Motes played.
Tonight, she played hard. It was a big Motes night. It was a human night. It was a night for hovering somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. It was a night for standing as tall as Beholden, as tall as so many of the other Odists, yet far more lithe. Tonight, she dressed up in her finest crepe-cotton blouse and gauzy skirt, and she braided for herself a fresh crown of flowers — marigolds, this time — grown by A Finger Curled and Beholden To The Music Of The Spheres.
Tonight, Motes played in hedonism. A night at a restaurant out on the town, where she stuffed herself with two Chicago-style hot dogs. “Drag them through the garden!” she laughed — and she was always laughing — “Everything but the ketchup!” A night when she ate all of her fries, and even mopped up the last of the fry sauce with a fingertip.
Tonight, she played drunk: a beer with the dogs, drinks made fizzy with champagne and sweet with floral liqueurs at a pop-up bar, then fruity drinks served in tall glasses with taller straws at the venue before the headliner started, the thump of the bass from the opener echoing up through her feet, pressing at her chest, leaving a warmth in her belly that verged on sensual. Tonight, between sets or whenever she felt like she needed a break, she would waft back to the bar and order a vodka soda or some other ridiculous drink meant more to hydrate than taste good.
Tonight, Motes played as hard as ever, letting that warmth that was building low in her belly be her guide as she latched onto a dancing partner, a solidly built mustelid — an otter? A fisher? — of some sort who wound his way through the crowd in a fluid motion that was dancelike even when the music had stopped. It was a night for letting him dance closer and closer as the sets progressed, a night for letting him press a pill to her lips and beneath her tongue. It was a night for letting him push his whiskery muzzle up beneath her chin, letting him show her just how sharp his teeth were against her throat, for pressing close enough to feel just how thoroughly he shared in her excitement.
Tonight, she let him take her home. Tonight she let him pin her to the bed, paw on her shoulder and teeth on her throat. Tonight, she let him draw blood.
And then it was a night for sitting on his balcony and talking while the waves of whatever drug he’d given her continued to roll through her in languid pulses. “It is like someone is brushing the underside of my skin with satin in the best possible way,” she said, and he laughed.
They sat and talked, legs dangling through the bars of the balcony’s railing over an impossibly high drop, her ears filled with the chatter of an impossible myriad of monkeys, startled from their slumber by their arrival, her eyes filled with the black and gold of an impossible city built into a cylinder. He pointed to a building in the distance down the length of the cylinder, told her how that one was all gardens, all flowers like those in her hair, now crushed lopsidedly from her forgetting to remove the crown when they’d fucked. He pointed up to the gentle golden glow in the sky, told her that the sun here was in a long, thin line, that it turned on from one end to the other so that one could see dawn coming from down the tube, could hear birdsong come on like a wave. He pointed from one end of the cylinder to another, the bounding walls marked by arcane symbols in neon, and explained that nearly half a billion people called this home, then laughed as she asked, “How many do you think are fucking right now?”
They added one to that number before they slept.
And in the morning, she woke pressed against him, limbs all wrapped together and the satiny subdermal waves of sensation still lingering. She dismissed it easily and slowly disentangled herself from the still sleeping otter-or-fisher-or-mink and started to pull stuff from the exchange for breakfast. Cold sliced meats and fish. Cold cheeses. Cold vegetables, fresh and pickled. Dense, nutty bread. Small pastries.
They sat on the balcony once more, out in the bright sun, and ate their breakfast together, talking of only the small things.
“Is this the type of thing where I get to know your name?” he asked at one point.
She leaned over to kiss his cheek and smiled dreamily. “Nope.”
After breakfast: a shared shower, a few minutes of comfortable silence, a promise to never see each other again, a kiss, and one last bite to the shoulder “for luck”, leaving fresh stains of red on her blouse to join the ones from the night before.