Mizrah's Ladder Ch. 06

There are things he can do that you can't, clearly; an old semi-truck trailer sits rusting and unused like it has been for years. You watch amber shoot through his veins, his musculature bulges in his arms and he lifts it from the ground with a great exertion before letting the trailer crash down on the concrete...you can't help but wince, and feel like cops or nosy pedestrians are going to make an appearance, but this sort of racket must be common in Ashland as you're left undisturbed. You try the same, and only succeed in wrenching your elbow.

On the other hand, you do find yourself feeling something akin to new muscles you never flexed; like when you were a kid, and you finally figured out how to do something like flip your tongue upside-down, raise an eyebrow, or ride a skateboard. You touch the metal frame of the same trailer, fiddling with that metaphysical musculature until you notice nails and rivets start to pop out with quiet -tnk- sounds; Yusuf pulls you back by the shoulders as the whole thing collapses in on itself. Just to be sure you're doing it right, you 'discorporate' an engine-block, a desk, and a garage shutter into their component parts.

As Yusuf points out, he can't do that.

There's more to this than meets the eye...it isn't just improbable, spontaneous deconstruction of man-made objects at your fingertips, but other, subtler things. You try something with Mizrah, the simple trick of a coin flip; he's patient as you instruct him to call heads or tails, and each time he does so you feel the pulse of his very fortune, and in a way that feels like breathing underwater in a dream, you bite down on it...tearing it away.

He doesn't win a single toss, and on the twenty fifth throw the quarter shatters against the ground; a piece goes flying up and slices under his right eye.

You fuss over the rapidly sealing wound, as is your nature, but Yusuf laughs it off since he's "had worse", and healing or regrowing an entire eye is a long, agonizing process.

So those are...Imprecations. A whole language of little reality-warping dweomers, and ever the storyteller, Mizrah assures you there are some old members of your species who, if they desired, could alter the fate of wars, the course of pandemics, or even - so it was said - affect the movement of the stars.

"Nothing is set in stone." He's said it before, but you feel like it means something more now. It's heady, serious stuff about the nature of the universe and you can feel the weight of deep thoughts clawing at your mind. Mizrah is a canny one, and he can tell the experience was exhilarating and also unsettling; the rest he saves.

The two of you don't stick around in Ashland after that; a midnight art show opens that you'd been meaning to take him to as a surprise, since he'd expressed an interest in post-collapse, dystopian art. It was something of a surprise you wanted to show him.

How long had it been since you'd had a night like this? Or a week so filled with passion and affection, closeness and incredible, deep satisfaction? Maybe Marissa, but that was two years ago and she was...well, who knows where? What is Mizrah to you, even? You walk with him through the halls and rows, watching his expression of almost childlike interest as he indulged his aesthetic for destruction (you get the sense, based on some of the things he's said about the world, that his interest in fire and explosions, plasma-basted metal and ash go deeper than his novel and comic collection).

"Why?" He asks against your hand and you can't help but laugh in protest, pulling it back to cover your mouth.

"Nooo, don't make me say it! It's so cheesy, come on!"

"But what if I start to assume, hmm?" Laughter peels from your throat as he pulls your slender form to you, and you playfully melt against him like an icicle against a radiator. "Maybe you only like me for one thing." The sound he makes in your ear would drain the blood from a mortal's face, but you know he's being playful and...the way he presses his hips against yours makes your heart beat a little faster.

He's so bold, cocky-bastard ego already flying dangerously close to the sun; and yet...

"You are sweet to me. Even back when you were just commenting on my stuff, always kind." You rest your cheek against his chest, closing your eyes...he can't see your face this way. Besides, he smells really good.

"You are...really smart. Okay? I bet this is your favorite thing to hear, so drink it up Yusuf: I thought you were a total meathead at first, y'know?"

"That's fair," he admits, whirling a strand of your dark hair around his finger.

"And it's more than just the music, the hot crazy sex, and I may be presumptuous here but it feels like we...click well, yes?"

It had only been a few days, but what a few days it'd been! On your end, at least, comfort came more easily in his presence than that of most people; there was always the slight sense of being locked in a room with something inherently dangerous, like a lion or a collection of shotguns in his presence.

"It feels like I've known you for longer than I really have," Yusuf admits, and that's true. It does. "Like we were friends before and we're catching up, trying out something new...how's that for cheesy?"

"Sharp cheddar, man."

The two of you laugh and jaywalk in front of traffic, back to where you've been sleeping increasingly during the day. You're supposed to go to work tomorrow; you called in yesterday...are you really going there?

"Are you really going there?"

Your eyes track the spinning, metallic disc on the flatscreen as it flies in slow-motion through the air, slicing through sides of beef, one after the other before it impacts a man in a silver NBC suit; a gush of gore, half a body falls to the floor...good special effects for the early 90s, you have to admit.

"Ooo...and everyone is gone, Predator killed the whole team," you muse, pretending you didn't hear him.

