Luck be a lady (ReD)

Tuesday nights were Hentai nights at the Cross Fox.

Given the flurry of complaint e-mails calling her establishment a den of sin (to which Yoka highly protested, given that there actually was a club called the Den of Sin over in the strip which had actual sins going on), she figured it was best that she was on hand in case any protesters ended up getting wasted and trying to hump her tentacle monster again. Zzzykkk was not a cheap dancer and neither was her costume--tentacles were a lot of appendages to try to get bra straps over.

The night was calm and Yoka had retired to the onsen earlier in the morning to do some more damage assessment, add some spellwork and....

sulk.

Yoka was not used to feeling guilt. Some told her she should feel guilty as though wanting to stay alive and being proud of her body were things she should feel guilty about. Five hundred years had taught Yoka a lot, and in those five hundred years she vowed never to overestimate her own abilities. It's what kept her alive. Knowing her limits and how far she could push were the things she needed to do to plan ahead, and Yoka was always one step ahead of the plan.

She already made her decision before she started drinking.

And then she kept drinking.

Murphy had been her fault.

It wasn't even some kind of twisted guilt. Yoka had manipulated the situation. She put him in a place where danger was plausible and that's what she'd wanted, specifically danger to make sure her interests would survive a disaster.

She just assumed whatever natural oomph tendency she had would be enough to override Murphy's unnatural ouch tendency.

There was a reason she wanted him to have health insurance but that wasn't it. Yoka had already sent a check out covering his bills. If there was issues with the academy, well, she could raise hell. She had a great team of lawyers and if that didn't work, she would just show up in a cheerleading outfit and strip on the football field again. Admittedly that was the 50's but it had been effective then and things really hadn't changed that much. There will still milkshakes and racism, as a facebook post so eloquently pointed out. She did miss drive in movie theaters.


Yoka had been drinking an alcoholic milkshake when Murphy pulled up. She recognized the car, which made sense, because she did ask him to come pick her up. The sun was shining. The light hurt her eyes.

Yoka was fucking wasted.

As with many supernatural creatures, being wasted made her look hot in that she was disheveled and some of her natural unnaturalness was shining through. In her case, her ears had regressed to their fox shape and her tails were starting to come through. The kimono she'd slipped on for the themed night at the work had slid down and her rather ample bussom was spilling out over the top.

"Murphy," she said.

She thought she said. She repeated his name just to be safe. Her eyes were very amber and very orange and she eyed him through the car window.

She slid into the seat. She'd thought briefly about letting him hit her with the car, but figured that would somehow end up in the car being totaled.

She'd never really considered him fragile before but now she was very, very afraid of breaking him.

'Thank you for picking me up," she said.

She probably wreaked of her surname: sake.

"I thought," she said after a moment, frowning at him. "You might still be recovering. Did they spell you?"

She placed a hand on his leg gently, although it was partially to balance herself while she tried to remember how a seat belt worked.

Yoka caught the hiss.

Her expression didn’t change, but her left ear twitched.

She considered his question for a minute. Her expression sobered—even if her body didn’t.

“Not as the patient,” she said.

Virginia. 1909. Tuberculosis.

Murphy leaned forward and she thought for a moment that it was a bold move on his part—was he going right for her breasts? They were great tits. She couldn’t blame him.

She wasn’t thinking straight, or really, she wasn’t seeing straight, because she’d moved the hand from his leg to catch the end of his hair. Her fingers traced against the skin on his jaw as he snapped the seatbelt in place and moved away, her orange nails acting like tracers.

The seatbelt. Right.

She did sit back, but not because he told her to, because she chose to.

“You shouldn’t be driving,” she said, but of course, she couldn’t be driving either. Yoka was reckless in a lot of ways but she wasn’t stupid, and driving drunk was the dumbest thing she could think of next to sticking a keg of heroin and dynamite up her own asshole, and there was no way in hell she’d ever do that.

“I want you in bed,” she said.

Sultry. Practiced. Pure liquid sex.

It was her voice at its most raw and natural.

“You should be resting,” she finished, but she realized now the car was moving. “I shouldn’t have called you. But I did. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things I have. But I did.”

She used the same nails she’d traced against her jawbone to run against her lower lip.

“Can I ask you a question, after I ask this one, Murphy?” she asked.

Even drunk she was wise to the ‘you already asked me a question’ game.
Ever in control.
Ever grasping for control.

