{"id":714834,"date":"2026-08-22T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T01:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/secrethopes.com\/?p=714834"},"modified":"2026-08-18T19:13:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:43:23","slug":"love-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secrethopes.com\/index.php\/erotica\/desi-stories\/love-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Love All"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
IN PICS: AVANTIKA<\/a> | CONTRIBUTED BY: YASH (EMAIL)
FOR BEST EXPERIENCE, READ ON A COMPUTER OR LAPTOP<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
\n

Some of my stories are loosely based on real-life incidents, but details are fictionalized. My stories involve unsafe sexual acts. I do not condone unprotected sex and recommend readers to always practice safe sex. The risk is not worth it. These are fantasies and meant for entertainment only. My stories are my hobby \u2014 an expression of my erotic side. I mean no disrespect to women featured in my stories. If you know the woman in the story, please\u00a0write to me<\/a>\u00a0and the pictures will be taken down \u2014 no questions asked. <\/em>
Happy reading!<\/strong><\/em>
<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The umpire said match point and the hall went quiet enough to hear the shuttle.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Avantika had her hands over her mouth. Three rows up, dead centre, in the seat Vikram had been putting her in for four days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She’d known how the rally ended four strokes before it ended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Indonesian pair had been defending flat for eleven shots and their front man had crept, the way front men do when they’re tired, half a step closer to the net than he had any business being. Nat saw it. Nat lifted, deliberately short, and the boy went up for it because he had to, and the clear he produced from that position was never going to be anything but a gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was already coming up out of her seat while the shuttle was still climbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel was under it before it started falling. Six foot seven, no backswing worth the name, and it made no difference that everyone in Istora Senayan could see what was coming, because when he hit it from there, knowing was not a defence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The boy at the net got a racket to it. That was all he got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shuttle went into the floor at an angle that made a sound, and the hall came apart.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Then she was screaming with four thousand other people, hands in the air, her voice going somewhere it hadn’t been in two years. Down on court, Nat had already thrown his racket up and was running at Mikkel with both arms out, and Mikkel caught him, and then Chidi arrived at speed and took both of them down onto the mat. Jinho stood at the service line with his fists closed and his head back. Wei clapped, four times, precisely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Vikram, at the side of the court, still in his warm-up jacket, not playing this tie, watching his squad win the thing they’d come for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He turned and found her in the crowd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He always found her. She had never worked out how. Four thousand people and a 5’3″ woman with her hands over her mouth, and it took him about a second and a half every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She waved. He didn’t wave back. He held her eye for a beat too long, then turned into the noise as his team came off the court and swallowed him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel looked up into the stands as well. He’d been doing that for four days and she’d been filing it under tall, Danish, that’s just how they are<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She filed it there again and went to find the exit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had not wanted to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram had asked her in February, casually, over the worst coffee in the faculty building, and she had said no. He asked again in March and she said no again. In April he stopped asking and simply told her which day the squad landed, and left it there, and did not mention it for six weeks, and that was how he had always handled her.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She got the taxi to Soekarno-Hatta on the Monday morning and told herself she was going because he was her friend and it would be rude not to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They came through arrivals in a block, eight of them, kit bags and racket bags and the particular swagger of a team that has come somewhere to win. Vikram was in the middle of it. He saw her over Chidi’s shoulder and his whole face changed. She remembered thinking, with some surprise, that she’d never seen him do that before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Mikkel came out from behind the pillar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was the tallest man she had ever stood near. He was wearing a T-shirt that had been washed a hundred times and carrying a bag on each shoulder, and he came to a stop about a metre and a half away and looked at her for slightly too long, and said, “You’re the friend.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m the friend.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Right,” he said, and picked up somebody else’s bag as well, and walked off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had filed that under tall, Danish, that’s just how they are<\/em> by the time they reached the car park.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What she got over the next four days was an education in eight men.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Mikkel was twenty-six and the oldest, and everyone deferred to him without appearing to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi was twenty-five and Nigerian and had opinions about everything including things he had never encountered. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho was twenty-five and Korean and said perhaps nine words a day, all of them final. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit was twenty-four and Indonesian and therefore home, which meant he spent the entire week being the one who knew where things were, who talked to the venue staff, who ordered the food and got it cheaper, and whose mother rang him at eight every evening from forty minutes away in Bekasi and made him take the call in the corridor while the rest of them made noises through the door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei was twenty-four and Chinese and had the best hands in the squad and did not say so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat was twenty-three and Thai and had never once in his life been embarrassed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Ren was twenty-one, two clear years younger than anyone else, and they looked after him with a roughness that she found genuinely moving; nobody let him carry anything heavy and everybody made fun of him constantly and he was the only one who got the last of anything.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Nat and Jinho had a running argument. She never established what it was about. It had clearly predated her by about three years and it surfaced twice a day and both of them enjoyed it enormously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She went to every session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had told herself she would go to one. She went to all of them, and by Tuesday afternoon she was sitting in the second row of an empty hall with a bottle of water, watching Wei drill cross-court net kills for forty minutes, and she was calling them in her head before he played them and getting them right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Wednesday she said something out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was during the doubles session and it was one word, and it was directed at nobody, and it was: “Rotate.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel and Nat rotated about half a second later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody heard her. She was fairly sure nobody heard her. But Vikram turned round from the coaching bench and looked at her for a moment with an expression she couldn’t place, and turned back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Thursday, in the corridor at Istora between ties, a racket came out of somebody’s bag and slid across the floor and stopped against her foot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stood and looked at it for a second and a half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Ren scrambled past her, said “sorry, sorry,” picked it up and was gone, and she went in to watch the semi-final.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first bus was loading when Vikram caught up to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support staff, physios, the two officials from the university, a knot of first-years who’d been handing out water all week. Half of Jakarta seemed to have opinions about the traffic. