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In some kind of fitful deliverance, Nod-Krai took to autumn. The cloying heat and drone of summer was no insignificant foe—for Nefer’s hair, for Nefer’s clothes, weighted in accessory and tailored textiles.
But it was autumn. As if the bottleneck harbors drew a strangled breath, cool wind carried off the sea—salted, mineral-rich, diluted, if faintly, by the drizzle overhead. Rainwater pattered the canvas awning, streaking down the swaying valance to the metal solder below.
“What about roast? They have a special tonight, too,” Jahoda read aloud from the trifold of her menu, hunched over the table at Nefer’s opposite. Her right hand spidered the lamination, her left lost in the thick of her hair, finger twirling a crimped strand. The fall of it frizzed and coppered, wild, wisps scintillated by lantern light.
Nefer watched her, chin to palm, elbow to table. She’d plucked away her finger claws for functionality’s sake, her free hand flat and splayed on the table. No celebration had brought them here, only end of day hunger, the urge to occupy the same space a little longer.
It was habitual now, the way they left the Curatorium as one body, linked from elbow to hip. A kind of tradition that snuck its way through the cracks of their day to day.
“Braised fish—oh, but you wouldn’t like the texture, right? Too delicate.” That finger in Jahoda's hair, twirling and twirling. She let her hand fall to the table, unwittingly resting over Nefer’s own. Such a strange vulnerability, to seek her out so unknowingly, connected between saltshaker and dewy water glass.
Nefer turned the flat of her hand over, sliding their palms together. Synthetic fiber under warm, bare skin. Jahoda paused in her distracted rattling, eyes tripping over tablecloth and dinnerware to meet the join of their hands, then lurched her gaze, swiftly, to Nefer’s face. Like she’d been caught doing something uncouth, too barefaced to hide that hitch of uncertainty.
Nefer raised a brow. To goad or to challenge, she let Jahoda decide. Let her agonize over the intent of her own actions with a look of pure panic that did very little to occlude the appetite that flitted beneath. Jahoda cleared her throat, hiding her flush behind the ball of her fist as she swiped a thumb across Nefer’s wrist, dug in with the nail, held a little tighter.
“Well, we always order the same things anyway, don’t we?” she buffered, swiping at the night air like it might dispel the tension between. Nefer tipped her chin, agreeable smile barred only by the stretch of her fingers.
“There’s comfort in familiarity,” Nefer said, flagging down a milling waitress. She did nothing to shake off Jahoda’s touch. “You still like a hearty cider, yes?”
Jahoda brightened, teeth flashing under a lightless sky. They ordered one after another, spoke of treatise and longer hours over something sweet, tart with tannin, much too rich for Nefer’s tastes. But it was autumn, the air had changed, and Nefer mused that drunken apple mixed well with curry spice and lively company.
They ate mostly in silence, Jahoda plucking from Nefer’s plate with what gluttony she had earned. A noisy party shambled past their table, smelling of smoke and murmuring word of new dawn. News about the League spread as new waves swept the bay, churning the estuaries with muck and mirth, hope and opportunity. At the passing mention of Nefer’s name, Jahoda dropped her skewer and perked up. As if itching to join the conversation, spare no self-pride, and sing Nefer’s praises.
Nefer hooked a foot around Jahoda’s ankle under the table just to stay her.
“They sound so… optimistic,” she whispered, eyes glinting with the very same notion. Nefer swallowed down the bitter leavings in her glass, and said nothing, watching as the light there refracted and bounced.
Convince me, Nefer so wanted to say, but made to settle the check instead. They'd done this much together before, girded the river flow to once-unthinkable convergence. Perhaps again…
But Nefer didn’t spare much mind to hypotheticals; only time would tell.
The rain now spat in fat, heavy droplets, their walk home conjoined and sodden. Jahoda latched on to Nefer’s arm with a shriek of displeasure, dragging them through side streets of lesser exposure, a little tipsy from the cider. An honest game of evasion they duly lost.
