House Party

[Nesrin Aziz]

The woman in the muta mask preferred the shadows. A neat velvet oval obscured her features, and black hair slid unusually sleek around her shoulders. The dress was smokey dark, and showed a lot of long bronze leg, but not much else; she did not stand out, dancing alone amongst a throng of others, hips and arms to the sway of an old ghawazi rhythm the whores of her youth had favoured. She was content in the anonymity, the incidental slide and touch of hands, and the silence of her own company. But behind that mask, her dark eyes missed little.

Amidst the crowd, a devil pressed a gloved finger to his latex lips, and she was about to turn her back to the proposition before something in the tilt of his head gave her a heartbeat’s pause. His finger crooked, and she instinctively used the distraction against him. He wouldn’t see the smirk, only the sly eyes behind her mask as her fingers dipped into his pockets in curious reflex. Not that he’d be carrying anything identifiable at a party like this, but she still felt a swell of disappointment when she found only the edges of a presumed burner phone. She left it there. He was already shifting like he expected her to follow, and she had little intention of such distractions so early in the night. In those last moments before he disappeared she didn’t know why she swiped the badge from his lapel instead.

The dancers swallowed her backwards, and she let herself be engulfed. Didn’t look for him again as she shifted back into the music, though she did pin his badge to her own chest.

The night grew more raucous as the alcohol fuelled, and she moved amongst the revellers in silence. She witnessed the arrival of the maskless duo before the lights plunged and the music cranked louder. A face she recognised with some small surprise, because she had presumed it was behind Wicked’s red screaming mask. But it wasn’t that which prompted the curve of her lips, but the call of mischievous opportunity. There was safety in the arms of darkness. Invitation of sin. And she’d been remembering the nametags she’d encountered, for no other reason than a mind always on the move – and always looking out for her own interests.

She loosened the button between her teeth, and let the moretta muta slip from her face. Then she tugged the nearest pair of hips close, pulled free the long muzzle of a mask, and voraciously kissed the mouth beneath. Her fingers tangled the damp hair at the nape of his neck, body pulled close. For random chance, it was a surprisingly good kiss. Yet when he broke panting for air, she tilted him gently away in the darkness, a giddy and playful twist, sending him dizzy into the arms of another. A gentle encouragement to a game that would shed remaining inhibitions. She donned her own mask once more – the puppeteer, not a puppet – and in so doing felt the flutterings of another kind of power in her veins.