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Her hotel was fourteen minutes away on a good night and it was not going to be a good night, and she had a class at nine in the morning that she had every intention of attending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Stay for dinner.” Vikram fell in beside her, still in the jacket, sweat at his hairline that wasn’t from playing. “We’re ordering in. Everyone’s eating at the dorm. Second bus is coming for us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at the first bus. Then at him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then past him at the squad coming out of the players’ entrance in a loose scatter, all of them still lit up, all of them shouting over each other. Mikkel with his head above everyone. Nat walking backwards to argue with somebody. Chidi carrying two kit bags that weren’t his. Jinho, silent, with his jaw set, coming down off it slowly. Adit and Wei. Ren at the back with his ears red, twenty-one years old and hearing his name in a hall of four thousand people for the first time in his life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eight of them, counting Vikram. She had been in a room with all eight of them at least twice a day for four days and she had been telling herself the entire time that it was going one way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first bus pulled out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Fine,” she said. “But I’m not staying late. I have class.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram nodded. He didn’t say anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She noticed, much later, that he hadn’t agreed with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second bus would take forty minutes to come, which gave her forty minutes on a kerb outside Istora Senayan with eight men and eleven kit bags, and a certain amount of time to think about the week.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She had come because Vikram had asked her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the whole of it. He’d asked her in the library in the second week of term, the way he asked her things, which was sideways and without pressure and with an exit built into the sentence, and she had said yes because in two years in this city she had never once said no to Vikram and had never once regretted it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monday, arrivals hall, Terminal 3. She’d come out to meet them because Vikram was flying in from KL on a different carrier and she had nothing better to do on a Monday morning. The squad had come off the Denpasar connection in a scatter of kit bags and terrible hair, and she had stood there with a phone in her hand feeling faintly ridiculous, and then Mikkel had come round the end of the carousel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was the tallest person in the building by four inches. He had looked at her over the heads of about two hundred people, and he had kept looking, and she had turned round to see who was behind her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody had been behind her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had filed that immediately and efficiently under tall, Danish, that’s just how they are<\/em>, and she had gone on filing things all week.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Monday night, first team dinner: Mikkel sat opposite her. Tuesday lunch: Mikkel sat opposite her. Wednesday, Thursday, same. She’d decided this was how people are with tables, that everyone falls into an arrangement on the first night and defends it for the rest of the trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tuesday, Nat had asked her something in the queue at the canteen and then gone the colour of the tray he was holding and changed the subject to the humidity, and she had thought: sweet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday, Jinho had held a door for her with an expression of complete indifference and then done it again on Thursday and again on Friday morning, and she had thought: Korean politeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi ran a commentary on her entire existence from Monday onward, which she’d assumed was Chidi’s setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei had said perhaps forty words all week and had somehow been in every room she was in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren could not look at her. Not once, not in four days. She’d found it funny on Monday and had gone out of her way after that to say good morning to him by name, just to watch it happen, and it had taken her until Thursday to notice that nobody else in the squad ever called him anything but the kid<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Adit, on Tuesday, had taken her out of the hotel and down two streets and into a warung his aunt’s neighbour ran, because it was his city and he’d decided she wasn’t going to spend four days in Jakarta eating hotel club sandwiches. They’d sat on plastic stools and he’d ordered for her without asking and had watched her eat it with visible satisfaction.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She had thought: they’re nice boys. Good looking too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday afternoon she’d gone down early to the practice courts and watched them warm up from the empty stand, and it had been the first time in two years that she’d sat in a hall with the sound of it going, the flat pop of a clean hit, the squeak, the shuttles coming out of a tube one after another. She had sat there for an hour and a half.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At some point her right hand had come up off her knee and rolled, once, the way it used to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had put it back down and had not mentioned this to anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Vikram had been strange all week. Quieter than usual around her, and louder than usual around everyone else, and twice she’d looked up and found him already looking away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had run all of this through the only diagnostic she had, which was two years old and had been built by somebody else, and it had returned the answer she expected. They were athletes. Athletes are friendly. She was the only woman in a travelling party of nine and any woman would read the room the same way and any woman would be wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don’t be ridiculous, she had told herself, on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had gone on telling herself that until approximately nine forty on Friday night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They ordered enough food for thirty people and ate it in the common room of Blok C, containers pushed across two tables shoved together, the squad in every chair and most of the floor. Somebody had found speakers. Somebody else had found beer, which was its own small miracle in Jakarta on a Thursday. The room had the particular electricity of a group that had just won something and had not yet come down, loud and physical, men knocking into each other and not stepping away.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Avantika sat between Vikram and Chidi and ate nasi goreng out of a takeaway box and enjoyed herself thoroughly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was the only woman. She’d been the only woman at most of these meals for four days and it had stopped being a thing she was managing. She was twenty-three years old, she was eight months into a master’s she’d taken partly to be four thousand kilometres from Delhi, and this was the best week she’d had since she got here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The squad ran on its own weather and she’d learned to read most of it by Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat and Jinho had a dispute that predated her arrival by at least a season and possibly by years, conducted entirely through the medium of Nat saying something and Jinho not responding to it. Nobody would explain the origin. Chidi claimed there wasn’t one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren got protected. She had noticed this on the first night without understanding it and understood it fully by the third: the youngest man in the squad got given the best seat, the last piece of anything, and no responsibility whatsoever, and if a stranger spoke to him at the wrong moment there were three people between them inside a second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel got deferred to, which was funny, because Mikkel had opinions about approximately four subjects and would not be drawn on anything else. When he did speak the table went quiet for it, and then he’d say something like “the coach is right” and go back to his food, and the table would treat this as an intervention.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Adit was home. He’d been home all week, forty minutes from his mother’s house and unable to go there because of the tournament schedule, and he had spent four days feeding people in his own city and being extremely happy about it. It was Adit who knew which places delivered after ten. It was Adit whose phone had the emergency alerts in Bahasa. Every squad has one man who knows where things are, and this week the man was Adit, and the reason was that this was his floor they were all standing on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Vikram sat at the head of it and said very little and the entire thing arranged itself around him anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel sat directly across from her. He’d sat directly across from her at every meal this week, which she had attributed to habit, the way people fall into arrangements at tables without deciding to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She ate her rice and didn’t think about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho reached across for the last of the bread and looked at her while he did it. He was twenty-five and Korean and he had the flattest delivery of anyone she’d ever met.