He'd flinched and Yoka didn't blame him. She did not pity him, either, though it would be easy to.

Yoka had been in the business of pleasure for a long time. She worked in a club and asked the women--and the men, but she always had more women than men--to reveal themselves and lay their flesh bare in the context of a society that begged women to do this and then condemned them for it.

There was more to being an exotic dancer than dancing. Very few people who come into the line are beautiful or skilled dancers. The ones that made it were the ones that could forge relationships, the ones who could play counselor and listen to the client talk about losing his job and being unable to tell his wife, or the one who was too embarrassed to tell his wife he was afraid he might be gay, or the one who had no idea how to approach a woman he wasn't paying for.

Some of the women who danced for Yoka had only ever been touched by violence. It was their reality. If she could, she could glamour them with some fox fire, give them some protection, help transform them into another person for a night or two, but Murphy wasn't hiding from a horrible parent or an abusive partner.

She knew he should be hiding from her.

She could hear his heart beat.


They drove in silence and she listened to his heart beat. She wondered what it was like to rest her head on his chest.


He was right and he was wrong when he said that he was a pawn. Yoka considered how to elaborate, but the only thing she did was open her mouth once, yawn, and then close it again.

She glanced at him and caught his smile. She tilted her head to the side, her black hair falling like a curtain and causing the sunlight from the passanger side window to backlight her.

"Are you afraid of dying, Murphy?"

She was quiet when he spoke, her sharp eyes following his features. Despite being wasted, or perhaps because of it, Yoka was very attentive to this conversation.

He answered quickly which surprised her at first, but then she supposed it shouldn't. She'd seen his body. She'd seen the scars. You don't get one scar without questioning death, let alone a canvas full of them.

"What I think," Yoka told him after a moment. "Is that it is unfair how fast you've had to grow up."

He ordered and it was only then that Yoka realized they were in a drive through menu. While her ears had peaked through and her teeth were sharp and her eyes more fox-like than ever, her tails were still vacant. Otherwise, they'd be wagging.

Now that she knew there was coffee coming she wondered how she didn't smell it before.

She tried to pretend it was for any reason other than because she'd been enjoying his scent.

His question was on point and it brought a smile from her.

"Yes," she said.

Her answer was her gift to him, or at least, it was the wrapping.

"If you asked me before the other day, I would have said no," she said. She was drunk, so she didn't think too much, but it's not like the other day could really mean anything other than the onsen incident. Or maybe it could.

"But I was afraid, Murphy. And I am very afraid still," she said.

This was an admission, a slip up, a confession of the control she didn't have.

"Which is exactly why I want you to drive me back to the cross fox," she said. "Because i'm going to put you on bed rest in a place better than a hell hole. I suppose.."

Yoka stole a page from Murphy's book.

She attempted to speak the language of jokes, of cracking a smile, to maybe, just maybe pretend it wasn't that bad. Unfortunately, Yoka did not have the experience Murphy had. She realized it as the words came out. You couldn't sleep in what she offered. But she made the stab at a pun anyway and didn't even wrinkle her nose in distaste.

"You could say I'm putting you to bed rest in a glory hole."

Yoka was certain of a few things.

One: Murphy was a good boy.

Evidence A: he did what she asked, when she asked, regardless of his personal state and well-being. he was her fucking employee. Governments literally needed bootcamp to train people to do that, and here he was, picking her up when he had other things to do, and taking care of her.

Evidence B: this coffee had lots of whipcream in it. She licked some off the edge of the cup.

Murphy's inner crossroads where unbeknowst to her. he took a sip of his coffee and she took a sip of hers and then Murphy was spraying the window. Yoka already had her coffee in the cupholder and was jabbing at the seatbelt release, or at least, at the area she thought it was at.

He just burned himself or he's choking or having a heart attack or--

what was that sound?

oh god it was definitely choking because Yoka had never heard it before but--

Laughter.

She stared at him, and then she was smiling, too, and she wasn't laughing but it was a real smile. Not a sly smile, even though that was a real smile for Yoka, but just the smile of a woman in a car with a man she liked, sharing a really, really shitty joke.

She was already unbuckled. He'd already pulled the car over.

She took the coffee cup out of his hand and set it far in the other cup holder.

Then, she cupped his face with her hand and before he had a chance to flinch, she kissed him.