seventeen
Although Sulim was no stranger to another woman’s touch, she was still in awe over how easy it was to make love to someone who so easily saw her for everything she was.
Mira had no expectations of her. She made no comments over undressing Sulim’s body in the loft, where the table was shoved aside so Sulim could pull Mira on top of her.
Instead, Mira said everything, shared all of her admiration with nothing but her kisses and the heady, pleased sighs that descended Sulim’s skin inch by overwhelming inch.
I’m in love. She felt no guilt thinking it—feeling it.
After all, why shouldn’t she be in love?
She had known incredible loss. She had sacrificed much to make it this far.
Perhaps there was someone who would be hurt, even angry, to know this was happening, but Sulim knew—from the moment Mira fell on top of her and tangled their limbs together—that she was in love.
It was more than sex, after all. It was more than a purge of negative energy or an embrace of the physical. It was lovemaking. It was a spiritual connection that ran deeper than any shallow crevasse she had traversed with any other.
She wanted that mouth on her ear every day.
She yearned to know how deeply the two of them could fall into the deep ravine of the Void’s beautiful embrace.
Because when Mira touched her, it was as good as a heavenly dream that made Sulim believe in the blessings of the Void.
When she kissed her, it was as magical as the first time she realized there was a whole universe beyond her little Qahranian hamlet.
One day, I could be somewhere else. Here.
She could be right here, while the rain poured outside and love poured into her heart.
The only time Mira spoke was to tell her how long she had been waiting for this moment.
“From the moment I first saw you.” Even when she learned Sulim was married, it didn’t matter.
She was to be Mira’s. And as Mira became as naked as Sulim, shedding her dowdy Temple garbs to reveal a lean physique tipped in a woman’s lovely curves, the more Sulim realized that Mira was hers as well.
Panting declarations and whimpered truths flowed through their veins the more their heartbeats aligned in that quiet loft.
Did Mira do things to her that no other had even thought to try?
Sulim barely noticed at first, because she was so deep in love’s foolish disbelief that she almost forgot what a new experience was and what felt like she had been doing it her entire life.
Even shedding the first climax together was more perfunctory than anything else.
Tear down my walls. Expose me. It was what Sulim had meant to feel since the day she realized that life existed beyond her hamlet.
Did she ever think she would be here, in bed, with the High Priest’s daughter? She didn’t even think about that. Mira was just Mira. The woman Sulim loved. The woman she had loved at first sight, but forbade herself from embracing due to life’s circumstances.
But she embraced her now. Sulim refused to let her go.
I want to know exactly how we’re alike, how we’re different.
To her bewildered wonder, Mira’s body was just like hers: she had a female form that had evolved to create life and nourishment, and somewhere along the way, it rewarded her for engaging in the social beauty that was sex.
Because it was moments like these that reminded Sulim that sex went beyond procreation and the desire to feel good.
It forged incredible bonds between two souls that had been searching for each other for their whole lives.
Mira said one thing that stuck out to Sulim’s joyous revelations.
“You’re incredible.” Said with such romance, such spontaneity, that Sulim had no choice but to believe her.
Who knew how many women Mira had been with in five hundred years?
Who knew how many beautiful women, julah and human, had been touched by these curling hands and delicate kisses that took Sulim to places she had only dreamed of?
Yet she was here, speaking in awe as she explored Sulim’s body.
Mira didn’t half-ass anything. And when she decided to take charge, it was as natural as giving over to the forces of the universe that knocked on Sulim’s heart.
She kept the feeling of love as a treasured secret in her heart.
Her soul was fit to burst with the wondrous sensation that completely rewired her brain and threatened to rewrite her aura, but she didn’t share it with Mira.
If Mira wasn’t using her words, then neither was Sulim.
She would use all of her mortal energy to tell a story, to confess her innermost feelings in a place where she was used to keeping her hopes and dreams to herself.
Her fantasies. Her very soul.
No, she didn’t stay silent out of worry that Mira didn’t love her, too. The thought was impossible to consider now.
Just let me have this.
She longed to be smothered, trapped, and consumed beneath Mira’s body.
To be marked as hers with bruising kisses and the kind of soreness that reminded a woman the next day that some actions haunted them long beyond the event itself.
Make me feel you here forever. Here, on top of her.