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You didn’t congratulate us,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She raised her can. “Congratulations.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s not what he means.” Chidi, beside her, grinning so wide it took up his whole face. “We won a championship. You didn’t hug anybody. You didn’t kiss anybody. You’re sitting there eating your dinner like we’re not champions.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A noise of agreement went round the table. Nat said something in Thai and then translated it as “he’s right” in a tone that suggested the translation had lost most of it. Adit nodded. Even Wei, who had said perhaps forty words all week, looked at her with an expression that needed no help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika looked at the table. Then at Vikram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was watching her with his mouth very slightly curved, giving her absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Fine,” she said, and pushed her chair back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She started with Ren because he was nearest and because he looked the most alarmed, which she enjoyed. She leaned down, took his face in her hand and kissed him properly, mouth open, taking her time. His hands were at her waist before she’d finished the thought. She felt them tighten. When she pulled back his eyes stayed shut a second longer than they should have, and something in her went warm and low and stayed there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit next. He stood up for it, which nobody else did, and he kissed her with a slow attention that had no hurry anywhere in it, one hand at her jaw and the other flat between her shoulder blades. When she stepped back he said “thank you” in a completely ordinary voice, and she laughed, and he smiled at having made her laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Nat kissed her like it was a sport he was good at. He was good at it. His hands went from her waist to her lower back to her arse, palming her through her shorts, and he made a small approving noise before deciding that was enough for now. When she straightened up he was watching her with an appetite that had no complication in it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei held her face in both hands. He kissed her quietly, without urgency, and the whole of his attention arrived at once and stayed. She had expected almost nothing from the quietest man in the room and got the most focused kiss of her life. When he let go she stood still a moment before she remembered to move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi was competition. He kissed her like there was a scoreboard, both hands in her hair, all in, and she was laughing against his mouth before it was over. He sat back grinning. “Top two,” he announced, to the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room had views on this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho didn’t wait for her. His hand closed on her wrist while she was still two steps away and drew her in, not roughly, but with the finality of a man who had already decided how it was going. The kiss went long and deep. His other hand moved up her spine and pressed her closer and his thigh came between hers, and she was aware of the whole table watching and aware that she did not care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he let her go she had to take a breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel was last.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He didn’t move. He watched her come round the table, and when she got to him he was still sitting and she was still standing and she was, barely, taller. That was funny. She lost about two seconds to how funny it was. Then he put one hand on the back of her head and brought her down and it stopped being funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The kiss was warm and slow and enormous. His palm covered the base of her skull entirely. She felt it in her knees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she finally pulled back she was four inches from his face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s better,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She straightened up. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was hot from her scalp to her feet, her underwear soaked through, the entire room looking at her, and she had no framework of any kind for this, so she walked back to her chair and sat down and picked up her fork.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Then Vikram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She kissed him standing beside her own chair, one hand on the table. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His hand came up to her face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was different from all seven of the others and she couldn’t have said how, except that it was slower, and more careful, and there was something underneath it with weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she sat down he was looking at his plate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She pressed her thighs together and finished her rice and said nothing at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The earthquake arrived while Nat was mid-sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn’t come as a jolt. It came as a long low roll that ran up through the floor and the table legs and into everything at once, and the sound of it was the sound of every loose object in Blok C moving half an inch. Containers slid. Something came off a shelf in the corridor. The beer cans on the table shivered and drew together like they’d been asked to.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She grabbed for her water glass and got the edge of it, and the whole thing went straight into her lap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roll ran another eight or nine seconds and stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everybody looked at the ceiling. Then at each other. Then the lights went, all at once, the fans winding down with a descending whine that was somehow worse than the shaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a second the room was black and silent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then every phone in it buzzed at the same time, and the screens came up one after another like small blue windows, and Nat read his out loud in English for the ones who couldn’t read Bahasa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shelter in place. Transport suspended. Network reduced. Aftershocks likely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Well,” Chidi said. “That’s the bus.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody found a hurricane lantern in the kitchen cupboard, left over from the last blackout or the one before. Somebody else lit two of the emergency candles from the fire cabinet and stood them in a saucer. The room came back in pieces, orange and moving, with everything past three metres given up to the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Outside, Jakarta had gone black in patches and stayed lit in others, whole blocks of it burning away on their own generators while the street below sat in nothing but headlights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heat arrived about ninety seconds after the fans stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika looked down at her lap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her top was a black spaghetti-strap thing with a neckline she’d chosen four days ago in a mood, and it had gone transparent from the collarbone down. The polka-dot bra printed through it in perfect detail. Her nipples were visible through both layers. The denim cutoffs were soaked dark through the front and the water was still running off the seam of them onto the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The table had gone quiet in a way that was different from how it had gone quiet after the kissing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody offered her a dry shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was aware of that. She was aware, specifically, that eight men in a dormitory block containing several hundred shirts had all arrived at the same decision, and that the decision was to say nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Fantastic,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi’s mouth was doing something she elected not to examine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The food got cleared by the light of two candles and a lantern. The squad drifted toward the corridor and the stairwell in twos and threes, and the room emptied out and refilled and emptied again, the way rooms do when nobody can leave a building.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Avantika stood at the far window with her phone held up, hunting for a bar of signal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The wet top clung to her everywhere and she had mostly stopped noticing, partly because there was nothing to be done and partly because the air was now so thick that dry clothing would have been academic within ten minutes anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The window was open. It made no difference. The night outside was the same temperature as the night inside and both of them were the temperature of blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram appeared at her shoulder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I have one bar,” she said, without lowering the phone, “if I stand exactly here and hold my breath.