Jada and Ayano - Collection 01

She opened the envelope and tilted it downward. Metal handcuffs fell into her hand. She laughed out loud. It was true, she did ask for them. Never in her life had she gotten a gift like this before. She put the keys in her wallet for safekeeping. She called up one of her friends to gush about the gift, but didn't mention the handcuffs.

That evening, her friends-- some from art school, others from capoeira-- threw her a party at her friend Sam's house. He was a trust fund baby with an enormous loft and a drinking problem, so he always threw the best parties. It was too soon to have Ayano meet all her friends. Most of them were much younger than him, like she was. She made no plans to see him that evening, but made sure to call him to thank him for the gift, saying they'd talk later.

It was past midnight. Jada rang the second floor doorbell at Ayano's brownstone. She had been to Sam's party and then some of them went bar-hopping, so she was pretty wasted. After the second bar, everyone had thought she got a cab to go home but she had a last minute change-of-heart.

"Yes?" his voice sounded from the intercom. "Oh, Jada!" he said before she said anything. He must've had cameras out there somewhere.

"Sorry to stop by unann...unan... without calling. Is that bad? That's bad, isn't it?" she asked, leaning against the front door.

"No, just the opposite. I'll come get you." his voice cut off. Within a few moments, he came downstairs and opened the door. He was still dressed.

"Hi." she said, a big smile on her face. She was holding her black high heels in her hand, feet bare. She was wearing a mid-length purple-blue halterneck dress and carrying her multicolored, sequined purse.

"What a nice surprise." he said, smiling just as much as she was.

"Can you show me where to sit down and then you have a drink? I don't need a drink but you need at least one." she said, taking his hand and coming inside.

"Come into the living room." he said. He directed her to the couch. His dining room table had empty glasses in front of the chairs and a couple of ashtrays, the house still smelling of smoke.

"Did you have fun tonight?" he asked as he walked over to the dining room table to grab his drink. Jada put down her things and sat down. She sank into the couch, put her arms along the couch's back, and crossed her legs.

"I did. We all did. I smoked some pot, though, and that was a bad idea I think. It sounded like a good idea at the time." she sighed.

"It always does when you're drunk."

"I liked your present." she told him, lighting up. She remembered: that's what she wanted to talk about.

"Yeah?" he said, peering at her over the rim of the vodka tumbler. He sat down on the other side of the couch.

"Yup. It was very thoughtful. Thank you for not insulting me with those cute fuzzy handcuffs. Now, I'm going to show you something." she said, rummaging through her purse and pulling out the handcuffs and their keys. "I'm gonna show you a magic trick. That is why you got these for me, right?!" she laughed. She handed him the keys.

"You like 'em?" he asked. "I'm such a good listener."

"Watch. This is a good brand, too. Nothing in my hands." she showed him. "Put them on me." she said, turning around and putting her arms in the under-arrest position behind her back. He put them on her wrists firmly.

"There. They're on." he said, looking amused. She spun around.

"Alright. If I weren't drunk this would be way faster." she wriggled slightly and did something behind her back. There was a two second struggle and then she brought her hands out again, without the cuffs on. She held them by their chain, the cuffs still closed. "Ta-da!"

"Wow. That's actually pretty impressive. How'd you learn to do that? Have you ever been arrested, my dear?" he asked. Jada gave him a wicked grin and walked closer to him. She put her knees on either side of his lap and knelt, talking to him up close.

"Maybe I do something bad. Maybe I do stuff that would get me in trouble with the police. Maybe I have a secret reason I needed to learn Răz-nevă." she teased.

"Oh?" he said, trying to evaluate how serious she was being.

"So, I heard some rumors about you--" she pointed a finger into his chest. "--at the pub in Marseille. So there's something about you and there's something about me." Her voice was overly animated from the alcohol. Ayano gave her a furtive smile, not revealing a thing.

"You tell me what you do." he suggested. He had to go for it. Her internal vault of secrets was clearly out of order.

"You have a good poker face, guy." she said, straddling him. "Maybe I'm not the interrogator I thought I was."