Here, between her legs. And here, in the depths of her throat that hardly ever went without Mira’s tongue when it wasn’t off exploring elsewhere.
What was human? What was immortal? Sulim was invincible.
She was fragile and transient in the sensual world.
There had been nothingness before her birth, and there would be nothing beyond death.
The Temple taught humans that their souls were rinsed and repurposed in the Void, sent off to live as other people, other entities, until the end of time.
But how true was this? How could anyone truly know?
How did Sulim not know that beyond the long tail of losing final consciousness wasn’t just the endless pleasures of the universe?
How could there be anything beyond this moment?
How could she ever spend eternity with anyone else?
How could she bear to see Mira without her a hundred years from now, when one was destined to live for thousands of years, and the other for one century’s cycle?
Don’t leave me. I won’t leave you. Yet the closer Sulim crescendoed toward eternal bliss, the closer she was to understanding death itself.
It wasn’t losing her blood, her breath, or even giving her soul back over to the Void.
Death was losing this. The very moment of being alive.
She would spend the rest of her existence exploring how to share the sentiment with Mira. Without words, because there were no words when the Harmony echoed from the Void.
“You should wear your hair like that more often.” Mira loomed over Sulim, tracing the line of her nose before lightly ruffling her tangled hair. “It’s a good look on you.”
“What? Sweaty and gross?”
“Well-loved, darling.”
Sulim blew one of those hairs out of her face before turning onto her back, one hand up to her eyes as her elbow drew invisible circles in the fading light.
It was a shame that the rain and clouds obscured so much sunlight this late in the day.
We should have another hour to enjoy each other like this.
After Mira had proven herself to Sulim, she wanted nothing more than to lie here in the afterglow, enjoying each other’s unblemished company.
She also wanted a smoke, but settled for pressing little kisses against Sulim’s shoulder, her cheek, and her chest when her oral fixation reawakened.
“You are beyond beautiful.” Mira propped herself up on her elbow, fisting her own tangled hair as she reveled in what she had accomplished that afternoon.
“Have I told you that yet? Oh, get back here.”
As Sulim attempted to roll over toward the window, Mira wrapped an arm around her and nestled her chin right in the crook of the warm and lovely neck.
She smelled of sweat, yes, but also of the sea.
We’re not anywhere near the sea. Perhaps it continued to blow from the wind behind her back, straight from the seaports of Qahrain.
“You may have said it a couple of times.”
Mira now realized that this was part of Sulim’s lovemaking style. She liked to pretend to evade and act like she was a bit above it all, but in reality, she moaned and screamed like most on the other end of Mira’s own lovemaking style. Let her be indirect. I can make up for it. Hmph.
“I’ll say it a couple more.” Mira half-rolled onto her, pushing Sulim into the thin mattress that separated them from the wood floor. “You’re beautiful. You’re gorgeous.” She nipped the bottom of Sulim’s ear. “You’re imprinted on my mind for the rest of my life.”
She meant it, too. As Mira was soon reminded, she became enthralled, once more, in the unassailable curves of Sulim’s naked body.
When Mira’s energy petered off, and Sulim continued to stare at the wall, she eventually said, “I wish we didn’t have to go back. Let’s stay here all night.”
“I will. With you. Just say the word.”
Sulim poked her finger into a tiny hole in the wood beneath the window. “Someone will come looking for me.” She lowered her hand. At least she had the decency not to reference her husband, a man Mira had soundly forgotten while fucking someone else’s wife.
“We don’t have to leave now,” Mira reminded her. “We’ve got a little time.”
She almost feared being pushed away, but Sulim lowered her arm atop Mira’s, and the two of them cuddled like that for a short time.
Eventually, Sulim slipped into the full embrace of her lover, beseeching Mira’s warmth as the disappearing light brought with it a heavy chill.
They were beneath the blanket Sulim kept up there, but it wouldn’t keep them warm enough for long.
If only I didn’t have this stupid tattoo.
Mira could keep them plenty warm with sorcery.
“Have you ever heard of Dreamwalkers?” Mira asked. “I was visited by one recently.”
“No. What are they?”
“They’re a legend from the most ancient Epoch. Powerful sorceresses who were so connected to the Void that they could enter people’s dreams to deliver messages, even when they were thousands of miles away. Apparently, they can travel through time, too.”