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Avantika.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something in it made her lower the phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The boys enjoyed the kissing,” he said. He said it quietly. He said most things that mattered quietly, and after two years she could tell the difference between his quiet and his silence. “They want more.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She turned to look at him. “More what.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn’t decorate it. “They want to spend the night with you. All of them. Fucking you, all night, if you want that.” He paused exactly long enough. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“If you don’t, I’ll deal with it. Nothing gets awkward, nobody says a word about it, we all get the bus in the morning and that’s the end of it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was aware, without turning, of the room behind her. Of its weight. Mikkel in the doorway to the corridor, which she’d seen in the window glass. Jinho not far from the table. Wei against the far wall with a candle in front of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at Vikram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She said it flatly. She wasn’t fishing. She wanted the answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Vikram. Look at me.” She gestured at herself, at all of it, the transparent top and the soaked denim and the body she had been managing in her own head for two years. “They’ll be disappointed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there it was, arriving the way it always did, uninvited and fully formed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A car park in Delhi in April, twenty minutes after the state final. Still in kit. Her racket bag on her shoulder because she hadn’t put it down, because putting it down would have been admitting they were having a conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

They had lost in three. The opposition had done what every pair does against a mixed pair, which is to attack the woman at the net, over and over, until she cracks. It is not a tactic. It is the entire sport. She had known it was coming from the first serve and she had held the net for two games and in the third her arm had gone and they had put eleven shuttles at her feet in a row.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kabir had walked to the car park without speaking. She had followed him because they were partners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I should have known better,” he said, “than to put my career on a pretty face.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had actually laughed. She’d thought he was being cruel in the ordinary way, the way people are for an hour after losing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he’d said the rest of it. That he’d asked her to partner him because he’d wanted to fuck her, and he had, and that had been fine, and now the fucking had cost him a national ranking, and he’d like it noted that he had known this was a mistake and done it anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, because he was thorough: that she was carrying too much through the middle, that she’d been half a step slow at the net since Diwali, and that if she was going to play front court she needed to look at herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years. She had carried every word of that for two years, and the worst of it was never the weight. The worst of it was that she no longer knew whether any of the rest had been true. Whether he’d meant a single thing he’d said in eleven months. Whether she’d been a girlfriend or a convenience with a good backhand.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

What she could not get rid of, and had never once said out loud, was a Tuesday morning in January the year before that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Empty hall, six a.m., the two of them on court four because nobody else wanted six a.m. He had spent forty minutes teaching her the cross-court net shot, standing behind her with his hands over hers on the grip, moving her wrist through it again and again until she got it, and then making her do it two hundred times while he fed shuttles and said nothing except again<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had gone home that morning and lain on her bed and grinned at the ceiling like an idiot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For eleven months that had been the best thing that had ever happened to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the car park she could not decide what it had been. Coaching, or a manoeuvre, or both, or neither, or a man who genuinely loved the sport passing something on and separately wanting to sleep with her and never once seeing a contradiction. She would never know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had made sure of that in ninety seconds and she had been carrying the not-knowing for two years, and it had turned out to be much heavier than the thing he’d said about her weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had not picked up a racket since. She had come to Jakarta instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Avantika.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She came back to the window.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram was quiet for a moment. Then: “Every man in this room has been sitting there in pain since dinner started. I’m not saying that to be nice to you. That’s just what’s happening.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He tilted his head fractionally at the room. “You walked into the arrivals hall on Monday and Mikkel looked at me and I knew straight away. Jinho hasn’t taken his eyes off you all evening. Chidi was watching you eat. Adit. Wei. Nat asked me on Tuesday whether you were seeing anybody and then apologised for asking. This isn’t going one way. It hasn’t been going one way for four days.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked past him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel in the doorway with his arms folded, watching her with the same level attention he’d brought to every meal that week. Jinho making no attempt whatsoever to appear to be doing anything else. Wei across the room, his face lit from below by a candle, an expression on it that required no translation in any language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She thought about Jinho’s hand closing on her wrist. About Mikkel’s palm on the back of her head.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“You too?” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram didn’t look away. “Me too.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Since when?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Longer than four days.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stood with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years of him walking her home from the library. Two years of a friendship she had needed so badly that she had never once let herself examine it, because examining it might have cost her the only reliable thing she had in this city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Okay,” she said, at last. “But you don’t get to say I didn’t warn you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She turned from the window.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Adit who said it, from the doorway, holding his phone up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“They’ve updated it. No transport until morning at the earliest. Bus isn’t coming till six.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bas<\/em>,” Avantika said.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram made a sound like he’d been hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at him and he looked at her and both of them went, at exactly the same time, and it was the kind of laughing that has nowhere to go and doubles back on itself. She had to put a hand on the table. Vikram sat down on the arm of a chair with his forearm across his eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seven men watched this happen with the expressions of people excluded from something.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What,” said Chidi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s a Hindi thing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What Hindi thing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wiped under her eye with a knuckle. “Bas.<\/em> It means enough. It means stop, that’s enough, no more.” She was still going. “He said bus and I heard bas<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi considered this and found it disappointing. “That’s it?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s it.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“That’s not a joke.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a joke in Hindi.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s not a joke in Hindi either,” said Vikram, from the chair, wiping his face. “We’re just tired.