Nefer slipped her heels off at the door, dripping onto the coir mat and tile. Jahoda grumbled, fringe plastered to her forehead, and kicked aside her boots with decidedly less grace.
“Should I make us some tea?” Jahoda asked, trudging after Ashru’s impatient chirrup. She paused, framed focal beneath the ogee arch of the kitchen, head an expectant tilt.
Jahoda looked as if she belonged there, frozen a moment, bracketed comfortably in the opening breadth of Nefer’s den. Soft, half-undone, lightly humming as she waited. An old track from the only record Nefer had never the will to part with—falsetto Aaru soul, well suited for her range.
Nefer turned for the stairs. “Don’t trouble yourself,” she said, then, offering up a little sap of her own, called over her shoulder, “I’ll be in the shower.”
There was quiet in the marble round of the bathroom, low clamor filtering up from the kitchen. Jahoda chided Ashru, and Ashru chattered back in a rapid fire of trills. Jahoda sighed, and Nefer laughed, softly, through the line of her lips.
She dressed herself down, blunting her edges, and scrubbed at the powder and kohl around her eyes. Her vision hazed, as if this action stripped away some refining veil—sooth scar, an everlasting damage, the recurrent strain it wrought pulling new, worried diatribes from Jahoda each week.
Nefer fiddled with the tub faucet, lost in the fall of steaming water for some time.
“Nef?” Her name carried over the thunder. Nefer glanced back, still bowed, and caught the wandering fall of Jahoda’s stare—from eyes to shoulders to waist, down the backs of Nefer’s thighs with little mind for discretion. “Need any help?”
She’d propped Ashru on her hip the way one might brandish a small child, his chin still wet from feasting. He licked up the stretch of his foreleg, grooming his fur to a satiny sheen. A passing flicker caught his eye—perhaps the lurking shadows only a cat could see—and he leapt from Jahoda’s arms into the hall.
Jahoda crossed over the threshold, heedless of response, and met Nefer from behind. The twill of her shorts brushed Nefer’s bare skin, fingers coming down gently on her hip. Jahoda curled into the skin, holding her there, watching as she worked, dragging the brass-bolted curl of a knuckle up Nefer’s spine.
From sacral flat to thoracic arch, cold and featherlight. Jahoda shuffled closer, and Nefer’s knees knocked into the ivory porcelain. “Jahoda,” she said on the fall of an exhale; blood was beginning to rush her head.
“Ah—” Jahoda stepped back, and the air returned to Nefer’s lungs. “Hah. Sorry!” Her voice was muffled by fabric, the tangle of her shirt as she tugged it up and over her head. “I like to count.”
Jahoda’s laughter was snappy, shy, a bit self-deprecatory, as if she knew just how strange a habit it was. Something she’d taken to after Nefer’s latest bout of dire decision making. To take stock of the body and all its working parts, to self-soothe and assure. Nefer sighed, righted herself, then summoned the overhead spray.
“I know,” she said so softly, and turned, taking hold of Jahoda’s arm. She didn’t speak any further, only clamped the locking mechanism, and wrenched it free with a twist.
The prosthetic alloy disengaged from its socket, elbow and wrist joints falling limp without musculoskeletal reading. Jahoda rolled her shoulder, shaking out tension from the residual limb. From the cuff of her compression sleeve spiderwebbed silvery striates, an eruption of cicatrix that tallied the skin.
Nefer hooked the loose prosthetic on the lower rungs of the wired towel rack, darting her thumb over the crescent gash that rose in wane above Jahoda’s right breast. A sniper’s arrowhead, once lodged so deep the tender skin had grown over, spliced raw anew when the affliction was later removed.
Her own hands bore scars beneath the glove, the deep lacerations of desperate forage paling her brown skin in erratic crosshatch. In all things misfortune and sacrifice, they might have matched each other perfectly. Nefer trailed Jahoda’s breast lower, and sounded her yelp with a short pinch.
