, and beg forgiveness. The elevator doors close so slowly it’s painful. Yasmin doesn’t even glance backwards as she passes through the revolving door and out to the street.
Seven minutes later, five minutes into the associate whose name she’s already forgotten’s presentation-slash-self-pitch that he clearly thinks is some kind of job interview, Harper realises belatedly that Noir Extreme is an absurd perfume to wear to any kind of meeting, let alone one with some idiot from a goddamn consultancy-slash-accounting firm. It dawns on her that it would have been far easier and far less expensive for Yasmin to get her hands on Harper’s itinerary than it had been for Harper. She’s got more access here in London, not only thanks to Henry but also thanks to the lingering pity for Pierpoint’s wrung out and discarded traders. It’s the first time in over a year that Harper’s been blindsided quite like this. It should piss her off, but it doesn’t: partly because there’s nothing to blame but her own idiotic myopia, but mostly because it’s Yas. She’s got her spine back. She’s stepped up to the plate to swing.
Yasmin planned the entire thing, right down to the goddamn perfume she put on. The backless shirt she was wearing was for Harper’s benefit. And there, in that shitty conference room, Harper can’t fight off the smile that worms its way onto her face: the slight swing in Yasmin’s hips as she crossed the lobby in seventeen seconds exactly had been for Harper’s benefit, too.