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said it in English. He said almost everything to her in English, because his Tamil was his and her Hindi was hers and the only language they actually shared was the one they were both studying in. What Hindi he had came entirely from films, which meant he could deliver an accusation of betrayal beautifully and could not order a coffee, and it had been making her laugh for two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bas,” Nat repeated, testing it. “Bas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Stop saying it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bas<\/em>,” said Chidi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the laughing ran out, the way it does, and what was left was a dark room with nine people in it and nobody saying anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stood at the end of the table with her hand still resting on the back of a chair.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Nobody moved towards her. That was the thing she noticed and went on noticing for the rest of her life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eight men in a blacked-out common room, every one of them wanting the same thing, and not one of them took a step. How much they wanted it was clearly visible in the bulge in their shorts. She still couldn’t believe they would want her, but if they wanted to regret it, maybe they deserved to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were waiting, and they were going to go on waiting, and if she picked up her bag and asked Vikram to find her somewhere to sleep then that is what would have happened and there would have been no conversation about it in the morning or ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The exit was nine feet behind her. She could see the strip of grey under the door where the corridor emergency light was still going on whatever the emergency lights ran on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She thought, with total clarity: I could still get on the bus, or…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She thought about the bus. About the hotel with the lobby that smelled of air freshener and the class at nine and the two years of being extremely sensible in a city she had moved to specifically in order to stop being a person things happened to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her heart was going hard enough that she could feel it in her jaw.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She let go of the chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel crossed the room in four strides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had watched him move on a court for four days and she’d thought she understood what he was. Standing still in the middle of a dark common room while he came at her, she found out she hadn’t. Six foot seven arrived in a way it did not from three rows up. The width of his shoulders blocked the lantern and put her in shadow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stopped in front of her and she tipped her head back to look at him from a distance that was not far at all, and he looked down at her exactly as he had been looking since the arrivals hall, except that now she knew what it meant, and her body reacted to the knowing before her brain got a vote.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He bent and kissed her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She went up on her toes to meet him and felt his hand come up and cup the side of her face, his palm nearly covering her jaw. The size of him against her was everywhere at once. She was small and outmatched and he was handling her with a care that made the smallness the entire point of the exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram’s hand found the small of her back from behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then the rest of the room moved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn’t orderly and it wasn’t slow. Seven men who had been sitting on something for four days arrived at once, and what came with them was the pressure of a want that had been building since Monday. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Hands at her waist, her shoulders, her hips. Chidi’s mouth at her neck on one side and Ren’s on the other. The heat of that many bodies closing in around her in a room with no air conditioning and no fans was immense and disorienting, and she laughed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually laughed. The full one, the one with the dimples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What?” Chidi said, against her throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“All of you,” she said. “All of you at once.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Problem?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then Jinho’s hands were at the hem of her top.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He pulled it up and off in one movement and she raised her arms to let him, because her body had been several steps ahead of her head since the kissing round. When the wet fabric came away the room made a sound that nobody performed, seven men registering the same thing at the same instant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The polka-dot bra was still there. Jinho found the tie at her back without hesitation, two fingers, a pull, and it went.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her breasts were large and full and entirely her own and the room stopped dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Mikkel, from close enough that she felt it more than heard it: “No.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Around her they were stripping. Kit hauled over heads in the candlelight, shorts dropped, seven large men getting naked with total conviction and no ceremony whatsoever. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stood in the middle of it and watched them do it and a wave of pure want went through her from her throat to her knees. All of them. Every one of them, hardening as they looked at her, in a dark room in a city with no power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years of Kabir’s voice narrating her body back to her as a problem went somewhere very far away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat was on his knees in front of her, hands at the button of her cutoffs, then the zip, then the wet denim dragged down her legs. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Her knickers were the matching polka dot, ties at each hip, and Jinho took one side and Chidi took the other and they pulled at the same time and the fabric went at the seam. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She heard it go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at them on the floor. “How am I supposed to get home?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Wear one of ours,” Nat said, standing up, his hands already at her waist, his cock hard against her hip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi, behind her: “And we can have some fun on the bus. If the driver’s agreeable.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She filed that away for the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She reached back for Vikram’s hand. He took it without being asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel lifted her onto the cleared table like she weighed nothing and set her on the edge, and from up there she was almost level with his shoulder, which was the closest to level she was going to get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He put his hands on her knees and pushed them apart and went down onto the floor between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looked up at her from there. “Since Monday.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She opened her mouth to answer and he put his mouth on her cunt and she forgot the sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel ate her out the way he did everything, with complete attention and no interest in being watched doing it. He read every sound she made and adjusted without being told, tongue working her clit, sliding lower, coming back, learning her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inside two minutes she had both hands in his hair and was pressing herself into his face and had stopped caring about anything happening above her waist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which was convenient, because a great deal was happening above her waist.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram was on the table beside her, his mouth at her neck, her shoulder, his hand moving up the inside of her arm. She reached for him without looking and found his cock hard in her hand and heard his breath go out against her skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi’s mouth closed over her left nipple, his hand cupping and squeezing, and the heat of it pulled a cry out of her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho took the right and was considerably less gentle, teeth and pressure and pulling, and the difference between the two of them working her breasts at the same time was its own kind of undoing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren stood at her side and she found him with her other hand, already hard, and stroked him and felt him shudder against her arm.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The first orgasm came fast and hit hard, her thighs locking round Mikkel’s head, hips rolling up into his mouth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn’t stop. He brought her down and kept going, tongue back on her clit, reading the new sensitivity, and the second one built from somewhere deeper and took longer and broke over her in a way that left her flat on the table with her arm across her face and her chest heaving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel sat back on his heels and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked deeply satisfied with his evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Sweetest fucking pussy ever,” he said, licking his lips.