The bathroom dries them, evaporating water off their bodies in thin mists. Taheen takes her by the hand, leading her to the bedroom where they rub emollient into her skin. Staring into the mirror, it occurs to Suzhen that she’s never seen Taheen this way either, bare of coiffure and cosmetics. A constellation of bright dots wind between their breasts, brilliant gold and blue; they always like body mods that make a map of stars on their skin. Something from their childhood, a preoccupation, though she has never seen these arrangements—but they lived under a sky different from Vaisravana’s or Anatta’s.
“I hate,” she begins, stops. “You keep doing these things for me. I hate that—that I’m using you, that I never give anything back, that I…”
They have liberated a styler from her vanity, extending one of its heated combs. “You? Using me?” A smirk. “Nobody uses me. I do this because I want to. I do this because you’re my friend. And because—” But they stop there, instead concentrating on sectioning her hair.
Hunger nips at her as they work her scalp. Losing herself in their body: she’d be able to forget Ovuha’s death, only wouldn’t that be more exploitative use, more burdening on their resplendence with the coarseness of her flesh. Or perhaps it would be service offered, she would satisfy them first, for once. The firm-soft broadness of them, their assured strength; how she wants to be worthy of this, of their regard and their splendor. “Do you want me to,” she says, falters, licks her lips. Feeling faintly stupid. They’ve coupled many times before, though this would be the first occasion she initiates.
An eyebrow rises. “Want you to what? Don’t let me take advantage of you.”
“It wouldn’t be like that.” The other way around, if anything. She stares down but that only means she is studying their breasts, a soft generous expanse. She looks back up. “It’s just that I’ve never been able to tell if you find me desirable, or if it’s just…”
Some unnamable emotion knifes through their features; for a second they look stricken. Then they snort. “Seriously? You’re asking if I want you, like I haven’t pulled you into my lap and kissed you senseless how many times? Did you think I was doing that just to be what, charitable. Charity! You think I’m made of charity. I don’t fuck someone out of pity, Suzhen. I fuck them because I want them and I like the taste of them, and because I think they’re gorgeous.” Their chest rises and falls heavily as they hold out their hand. “Touch me.”
She does, describing a path that follows Taheen’s skin-stars with her fingernails, approximating the silhouette of it—a dragon constellation, she thinks, ophidian and infinite. With her other hand, she cradles their cock, curling her hand around its warmth. She grips and rubs and strokes it to hardness; keeping her eyes on Taheen’s, she kneels and takes their erection between her lips. This too is a first, they have not done this together before, and she takes as much into her mouth as she can.
“Deeper,” they whisper, clutching at the back of her skull, and she obliges.
Halfway through, they pull out and hold her face between their sweat-damp hands. “Tell me what you want me to do to you. Tell me everything.”
Her mouth is full of salt. “I want to think only of you. Tonight. Tomorrow. The day after.” That would be healing, the sealing of wounds. “Mark me with your teeth and with your fingers and with your body. And—don’t be gentle.”
They grin. “All this time I should’ve known you wanted things a little rougher. But you never said.”
“I’m saying now.” Her cheeks are hot, remain hot as they bodily lift her off the floor; beneath the softness of their limbs there are potent muscles, and they carry her to bed with no effort. The bed that she has never, ever shared with anyone. She sinks into the mattress, makes a small noise as Taheen maneuvers her legs over their shoulders. Her pulse leaps as they lean down to kiss her before they thrust into her.
Her eyes clench shut: it feels like being exquisitely impaled, and when they begin moving it is a promise gloriously kept—she has wondered, time and again, what it would be like if Taheen stops treating her as excruciatingly breakable, as the most fragile of glass. Her hips buck; her hands close on the sheets, fistfuls of seafoam silk, and she is the sea too. Wave crashing on wave, wave breaking upon the shore. Thought suspends—there is only now, there is only Taheen.
“We should have done it like this years ago,” they say much later, as the two of them lie entwined.
The joints of her thighs are sore, wonderfully so. Suzhen kisses their wrist, stroking the glittering specks beneath their collarbones. In the dark, they shine as though Taheen is transcendent in truth, a celestial spirit drawn down to the earth. “Yes. We should have.”
She waits for the gap to fill, for them to say more. It does not come. They nest in each other’s arms through the night, separated by nothing, not clothing, not the distance of yesteryears. But still separated. This is as far as they can go, she tells herself, and that is further than she could have ever imagined. To have Taheen finally, and hers for a time.
Chapter Sixteen
For the next week Suzhen does not apply herself to much, though she eats and makes herself as social as she can to appease her guidance, mostly spending time with Taheen. She does not see Atam again, even though she knows she should—to apologize, to offer sympathy, to admit that the two of them have been sundered by the same grief. But she can’t bring herself to this task, this labor, this confronting of her own monstrous conduct.
She is determined to get out of this rut. Ovuha was not the hinge on which Suzhen’s life turned. Even if things had gone differently, a potentiate would have left her care upon attaining citizenship and Suzhen has never kept in touch with her successful charges. Too close to home, too blunt a reminder. And she was irrationally wary of being found out: a potentiate turned selection agent is either a fraud or a traitor. Ovuha would not have been a fixture in her days, would not have been permanent in Suzhen’s apartment. Those impulsive moments, those frissons. Suzhen could never have let them bear fruit in good conscience.
And yet, this absence. She imagines an excavated space, covered up by thin membrane but never filling out, a permanent hollow.
She goes to a play, once or twice, but she is not good company and Vipada does not invite her for a third. The theater is mindless in any case. There is no interdict officially, but presently nobody wants to pen or produce anything overtly political. Taheen drags her to concerts, operas, dance pieces that they assure her are stunningly original and the talk of the season. Experimental, acclaimed, due for awards. For Taheen’s sake, Suzhen does her best to pay attention but finds it difficult to stay interested. Midway through a show where the singer vivisects herself onstage—draping the prosthetic wounds in vantablack so sections of her body disappear into the dark—Suzhen replays the Comet’s suicide. Even that word seems pallid, inadequate for the force of the act, the red blood on the ivory hair.
She never saw the Warlord of the Mirror die. Neither did Mother Xinfei, not that Suzhen knows of. She wonders whether Bhanu has kept a copy of the broadcast. He must have, of all people he must, and she expects it was as public as the Comet’s. Did the Mirror die broken and pleading, did she die on her feet like the Comet, was she paraded an amputated and mutilated husk. Despite herself Suzhen does not remember her mother ever speaking of it, speculating or recalling, or even remarking on when it must have happened. A perfectly still surface to the end.
“The show’s finishing,” Taheen says.
Suzhen blinks and sees that the singer has almost vanished into the stage, leaving behind only a drapery of organs and a tenor voice treading the outro. “I’m sorry.”