Jude on Knotty Biscotti

Let Them Praise You

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Lófaszt! This fucking thing!” Imani held the gleaming metal skewer like it was a dagger. She stabbed again, swearing again, and again. The petulant garbage disposal only growled.

“‘mani,” Jude began softly from somewhere behind her.

“Nothing works in this fucking place!” Imani spun to face her—well, what was Jude, really? Her bodyguard? Yes. Her fixer? Yes. Her lover? Yes.

Her girlfriend?

“‘mani,” Jude began again, stepping into the dingy little kitchen of the apartment Chopra had secured for them. “It was like that when we got here. You can’t fix everything.”

Imani knew she’d been difficult while the new clinic was being set up. She’d been sleeping better and spending precious time with Jude, but every day had her more on edge. Every day here was a day she wasn’t saving lives, a day she wasn’t doing what she needed to do.

Why couldn’t Jude—her left hand trembled. Imani slipped it behind her, terrified Jude would see. Would know.

“Get your ame-stick,” Jude said softly. “You need to get out.”

Thunder rumbled. There might’ve been lightning, too, but even here in MacArthur Low, the Los Angeles lights completely washed out the sky. There might not be a single building occupied above the fourth floor, but the city was never dark.

Jude led Imani past the wet market, weaving through the throng like a ghost. It was busy tonight, despite the punishing rainfall, and Imani was glad of the ame-stick. She could almost love the city on nights like this. Everyone huddled close to each other, the neon glow from shop-signs took on a hazy aspect and reflected up from the puddles. It felt bright, not just well-lit.

They passed Imani’s favourite ramen-ya, and she almost asked to stop—Auntie Székely would have made shoyu eggs today—but she resisted. Jude never asked her for anything, and whatever she had planned, Imani needed to know.

Down a crumbling concrete stairwell, then through a fire-door, then up an institutional-green stairwell. Seven, eight, nine floors? Imani’s lungs were burning by the time Jude opened the door leading to a carpeted hall.

“Wh-what’s… what’re we doing here?” she asked, sucking air.

Jude said nothing, simply waited for her to recover, then walked on.

“Jude?”

They stopped before a door bearing the number ‘982’. Jude fixed Imani with an intensely serious look. “You can leave any time. Nobody in there knows you. Nobody in there wants anything from you.” She produced two half-masks from somewhere inside her yama-kaza. She smirked. “Except me.”

Imani studied Jude, then the mask, then put it on.

Inside, the apartment was lit only by candles. The far wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, rain-streaked and glittering with the city lights below. This had once been a family room, Imani guessed, but now it was more of a shrine than anything. In the middle rested a comically large bed dressed with sheets that seemed to glow in the half-light. Six people were already present, all naked but for their masks. A dark-skinned, muscular man rose from the bed as they entered, and Imani’s gaze dropped to his erection. Behind him on the bed, two naked women—one with an even larger erection than his—were entangled.

“Jude—”

“I got you.” Jude’s mouth at her ear, the forehead of her mask nudging the edge of Imani’s. “Say yes or say no. That’s all you have to say tonight.”

The porcelain fox mask was cool. A woman’s hand at her hip. Another at her nape. Jude laced her fingers through Imani’s trembling ones.

“Yes.”

The word barely left her before hands were peeling the clothes off her. She was led to the bed. She sat. Someone knelt between her thighs, and Imani gasped—a wet, flat, unhurried tongue dragged from her entrance to her clit. Again. Then it entered her while fingers squeezed her inner thighs.

“Ah—fuck—”

“Yes, love.” Not Jude. A woman in a hannya mask gently pushed Imani onto her back. She lowered her bare breasts over Imani’s face, offering a stiff pink nipple that Imani took into her mouth without thinking, suckling desperately, moaning around it as the tongue below returned to her clit and two fingers pushed inside her at once.

A man was at Imani’s breasts—teeth grazing, a tongue flicking the dark-chocolate peak until it ached. A fourth stranger lifted her trembling left hand and sucked her fingers one at a time, tongue curling between her knuckles, and Imani sobbed around the nipple in her mouth because nobody had ever touched her hand like that.

“More.” She didn’t recognise her own voice. “please—”

Imani heard Jude smiling. “More.”

The mouth and fingers at her pussy vanished, and Imani whined at the loss—then whimpered, then choked on a moan as something thicker, blunter, pressed to her entrance and shoved. A strap, gleaming black, worn on the hips of another masked stranger. It filled her in one long, patient stroke, and Imani arched off the bed so hard the hannya-mask woman laughed and pinned her shoulders down.

“Oh, no! Stay. We’ve got you.”

