Chapter Nineteen. Discontent #2
Once she was no longer staining the floor, she set about wiping the rest of her with a wet towel. It was strangely soothing, and she rinsed it out methodically before repeating the process.
She was staring at her reflection as she did, and was trying to find what Pek Mun had seen, what veil she’d recognized and known to provoke.
It alarmed her that someone else could see a thing she hadn’t known about herself.
But if the goddess had been there, she was gone now, stopped up like a flow.
Adeline found Tian on the small back terrace overlooking the alley, silhouetted against a scorching white afternoon.
“Hey,” she said.
Tian turned. Her eyes were red but dry, and she forced something like a smile. “How’s your arm?”
“It’s fine.” But she let Tian pick it up and run a thumb over the gauze, smoothing and then adjusting the bandage she’d haphazardly wrapped.
She also let Tian run her hands down her arm, to where the butterfly was still tender, but no longer bleeding.
With their wrists side by side Adeline realized they had matching ones. Tian was studying it intently.
Eventually she dropped Adeline’s hand.
“I’m fucking sick of her. She always has to know better.
” She returned to the balustrade and Adeline joined her, slinging her arms over the railing.
The streets rolled beneath them, the day hawkers packing up before night fell, and the night shutters preparing to stir.
The sounds floated upward: wheels, interlacing voices, the ever-present hum and grind of distant demolition and construction.
“We went to see her mother.” Adeline traced her own butterfly, marveling at how the skin hadn’t broken at all, like the blood had come from somewhere else. “They’re all taking these pills that make them more beautiful.”
“Please don’t talk about Pek Mun.” Whether she’d changed her mind or didn’t realize the irony, Tian braced her palms against the balustrade and dropped her head between her arms like she needed to find her breath. The outline of bandages pressed through her shirt.
“Does it still hurt?”
“It just missed all the important things, apparently.” Tian winced.
When she looked at Adeline next she scanned her up and down with lidded eyes that made Adeline almost shudder.
Then she grimaced and shook her head with some kind of half-ironic noise, squeezing the balustrade and staring at the drop below. “Fuck.”
“What?”
“She thinks I’m stupid. And she’s right. I just hate when she’s right.”
Adeline reached for her, but Tian flinched. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and backed away with that same ironic, half-amused expression. “Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
Tian took a deep, shaky breath, tipped her head back to blink rapidly at the sky, then shut her eyes to the sunset. “I can’t ruin anything else today, okay?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tian nodded, swallowed, nodded again. She wouldn’t look anywhere near Adeline. “Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
Adeline’s heart was pounding again, something bone-deep reaching through her for the second time that day.
A realization of herself was starting to form, and with it the world finally falling into place, but it was falling slowly, the exact shape of it still just beyond reach.
She stepped forward to it, unconsciously, and when Tian winced this time she went closer with full understanding of her own desires. “Look at me.”
It took Tian a moment, but she did, and then she was searching Adeline’s eyes, too, for something other than a goddess.
She needn’t have looked; Adeline had already found it, in her.
Understood now why Maggie’s magic might have made her think of Tian.
If the magic had made Maggie beautiful, then it would have been in this shape.
Tian’s lips parted. Whether to speak, or to catch a breath, it pulled Adeline’s eyes to the slight wet of her mouth.
Adeline kissed her.
For the first second, only fiercely, and then by the next, with brazen confidence. It was the easiest thing in the world. It burst within her a wanting so raw and realized it almost staggered her.
Tian made a sound that could have been shock or desperate relief.
Either way, as Tian’s arm circled Adeline’s waist to pull her in closer and kiss her again, Adeline knew this would rend her in two.
Tian kissed back like she had only been waiting for permission.
Like she’d spent time imagining it and she’d only been waiting for Adeline to catch up.
Right when Adeline might have gone dizzy, or remembered she needed to breathe, someone cleared their throat behind them.
Tian sprang away first, hand jumping to her hair.
Adeline stumbled at the sudden lack of her, trying to regather herself.
It was Christina who was standing there, but she didn’t look fazed.
In fact, after taking in her folded arms and the tooth snagged on her lower lip, Adeline’s initial embarrassment darkened into dread.
“What happened?” Tian said warily.
“You should come downstairs.”
Something had gone wrong while she and Tian were on the balcony.
Vera and Hwee Min stared as they passed.
Somewhere Adeline saw Mavis and Ning huddled again, whispering in panic about a box in Mavis’s hands, but Christina was walking too quickly to linger, leading them to Pek Mun’s room, where the door was already open.
Tian halted. Adeline had to sidestep her to see that the room was empty: everything had been straightened out, as though none of the furniture had ever been touched. There was nothing to indicate anyone had ever been here at all, except the faintest sour pulsing of a remaining anger.
Pek Mun had left the Butterflies entirely.