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram was still beside her. She turned her head and kissed him and this kiss was nothing like the one at dinner. Two years of patience in it, a wanting that had been held carefully in place for a very long time and was not being held any more, and she made a sound against his mouth that she hadn’t planned to make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel stood. All that height unfolding off the floor. His cock came up to her eye level as she sat on the table and the size of it made her exhale slowly and reassess several things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She wrapped a hand around him and looked up. The distance from her face to his was substantial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hi,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hi,” he said. The corner of his mouth moved.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He pushed into her slowly, hands at her hips, watching her face the whole way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The stretch was real and required her full attention and she breathed through it, taking him in stages while he held still whenever she needed him to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she had all of him she stayed still herself for a moment and felt comprehensively full, and pressed her nails into his forearm and held on.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram came to her mouth and she took him between her lips, one hand at the back of his thigh for balance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi and Jinho went back to her breasts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat stepped up at her free hand and she wrapped her fingers round him and stroked him while Mikkel fucked her.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The orgasms came rolling into each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel fucked her without a trace of ego, just attention, just staying with what worked, and the absence of any performance in it made it more intense rather than less. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He finished inside her with his hands locked on her hips and his head dropped forward, and she felt every pulse of it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram came in her mouth. She swallowed and looked up at him and the expression on his face was going to need more time than she currently had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi touched her arm. Just that. A light touch, and then waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at him and her dimples came out, because his face was so free of embarrassment about what he wanted that it was genuinely charming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lay back on her elbows and pressed her tits together around his cock and watched him as she did it. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

His jaw went slack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She worked him slowly, her breasts slick and warm around him, and he lasted longer than his face had suggested, hips moving, chasing it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She could feel him throbbing between her breasts and knew his release was close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He groaned and came across her chest with a precision that said he had thought about exactly this and exhaled like he’d set down something heavy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m coming back,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They moved the bench cushions off the window seats and laid them on the floor, and that became the floor of the rest of the night.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Jinho got her onto her hands and knees and took her from behind with one hand fisted in her hair, and it turned out that this was the thing she had been not thinking about since he caught her wrist at dinner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He pulled her head back until her throat was open and he fucked her hard and without any negotiation at all, and she came in about ninety seconds with a noise she would have been embarrassed by in any other room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Again,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She got her knees under her and pushed back into him and rode it, both hands flat on the cushion, her hair wrapped once round his fist.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The aftershock came in at about half past eleven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The floor rolled. The lantern swung on its handle and threw the whole room sideways and back. Somewhere below them a car alarm went off, then a second one, then a dog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every man in the room went rigid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat froze with a beer halfway to his mouth. Mikkel’s head came up. Chidi said something in Igbo that was almost certainly a prayer. Adit and Wei both looked at the ceiling with the specific calm of men who had grown up in a place where the ceiling occasionally required looking at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika kept going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The floor moved and she moved with it and she was rocking back onto Jinho’s cock at very close to the frequency of the seismic event and she did not, in any way, register that anything had changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It ran nine seconds and stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody said anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why has everyone stopped talking,” she said, eventually, still moving.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

There was a silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Avantika,” said Vikram, carefully. “There was an aftershock.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at the lantern, which was still swinging. She looked at the beer in Nat’s hand. She looked over her shoulder at Jinho, who had the expression of a man holding very still inside a woman during a natural disaster and making the best of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Hai Bhagwan<\/em>,” she said. “When?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Just now.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How long?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ten seconds.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She thought about this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Arre, that was me,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room came apart. Chidi went down onto the cushions and stayed there. Nat had to put the beer down. Even Wei, who had not laughed out loud once in four days, made a sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho, who had not moved, said, “Can we finish.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a lull after that, the way there is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody got the beers out of the dead fridge before they went completely warm. Somebody opened the second window, which achieved nothing. Ren fell asleep for eleven minutes and woke up furious about it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Avantika sat on the cushions with a can against the side of her neck and her legs stretched out, and at some point Nat said something about the final, about the boy at the net who’d crept half a step forward in the last rally, and she said, without particularly thinking about it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s the job, though. Front court is just standing there being a target. That’s why they always put the woman there and that’s why she’s always the one who cracks.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody said anything for a second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Mikkel, from the floor with his back against the wall and his knees somewhere up near his chest:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s not why they put her there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“They put her there because she can get down to it,” he said. “I can’t get down to it. I’m six foot seven, I’m useless inside two metres, everything below my knee is somebody else’s problem. Front court is a low job. You want somebody low.” He drank some of his beer. “Being low is the qualification. It’s not the compromise.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The room moved on almost immediately, because it was an unremarkable thing for a badminton player to say and he’d said it in the tone of a man explaining a rota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika sat very still with a warm beer against her neck for about four minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Half a step slow at the net since Diwali. You’re carrying too much through the middle. If you’re going to play front court you need to look at yourself.