“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.
