The Art of Broken Pieces

Moon Porg Equilibrium

Rey woke to a body that felt wrung out, and a head that pounded like a stampeding hapabore. The tines of a brush made their way across her scalp, and something like a warm wet cloth was wiping at her face. She groaned, waving away the beauty droid's ministrations, and sat up. A drip of some thick cream slid from her face and landed on her naked thigh. Rey snatched the wet cloth and wiped the rest of the gunk clumsily from her face.

There were a few more minutes of blissfully hungover misery before memory slid back into place. She'd been at dinner. Then she'd been hugging Ben outside. Then...blast, she'd been in Ben's lap, pawing at him, mewling like a kitten, desperate for him to touch her. No, not just touch her. She'd wanted him to fuck her senseless. Thank every god she'd been too helplessly incoherent to tell him so, though there was no way he hadn't figured it out.

Humiliation descended over her like a nauseating blanket. She pressed her hands to her face, then drew them away—they smelled like sex, musky and intoxicating. An image slammed into her mind, Poe's head between her legs, his near-black eyes sparkling as he looked up at her and smirked, then went right back to ruining her with his tongue. But the Poe in her head changed to Ben, and she'd touched herself, again and again, riding the high of the drug as she imagined him wrecking her with his tongue and his hands. She'd fallen asleep exhausted and unsatisfied, her body clenching around nothing as she sobbed helplessly into her pillow.

Never again. She was never eating anything on this stupid planet that Ben didn't try first. She was never drinking again.

And how the hell was she supposed to look Ben in the face when she'd spent half the night sweating into her sheets, imagining his tongue inside her?

For once, she let RD do what it wanted. Rey stewed in her private misery, drinking the tonics and submitting to the facial toners and neck massages and eye creams and hand scrubs without complaint. It felt almost nice, and she could see why someone with nothing better to do with their time might submit to this sort of pampering daily. If she hadn't been so assiduously putting off seeing Ben, she probably wouldn't have let it go on so long.

RD chose her beloved black silk pants and a red shirt comprised of several bands of stretchy fabric that offered slashes of visible skin here and there around Rey's torso. She stared at it, wondering if she actually looked elegant in it, or if her mind was simply warped by the shocking display from the night before.

She slipped on her short black boots with the slight heel, and let RD work her hair back into a pair of combs. She didn't realize anything odd was happening until a sudden, pinching pain shot through her left earlobe.

Rey leapt from the side of the bed with a yelp, snatched up the vanity stool, and backed toward the door.

"What in hells, Ardee?" She shouted, reaching back behind her for the door as the droid held up a sparkling black earring. Rey recognized it as part of the set Ben had purchased on that first disastrous shopping venture. She reached up, and felt its twin embedded in her ear.

"No," she said. "I don't want..." RD advanced. Rey reached for the door and backed out of it, stumbling over a runner carpet. "Get away from me!"

The sudden commotion on the other side of Rey's door made Ben look up sharply from where he had been settled comfortably on the couch with a hot cup of dark kava. He had spent the morning digging up as much information as possible on Chamberlain Octavius, the host of the gala and--hopefully--the target they had been looking for.

The door slammed open and Rey backed out, one hand clamped to the side of her head as she tripped and almost fell.

"What the hell is going on?" Ben snapped irritably, trying to figure out the scene before him.