"You show me yours, I'll show you mine." he said evasively, putting his hands behind her back so she wouldn't fall off of him. She smiled like a drunk with a secret, exactly what she was. She got focused and made eye contact with him for a long time, sizing him up.

"Who do you think's badder, me or you?" she finally said, in a low sexy voice and pressing her breasts against his chest.

"It's hard to be badder than me." he said, his hands on her hips as she began to gyrate on his lap. She gave him something resembling a lap dance.

"Mmm..." she said, deciding what to do. "Should we go upstairs...?"

"Oh, what did you want to do upstairs?" he teased, wanting to hear something dirty.

"Well, this..." she said, grinding against his cock. "...is the extent of what I can do right now. If we go upstairs, you are honestly going to have to do most of the work. I had a LOT to drink..." Ayano laughed at her honest assessment. Usually, Jada would try to pretend that she could hold her liquor, but tonight she knew it'd be impossible.

"Yeah? What do you want me to do?" he asked coyly.

"Fuck me like it's my birthday." she said, kissing him hard.

"You were waiting to say something like that all night, weren't you?" he laughed.

"It's the whole reason I came over." she laughed, too. "Bring me upstairs, stud." He stood up with her still on him, so she swung her legs around him to stay up.

"You're a lot of fun, Jada." he said, hoisting her up as she put her arms around his neck.

"I like being with you." she said. "I hope I'm wearing a cute bra. I didn't know I was coming over here when I got dressed."

"You have cute everything." he said, bringing her up the stairs.

They fucked like bunnies in bed, as they always did. Jada went to sleep the moment they were done. When she awoke the next day, she remembered very little about arriving at Ayano's house. She asked for some reminders.

"You showed me you could get out of the handcuffs without a key. It was very impressive." was all he would tell her as he was getting dressed.

"Was I any good in bed?" she asked.

"You were a hellcat. It was mind-blowing." he said in an even voice.

"Really?"

"No."

"Thanks a lot!!" she said, hiding under the sheets.

"No, it was fine!! It was just funny because you told me if we went upstairs I was going to have to do all the work. And it was true!" he said, trying to tickle her from over the sheets. She groaned.

Ayano drove Jada home. She wanted to be unattractive and didn't want to do it in front of him. She changed into her pajamas. She recovered from her hangover eventually, after eating a lot of junk food and watching all of the Die Hard movies.

AYANO SAYS GOODBYE

At the end of June, things were winding down for Ayano at work. He told Jada that he had almost everything set for the end of the financial year and the next projects he'd be working on would be in Romania. He and Jada had barely spent more than a few hours apart lately. It had just happened that way- every time they parted ways, they made plans to see each other soon. He told her he would have to leave the first weekend of July. She didn't want to think about it. It seemed like he wanted to talk about this time limit, but she dodged him as much as she could.

And then, the date had crept up on her before she knew it.

"Your flight is tomorrow night?" Jada asked, in bed with him in her apartment.

"Yes, it's tomorrow already. I don't suppose I can interest you in coming back to Romania for a while?" he added persuasively. He stroked her hair as they were lying face to face.

"What would I do in Bucharest all summer?"

"Well, there is art everywhere in the world, you know. And you could come to the beach, meet the rest of my friends, and keep fucking me, I'd hope..." he said smoothly.

"I don't know... I was just away from the gallery for the Răz-nevă and the fall is our busiest time of the year... I really want to. When can you come back to Gotham?" she smiled, trying to be sensible.

"September at the earliest." he told her. "I thought you liked me... and you'd like Romania."

"I do like it, I just have a whole life here." she said, thinking of a project she was working on as Cheshire. She had been planning it for months and the piece was worth $4.2 million on the current market. There were things she would bail on for a man, but this wasn't one of them.

"What are you going to do without me?" he pouted.

"I don't know. I think if it's meant to be with us, it'll work itself out." she said lightly. But she was torn. Why did he have to be from somewhere so far away?

"You're going to miss me too much." Ayano said confidently.

"We'll figure out something..." she halfheartedly assured him. He kissed her as though she were his one and only devotion. He kissed her neck, lingering for a long time, and then held her closely, as if to show her the tenderness she'd be missing.

