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.
"She won't hold still!" RD stated amiably, still pursuing her target with single minded focus.
Rey swung the stool at RD. "She won't listen to me! Tell her to back off, I don't need—" another swing "—holes in my ears!" Rey skipped backwards a few steps, drawing RD out into the open. With a quick move, she tossed the stool in the droid's direction, then ducked around behind it, snatching at the back of it's neck. She froze, hand on the deactivation button. "Don't make me do this, RD. I'll dismantle you into a thousand pieces and throw your processor into the canal before—OW!"
The droid struck, perfectly, with the second earring. Rey slapped the deactivation button, furious.
Ben smirked, uncoiling his long legs from the couch and standing. "Better to have both than just one." He shrugged. "Then you'd just be lopsided."
Looking at the slumped droid, he sighed. "What's done is done, Rey. You can turn her back on."
It was easier to talk about the droid and her antics than whatever had gone on the night before. Maybe Rey was lucky enough not to remember... the drugs and alcohol had hit her pretty hard. Hard enough that Ben was certainly having difficulty not thinking about the way her body had felt against him, especially as the shirt the droid had put her in did absolutely nothing to hide that body. Clearing his throat, he moved towards the villa's kitchenette to get her a mug. She probably had one hell of a headache.
"She's staying off until I need her," she said. Swallowing, she watched through the wisps of hair falling around her face as Ben made his way into the kitchen and back with a fresh mug.
She couldn't look at him. Even as he handed the mug to her, and their fingers brushed on the hot ceramic. Fingers she'd imagined on her last night, in her. She squeezed her eyes shut to shove the image away. The air between them felt charged, as if any wrong move or word might crack the air with lightning. He was still standing there, just an arm's length away.
His gloves were off, at least, displaying the bruises on the backs of his hands.
"I meant to work on your hands last night," she said. Then, realizing that statement could be taken the wrong way, rushed to continue. "There's a med kit in the kitchen. Go sit down. Fill me in on what actually happened with the contact last night. You've got scheming face this morning."
She ducked into the kitchen and snagged the med kit, then met him at the small bistro table at the little nook next to one of the villa's many balconies. The doors were open, a sweet-smelling breeze wafting in from some nearby plum orchard. She took a deep sip of khav, letting the scent and warmth of it ground her. Her headache started to abate at last, and she reached across the table for one of Ben's hands.
He extended it to her, the awkward tension in the air almost visible. Her fingers were warm as they carefully held his hand, reminding him of more desperate touches.
Re-ordering his thoughts, he focused on the discomfort as he filled her in on the message he had received the night before.
"We'll want to get in contact with this man directly, from the research I've done my guess is he is one of the major players on world. He'll be the one with direct First Order connections."
Rey listened, processing the information as she went through the steps read out on the data pad's analysis of Ben's injuries.
"What's a masquerade?" She asked, sliding the minuscule needle in through his skin. It was a careful thing, and she let her senses expand, guiding it into place half with the screen schematic, half with the Force. When it reached the cracked bone, she depressed the button, which released the cells and nanites to begin the fast-construction of a matrix between the cracked bone.
When she withdrew the needle, part of her wanted to keep hold, to stroke his skin with her fingers and soothe the wounds now shuddering in her senses.
Bracing himself against the pain, Ben watched her work. "Ah... it's a fancy dance. Everyone wears ridiculous dresses and full masks so that no one knows who they are. In theory, at any rate." He glanced up at her. "That means shopping again..."
It was hard not to take her hand as she let his go, to reassure her. Embarrassment and anxiety still bled off of her, clearly she remembered.
He extended his other hand to her, letting her repeat the process slowly. As she finished he gave up, lacing his fingers through hers and holding her in place.
"Rey, stop worrying." He tried to get her to look at him. "The effects of Aurelian Liqueur are powerful, they would affect anyone."
She stared down at their clasped hands, humiliation rolling up her back. She couldn't look up, didn't want to see his face as he reassured her.
"I was horrible," she whispered. "After everything we talked about, and... I had no control. None. I should have been more careful. Not only did I not help at all with making the contact, the way I reacted to the liqueur was..." she shook her head. "I'm not sure how I would have reacted this morning if you hadn't pushed me away. I could have done a lot of damage. To both of us."
She took a deep breath and blew it out, wishing RD hadn't put her hair back yet, so she could hide behind it. "You said to give you time. I need time too. But that stuff—it erases everything around you, and you can't think about anything except what you're feeling, and even then, no matter what happens, all you want is more. I thought I was going insane before I finally managed to fall asleep."
"It's done." Ben said calmly, knowing that too much attention to on the subject would only make her more uncomfortable. "Whatever could have happened didn't, and one way or another we did make the contact we needed." He squeezed her hand lightly with stiff fingers before letting her go and standing slowly.
