#everything au

If it weren’t December, Sansa would roll her window down and embrace the stench of lower Manhattan over the cloying scent of mint and cloves, but she’d left her coat at home. Petyr was taking her to the club and it was next to impossible to get the smell of smoke out of suede. She’d have to hang the coat from her fire escape and risk the girls from 12B stealing it. Last month, she’d run into Shae on their narrow stairs, leaving the building in her yellow plaid jumper; the one with an S that Sansa had embroidered on the pocket. She hadn’t breathed a word of protest though. Without Shae and Gilly’s help navigating her new, limited independence, she’d have already locked herself back in Petyr’s gilded cage. 

“This isn’t the way to the Water Gardens,” she observed, turning from her window to glance at her would-be keeper. He sat leaning against the opposite door, watching her. He was always watching her. Lyn was driving the Continental south on Lafayette when he should have been headed north, and she had more than a passing suspicion they were making for the Brooklyn Bridge. 

“I hate your hair like that,” Peytr said, his eyes traveling down from her halo of kinky curls to land, with considerable more appreciation, on her gold lame mini-dress. She’d spent four precious hours wrapping her hair in foil to achieve the effect; four hours when she could have been catching up on sleep or practicing her shorthand. She didn’t care what Petyr thought. She loved her hair, and it was Oberyn Martell she was aiming to impress. “You look tired. You should quit that silly job at Bonwit Teller.”

That silly job paid her rent, she wanted to remind him, but then he’d only argue for her to quit her studio apartment in the Village and live with him again, and she couldn’t do that.

They started across the bridge, and she huffed, crossing and uncrossing her legs in agitation. 

“You’re taking me to a fight.”

“Don’t fret. I just need to see about a match. We’ll be back in Manhattan before Oberyn blows through his first 8-ball. You don’t want to seem desperate, do you?”

A bit late for that, she thought, clasping her fingers in her lap, looking down the long expanse of skin to her gold leather stilettos. Her mother would roll over in her grave. “Of course not, Petyr. You know best.”

“That’s why I’m your manager, doll.” From uncle, to legal guardian, to manager, to what next? It was a question that kept her up at night, but what could Sansa do? Rickon and Bran were still his wards, and he controlled all of her money; all but what she earned selling lipstick at the Bonwit makeup counter five days a week. 

“I just hate the fights. You know that.”

“We’ll be in and out before the match even starts.”