“Sensitive,” Nefer murmured, guiding Jahoda by the hip into the fog of the shower. Water doused them in seconds, rain chill gone for cloaking warmth. Jahoda sighed, and melted languidly into Nefer’s front.
“Feels good.” Jahoda stood on her toes, arm hooking around Nefer’s neck. She tried for Nefer’s lips, but missed the mark by an inch, whining a little peevishly when she pecked Nefer’s chin instead, “Come on…”
It was this, too, Nefer could not deny her. Not the after hour walks, or the shared cider, or the wandering touches that snagged her heart so strangely. Nefer kissed Jahoda, deep and lavish with tongue, pressing her into the frigid wall until she gasped and tore away.
Nefer dropped a hand to Jahoda’s hip. She slipped a leg between Jahoda’s thighs, suspending her with sturdy grip and lips and pressure, abrading her teeth against the pale stretch of Jahoda’s throat.
The tremor of her gasp tasted of salt and bitter—the faint remnants of her perfume, of ozonic petrichor, the savor of dinner. It all sloughed then gurgled down the drain. And they would smell like each other again, like juniper and clove, a little spiced from the lotions and sudsy lather.
Nefer pressed her nose to Jahoda’s cheek, a thrill she did not voice driving the harshness of her urgency. She guided Jahoda in feverish grind, fraying her down to the pulp of her hunger, not yet sated on meats and alcohol and idle chatter.
“Yes,” Jahoda whispered, long lashes fluttering closed, lost on the feel of it. Nefer nipped at the lobe of Jahoda’s ear and took up handfuls of her. The soft as invaluable as her trust; and sometimes Nefer laughed incredulously at the memory of it. How this trust befell her doorstep, hungry, bloodied, and snapping. Familiar.
The war beat of Jahoda’s heart throbbed under Nefer’s tongue. She paired her last bruise with one much higher, darker, blooming red-purple over the jolt of Jahoda’s pulse. The painful sort Nefer knew she liked to prod at when working the field—
Jahoda’s orgasm barreled into her, swift and devastating, the arm around Nefer’s neck cinching to a chokehold. “You’re good- you’re so good, Nef.” She gave unto profuseness, babbling a sure mixture of profanity and praise, going boneless with a sigh. “Seriously… I could stay here all day.”
“And how counterproductive that would be,” Nefer intoned, bent uncomfortably in the sudden aftermath. She surrendered to it, an unchallengeable thing, navigating the shower with this added weight in her arms.
She worked shampoo into Jahoda’s hair, feeling as she rumbled with pleasure. Entirely feline, the way Jahoda rubbed up against her, then slinked away—lavishing, circling with washcloth in hand, insistent that Nefer abide this chafe of reciprocity.
Nefer watched through hooded eyes, back and palms flush with the tile. Jahoda eased her way down Nefer’s legs, prostrate, water pelleting her cheeks. She lifted Nefer’s foot to rest atop her thigh, and kissed at the bend of her knee.
So innocent a touch. The washcloth fell, and all pretense with it, Jahoda’s tongue searing the same as her stare.
Nefer’s hips lurched unconsciously. “Jahoda.” She spoke through her teeth, held Jahoda by the conch of her ear, steering her with a tug. “Not here.”
Not here, where the air congested and all the many softnesses and vulnerabilities they’d amassed began to weigh. This trust—hungry, bleeding, snapping—sometimes strangled if she let it. A trick of the tortured mind.
Jahoda sat back on her heels, regarding the terse curl of Nefer’s lips, eyebrows drawn tight. She puffed her cheeks out, and released a breath akin to astonishment. She gazed up at Nefer like she knew exactly what she shied from.
“Yeah, okay,” Jahoda said. But she would not let it go, Nefer knew, the hale pink of her lips blanching white with how hard she gnawed at the skin.
They rinsed and dried in silence; not dispirited or solemn, but portending to something. Jahoda followed Nefer in stride, diverging for the bed as Nefer sat at the vanity. She would balm herself soft, and leave Jahoda to think.