"Now we have preparations to make, the gala is tomorrow evening. How are the repairs coming on the Betrayal?"
Glad for the change in subject, Rey stood as well. A hand went to her still-smarting ear lobes. "A body paneling expert will have to come in to fix any of the visual damage, but she'll fly right. I don't really have much left to do."
She fell into step with him. "What sort of preparations?"
He glanced at her sideways, relieved to feel her tensions slowly fading. The memory of the night before still lingered uncomfortably, but it was something they could move past.
"More shopping, I'm afraid." He poked the button on RD as they moved past, and the droid came to life mid-sentence, then looked around in droidish confusion.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Ben turned to face Rey, delivering the news he knew she wasn't going to like. "We need to get our host alone, have a... private... conversation. You're the bait."
Rey stared up at him just long enough to confirm he was serious. Then, her composure crumbled.
A squeak of laughter wheezed from her, followed by a bubbling continuation that caused RD to flit helplessly around her doubled-over mistress, squawking about mascara.
Rey couldn't help it—all the bumbling, blushing, and deferring she'd done while playing the role of Sana, and Ben thought she could muster the aplomb to suddenly pose as bait? That was a role played by women with more deft lying capabilities, women who knew how to wield a flick of the eyelash as well as a blaster. Women who could hold their liquor and their objective at the same time.
Rey was none of those things. She was straightforward and honest and terrible at pretending to be anything else.
She braced herself on RD's metallic shoulder as the droid produced a handkerchief and blotted at her mistress's face.
Ben frowned at her, taken aback by her reaction. It was not the one he had expected.
"I've been researching his habits, we can make some assumptions about his tastes based on the purchases he has made recently. One of the information brokers I've paid rather well informs me he has a bit of a... weakness for otherwise engaged women." Ben cleared his throat.
Sniffing, Rey forced herself back to a semblance of sobriety. "I hope he has a weakness for women who've got no idea how to behave in high society, because that's the only way he'll look twice at me," she said, then chuckled again. "I'm a horrible choice for bait."
Ben blinked at her, realizing just how oblivious she was. He sighed, holding back amusement as he tried again, much more bluntly.
"He likes married women, Rey. He likes to steal them from their husbands to prove he can. He'll probably see your... inexperience as making you an even easier target."
Rey's eyebrows lifted. "He...ah. Like that Twilek girl at the shop?" She nodded. "But there will be lots of married women there, right? How am I going to make sure he chooses me instead of the others? I don't exactly have..." What did Finn call them? "Feminine wiles."
"That's where the shopping comes in." Ben smirked, picking up the data pad he had working at all morning. "Based on the kinds of gifts he buys for his paramours, I have some idea of his tastes. We make sure you fit them. Then, once we're there, you'll make conversation. He won't be able to resist your naivety. We'll know which he is by the welcome toast he'll be performing to greet his guests. You can ask him to dance."
"I can't ask him to dance!" Rey said, reaching for the front door. "I don't know how."
She stepped onto the front landing and descended toward the approaching speeder. "Maybe there's something else I can ask him to do? Like...explain a piece of art or something. Men seem to love explaining things."
Opening the door for her, Ben shook his head. "It's a dance, Rey. Dancing is what is done." Moving around the speeder he settled into his own seat, directing the nav console towards the most elite shopping district. It was time to take advantage of the token Madam Concierge had gifted them with at their first meeting.
"Just let him lead and try not to fall over. Your efforts will be endearing."
"Better make sure whatever unholy footwear I'm in doesn't have sharp heels," she said. "Unless your plan is for me to spike him to the dance floor to keep him from running away."
The mental image that accompanied her words wasn't entirely unpleasant. Ben already hated their target, his extravagant tastes and back room deals. He had taken up residence on Aurelia nearly ten years prior, and since then had established himself as a rather well-known art collector and contributor. He was known for his commitment to both governmental aspirations and 'charity', and Ben couldn't help but wonder how long he had been a big player in the funding of the First Order. Frowning, a new thought crossed Ben's mind. Had this always been one of their many revenue streams? Before they had fallen apart?
Ben realized he had never considered the sources of their wealth and influence, he had taken it for granted as he assumed Snoke's position. He had been focused on destruction, on the anger that drove his careless decisions-- He had left the day to day matters to Hux. Now he was beginning to wish he had actually paid more attention to the details. It would explain how the First Order--even in its current state-- had managed to make contact with Aurelia... if it was contact they had possessed all along.
Feeling an annoyed headachebuilding behind his eyes, Ben rubbed his temple with his fingers and watchedRey's hands fidget nervously in her lap. She was always uncomfortablehere, out of her element. He would be glad to be done with this planet,to get her back out into the wilds of space where she belonged. Where sheshone.