Adeline blinked, trying to figure out whether she had anticipated this consequence—had hoped for it, obviously, but she’d been resigned to Tian and Pek Mun screaming at each other and then finding a way to work out the difference like they always did, someone relenting and someone keeping the grudge, but choosing to stay together on top of anything else.
At the very least, she would have expected a proper departure, because Pek Mun had only ever done things with rigorous properness: making sure all the affairs were in order and passed over, wrestling Tian into all the responsibilities she needed to bear in mind without Pek Mun around.
But by the looks of it, neither Christina nor Tian had known she was going to leave. For all intents and purposes, she might never have existed. Except for the marks on Adeline, none of the day might as well have happened.
A little shriek popped the silence, a flurry of movement from the girls behind them. Mavis, looking nauseated, marched up and thrust a wooden box at them. “I don’t think it’s the best time but,” she began. “This is a rat I caught.”
Tian gritted her teeth. “And?” Her heart wasn’t in it; she was still casting glances back into Pek Mun’s room, as though expecting the older girl to materialize with the answer.
“I’ve been feeding it the drugs I took from Skinny Steel Weng,” Mavis confessed. “I wanted to see what would happen. My boyfriend’s gang used to do it all the time. It didn’t really seem to do anything.”
“It got bigger,” Ning supplied, hovering behind Mavis. “And shinier.”
“Sure, yeah. It was stronger, too. I had to put it in a wooden box instead of the shoebox. But then I ran out.” Mavis dangled the empty pouch that Adeline only barely remembered from ambushing the Steel in the alley that night.
“So I just left the rat for a week and I was going to release it. Then Pek Mun came back and started talking about the pills, so I went to check. Well…” She pushed the box at them again, as though trying to get Tian to take it.
Tian did, unwillingly, and opened it. Christina yelped; Tian swore and almost dropped it. Adeline leaned forward despite herself, mind already putting things together.
Inside the box was a creature vaguely recognizable as a rat.
But its spine had flicked upward through its back, and a bulge of raw flesh and hair had replaced its snout, beneath where its skull had contorted.
It was brown with its own dried blood, and already flies were moving across its matted fur.
“I guess that’s what’s killing the girls,” said Mavis in a tiny voice.
It was dark by the time Adeline found Tian alone again, sitting on Pek Mun’s abandoned bed with Mavis’s box in hand. She’d been gone all afternoon, searching. “Ning’s been looking for you,” Adeline said. “Fatt Loy’s had some trouble.”
“It can wait.” Tian rattled the box violently, the deformed creature inside thudding from side to side. “I couldn’t find her. I don’t even know where she has to go. She just disappeared.”
Adeline shouldn’t have been shocked at Pek Mun’s ingenuity, even now. “She’s just punishing you. She knows how to hurt you.”
“I should have killed her. Going to the fucking pigs. Anyone else, I would’ve…” Tian stared at the box before hurling it across the room with a furious noise. The rat rolled out onto the floor, misshapen and hardly recognizable. “Now there’s this shit.”
“It doesn’t have to be your problem.”
“It is my problem. I care about this, I care about those girls.”
Adeline sat down beside her. “We care if you care,” she said. Conversations had happened, while Tian was chasing after Pek Mun. In Tian’s absence some of the girls had come to her. “Some of them are scared. They don’t know if you can do this without her.”
“What did you say?”
“That they don’t know what the goddess wants.”
“Me?” Tian said wryly. Their hands brushed on the edge of the mattress, and Tian looked down. “Earlier…”
“You regret it?” In Tian’s absence, she’d begun to fear that Tian would make it her fault that Pek Mun was gone.
But Tian laughed shortly. “The only thing I don’t.”
Adeline touched Tian’s hand. Squeezed, then, undeterred, squeezed her upper arm. “You’re better than Mun. Lady Butterfly belongs with you.”
There was a tightening silence. Then Adeline was tilting her chin to meet Tian’s mouth, and Tian pulled her onto her lap to fit them exactly together.
After some minutes they tumbled onto the bed and Adeline decided this was the only thing that had ever been worth anything.
This racing, building heat between them and in her stomach and between her legs, a state of feeling she only used to see glimpses of when she lit flames.
But she lived in it these days, and it unfurled within her now stronger than it ever had, with her spine against the mattress and Tian on top of her, needy pressure in their pressed hips and grasping hands.
She huffed a frustrated breath when Tian pushed away, palms braced against the mattress on either side of Adeline’s shoulders. Tian hovered uncertainly. “You’re still hurt—”
“So are you. Do I look like I’m stopping you?” Then, not deigning to wait for an answer: “Do you want to?”
The swimming dark of Tian’s pupils was answer enough, but still she said: “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I will tell you if you are hurting me,” Adeline said. “So are you going to take off my clothes, or not?”