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In Harper’s wildest dreams, in her most private thoughts, Yasmin tastes like forty-thousand-dollar-a-glass red wine and shiny pink pearls. Crisp silk painted wet and dark with an errant tongue. Caviar, diamonds, a credit card with a balance she’d never check. Pawns scattered across a heavy chessboard, oil-coloured ebony and bone-white ivory. Smooth olive skin stretched taut over sharp hipbones, bruises fading to green in the shape of wide, cruel thumbs. White residue on the keys jammed into a lock of an empty house.
Right now, in the club that’s dark and humid where they’re surrounded by bodies, Yas tastes like cigarettes and the coke she’d rubbed on her gums once they’d finished sniffing it up and her fingers are curled against the back of Harper’s head as their lips meet. All things considered, it’s a rather demure kiss. Harper doesn’t open her mouth to let Yasmin’s tongue between her lips and Yasmin doesn’t force it open anyway and when they break apart, Yasmin’s mouth shines with spit in the blue-red-pink-orange lights beaming down on them. It’s gentle, really. Practically chaste. She’s never known Yasmin to be chaste. She remembers watching her get married in the drafty nave of a church in the middle of the English countryside, resplendent in white, kissing Henry with tongue when the priest gave them the go-ahead in front of the richest men on this cold wet island.
(She’d left the reception at the same time Yas and Henry did with one of Henry’s friends from school and fucked him hard in his hotel room and imagined Yas fucking Henry hard in the honeymoon suite and came twice imagining it. She hadn’t brought a gift and Yas hadn’t sent her a thank-you note and they didn’t speak again for nearly four months afterwards.)
They keep dancing. Yasmin’s hands graze her over and over again—knuckles against her sides, nails against her shoulders, sweaty palms against her hips—and Harper’s hands graze her right back, music swelling and falling as her feet ache and her eyes burn and the throbbing of the bass marches in time with her pulse, hup-two-three-four, and sweat drips down her spine and Yasmin’s gaze finds her own. Yasmin’s gaze always finds hers. Crowded rooms, empty rooms, boardrooms and offices, hotel rooms, the Pierpoint trading floor. It doesn’t matter. Harper could run back to New York and Yas’s gaze would creep across the ocean just to claw at her door.
The song changes. Harper’s never heard it. She can’t hear it now. She doesn’t really care. Yas tosses her hair, twists in the light, tips her head back and stares up at the ceiling and bares her throat. It’s vulnerable. It’s nauseating. It sends a swell of something into Harper’s chest, a swell of something that threatens to bubble up between her lips and drip down her chin, and all she can think to do is stagger forward a step and put an arm around Yasmin’s waist and press her face into the warm, sweat-damp skin that Yas has exposed to her teeth.
Yasmin sighs when Harper touches her; a sigh of relief, terribly sad and terribly pathetic, the sort of sigh that makes Harper pity her more than she ever thought she was capable of pitying anyone and the sort of sigh that makes Harper want to swallow her whole. It’s not all her fault, not really. Oh, most of it is, but honestly, Yas never really stood a chance. How could her life have turned out besides like this? Her neck is sticky and hot and Harper noses at her pulse, teeth tucked behind her lips lest she bite, smelling salt and booze and the perfume she’s in the process of sweating off, the perfume she started wearing after getting married that she probably thinks makes her a grown up. Yasmin’s hand comes up to cradle the back of her head again, long slim fingers in her hair, another fractured sigh escaping her mouth when Harper huffs a breath against her throat.
The song keeps playing. Harper still can’t hear it. Yasmin’s hair is in her face, thick and heavy and darker than she’s ever seen it, fine strands plastered to the side of her neck and the skin around her ears with sweat. Sometimes Harper wonders if their scalps ever ache the same way, if Yasmin’s skull ever pulses under the weight of all that hair, if she’s ever thought about cutting it all off and starting again. Probably not. She knows Yas is incapable of reinvention, despite all her best efforts. She shed her career (however fruitless) and her clothes (however beautiful) and her last name (however weighty) but she can never be anyone besides Yasmin, never be free of that chasm of need in the center of her chest. Wealth and a husband and a title and all the trappings of wealth and every door flung wide open for her won’t sew that wound shut. Nearly thirty years old and her entire life revolves around the hole her father left in her. Yas draws Harper closer still, hips to navel, thigh to thigh, so close that if she wasn’t drunk and restless and lonely she might nudge her away with an itch in her skin, but she’s drunk and restless and lonely so she just drags her nose across the pulse in Yasmin’s neck and lets herself be embraced.
“Are you happy?”
It’s barely a question. It’s certainly not a question Yasmin actually wants an answer to, because she doesn’t look at Harper when she asks it, only sighs it into her ear, all cloying breath and damp skin, letting Harper push at her jaw and nose at her chin. It’s a question that might have stumped Harper, once, thrown her so far off-balance it would take her a crucial moment to recover, displayed a chink in her armour she’d never be able to hide away again. It’s a question that, coming from Yas, doesn’t mean anything at all. Most of the time Yasmin’s questions aren’t worth the mouth they’re spat out of. It is, after all, an expensive mouth.
(She doesn’t think she’d ever ask how expensive. Not that she wouldn’t be able to handle the answer—she could, she would, she knows it already, it’s written in Yasmin’s wide wet eyes—but because she thinks it might break Yasmin’s heart. The idea of breaking Yasmin’s heart doesn’t bother her, not exactly, she’s broken it plenty of times before, she’ll break it again. It’s just the idea that this question will make her only tangentially responsible for Yasmin’s heartbreak rather than its sole architect. That she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stand.)
Is she happy? Has she ever been happy? Will she ever be happy? Her mother is dead and her brother hates her and Eric is gone, Eric has left her, Eric broke her fucking heart. She’s killed Tender. Yasmin has killed her husband. Yasmin is adrift, anchorless, looking for all the world like a malnourished puppy begging for a boot.
It’s kind of everything you’ve ever wanted, really, isn’t it? Me like this and you like that. Yes, yes, yes!
Harper cups the back of Yasmin’s neck in her hand, falling into her, pressing her brow to the soft smooth skin of Yasmin’s cheek. She doesn’t answer. Yasmin doesn’t ask again.