Unfinished Business

Chapter Thirteen

Inara really needed to get back to work.

She knew it, of course. By all rights she should have started her practice again as soon as Serenity was spaceworthy once more. But she had been putting it off, encountering one convenient excuse after another, for over a month, now. True, she was due some rest, after the horrors she had witnessed on Miranda, and that rock Mr. Universe had called home. But she was weeks past the point where she could use that as an excuse. The Reunion, likewise, had provided a gay distraction – it had been every wild, wooly thing she had dreamed of about life on the Frontier, and she had indulged herself in the unsophisticated – and decidedly unsanitary – celebration with abandon. But as they left Muir’s orbit, she knew she had to get back on her back, no matter how reluctant she was.

Mal hadn’t made it any easier. He hadn’t asked her for rent once since Miranda, and because of that Inara still had a comfortable cushion of savings to live off of. But it was only a matter of time before the crew got hungry, and the businessman in Mal would force him to her shuttle door. She had enough for a few months, perhaps, but beyond that she was at his mercy. And while the exact nature of their relationship had changed – in what way, she wasn’t entirely certain – she felt most comfortable keeping the business end pure business. No, she needed to get back to work. Otherwise she’d be beholden to Mal, and that she just couldn’t bear.

She looked around her shuttle with a sigh. It was hardly a fit space for her work, anymore. All of her luxurious silks and wall hangings and carpets were back at the training house, clear on the other side of the system. She had done what she could in terms of shopping at the few dusty worlds they had visited since she had rejoined the ship but the result was decidedly low-end.

She had found a few tapestries, the rugged homespun design of which could be told off as “artistic”, in a barbaric sort of way.