You don't want to interrupt the moment because it's so nice. You're lying together on your couch, mostly undressed...you're wearing little more than the top part of a white T-shirt, the stomach cut away, and nothing underneath; a pair of light blue shorts are an insignificant presence on your hips, ending at the apex of your thigh and rear. Reclining on your side, your cheek is pressed warmly against his bicep, other arm loosely looped around your waist.

Yusuf, for his part, is dressed down to a pair of Chicago Bulls athletic shorts and nothing more - he's already stashed a few articles of clothing here. It's early, but it feels natural, sensible. His presence is incredibly, radiantly warm behind you, defined lines of his torso already mapped into your memory and read by your fingertips and eyes, your tongue and skin.

"Mmm-hmm...he's good but he isn't as good as Danny Glover, ninja-girl."

"Ninja-girl? Where does this come from?"

"You're being evasive," he purrs into your ear, snapping his teeth in a way that sounds like a little steel trap - for some reason it has the...same effect as if he'd tickled you. Your pulse plays a staccato rhythm, your nails tingle as they harden and darken...a reflex you had trouble controlling.

You sigh - a characteristic sound heavy with longing - and you tear your eyes from the screen to look back and up at him.

"And you are relentless."

"I honestly don't know...I don't want to, at all. It's never seemed so pointless, and I mean...I'd have to take these out." You gesture to the two little steel beads, pierced through the bottom corners of your lips - your old snake bites, a familiar hardness for your teeth to worry, restored to you. Mizrah's piercer did good work.

"So don't go," he suggests, the tip of his nose touching yours lightly. You can't help but smile, softly nipping his lip and tugging - it makes a cute 'flp' nose when you release it.

"You really think it's just that easy, don't you...to give up on this career I've spent all this time building. I've put up with so much bullshit, I can't just throw it away."

Mizrah nods thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling fan, whirring to stir up the air conditioning in your apartment and fighting off the sticky heat rolling off the Gulf mercilessly. For a few minutes the two of you watch Danny Glover give the alien invader a surprisingly fair fight before the musician speaks again. "Maybe...you can do something to, shall we say...have your baklava and eat it?"

"Hahah, cute." You reach around and take a handful of his glute, giving it a squeeze, but you're thinking.

"Have my baklava and eat it..." you muse.

You finish the movie - it's terribly campy but he really, truly seems to believe, Isabel, that Predator 2 is in the same league as The Great Gatsby. He asks what you think, and you oblige him by telling him it was absolutely one of the finest works of 20th century cinema you've ever witnessed; you're a terrible liar, and he's know you're full of it but you also know it makes him feel good.

You enjoy the utterly unique, new sensation of being cradled and carried in his arms like a princess - a feat your...wiry ex-boyfriends never quite pulled of - into your bed. You relish the way he pulls your clothing off with his teeth, how he paints poetry with his words to describe the perfection of your form. You adore the way he touches you, leaving trails of electrical pleasure across your bared, pale skin...

You draw him into you. You fuck him. You ride him. You pull him forth, stroking his pierced length, running your tongue across its curved prominence and tasting your pleasure; you feel yourself shifted to stride his lips, nestling your hips against them as you felate his glans. You recline forward on your elbows, lift your hips to take him from behind, and cum from his girth; his piercings running over your G-spot; his fingers circling your clit.

He groans in your ear; you pull him deep into you; he ejaculates and you both make a mess.

You clean up. He sings to you, and you fall asleep in his arms.

The next morning.

You wake up before your alarm and find yourself surprisingly rested; you fell asleep around 6 in the morning, and it's...08:12, by your phone's reckoning. While your mind thrashed in a brief well of darkness, you saw something in the depths of your savage dreams and awakened with a plan in mind.

You're quiet that morning and don't awaken the inhuman in your bed...even when you bend down to kiss him lightly on the forehead, dressed for the day in your sheepskin. You're hungry...the tapioca and egg you consume don't fill you; they seem to enter your belly and disappear, processed in the furnace of your gut into mere...nothing.

No matter. You are going to have your baklava and eat it.

You go through the workday...it is a drag, even worse than usual; those same people you looked at for a day as something between objects of your lust and starvation...now you simply see them as food. Locked in, this close with them in an office, you can smell the sweetness of their flesh, their sweat, the blood pumping just beneath the surface of their skin; they're like walking, chattering bags of nourishment. It isn't as bad as just after Mizrah had bitten you, but you realize a simple truth.

They aren't safe with you here.

No matter. You will have your fill.

When you leave for the day, freeing yourself of the stale office air and the locked-in stink of human hormones, perfume and bodily waste, you start receiving texts of mass alarm.

You're not a skilled enough coder to disable the whole of the STAR-Accounting system, but what Mizrah showed you yesterday...you instinctively understood enough to increase the likelihood of a major, fatal error in the building's servers.

Everything's down, and will be for a couple days at most...right?

You look behind yourself once more as you near the Metro; the little skyscraper holding your bank seems to dance in a nimbus of invisible, vein-shot flame. You can taste the misfortune.

Fuck reality.