Chapter Text
December was always drizzly in Los Angeles. It took particular pleasure in turning the 10 and the 405 into cross-city slip-n-slides and giving everyone something to talk about when they were inevitably fifteen minutes late to wherever they were trying to go. The whole of the winter season that was packed into a single week was otherwise harmless, so long as no one was counting the freeway fishtails, flooded San Fernando Valley backyards, and the odd floating autonomous delivery robot.
Harrow saw it as the logical next step of seasonal-marking ritual that mankind had been doing since time immemorial, only now it included highly performative tall tales about how high, exactly, the water came up on one’s car when they hit the poorly maintained corners of Olympic and Bundy. The same went for fire season and the Santa Ana winds and the traffic generated by awards season. Though that was the point in her thesis at which she began to notice eyes glazing over, and so she’d stopped bringing up her theories in mixed company—on the rare occasions she found herself in it, of course.
The server, a young, aspiring somebody, placed a glass of wine in front of Harrow. She idly spun it in slow circles on the fabric tablecloth, watching the liquid slosh up the sides of the bowl and saunter back down on dark, spindly legs to rejoin the collective.
She told herself when she’d ordered that she wasn’t going to drink it. Or at least, not much of it. It was more a prop or a fidget toy than anything else.
It wasn’t that Harrowhark Nonagesimus didn’t drink, or that she’d never drank. It was more a particular kind of insecurity that came from a sheltered childhood, that she was certain would follow her for the rest of her days. A mark. A brand. Something that declared, loudly and accusatorily, to everyone assembled, that not once in all her years had she ever gotten drunk in someone’s basement, or had a fumbling set of teenage hands try to finagle her bra off after two Smirnoff Ices.
She always had the sneaking suspicion that she would somehow have been able to hold her liquor better, tolerated the taste more, had she gotten it all out of the way at a more tender age. That the act of sneaking out or lying to her parents would have made her a more well-rounded adult. Instead, she was a pace behind, still learning to enjoy the things she’d been told would send her to hell.
She took a sip.
Ass.
She glanced back at the drink menu she’d idly pointed at without reading.
Twenty-five-dollars-a-glass ass.
It wasn’t her money, after all.
She took another sip and looked out the window.
It had really started to come down in the fifteen minutes she’d been waiting for Ianthe. The sun had set before she’d even left the museum, and now rain slicked down the restaurant’s wide picture windows, smearing the bright traffic lights, highbeams, and the flashing blue-and-red lights of the inevitable sirens into increasingly abstract shapes.
The sky lit up in a single crack—either lightning or a blown transformer, Harrow couldn’t be sure. And for the briefest moment, everything seemed to slide into place: the deep-winter dark, the lashings of rain, the light—
The light.
The stoplight at the intersection had turned red at just the right moment, and she swore it very nearly formed the shape of a woman, with two streetlamp-yellow points of light for eyes and a shock of red-means-stop hair.
Harrow’s face was briefly illuminated in the glass, and she saw herself all at once: a grown woman of thirty, stylishly short (albeit a bit frizzy from the rain) hair, dark eyes with wide slashes of black liquid eyeliner, high cheeks and a pointy chin framing a set of full blackberry lips. A far cry from the nineteen-year-old she always, just the tiniest bit, felt she still was.
Harrow routinely had to remind herself that, for better or worse, she was a long way from that age, a long way from her hometown, a long, long way from the night that had finally driven her away.
Another crack lit up the sky, and another figure—this time very real—appeared behind her, causing her to nearly jump out of her skin.
“Harry,” the figure said, “Apologies. You know how the rain is.”
“Surely Sextus told you that I hate being called ‘Harry,’” Harrow sniffed, surveying her date as she lowered herself into the chair opposite her.