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had held that sentence for two years and it had never once occurred to her that the man who said it had been describing the position and calling it her body, and that this was a thing you could simply notice and put down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She didn’t say any of that to anybody. She drank her beer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But something had come loose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Chidi who started the contest, because of course it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’d come back, exactly as promised, and afterwards he was lying on his back on the cushions with one arm behind his head announcing that he had now had the best of it and everybody else was playing for second.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Second,” said Nat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Second.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You went twice and you finished twice in the same way both times. That’s not a range.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a specialism<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a lack of imagination.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Right.” Chidi sat up. “Doubles. Pairs. Two of us at a time, and we settle it properly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Settle what?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Who’s better.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Better at what,” said Mikkel, from the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Making her come,” said Chidi. “Obviously. Or \u2014” and he thought about it “\u2014 or who comes the most. Either one. Pick one.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room got into this immediately and badly. Somebody proposed counting both. Somebody else proposed that finishing quickly should cost points, which Nat objected to on the grounds of enthusiasm. Adit asked, mildly, whether anybody was planning to consult her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika sat up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was naked on a pile of bench cushions in a blacked-out dormitory in South Jakarta, with Chidi’s cum drying on her chest, and eight men were arguing about her like a fixture list.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“No,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everybody stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No, you’re not doing it like that.” She pushed her hair back off her face. “You’re not scoring it and you’re not deciding it, because you can’t. Only one person in this room can tell whether it worked and you’re all looking at her.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody said anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So,” she said. “I’ll umpire.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi’s face did something complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I pick the pairs,” she said. “I call the points. A point is a point when I say it is, and I’m not explaining my reasoning, and there are no challenges.” She looked round. “Win by two.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Win by two,” Mikkel repeated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s badminton. You have to win by two.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Nat put his hand up. “Can we ask for a specific \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can ask.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Can we \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can ask, Nat.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a pause while eight men adjusted to a change in the management structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Vikram, from the edge of the lantern light, quietly, in a voice she had heard him use exactly twice in two years:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Love all.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She’d told him once, in their first term, half-drunk on the roof of the library, that it was the only bit of scoring in any sport that sounded like a blessing. Nobody has anything yet. Everybody starts at nothing. Love all.<\/em> She had not thought about it since and she would have sworn on anything that he hadn’t either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She held his eye across the room for a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she lay back on the cushions and put her arms over her head.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Love all,” she said. “Play.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She called Nat and Adit first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat went between her legs immediately and with an enthusiasm that bordered on rude. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He ate her out like a man who genuinely preferred it to everything else on the menu, no rushing, no showing off, working his tongue through every response she gave him and then staying wherever she got louder. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twice he stopped to say something appreciative into the inside of her thigh. Once he laughed at something she did and she felt it against her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit worked from the other end and his approach was nothing like anyone else’s.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He started with his tongue at her arse, slow and thorough, licking her open before he touched her with anything else, taking a length of time that in any other context would have been rude. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then his fingers, one and then two, patient, reading how ready she was without needing to ask. Then, because he did this every single time and it turned out to be the most disarming thing about him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Is this all right?”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Yes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Tell me if it isn’t.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Adit.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s all right.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sensation of the two of them at once split her attention and doubled everything. She stopped being able to locate which feeling was coming from where and gave up trying. Nat brought her over the top and Adit went in on the crest of it, deliberate and slow, and the fullness of it ran from her tailbone to her throat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Point,” she said, when she could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“To who?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Both.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can’t give it to both.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“I can give it to whoever I like.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi, from the dark: “This umpiring is corrupt.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Noted.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’d like that recorded.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s recorded.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat sat up on his heels, hugely pleased with himself, and made his case at length. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something about anticipation. Something about how the whole thing was like reading a shuttle in the air, you had to know where it was going before it went, you couldn’t wait for it to arrive \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Cock,” Avantika said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Shuttlecock,” she said. “Sorry. Carry on.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat lost his thread and never got it back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody found a pen. She never established who. By half past midnight there was a score on the back of a delivery bag, propped against the leg of the table, being maintained by Chidi, who had appointed himself to the role without a vote and was already being accused of bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You’ve given yourself two.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“I have two.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You have one and a half.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There is no half in badminton,” said Chidi, with dignity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika, flat on her back, one arm across her eyes: “He has one.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One?<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On what \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m not explaining.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You have to explain, that’s what an umpire does<\/em> \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“An umpire,” said Adit, mildly, from somewhere near the window, “is the person who does not have to explain. That is the definition of the job.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi appealed to the room. The room, to a man, sided with the umpire, on the grounds that the umpire was currently naked on a pile of cushions and Chidi was not being fair to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You’re all corrupt,” Chidi said, and wrote down one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei next, with Mikkel.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She had Wei in her mouth and both hands at his thighs and he was quiet the entire way through it, one hand resting on the back of her head, not steering, just there. When she looked up at him he was already looking at her, and he had been the whole time, and there was no part of his attention anywhere else in the building.