THE AUCTION HOUSE

The day Jada said goodbye to Ayano and let him go back home to Romania was one of the most challenging ones in her recent memory. Luckily, that night, she had a Cheshire thing to do. It would keep her from pining away all night.

At 2:30 AM in midtown, hardly anyone was on the streets. Almost total silence. On the roof of a large, gray stone building stood a woman wearing green and silver body armor, a mask, and a cloak. Her long black hair was beneath the hood, trying to stay dry in the pouring rain. The building was a well-known auction house, Adnet-Cerf, a French company that had the most valuable items for bidding from all around the world. The woman in green was watching a group of men dressed in black break into the building on the sixth floor, entering from the roof of a smaller neighboring building.

Despite her access to high society, she also made sure she had access to the secrets of the underworld of organized crime for the other part of her life. Tonight, for example, the men a few flights below worked for Mario Regetti, a Gotham crime boss. They were after a painting by a famous Brazilian painter that was speculated to sell for around $4.2 million tomorrow. Jada had heard about the heist through a friend of hers who worked at a day spa frequented by Regetti's loose-lipped mistress.

"I'm not supposed to say anything, but he's getting a lot of money from paintings these days. From some artist in South America. It's just fruit or something, for all that money!" the woman blabbed one day to her friend after a few glasses of complimentary champagne. The woman thought nothing of mentioning it, especially in front of a latina woman folding towels. Jada looked into the possible lead and it turned out Regetti was, in fact, planning to steal an abstract painting of fruit from Adnet-Cerf when it arrived in July.

As Cheshire, she was going to make sure that this didn't happen. She surely couldn't stop the sale of every Brazilian work of art, but sometimes she heard gossip that was too good. Regetti was known to have killed many business owners on the Upper West Side who didn't pay for his "protection services." Jada was not so innocent herself-- she planned on selling the painting to a private collector in Argentina-- but fuck Regetti! He had no business profiting from South American artists.

As Cheshire, she worked alone and kept a low profile. She hadn't even had to kill anyone lately. An expert in poisons, she needed only to scrape an enemy with her daggers or shuriken to debilitate them. If the occasion called for it, she would use a gun for dramatic effect but when it came down to it, they were less reliable than her blades. Poisoning followed a generally predictable set of symptoms whereas a gunshot may or may not kill somebody.

As for this evening's criminal activity, she had discovered several details about the heist. Her plan was to let these guys do most of the work and reap the benefits herself. It certainly wasn't "fair," but what on earth was fair? Stealing from thieves may not be completely honorable, but neither was taking a painting that they had absolutely no respect for.

Regetti's men had done tons of research on the auction house's security system. She was confident they were going to handle that just fine. After the six men had collected the painting-- and whatever else they might choose to grab-- Cheshire could either knock out a few of them as they left the side door, follow them to the safehouse and try to get it there, or just play a recording of the alarm going off and let that scare them into messing up. She was going to play it by ear.

Cheshire used a grappling hook to scale down to the 6th floor of the building, watching what the men had already accomplished. It looked like it was going fairly well, they had gotten in without the alarm sounding. The rain was coming down hard, making it difficult to see anything from far away. She decided to disable the getaway SUV, debilitating the driver and locking it, and wait above the side door. She had also ascertained that these were probably Regetti's best men, so she applied a dangerous but easily reversible poison to her weapons in order to prevent retribution for murder. The one she had mixed today would burn like hell, very painful, but not do permanent damage if the antidote was administered within 4 hours.

When the men hurried outside, she hit one of them with the poison-tipped shuriken. One of the remaining four had a hard plastic case strapped to his back. All of them attacked Cheshire. She had trained in capoeira for years and considered herself an expert. Against these men, in the rain, she was having a hard time defending herself. These guys were unexpectedly fast and sturdy. Then, without warning, Batman appeared from above.

Batman was inadvertently doing her a favor by attacking these guys. She had never met Batman and wasn't sure if he knew she wasn't there in any kind of heroic capacity. She scraped one of Regetti's men across the chest with a dagger, but he must've been wearing a bulletproof vest. She landed a hard kick to the guy's head while Batman tangled with the other two.