The woman’s blonde hair had been twisted into a neat bun at the nape of her neck, though a few pieces had fallen loose in her hurry to get to the restaurant in time—a single display of vulnerability that likely would never show its shameful, desperate face again. Her makeup, in contrast to Harrow’s, was minimal and expensive-looking: brown-black mascara on blonde eyelashes, neatly arched brows, and a dusty, rosy sheer lipstick on her mouth that was just a touch too pink for her coloring. It was all a little off, truth be told; for all her money, she still looked a bit as though she were playing dress-up.
Ianthe was beautiful. That was not up for debate. Unfortunately for all involved, the beauty was closer to that of a lionfish’s or a particularly craggy and treacherous overlook at the Grand Canyon, which had a terrible habit of swallowing tourists.
“Oh, of course he did.” Ianthe smiled wide, the flickering candlelight and passing traffic giving her grin a wolf-like appearance, some part of which Harrow was horrified to find did something for her. “Probably the same day he’d told you not to accept my invitation.”
This had all begun with the simple realization that, despite working on opposite ends of the campus—Harrow in her job as a paleontology research associate at the George C. Page Museum and Ianthe as a curator at LACMA—she seemed to see Ianthe in passing more days than not.
In fact, if one didn’t know better, one might have been inclined to believe someone (Ianthe) was orchestrating the whole dance.
Ianthe had even been so bold as to flirt with her a couple of times, the extent of which seemed to be telling Harrow she smelled like rotten eggs after a day in Pit 91, up to her tits in tar, and Harrow responding that her knockoff Baccarat Rouge made her smell “middle class fancy.” Apparently, Ianthe had been smitten.
She’d likely hounded Palamedes for an introduction; Harrow could suss out that much on account of how terribly apologetic he’d sounded when he said she’d be joining them at the next happy hour some weeks prior.
Happy hour had turned into evening drinks, which had turned into one dinner, which had turned into three—each ending with the reminder that Harrow wasn’t looking for anything and the assurance that Ianthe wasn’t, either.
And yet and yet and yet.
“Anyway,” Ianthe sighed, midway through what was fast becoming her signature dinner screed about the “uncultured swine” she answered to. “They looked me dead in the eye and said they wanted something flashy to bring in the Broad crowd. I told them if that’s what they want, they ought to offer free tickets to bring in more tourists and students—but no, they want—”
“A gimmick,” Harrow offered, admittedly and begrudgingly invested in the whole saga.
“A fucking gimmick! They want some sensory deprivation room bullshit or some trite Cindy Sherman knockoff or, God forbid—”
“Fucking Jeff Koons.”
“Fucking Jeff Koons, exactly!” Ianthe gestured aggressively with a chunk of fresh bread, her lips curled into a mean little smile. “You get it. I’m trying to put together a screening night of twentieth-century Scandinavian performance art, or pull an Impressionism exhibit out of my ass that isn’t drier than a nun’s cunt, and they are two seconds away from suggesting I bring in some godawful balloon-dog sculpture. What is this, a real estate office in Palm Springs?”
The wine, ass or no, must have hit the sober-to-tipsy threshold in Harrow’s underfed, overworked mind at just that moment, because she opened her mouth to let out a sympathetic groan but instead (and much to her horror) let out a little giggle.
She tried to stifle it, but Ianthe zeroed in immediately, her pupils going wide like a shark catching its first whiff of blood in the water.
“But enough about me. Self-important donors will be there tomorrow, and I refuse to let them ruin our date.” She leaned forward, resting her chin in her hand. “What about you? I know they didn’t have you out in the pits today—unless they took one look at you and assumed you wouldn’t mind spending hours poking around a warm, wet hole.”
A jolt of recognition ran up Harrow’s spine.
The joke was crude and poorly delivered, but still there was something familiar in it, something that wheedled its way into her ears and deep inside her brain. It found the door in the very back corner of her mind’s basement—the one obscured by half-abandoned hobbies and pleasanter memories, prayers, dreams, “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”—and kicked the landlord-special, painted-shut door clean in. She hadn’t thought of what was behind that door in ages. She hadn’t let herself.
She choked on her wine.
“Oh, come on, Harry,” Ianthe purred, misunderstanding her reaction entirely. “Someone was bound to make the joke eventually. I figured I might as well be the one to get the credit for it.”