“Don’t tell me one traveled through time to visit you.”
“Hey. What’s that mean?”
Sulim giggled. “That you shouldn’t be dreaming about other women when I’m here.”
It didn’t stop Mira from describing the dream to someone besides her mother.
I haven’t even told Ramaron yet… She had meant to, but there was so much going on that it had slipped her mind.
I’ve been busy this afternoon. Kissing and loving on this woman who had been taunting her for weeks.
Finally, she was in Mira’s arms, and they had all the time in the world to do whatever came naturally to them.
Like discussing the most esoteric parts of julah lore.
She didn’t tell her all of the details, though. Nor did she share Joiya’s reaction when her daughter told her what she had seen.
“Well, you are your parents’ daughter.” Sulim wrapped some of Mira’s hair around her finger before releasing it again. “You would be quite special.”
“You ever have something like that happen to you?” Mira asked.
“I can safely say that you’re the first julah anything to completely fuck me up.”
‘But not the first one you’ve met,” Mira said.
“No.” Sulim hesitated before playing with that ringlet of hair again. “I’ve known a few before you. None that I’ve ever seen naked, though.”
Although that was a joke, Mira wanted to get to the meat of the matter. Yes, even so shortly after lovemaking. “Including Hannu.”
“Ugh.”
“Tell me about her.” Mira realized what that sounded like. “Your first girlfriend.”
“Now?”
“What better time?”
Sulim bit her lip before indulging Mira’s curiosity.
“She was very feisty. Hotheaded. Didn’t take shit from anybody. She was mostly raised by her dad, and he was kinda abusive, I guess. Nothing gross, but he often kicked her out of their house and implied he’d sell her to sailors if she acted out again. From what I gathered,
it was his way of saying I love you.”
“Ah, yes, I know father-daughter relationships like that.” Mira would not reveal who. I should call my father. Just to hear him say, “Why the hell are you calling me?”
“She might have gone down a dangerous path if she hadn’t gotten involved at the Temple. When Hannu was there as the new priestess.”
Sulim rolled onto her back again, staring at the low ceiling above them.
“That’s where we met. We were interns together. Eyne wasn’t really a believer, but she needed structure. She was always unapologetically into other girls. She flirted with me constantly.”
Sulim glared at Mira. “Kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“All I hear is that there’s a pattern of it working on you.”
“Yeah, well… I shocked her when I took her up on her offer to ‘blow my mind’ one evening. We went back to her shitty apartment by the docks, and she took me around the block more than once. It was my first time.”
“I like her already.”
“It wasn’t really love, you know?” Sulim’s fingers gingerly walked up Mira’s arm, tickling her.
“I mean, I loved her. And I definitely thought it was love back then. I was barely eighteen, maybe nineteen. Being with her was fun. She introduced me to the kinds of characters I would have normally run from, but to her, they were just weird neighbors and the kinds who needed help sometimes.
She had a big heart. Crude-ass mouth, but a big heart.”
“Like I said, I like her already.”
“I moved in with her pretty quickly. We could split the costs, and it got me away from the farmwork back home. And the babysitting.”
Mira nodded.
“We were probably together a few months when the mercenaries attacked. And, uh…”
“You don’t have to talk anymore about it. I know the rest.”
Sulim continued to stare at the ceiling. “I miss her. But it’s mostly that I miss what she brought. Maybe it’s better she died instead of being kidnapped, but… they did get one of us. A mute girl worked at the Temple. Her name was Nem. I wonder if she’s a mercenary now.”
The name did not ring a bell.
“I shouldn’t be so hard on Hannu.” Sulim coiled her arm around Mira’s. “It wasn’t really her fault. I guess we just thought that having a julah around would protect us.”
“I bet she’d love to talk to you about it. I know she doesn’t seem like she would, but… eh, that girl also needs closure. She’s so insufferably mopey.”
“I had no idea she beat herself up so much about it.”
“Priests take their work very seriously. Well, good ones do. To lose people on your watch, when you have even an ounce of talent, is a moral failure.”
“Guess I never thought of it that way.”
“Well…” Mira made sure that they were both perfectly entwined before continuing. “That’s such unpleasant talk. You know what I would rather chat about?”
“What?”
Mira sighed. “Absolutely nothing.”
She meant it, too.