Chapter 26 #2
Her eyes met Fawn’s between the pillars of Fawn’s thighs.
Nina licked, hard and rough, and touched the slickness of herself at the precise moment that Fawn’s thighs shook with sudden vigor, like coming alive.
Nina licked again, harder. Harder. She slid her fingers to her own clitoris and widened her legs, bracing them against the bed.
Something told Nina she no longer had to wait for pleasure. Something in her life had profoundly, unalterably changed. Fawn watched Nina with interest, with expectation. Nina fucked herself with two greedy fingers until she came with alarming quickness, a seething grit of relief between her teeth.
Fawn propped herself up on her elbows then, waiting to be rewarded for her patience.
Nina pulled Fawn’s pants down, then smacked Fawn’s hip with one hand.
Fawn smiled a knowing, Cheshire smile, closing her eyes and lying back down.
Then, inexpertly, with the ardor of an amateur, Nina sucked and sucked until Fawn came like a gunshot.
They fell asleep close to five in the morning. Blood and orgasm on Nina’s tongue.
She rose carefully now from Fawn’s bed and looked in the mirror, inspecting herself.
The abdominal pain was gone as if it never existed, barely a phantom ache to memorialize a lifetime’s curse.
No wonder no one wore glasses, used an inhaler, took Adderall to study.
Nina felt clear-eyed, mindful, in tune with something—groundedness, she thought.
She felt grounded, no longer adrift. Her hair seemed …
shinier. It seemed longer, thicker, like she’d gotten it blown out for hours instead of just dry humping for a cool forty-five.
Whose blood was it? she’d whispered to Fawn before they drifted off.
Something we had in the reserves, said Fawn. I think he was a state senate candidate.
Nina looked at her cheeks in the mirror. They seemed … dewy. Her skin seemed radiant, like something was glowing from underneath.
In her montage of the night, Fawn flipped over on the mattress to face Nina, her palm steady around Nina’s cheek.
What you’re tasting is revenge. Tessa’s voice was laced with Fawn’s sweetness, or maybe the other way around.
It’s reprisal. It’s violence. It’s the guns they won’t ban no matter how many abusive assholes kill their wives.
It’s the choices they strip from us and the formula they lock up so the babies they forced on us will starve.
It’s every time you were called a bitch for saying no and a slut for saying yes.
Peaceful protest only works if the enemy has a conscience. The two-headed monster of Tessa/Fawn blew out a breath like a smoke ring, coolness personified. If they have none, why should we?
Nina had shivered gladly then, wondering if anyone knew, if anyone could ever know. Whether anyone could really judge her if they actually understood.
And Fawn had stroked her thumb over the bone of Nina’s cheek, a play of sympathy spilling over her delicate features. Hey. Let’s keep this between us for now. Okay?
Nina would have kept anything Fawn gave her. Hair, a vial of blood, all her secrets.
Okay.
In Fawn’s mirror, Nina could see her lips were bitten red. Her eyes seemed clearer, brighter. A deeper, more otherworldly brown.
She almost gasped. She seemed so … beautiful.
Not that she couldn’t have called herself pretty before, if pressed, but now it was different.
Her tawny skin looked less sallow around her eyes, the dark circles vanished in accommodation of the new inner light.
Despite not having slept more than a couple of hours, she didn’t look tired.
There was more depth to the color of her hair, highlights and lowlights, every motion as she turned her head from side to side a new spectrum of radiance from ebony to gold.
Her first day as a member of The House. So this was rebirth, and yet the clock went on ticking. Unbeknownst to Nina, her timeline had always been off.
“You know,” came Fawn’s voice from the bed behind her, “you should really move in here.”
“To your bed?” Nina joked, turning to look at her. In the morning light, Fawn was still perfection, a groggy smile on her petal-pink lips.
“The House, but you knew that.” The smile faltered, becoming a flicker of something else. Desire, Nina realized.
“Get back in here before everyone else wakes up,” whispered Fawn.
Nina knew she would mentally record this, skip class in favor of playing it back.
She saw a long shower in her future, all the excuses she would make to her roommate Simone.
She’d suck more expertly this time, with something like control, or at very least restraint.
Or she’d just masturbate violently in parallel to Fawn—who could really say, given her new appetite?
Everything would be different now.
“How’s the cult?” Jas asked when Nina finally called her back, smelling primly of body wash and lotion.
“You’d like them,” Nina said. “They’re your people.” On her phone was a missed call from Dalil, followed by a text: where’d u go last night?
“Why,” Jas sighed, “because they knit pussy hats?”
“No, because they slaughter men and eat them,” Nina said.
“Ha ha,” muttered Jas, slumping down in her desk chair with her usual gloom of systemic frustration. “Well, then good for them, I guess.”