She reached a hand across the table, and Harrow didn’t immediately jerk her own away. The fingers were bony, punctuated by a chalky-pink manicure with neat, short almond nails. But they were also soft.
“Mm.” Harrow straightened herself up, relieved that she had not suffered some sort of traumatic brain injury that morning and dressed herself in anything other than her usual monochromatic uniform of black on black on black. If any of the ass wine had escaped her lips, it was nowhere to be seen now.
“Anyway,” Harrow continued, refusing to dignify the joke or the memory that immediately surfaced, “you’re right—about the pit, I mean. We found an almost completely intact dire wolf—even down to the vertebrae of his tail. We spent the better part of today just sorting tiny bones.”
“Yes, yes, we’ve all had our little college comphet phase,” Ianthe said, huffing out a little snicker at her own boner joke. She waved her hand dismissively, very clearly trying to come up with a way to continue the conversation without prompting what would be—and Harrow was big enough to both recognize and own up to it—the most boring and unsexy infodump about Paleolithic mammals in the Los Angeles basin that anyone had ever given outside of a lecture hall.
Harrow realized that she had paused a bit too long. She hadn’t laughed or nodded or provided some sympathetic anecdote of subpar collegiate sex. That was what normal people did, right? They certainly didn’t sit, hand clutching a wine glass so hard it might shatter and embed itself in their palm, and let themselves be emotionally devastated by sex jokes. They didn’t spend dates trying to recall the way someone they hadn’t seen since before they could legally drink sounded when they passed out on the couch, their breath falling into the easy, heavy REM-cycle rhythm.
She was sure that Ianthe—who never missed anything—certainly hadn’t missed that.
There was a sickening drop in Harrow’s stomach as she felt control slip from her grasp, and a feeling of being at the top of an impossibly tall roller coaster about to careen into a pool of dirty water and humiliation. It would not do.
“Ianthe, if this is your way of flirting,” she snipped, gathering her haughtiness around her like shining, bitchy plate armor, “it’s both juvenile and unnecessary. We are, as you said yourself, on a date. You progressively lose buttons on your blouse every time we pass each other on the grass, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you’ve switched your perfume—”
Ianthe opened her mouth, her eyebrow pulling itself into an inquisitive little arch at the cutting observation.
“—because I no longer feel as though my nostrils are being assaulted by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s nice, by the way. Rose and vetiver? I’m assuming you ran yourself over to the Le Labo store at the Grove before this, and that’s why you were late. It’s the parking garage that will get you.”
She shut her mouth again and sat up straight, something hungry and desperate flashing across her face before quickly being shunted away behind her usual mask of unearned confidence.
“Oh, yes, mommy, tell me about myself.”
“Anyway, we’re in a mad dash to finish before Sextus goes up north to visit his family. I don’t want to be left alone in the lab over the holidays with Mercy, who’s full-tilt menopausal at this point and keeps the place like a walk-in freezer.”
“Are you not going home for the holidays?” Which, in this town, also meant asking if someone was a transplant—which in turn meant possibly forcing them to admit their Podunk roots. Ianthe asked it with a surprisingly appropriate and respectful air of sensitivity, as though she were asking someone if they had a rash or were going through a particularly contentious divorce. “Where is home?”
“No, and Rancho Cucamonga.”
“Never heard of it,” she shrugged.
“Inland Empire.”
“My condolences,” she said with considerably less sensitivity. And then: “Orphan, religious, or broke?”
Harrow hated this part. She’d hoped she’d maybe have a few more dates before she’d have to address the elephant in temple garments in the room—or maybe that Ianthe would decide she was just a touch too mentally ill on the crazy-to-hot scale (unlikely) and lose interest. If she was really lucky, one of them might die first.
She briefly considered telling Ianthe that she was an orphan—which wouldn’t have technically been a lie considering the terms under which she and her family had last parted—or flat broke, though she suspected Ianthe would have taken a certain perverse pleasure in playing sugar mommy and filling her gas tank.