Nefer dabbed a cool, unscented moisturizer below her eyes, tracking Jahoda’s movements through sound alone. There was a rustling from behind, a drag of leather over wood panel, a soft unlatching that preceded Jahoda’s light huff of approval. The floorboards groaned under Jahoda’s feet, their matching robes whispering together as she draped herself over Nefer’s back. Heavy and hindering, chin hooked on Nefer’s shoulder.
The flaxen ends of Jahoda’s fringe curled lightly in the open air, the faint smattering of freckles across her nose bridge all the more obvious under domestic lighting. Nefer reached for her, pressing them together, cheek to cheek, before the mirror. She stared down their dual reflections. Calculation beside forthcoming.
An absent nudge against Nefer’s hip displaced her scrutiny. She turned, half twisting around in the vanity seat, and nearly laughed outright. It seemed Jahoda was done thinking.
“I… I just—” Jahoda stammered, reeling back, pinkish and chastened. She must’ve taken Nefer’s shuttered eyes and thinned lips as certain rejection.
The excess fall of her right sleeve pinned up and out of the way, and from the fall of her left, she clutched her rummaged treasure, silicone toy hanging limply from its partnered straps. A sizable, emerald luster—familiar and bold, as was Nefer’s wont.
Jahoda squared her shoulders, leveling Nefer with a look the same as before. So knowing. “I can take care of you. I want to. You don’t have to worry.”
How very like Jahoda, to prod at the issue until it bruised or burst. Genuine, though boorish in her presentation; Jahoda made this daunting transparency rather painless. Exhilarating, too, the way Jahoda seemed unwilling to look away. Nefer sighed, resignation and fondness unspooling in equal measure. She pried the straps from Jahoda’s hand, unraveling the slip knot sash of Jahoda’s robe, and bent at the waist to hold the leg loops open.
“Hold on to me,” Nefer said, and Jahoda stood agape. Then started into action.
She braced with her hand on Nefer’s shoulder, stepping into the harness—dutiful in her task, though grimacing when Nefer wrenched the nylon tight. Jahoda looked a marvel like this: lips parted with eagerness, neck bruised from Nefer’s teeth, robe split to bare her breasts, her rosy nipples, strap jutting out from between her hips.
Nefer scratched lightly below Jahoda’s navel, humming low with mirth when the soft and muscle lurched beneath.
“What’s so funny?” Jahoda asked. Snippy, wound up, ready to be set free.
Nefer stood, and dropped her robe. She slipped her fingers beneath Jahoda’s lapel, inching the fabric away from her skin, if only to draw out this readying tremor. Nefer set her lips to the corner of Jahoda’s mouth, and whispered her induction, “You’re cute.”
The bed was a welcoming nest, the sheets both sleek and cool. Nefer settled in, propped on an elbow as she watched Jahoda putter around the bedside table. She flicked open drawers from top to bottom, of single-mind, surfacing a bottle of lubricant with a celebratory cheer.
She pinned the bottle between her ear and shoulder, plucking a pillow from the headboard. “Lay back on this,” Jahoda said, all logistics and determination. Really, very cute. “You’ll be more comfortable this way—shoot, I should’ve brought my other arm.”
“You’ve been thinking a lot about this,” Nefer said, an idle observation. She stuffed the pillow under her hips, and nabbed the bottle before it could fall, uncapping its translucent contents.
Jahoda swallowed. She crawled after the lazy spread of Nefer’s legs, watched, rapturous, as Nefer wet her fingers and splayed herself open. Cheek pressed to the inner smooth of Nefer’s thigh. “Not during work hours or anything.”
An obvious lie; Jahoda would try and sell it through nearness and girlish coquetry. She nuzzled at Nefer’s skin, that unspoken truth plain in the way she huffed in excitable spurts—against the back of Nefer’s hand, against the wet of Nefer’s cunt.
