ten #5
This time, Mira gave her a tender peck that rattled the table.
“Hmm.” Mira pulled away, leaving Sulim suspended between fantasy and reality—to acknowledge the latter now meant waking up from a beautiful dream. Because it was safe to explore something like this in her dreams. “I’ve always wondered what it was like to kiss a married woman.”
Well, there it was. Knocked back to reality.
“What?” Sulim asked.
“I tease. I’ve kissed married women before.”
Sulim didn’t know what to make of Mira’s comments. “I haven’t,” she said.
“Should I go out and get hitched to make this experience more exciting?”
Sulim rubbed her forehead as she completely detached herself from Mira’s orbit.
The two of them now sat back in their respective seats as if nothing had happened.
But something did happen. Sulim couldn’t deny it.
She had kissed not just someone who wasn’t her husband, but the julah daughter of the High Priest and his wife, Lady Joiya.
Arguably, Mira was the most eligible bachelorette in the universe, whether by human or julah measure.
Yet in that moment, she hadn’t been that girl.
She had just been… well, the interloper passing through.
She was an enigma who appeared at the gates one day, asking for sanctuary as she planned the rest of her journey.
She had made engaging conversation with Sulim but was not obliged to change her life.
Has my life been changed?
As if Mira read her fears that this had been a grievous mistake she’d have to take to her grave, Sulim was treated to another caress of the cheek. Sulim had never been on the receiving end of julah sorceric healing, but she wondered if it felt as gentle and warm as this.
Collateral.
“How old are you?” Sulim croaked.
Mira’s fingers stalled against Sulim’s cheek.
Yet she didn’t pull her hand away; instead, she allowed them to trace the subtle line of Sulim’s jaw.
Each inch she passed was another shudder down Sulim’s spine.
Right to the gut. Her body was alive and electric.
All Mira had to ask for was ten minutes, and, right here, Sulim would throw every oath she had ever made right out the window.
“A little over five hundred. Why?”
“Five… hundred.”
“Out of thousands of years.” Mira’s hand lowered to the table. “My mother’s not even a thousand years older than me.”
She seems so young. Joiya certainly came across as more youthful than Jacelah.
Somewhere in a nebulous space between Graella and Old Maid.
Sulim could barely conceptualize the age of the Federation, let alone how old julah were.
Oh, my God, there are julah out there old enough to remember when the Federation was officially founded, and the Human Age began.
“I’m twenty-five,” Sulim blurted.
“Funny. In human years, I’m not that much older than you. Honestly, my father would quip that I act eighteen.”
“Is that like a child in julah years?”
“Essentially. We reach the full age of majority at a hundred, but there are a lot of milestones before that. When I was twenty-five…”
That hand slipped over the side of the table, brushing against Sulim’s.
She let it. “I was traveling with my mother around the Federation while she went on tour with some of her natal House and also did work for the Temple. My father wasn’t quite High Priest yet, and she wasn’t yet the Keeper, so she had a lot more freedom. Those were fun times.
About ten years before I went off to the Academy.”
She caught Sulim’s inquisitive look. “That’s the university, in human parlance. We’re all drinking, smoking something, and fucking someone by that point.”
“Suppose it really isn’t that different from us.”
“It really isn’t.” Mira’s hand landed atop Sulim’s. With a firm squeeze, she smiled. “The passage of time is relevant. A year for me is like a week for you.”
“Then what’s a week for you?”
Mira leaned in again. This time, Sulim did not take the bait—she didn’t have to, with their hands entwined. “Around someone like you?” There was that charm, seeping into Sulim’s skin like the moisture in the air. “Eternity. A split second. Somewhere in between.”
Sulim had no gauge for how serious Mira was when she said things like that. But for her own split second, she pretended that her new companion had never been so serious about anything in her life.
One last kiss, please…
As if Mira read her mind, she backed away, letting her gaze linger on Sulim before making it clear that there was no more after that.
“I should get going,” she said. “My mother will come looking for me. Besides, I’ve intruded into your space for too long.”
Sulim was still too shocked by what had happened to insist that she stay. This is part of her seduction, isn’t it? So she remained at her table, watching Mira descend the ladder and head outside.
She stood in the small, muddy yard. The rain had cleared long enough for her to stop and look up at Sulim’s window.
Void, kill me now… That docile yet worldly visage. That languid way of standing. That loose hair falling off her shoulders and gently rippling in the breeze…
Sulim would no longer know a day when some part of her heart didn’t ache at the thought of her.