“Religious,” she finally said, and when Ianthe didn’t seem satisfied with the answer, she volunteered, “Mormon.”
“I thought they don’t like being called that anymore.”
“Well, I suppose they’re shit out of luck, since it’s been a long time since I lost sleep over what they do and do not like.” Which Harrow realized a second too late had been offering entirely too much information.
“Oh, well. That’s interesting—do tell. Is it true they get laughing gas with their filler injections just to do church-approved whippets?” Ianthe leaned forward, plucking Harrow’s wine glass from between her anxious, twitching fingers, and finishing it for her. “How old were you when you finally had coffee? How many siblings do you have? Do they really soak—did you ever soak?”
Harrow wanted to say: probably, nineteen, none, and just the once.
Her eyes drifted to the windows behind Ianthe, unfocusing and trying, just for a moment, to will the streetlights back into the shape of the red-headed woman.
Instead, she said, “Let’s get out of here.”
By the time they got to Ianthe’s apartment, Harrow was in a blind panic. She hid it well, by her own standards, but every part of her was itching to shuck her skin like a corn husk.
Ianthe had waited until the third floor before pressing her into a corner and snaking her long legs between Harrow’s, and, much to her horror, her body had responded—her hips jerking just the tiniest bit forward in anticipation of friction, her mouth rounding into a little wanton oh.
“Oh, needy, are we?” Ianthe had whispered in her ear, and she could have died. She wanted to die.
She wanted the whole screaming metal death trap to careen down all twenty-one floors of the building and take them both out.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to fuck Ianthe. She did. Not badly—she had never been desperate for anyone’s touch, with one exception—but she did want her.
No, the problem was Harrow. It was the insurmountable inexperience she never truly felt she could fuck away. It was the way she had never felt her body was her own, even after she’d left the church. And it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God so much as she felt her Heavenly Father had gone out for cigarettes at some point in her childhood and never come back, and she was trashing the house in His absence. One day He would come back and see all the horrid, wanton ways she had treated what was His, and He would look at her with abject disappointment.
And worse than eternal damnation was the fact that she didn’t know what to do with her body. Ianthe had meant to tease. It had meant to be sexy, it had been meant to turn her on—but all Harrow could think of, all she could agonize over, was the constant, scornful mantra in her head: You want it too much. You’re too greedy. Too loud. The face you make is wrong, the noise you make is wrong, the way you hold your arms and legs. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are wrong and everyone will know it. She will know it and throw you away.
Was the She in her mind even Ianthe?
The good thing, she’d either been lucky or unlucky enough to learn, was that people didn’t seem to mind where her mind was as long as they were getting off. And she’d gotten very good at guessing what got people off.
Hell, she’d gotten very good at getting them off.
And Ianthe was an easy mark.
When they pushed through the front door of the darkened apartment, she made to kiss Harrow, who turned her head to the side, causing Ianthe’s too-pink lips to brush against her cheek. She turned back, fixing Ianthe with a contemptful glare, and grabbed her squarely by the jaw.
“Ask,” she said. “Nicely.” And then wondered if she should have told her to beg. She was never very good at the improv part of it.
“Pless,” Ianthe said through a captive jaw and squished cheeks.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. Ianthe was significantly taller than her, and to compensate, Harrow pushed her into the wall of the foyer—because of course she had a foyer—sliding herself up Ianthe’s lanky frame as she pulled her down by the mandible.
The ragged gasp that escaped Ianthe when she sank her upper incisors into her lower lip told her that she’d calculated correctly.
The rest was a performance she’d rehearsed so many times over; the mid-day matinee of sex.
Her own arousal had been pushed so far down she doubted it was there to begin with. Harrow the girl, Harrow the good little child of God, Harrow the wayward saint, was gone. She was Harrowhark; she was something other than herself, five horny archetypes in a trenchcoat propped up and posing and moving so quickly, so expertly, that no one would notice she wasn’t really there at all.