Distraction would never serve an employee of the Curatorium of Secrets well. Not when treachery so often posed a likely snare. But Nefer knocked her head back and pictured it all the same, fingers prying, pulsing at the thought of Jahoda and her errant obsession. Nefer favored it with a quiet groan.
Jahoda’s fingers came down on her ankle, and she squeezed hard. She kissed the working strain of Nefer’s knuckles, tender from stomach to sternum. She closed her lips around Nefer’s nipple, drawing her tongue in tight circles, travailing with a slight wobble on one arm. Such unbroken deference enough to make Nefer need it.
Nefer pulled from herself in strings of arousal and lubricant, reaching for Jahoda, a fitful grasp. The length of the toy slicked through her, and Jahoda watched on in guileless fascination, elbow giving out the moment Nefer guided her deeper.
She dropped her forehead to the slope of Nefer’s neck. “Oh wow,” Jahoda whispered, extoling, suspended. She reared back a touch, then eased forward, slowly, slowly until their hips were flush.
Nefer thought only of pressure. Then, of consumption. She tripped her hands down the flexing stretch of Jahoda’s back, cutting her nails into Jahoda’s ass. Nefer held her there. Remembered to breathe.
“You feel… Nef, you feel so…” Jahoda started then stopped. She slid her lips against the locked hinge of Nefer’s jaw and willed it loose. She started again. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Nefer did laugh then—a short, sharp kick up from the lungs—and all the rest of her slackened. Languor deepened her breathing, unclenched her thighs, folding them into one another so snuggly Nefer could feel the dulcet rumble of Jahoda’s ardor through to her toes.
“There must be something else,” Nefer said, eyes running a blurred course across the ceiling trim. “Lived as you are.”
“Are you teasing me?” There was genuine query in Jahoda’s voice. She wiggled her hips side to side, acquainting herself with this swap of position. “I’ve done a lot, you know.”
Nefer knew. She knew, perhaps, better than anyone. But she could not speak the admission aloud before Jahoda was rocking into her, the stiff curve of the attaching o-ring nudging up against Nefer’s clit. Persistent, over and again, building up a steady delirium.
“Nothing’s mattered more to me. No one’s ever…” Jahoda trailed off, unable now to get the words out. She snapped her hips forward, like this bout of inarticulacy frustrated her, and Nefer arched with a grunt.
Jahoda situated deeper, somehow, butting up against the raw pulse of her. She must’ve felt it—in the cage of Nefer’s chest, through the line of Nefer’s body—that hiccupping tremor. Jahoda jerked her head back, and looked Nefer over with wide, fretful eyes.
“Was that too much? I can slow down if—”
“Your mind wanders far too easily,” Nefer cut in, rather sharply. She felt strangely, for a moment, like she might cry.
Had anyone ever cared about her this much? To a fault, to a near self-debasing degree. All to keep this river flow coursing, to ease her strain, give her pleasure without condition.
It was undue, surely, yet Nefer throbbed. Implacable beneath it all, still young with wanting; she could not tear herself away. “Do that again. Don't stop this time.”
She tucked Jahoda back into the sweaty alcove of her neck, limbs locking around her in serpentine possession. Jahoda found her stride quickly—steadfast where she sought to provide, yet unrefined with inexperience. She cared little for technique, only repetition, never fully leaving Nefer before she returned. A dependable force.
The hilt of every upstroke clipped Nefer’s grousing into something shrill and breathy. Jahoda shuddered at the sound of it, pausing just to roll them together. A move both base and instinctive, slickened by sweat and arousal, and Nefer moaned at the indulgence of it.
Jahoda mouthed at any stretch of skin she could reach. She dotted her lips over the high, jutting arch of Nefer’s cheekbone, below her eye where the dull ache of damage still pulsed in vivid echoes. She dipped low to Nefer’s ear, nose to fragile cartilage, and whispered a short invocation of name and question: Nef. How do you feel?
