“Are you afraid?” Ho Thi Thao asks, pausing at the well-tended entrance to a cave.
Dieu does not answer immediately. From the moment she followed this woman—no priestess, but connected nonetheless to realms outside Dieu’s scholarly understanding—into the woods, fear has been an irrelevant consideration; it is merely a companion in her chest, a bird whose wings have ceased to beat. She knows what her answer must be. “No,” she says, infusing the words with as much conviction as she can muster. “I am not.”
Ho Thi Thao's eyes narrow as her mouth widens, and she says, “Good.”
“Are you afraid?” Ho Thi Thao asks, after she has whisked her wife away from the false wedding.
Her wife shakes her head and says, “I was.” Crisp honesty and Ho Thi Thao’s clean sweat have overlaid the scent of deceitful table’s rotted offerings. Ho Thi Thao is pleased by this, especially when her wife smiles at her, soft in the ways of humans, and says, “But now I am safe with you.”
Ho Thi Thao wants to devour her sweet vulnerability, and so she takes her wife in her arms and kisses her as gently as she knows how.
“Are you afraid?” Ho Thi Thao asks, pressing her lips to Dieu’s wrist.
“Not anymore,” Dieu says. Then she gasps, for Ho Thi Thao’s cat-rough tongue strokes her delicate skin, curling around the scar that is her wedding promise. “Never anymore.”
“I’m glad.” Ho Thi Thao draws her wife into their well-appointed bed. “Let me taste you,” she purrs. “Let me learn every scent and structure of your body. Let me draw the most gorgeous sounds from your beautiful throat.”
“Yes,” Dieu says, as Ho Thi Thao’s hungry words fade into the air. “Please.”
Ho Thi Thao smiles, and begins.