She yanked at Ianthe’s expensive-looking silk blouse and quickly undid the buttons, her fingers zeroing in on the thin lace and satin of her unlined bra and pinching down on the nipple the thin fabric betrayed, earning her a hiss.
“The bedroom is just—”
“I don’t remember asking.” She punctuated this curt reply with another pinch, her other hand tugging at the top button of Ianthe’s trousers. “You’ve been gagging for it for weeks; don’t pretend to make me work for it now, Tridentarius.”
This she could handle.
Cruelty was a sort of comfort for Harrow; it always had been. It was a thick plaster that covered all the holes that her childhood had left in her. She couldn’t relate to her peers because she wasn’t allowed to watch the basic cable TV shows about horny teens with permissive parents and trashy reality TV? No matter; those were degenerate and low-brow. She didn’t understand the movie references her classmates made? Well, she didn’t concern herself with uncultured slop catering to the lowest common denominator of humor. She hadn’t read the popular books and cookie-cutter YA romances? Those were little more than pulpy diversions for society’s chronic underthinkers, and she had no patience for them anyway.
Ianthe’s fingers, she was pleased to find, were shaking as she slid the zipper down. The waist of her trousers was quickly yanked low on her hips along with what were almost certainly carefully chosen underwear that Harrow didn’t even bother to look at.
There was an obscene wetness when her fingers finally found their mark, her fingers gliding along Ianthe’s entrance, and all she could say was, “Who’s needy now?”
Which was met with an unexpected and frankly pathetic, “I am.”
“You won’t last a minute, will you?”
Ianthe’s head shook, her hair catching between the wall and her neck and finally falling free.
“Words,” Harrow commanded, working her clit in quick, crude circles before sliding two fingers in to the knuckle, her palm continuing to provide pressure and friction while her fingers curved inside her.
“N-no,” a harsh and high-pitched moan escaped her, and Ianthe didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Not I won’t. I’m so close, I—” She bit the last part of her sentence off with a reedy moan.
“Then beg.” Her free hand found the pale ivory column of Ianthe’s neck and squeezed ever so slightly.
“Please, Harry—”
“Not my name.” She was fucking into her with her fingers now, the ridged mountains of her metacarpophalangeal joints and the heel of her palm, and all the tiny bones therein, beating an uneven, aching rhythm on her clit as she did so.
The apartment, an over-dressed monstrosity of interior design in Harrow’s humble opinion, was filled with the sound of sex: the filthy slap of a hand meeting wet flesh and the flesh giving easily, the rasp of Ianthe’s impaired breath, the shockingly high-pitched, pitiful wails spilling from her mouth as she was shoved, urgently and unceremoniously, toward orgasm.
“Harrow,” she whined.
“Try harder.”
Harrow briefly removed her hand from Ianthe's throat to pull the satin of Ianthe’s bra to the side, exposing her left breast to the cool air of the apartment, and landed a bite on the soft, fatty tissue just offside a peaked and pink nipple.
“Harrowhark,” she gasped as her correct answer was rewarded with a faster pace. “Please, may I? May I come?”
She was shocked at how quickly the question melted into a chorus of pleasepleaseplease.
“So do it, then.” She removed her fingers and, before Ianthe could whine at the loss, landed a firm, open-palm slap between her legs. She came with a strangled cry, clenching around nothing and gripping Harrow’s shoulder as her legs threatened to give out from under her.
Harrow returned her hand, rubbing Ianthe’s clit with a firm-but-gentle hand, lazily alternating between rolling, determined stripes from her entrance to her clit and slow, intentional circles as she guided her through another orgasm and the ensuing aftershocks.
There was a long, awkward pause as Harrow wondered how to end the scene, how to disappear while the stage magic still held, punctuated only by Ianthe’s heaving breaths and the shuffle of fabric as she composed herself.
“Clean them,” she finally ordered, placing her offending hand against Ianthe’s lips, her slick still gleaming in the faint streetlights shining in through her uncovered windows.
