to clear the mind

Aether sat in the afternoon light with his spine against warm wood and tried, for the first time in a hundred and eight hours, to be a person who was not inside someone.

It should have been simple. Breath in. Breath out. The resort’s sun on his eyelids. The distant, ordinary sound of water. He emptied the room of bodies in his head the way he emptied a cup: tip, pour, done. For three breaths it even worked. The bungalow was just a bungalow. His hands were just hands.

Then Zibai came back.

Not as a name. As a sensation. He had put her on her back with her knees at her ears and fucked her until her womb gave up the polite fiction of being a separate room. The memory arrived with vulgar precision: the way her cunt had already been sloppy, the way he had felt the os yield, the wet, impossible kiss of pushing past it until the head of his cock was seated in the soft, clutching dark of her uterus itself. She had made a sound like she was being prayed in. He had rolled his hips and used that inner mouth like a throat — short strokes, the kind you used on a woman who could take a facefuck — and her belly had jumped under his palm every time he kissed the far wall of her. When he came it had nowhere to run. He pumped her womb like he was finishing in a throat, thick pulses packed into a space that was not built for speech, and she had clenched around the intrusion in ripples that felt like swallowing. A womb blowjob. That was the only honest phrase for it. He saw the bulge. He felt the seal. He heard her sob his name around nothing because her mouth was empty and her uterus was not.

He shoved it away. Breathed.

Lynette replaced her.

The cat on her knees in the recliner’s shadow, letter not yet written, ears flat, reciting her own price like a menu. A hundred thousand. No term. No veto. You do not schedule me around a life I get to keep. He remembered the way her throat had worked while she advertised herself — object, hallway furniture, borrowed mouth, shared cunt for a pride that would use her more than he would on some weeks — and the way she had gotten wetter with every clause. He remembered telling her Ningguang would buy her ass like a sugar mother signing a receipt, and the little helpless leak down Lynette’s thigh when the idea landed. She had said preferred with his cock on her tongue. The House’s lesson sitting in a girl who wanted the receipt in her own hand.

He breathed again. The sun stayed the sun.

Rosaria and Barbara arrived together, which was how the special had gone.

Not the public nun and the deaconess. The locked-room version. Barbara on her back with hymn-breath gone filthy, Rosaria’s mouth on her while Aether used the sister from behind, the two of them stacked into one wet circuit. He remembered Barbara’s shocked, earnest please when he switched and put the same cock that had just been in Rosaria into her, the way the deaconess had come like she was confessing. He remembered Rosaria’s hand in Barbara’s hair, not cruel, just certain, holding her open so he could see the creampie pull out and push back in. The special had not been a sermon. It had been two Mondstadt voices breaking on the same rhythm, holy language reduced to there and deeper and Rosaria’s wrecked laugh when Barbara came on a thrust that had started in someone else. He remembered kissing Rosaria over Barbara’s shoulder and tasting both of them. He remembered the ring on Rosaria’s hand catching the light while she held the other girl still.

He let it go. It took longer this time.

Yae Miko did not leave when asked.

He remembered her on her back , one tail in his fist, another wrapped around his thigh, swearing in a language that turned into begging when he stopped letting her set the pace. How he brought her to climax nonstop until she was drooling on his collarbone and admitting, small and furious, that she had lost. Not broken. Beaten. She had lit a cigarette with shaking fingers afterward and told him she would not make the same mistake as last time, which meant she would make a different one. The memory of her cunt gripping him while she said fine, you win was so precise he almost heard the ocean under it.

Alice was worse because Alice was not sex as he understood it.

That had been the surreal one. The witch had not asked. She had put a hand on his sternum and a hand on her own lower belly and then he had been in two bodies. He felt his cock driving into her. He also felt Alice’s side of it: the stretch, the wet clutch, the specific bloom of being filled, the moment her womb opened for him like a door she had oiled in advance. Breeding from both seats. He came and felt the come arrive. He felt her climax as his own and as hers, stacked, nauseating, exquisite. She had laughed in his ear and in his mouth at the same time. Good boy. Hold that. I want the echo. When she let the split drop he had been on his hands and knees in the grass with her sitting on him like a satisfied catastrophe, jar already capped from the first theft, and the second load cooling in a woman who could still feel the ghost of his nerves. The memory made his skin crawl and his cock harden. He pushed it away with both hands, mentally, like it might grab him back.

He exhaled through his teeth and started over.

Breath. Wood. Sun. The last five days stacked behind his eyes like a pornographic ledger and he pushed the ledger shut one page at a time. Zibai’s inner mouth. Lynette’s price. The sisters. The fox. The witch. Out. Out. Out. For a stretch of minutes he managed it. His pulse slowed. The Flame dimmed to an idle coal. He was a man on a porch. That was all.

That was when he heard Ineffa.

Not footsteps. Joints. A quiet, precise articulation of metal at knee and wrist, so soft it could have been the house settling. Then nothing. No greeting. No shift of weight. The silence after a machine had decided to be polite.

He tried to stay in the empty place.

The silence was worse than the sound. A person fidgeted. A person breathed loud enough to place. Ineffa had arrived and then subtracted herself so completely that the absence became a tap on the shoulder. He lasted as long as pride allowed. Then he opened his eyes.

She was waiting off to the side, fully nude, and patient in the way only something built to wait could be.

From the neck up she could have been a woman on a holiday postcard: synthetic, yes, if you looked for the too-even grain of the skin, but voluptuous in the human way — full mouth, quiet eyes, a face designed to be looked at. The torso matched it. Breasts with weight and softness that did not care they had been manufactured. A waist that dipped. Hips that flared. The illusion held until the limbs. Grey mechanical arms. Grey mechanical legs. Joints that had announced her and then gone still, clean lines where flesh should have been continuous. She did not cover herself. She did not pose. She simply stood in the sun with her hands at her sides and let him finish noticing that she had been there long enough for the light to move.

(https://im.ge/i/QQlJrux)
(artist: Purpleh)

Aether’s emptied mind, traitorously, began to fill again.

He did not speak first. Neither did she. The afternoon held the two of them — a man who had just spent five days making a resort into a wreck, and a nude construct who had chosen the edge of his meditation like a servant choosing the edge of a master’s nap — and the only sound left was the distant sea.