A car full of more of Regetti's men came screeching down the street to retrieve the painting. The auction house's alarm started to sound loudly. Regetti's men seemed to view Batman as a higher priority. Seeing the opportunity, Jada cut the case off one of the fallen men's back and ran for the rope she had used to get down to bring her back to the roof. Batman was still fighting the other guys but she knew he'd be right behind her. As she got to the highest roof to access her planned escape route, Batman threw something at her ankles. It flew around them, tying her up and tripping her. She fell hard to the ground. She frantically started to cut the rope with her dagger, but it was very tough. He was gaining on her.

Cheshire freed herself and ran only a few feet when Batman tackled her.

"Shit!!" she yelled, possibly breaking a rib or two.

"I don't believe we've met. Who are you?" Batman asked, turning her around and pinning her arms above her head on the roof to get a look at her. She groaned in pain.

"Would you believe I'm a museum worker?" she grunted.

"Not in the slightest." he said. "What's your name?" he asked more insistently.

"Cheshire."

"I've never heard of you. Brand new and heading to Arkham already. It's a shame." he said, holding her with one hand while he got the cuffs off his utility belt. She decided not to be insulted that he hadn't heard of her. It probably meant she was an excellent thief.

"Well, at least I got pinned by a hot guy first. Doesn't this kind of thing turn you on?" she asked coyly, trying to distract him.

"Not in the slightest." he continued, unperturbed. Cheshire wasn't too worried. Her mask was able to read her eye movements, so, with a specialized sequence, she activated a spray from an insignia on her chest. Poison sprayed on Batman's face. She used a well-placed knee to get him off of her while he was disarmed.

"So sorry! You should really get to a hospital. I recommend CroFab and fast!" she said, telling him the proper antidote and hastily heading to her escape route from the roof of a nearby building. The only problem was that the painting was on the other side of Batman. She had to leave it, she couldn't risk getting caught and sent to Arkham. Batman was a serious problem.

AFTER THE HEIST

When she got back home safely as Jada Versailles, she was pissed about losing the painting. Her next score would have to be big. She was eager to start researching a few ideas, but coming home to her empty apartment was heartbreaking. Ayano. For the last three months or so, she could get a fix of him very easily. When did she get hooked? He was usually available for her to see within a few hours, ready to make every mundane or unpleasant part of her day disappear.

At work, she found herself daydreaming about him and then came crashing down when she realized she didn't know the next time she'd see him. When they had said goodbye, they both promised they would figure something out. She hadn't predicted how urgent this would become.

She liked living alone and being self-employed- independent. After her first serious boyfriend turned out to be married, she ended it and he spitefully told her she had "daddy issues," an over-reliance on men. She made a conscious effort to appear aloof. Other relationships came and went with nothing to write home about, on her part, anyway. She wanted it to seem like she was an actress who signed on to guest star in a series but never became part of the cast. She was exciting and beloved, but too cool to stick around for the slow episodes. But really, she couldn't handle the slow episodes, the deep intimacy part of a relationship. And the behind the scenes stuff? Could she share about herself like that? Guest starring was the way to go.

But Ayano. He was a fascinating prospect. Was it possible that he wanted to know everything about her and could do all the fun stuff? The thought haunted her mercilessly. She was going to follow his lead and where it went.

Jada's day-to-day life was unbearable. She was constantly in a terrible mood. One of her employees at the gallery told her "I've seen heroin addicts that were more cheerful than you." It was like withdrawal, she thought.

Grace and another friend, Natalie, were happy to have her around again, having hardly seen her for weeks. They gave her shit about neglecting them for her man, but it was her older friend, Raquel, who verbalized an Ayano-specific problem. She brought it up unexpectedly. The two of them were having coffee and talking about how it was easier to learn languages when you were younger.

"When you're young, your mind is like loose, fertile soil. Seeds can get in very easily. As we age, our minds become like clay." Raquel had said. She was a very close friend but she did say serious stuff like this all the time. "This is why when an older man dates a young woman, it can be a problem. His mind is already clay. He knows what he wants, who he is. The young woman may not know herself as well and find one day that most of the seeds in her head are his."