Ianthe smiled—a gratuitous, veneer-laden display—and pushed Harrow’s hand to the side. She sauntered over to the kitchen, wet a paper towel, and returned to the foyer to gently wipe at her fingers.
“That’s not what I meant—”
“Oh, I know what you meant,” Ianthe said, placing a delicate, patronizing kiss to the pad of Harrow’s middle finger. “But I figured we could drop the act. Nice job, though.”
When Harrow didn’t say anything, she continued, thankfully ignoring the look of confusion on her little, pinched features. “If you’re not going to Rancho… Chupacabra?—which, again, I doubt exists—for Christmas, you should come to the family party.”
“I think I’ve made it clear I’m not looking for anything.”
“Oh, don’t be boring, Harry. Do you really not know who—” She looked confused, exasperated, and then a bit impressed all in short order. “My parents own Third House Entertainment? Ida Talent? Good to know you like me for me.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Harrow was eyeing the door, eager to take her leave.
“Oh, I have a point, I promise.” She balled the paper towel and tossed it into the bin behind her with a whispered, Kobe! “They throw an insane holiday party every year, and this year is supposed to be a sort of last hurrah because we’ve been bought out by some private equity firm that wants to turn Third House into an A24 jerk-off factory.”
“And you want me there because?”
“Because it would be funny. My sister and her wallpaper of a girlfriend have broken up for, like, the sixty-ninth time, and we both convinced my cousin Babs that plus-ones weren’t allowed, and I want to see their faces when I show up with you on my arm. Plus we can do something fun and tacky like fingerblast each other on the roof.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Harrow lived alone. For the most part, she always had. None of this had changed in the twelve hours she had been at work, at dinner, and in Ianthe. She was still alone—both functionally and literally.
However, none of that stopped her from looking over her shoulder as she opened her front door and locked it quickly behind her, as she washed the day from her body and hair and out from under her nails, as she cracked the window just a sliver to listen to the rain and passing cars.
She looked over her shoulder as she opened her closet door and shoved her rarely used winter coats (a term only applicable in Southern California; the jackets themselves were woefully unsuited for use anywhere other than a coastal Mediterranean climate) aside and yanked an odd, once-rectangular bundle from the back.
Her scripture case. She’d had two in her life: the bright pink confection she’d been given at her baptism and the deep blue one with flowers that she’d received as a teenager in lieu of the dignified black leather case she’d requested to replace the first. The same rose-colored baptismal abomination, now dulled with age, fixed her with a judgmental nylon glare.
It had not been a big case; in fact, there hadn’t been room for much of anything in it. And as such, she knew the exact contents of the case before she even opened it—not that knowing could have stopped her from reaching for the zipper and picking the scab open again.
As expected, the case, empty of religious texts and color-coded highlighters and pens and the journal she’d learned better than to keep, held a single photobooth strip she couldn’t bring herself to look at, an ancient, dried-out travel bottle of lube, and a black shirt that had been folded in on itself so many times to fit that she was surprised it didn’t turn into a tiny cotton black hole.
She unfolded the shirt. A skeleton in a top hat and cane tap-danced across it in cracked white screenprint with the caption “THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE BONE BUSINESS.”
She peeled her own pajama shirt off and pulled the relic over her head, holding the stretched-out neck over her nose and breathing in. The shirt hadn’t been washed in over a decade, and even with its careful storage, the smell of the original owner had all but faded away. All Harrow could grasp was the faint smell of its owner’s pine tar soap.
“You smell like a forest fire, Griddle,” she said to no one, her voice cracking just the tiniest bit.
Harrow was tired. A deep, to-your-bones tired. She shoved the scripture case back into its hiding place and closed the closet door behind her and poured herself into bed. She turned to her side and wrapped her arms tightly around herself and pretended she could feel someone at her back, holding her to them, clutching her to their chest as though she were a delicate and precious thing.
And then Harrow did the most honest thing she could remember doing in a good long while: she cried for her lost and beloved Gideon Nav.