They did. Hands everywhere. A mouth back at her clit—someone new, a different rhythm—while the strap fucked her with deep, deliberate thrusts. Imani heard herself sobbing with joy each time the stranger’s hips met hers. Jude appeared over her. She bent low and kissed Imani upside-down, tongue sliding in as another tongue circled her clit, and Imani came so suddenly and so hard she screamed into Jude’s mouth, thighs shaking, cunt clenching around the cock that did not slow, did not stop, only fucked her through it and into the next wave before the first had finished breaking. Imani’s thighs felt so wet. That wasn’t important.

“Again,” Jude whispered against her lips. “You’ve got so much more in you, ‘mani. Let them praise you.”

Imani let them.

Hours later—minutes?—Imani lay on her back in a bed she didn’t own, in a room she’d never see again, and studied the water stain on the ceiling.

It looked like a bird. No. A sheep. It was a sheep.

Jude was next to her, propped on one elbow, smoking. The cherry of the cigarette flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed, painting the pale slope of her shoulder in small orange pulses. Somewhere down the hall, someone was still laughing. Somewhere else, someone was still gasping. The party breathed on without them.

Imani lifted her left hand into the dim light between them.

It was still.

She stared—turned it, flexed the fingers, waited for the tremor to answer. It didn’t. She didn’t know if that meant anything, but it felt like a gift.

“How long were you planning this?” Her voice came out hoarse. Used.

Jude exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Didn’t answer right away. That was answer enough.

“Jude.”

“A while.” A pause. “I’ve been worried.”

Imani thought about the hannya mask. About the stranger who’d sucked her trembling fingers with such reverence. About how nobody had asked her anything. About how nobody had needed her to be ‘Doc Shen’. About how the only voice that had used her name had been Jude’s.

Nobody in there knows you. Nobody in there wants anything from you.

“You can’t fix everything.” She echoed Jude’s own words softly.

Jude’s mouth twitched. “I’m not fixin’ everything.” She stubbed the cigarette into a chipped saucer on the nightstand. “Just the parts I love.”

Imani turned her head on the pillow. Jude’s face in the low light was younger than usual, softer, unguarded in a way Imani hardly recognised. There was a faint red mark on Jude’s collarbone that Imani hadn’t put there. She found she didn’t mind.

“I’ve been sleeping for weeks,” Imani said quietly. “It wasn’t my body that was tired.”

“I know.”

Jude reached across the small distance between them and laid her palm over Imani’s sternum. Not on her breast. Not lower. Right on the bone.

“I got you, ‘mani,” Jude said. Same words. Different weight.

Imani let her eyes close.

Outside, thunder rolled somewhere over the Sepulveda Sea Wall. Inside, Imani slept.

She dreamed.

She dreamed of the impossible future.

Knotty

I Got You

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The dilapidated tenement shuddered as a spinner passed overhead with that uncanny blend of whine and growl Imani loathed. “How ugly d’you want this scar to be?” A disapproving tch came from the far corner, but Imani had neither time nor energy to spare.

“W-what?” Imani’s patient gasped, confused and frightened.

“Sit still,” Imani hissed as she resumed stitching, “or it’s gonna be really ugly.”

“B-but m-my—” Too afraid to put word to thoughts.

“You gonna do what I say?”

“Y–yes, Doc Shen.”

Imani’s chocolate-brown eyes flicked up to meet her patient, angry. She waited until the patient’s eyes sank. “You’re both doing great.”

Imani drew a deep breath, filling her lungs with untold pollutants, surely shortening her life, but still glad to be outside. She still wore her “work clothes,” wet with sweat, blood, and some amniotic fluid, but the constant wind that hugged the Sepulveda Sea Wall, and the ocean tang easily overwhelmed all of that. She fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket—always kept in the plastic—shook one out and brought it to her lips.

The lighter wouldn’t cooperate.

She glared and flicked at it, turning her body one way, then another, trying to shelter the lighter, but most attempts didn’t even produce a spark. “Fuck,” she cursed softly as the lighter slipped from her fingers and bounced along the broken sidewalk.

“I got you.” The voice from the corner. A strong, steady, perfectly vertical blue-orange flame appeared to Imani’s right.

“Thanks,” she said, after her third lungful of opt-in pollutants. “How are they?”

Jude took up position beside Imani, back against the building that, for now, was their medical clinic, looking up at the impossible structure that kept the Pacific from washing all of Los Angeles away for good. “Happy family.” Jude turned her head just enough to study Imani’s profile in the half-light. “Thanks to you.”

Taking another deep breath—ambient pollutants only, this time—Imani allowed herself a ghost of a smile. She tried to return the cigarette to her lips, but found her hand was less cooperative than her lighter had been, and her little indulgence slipped away. “Fuck,” she repeated, watching it come to rest in a puddle, hissing angrily. “How many more?”

“Bad news, Doc. None. You might have to try sleeping for once.” Jude’s teasing was the last thing Imani remembered before the waking world vanished.