Nefer didn’t answer, hadn’t the mind to. She’d grown weak in limb and core, budding pressure now fit to fill the rest of her. That fearful bind did not lessen, only strengthened its hold; her breathing hitched around the watery choke of it, tongue sluggish behind her teeth.
Tears crowded Nefer’s vision. She tasted cider and heat, smelled juniper. Nefer came on the breath of a sob, all but punched from her lungs, teeth sinking into Jahoda’s shoulder. Jahoda gasped, mewled with the pain, and jogged her hips.
She worked Nefer through it, drawing out that deep, blistering intensity. From the shock of her first orgasm crept her second—drawn out and fitful, a leisurely thing. Nefer warred with it, succumbed for what seemed a small eternity, inner thighs as wet as the curve of her cheeks.
Sound left Nefer in fractured discordance, a little panicked. Her heels slipped on the bedsheets in search of a foothold, arms smacking out to furl in the linen instead. Jahoda muttered disagreement at the abrupt separation, sobering immediately at the sight of Nefer’s eyes, the bunch of Nefer’s shoulders.
“Nef, are you—”
“Get off,” Nefer said, voice all weathered steel.
Jahoda scrambled to comply. She set her hand to the dip of Nefer’s pelvis, steadying her hips while she pulled the toy free. It went with a squelch, bobbing shiny and slick. Nefer breathed against the pounding of her heart and clenched around that newfound emptiness.
The pillow and top sheet were hardly spared, sodden beneath Nefer’s thighs. She did nothing to cover herself, nothing to dash away her tears. She sat up—a jittery, laborious task—and a lone straggler pearled down from the corner of her eye.
In near flawless recreation of her own helplessness from that decisive day—Nefer’s eyesight up for barter—Jahoda looked on in acute terror. Her hand distended, reaching yet never touching, unable to do anything other than let the pieces fall as they may. It must’ve been torture, Nefer thought, and pinched Jahoda by the nape, crushing their lips together.
Jahoda startled then sighed, fingers fastening around Nefer’s wrist. She pulled back, their noses knocking together. “Nef—”
“Don’t apologize.”
“Okay,” Jahoda whispered. Shaky, unsure, even as she dipped to kiss Nefer again.
“I feel good,” Nefer said against the seam of Jahoda’s lips, sounding battered, certainly broken. Perhaps it was a strange thing to admit aloud. “You kept your word.”
In the comedown, Nefer curled around that echoic pleasure. It sparked through every branching nerve, left her shivering beneath the unfolded down comforter. Jahoda had taken the sheets and pillowcase to be washed, swiped Nefer dry from top to toe, and vanished behind walls of wood and plaster.
Water rushed the bathroom sink basin, rain reprising its distant patter against the roof and windows. From the sliver in the door Jahoda had left ajar, Ashru bunted his way in. He gnashed his canines around a threadbare throw toy, a gnarled bird likeness Jahoda had gifted in her attempts to curry favor. Loved, though it had seen better days.
Ashru leapt up onto the bed and dropped the stuffie before her—a humble offering of soothe. He let Nefer rid him of golden rings and headgear, sitting patient and regal like a votive statue.
“Comfortable?” Nefer asked. Ashru gave a trilling coo, kneading around and around, pressing his nose to hers when he found that restful sweet spot. She stroked him between the ears in meditative repetition, wondering how brisk a walk through the thoroughfares would be come morning.
Jahoda returned looking ravaged and peaceful, stretching with a toothy yawn. She slipped into bed just behind, slinging her arm over Nefer’s midriff to toy with one of Ashru’s paws. She chuffed adoringly, humming her delectation as rolling and rhythmic as a cat’s purr.
Nefer felt… precious bracketed this way. An old and dusted feeling, there amongst the satiation and bone-deep tiredness. Jahoda would likely not sleep for some time, tossing about the way she so often did, but she would stay. Rise late, uninhibited by the week’s end, responsive only to Nefer’s touch. A galvanizing thought.
Nefer drifted and let herself be kept.