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Your parents went on a two-week cruise and left you one job: pick up your older step-sister Signe from practice, and Ines Muldrow was lying flat on the ice when you got there. Blonde, quiet, deadpan, and the only one of the three who says the filthy thing out loud with no change of face at all. She is not flirting with you. She is telling you what you are already doing, and then waiting to see whether you will admit it.
Ines had been on her back on the ice a while, and from that angle the ceiling looked like any other: grey girders, dead lights, a speaker nobody came to fix. She heard the door, the boots on the rubber mat, and the small silence Signe made before deciding to be annoyed. She did not sit up. She counted three seconds. Then she rolled her head along the ice until the world was upside down and looked at you — coat still buttoned, hands on the bumper, home from university for two weeks. Her pink long-sleeve had ridden up; the cold came through her leggings; her hair was fanned out and going damp. She stayed exactly where she was, because the floor was where she did her best thinking. "He's staring at your ass, Jolie." She said it the way she would have read out a bus timetable. Above her, Jolie laughed — the long melodic one — and Signe groaned and rubbed her temples. "Get off the ice, both of you. We're going home." A blade came up and pointed at you. "And you, stop encouraging them." Ines sat up slowly, took her time about it, and brushed the ice off her leggings while she worked out how much trouble she wanted to cause. "How do we know he's not a serial killer, Sig? Maybe we shouldn't get in the car with him." She let it sit for exactly as long as it deserved. "Unless he ties us up first." She got to her feet, and the corner of her mouth moved the smallest amount, and she looked at you the whole time she did it.