The debate had been surprisingly short. Last night’s patients were always going to be the last; an LAPD contact warned the raid was coming. By the time Imani woke to the smell of fresh coffee barely overpowering disinfectant, Dewitt and Chopra were loading the van with equipment. Jude appeared and, with a few careful words, Imani agreed. She’d slept nine hours and was still bone-tired.

She’d earned a break. A short one.

She was asleep in the rusted-out sedan’s passenger seat before Jude pulled away from the curb.

“We can’t afford this,” Imani declared, again, looking around the room. They’d ridden to the 39th floor, then entered the sort of amber-lit, smooth-carpeted hallway Imani had only seen in old vids.

“I told you,” Jude insisted. “I did a job—this is payment.” She secured the retinal-lock on the door, then dropped both duffels they’d brought. She shrugged out of her oversized trench coat and let it fall to the floor. “How about a shower?”

Imani turned so slowly Jude nearly laughed at the sight. “Shower?” she asked.

Jude smiled, inverting her shirt as she pulled it over her head. Her full, pale breasts bounced and wobbled as they were freed. “Yeah, a real one. We can stay in as long as we want.”

The tiny room, just big enough for a sink, a toilet and the promised shower, had filled with steam moments after Jude had turned on the water. She had finished undressing before entering, and now found Imani standing, touching her cheeks in wonder. Jude smiled and placed her hands on Imani’s hips. “You can’t shower like this, Doc.”

Jude’s fingers were efficient, confident, as she unbuttoned Imani’s cream-coloured shirt. She tugged it free of Imani’s threadbare jeans, then set it down carefully on the sink, brushing her bare breasts against Imani’s skin. The jeans followed, then Imani’s bra and finally her panties.

Imani allowed herself to be led into the shower. She marvelled at the water bouncing off her skin, the patterns it made on Jude’s skin as it ran down her back. She caressed Jude’s hip, giving it a squeeze. Imani loved the contrast, her mahogany skin against Jude’s almost milk-pale colouring. She was sliding her fingers up Jude’s belly when the other woman stopped her.

“Not right now, ‘mani.” Simply turning around in the shower meant Jude’s arm, then her hip, then her breasts pressed against Imani’s, but then Jude was turning Imani around, to face away. “Taking care of you first.” She filled her palms with a thick cleansing cream, then brought both arms around Imani’s body, pressing her hips against Imani’s ass while her breasts squished wonderfully against Imani’s shoulder blades.

Imani shivered at the first touch of the cream; it was much colder than the water or her skin, but then Jude’s hands were exploring. Both found Imani’s breasts and began working them in exactly the way she loved best. She moaned softly as her nipples, the colour of dark chocolate, stiffened beneath Jude’s palms. She followed with a lower, louder moan at Jude’s lips against her neck. “Jude…”

“Shhh,” Jude replied, then went back to kissing Imani’s neck, then gave her a gentle bite. She kept one hand on Imani’s breast, the contact firm but almost frictionless with the cream, but the other roamed down. She giggled at the way Imani stiffened and squirmed when her fingers found the stubble on Imani’s mound. Maybe a week since she’d shaved last, Jude guessed, the perfect growth. She loved the way it felt as she moved over, then further down.

Imani widened her stance—balance, and invitation. When Jude’s fingers spread her open, she moaned for a third time, this time long and pleading. Jude obliged. Two fingers pinched Imani’s clit, then Jude’s hand started pumping. Her fingers held Imani’s clit from both sides, but the co-mingled cream and Imani’s juices meant Jude’s fingers were sliding over the sides of Imani’s bud as much as they were pulling it. Imani tried to grab some part of Jude, reaching around behind her, but as Jude worked harder against Imani’s clit and her nipple, she found herself needing both hands to support herself against the shower wall.

Jude’s own breathing was growing ragged as she slid her hand down and curled her middle finger inside Imani’s pussy. The whimper this drew from Imani was almost enough to give Jude her own orgasm, she barely managed to regain her focus. She ground her hips against Imani’s pillowy ass cheeks, while she finger-fucked the dark-skinned woman from behind.

As Jude’s finger, two fingers, then three fingers, pounded harder and faster into Imani’s cunt, Imani felt herself get lightheaded. She’d needed this so much, and Jude—she shuddered as the first wave loomed over her. Jude was whispering in her ear, “I got you, ‘mani. I got you. Let go, I got you.” Jude’s fingers filling her, the way the heel of her palm still attended Imani’s button, the way her coarse pubic hair scratched over Imani’s ass—perfect.

Jude felt Imani tense, then shudder all over; she sped up her delicious assault on Imani’s passage and barely two thrusts later Imani was screaming wordlessly, gushing over Jude’s fingers.

Hours later, Imani lay in bed, studying the patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling. Jude was next to her, smoking silently. The new clinic would come. The exhaustion would come. Jude would disappear again into whatever shadows she always melted into. Not yet. For the next few days, maybe a week, Imani decided she would enjoy this little break.

Knotty