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel took her from behind on the cushions, one arm under her hips holding her up off the floor, and the difference in scale between them was absurd and she could feel him deciding, constantly, how much of himself to use. He never used all of it. She was aware of the ceiling of what he could have done and of the fact that he had put himself well below it on purpose, and that was more affecting than anything he could have done at full strength.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Wei came in her mouth without a sound. She swallowed and sat back and he took her face in both hands and looked at her for a long moment and then let go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Point,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“To Wei?” said Chidi, outraged. “He didn’t do anything!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Point to Wei.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He was standing there<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He was not standing there.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What was he doing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Paying attention,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi wrote it down in a manner that communicated a great deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She called Ren and Nat next, and then reversed herself before either of them had moved, because she’d looked at Ren and seen something and hadn’t wanted to put him in a rally he’d have to share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Actually. Nat and Mikkel.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can’t change it after you’ve called it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I can do anything I like, Chidi, I’ve been very clear about this.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

What Nat and Mikkel produced between them was the longest rally of the night and it very nearly went wrong twice, because they had entirely different theories of the case and neither would give ground. Nat wanted to work her towards it in stages, at length, with commentary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel wanted to hold her still and let her get there on her own. They arrived at a compromise that neither of them had proposed, which was that Nat went down between her legs and Mikkel got underneath her and held her, one enormous arm across her ribs and one hand flat on her stomach, taking her entire weight so that she was not lying on anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

That turned out to be the thing. Not the mouth. The being held up off the floor while it happened, six inches of air under her back and nothing to push against and no way to brace, so that when it broke it went through her with nothing to earth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was still shaking when Nat sat up and asked, with genuine academic interest, which of them she was awarding it to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Both.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You said you can’t give it to both.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I said you<\/em> can’t. I can.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That is not \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Two-all,” she said, to the ceiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a pause while Chidi did some arithmetic on a delivery bag in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It is not two-all,” he said. “It’s four-three. Wei’s on two.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“How is Wei on two?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He got one for paying attention,” said Chidi, “and I have given him one for not arguing, which as far as I can see is the only criterion in this competition that anybody has met.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei, from the wall, without looking up: “Thank you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then Jinho and Chidi, which was a decision she made on purpose, because they were both loud and she wanted to see what happened when they had to share.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

What happened was that they were extremely good at it. Jinho took her mouth and Chidi took her cunt and neither of them gave an inch of ground, and she was pinned between two competitive men who had turned her into a fixture they were both determined to win, and the noise she made when she came round Jinho’s cock was loud enough that somebody in the next block probably filed it away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi pulled out at the last moment and came across her tits again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Same as before,” Nat observed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s a specialism<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She gave the point to Jinho and the room rioted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram came and sat on the floor near her head between rallies and didn’t touch her, which was the single most conspicuous thing anyone had done all night.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She turned her face and looked at him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Not you yet,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He nodded once, like she’d told him the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m serious.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Don’t be so agreeable, it’s very annoying.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He smiled at that and looked away, and she lay on her back on a pile of cushions in the dark and felt something turn over in her that had nothing to do with anything happening below her waist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren was the one who asked, and it took him most of an hour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’d been steady all night. Twenty-one years old, youngest in the squad by two clear years, and he had taken everything that came to him without once putting his hand up for anything, which she had assumed was shyness until about midnight and had then started to understand differently.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Ren did not ask for things because Ren had never had to. The best seat was put in front of him. The last of anything was left for him. If a rally was going somewhere he might not want, three men would head it off before he’d finished registering it. He had spent a season being handed things by people who loved him and not one of those things had ever been his idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had some experience of being told what she was by people who thought they were being kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when he came and sat on the floor by her hip with his forearms on his knees and started, twice, to say something, and stopped, twice, she did not help him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi did. Chidi leaned in from the dark and said, “He wants \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He’ll say it,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody said anything for a moment. Ren looked at the floor.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Then: “Both hands.” He got it out in one piece. “Can you \u2014 both hands. On me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She sat up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Both of mine,” she said. “On you.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Just you?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went red to the ears. “Just me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There it was. Not the act. The clause after it. Four days of being handed things, a year of being the kid, and the only thing he had wanted enough to say out loud was something that wasn’t shared with anybody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Come here,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She took both his hands first and put them where she wanted them, and then she took him in both of hers, one wrapped above the other, and worked him slowly with her mouth at his ear telling him exactly what she was doing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He lasted about forty seconds and did not care in the slightest. He came across her stomach and lay flat on his back on the floor and stared at the ceiling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Okay,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody laughed. She noticed that. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Eight men who had spent the entire night mocking each other for everything available found nothing at all to say, and Chidi, who could not let a single thing go, let that go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lay down next to him and put her head on his shoulder for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ren.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Mm.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You played today.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Second singles.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You won it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Yeah,” he said, to the ceiling, and she felt the whole of his ribcage move under her head, and after a second he said it again, differently. “Yeah. I won it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem arrived in the form of Jinho’s hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had them on her hips and then higher, and she got about four seconds into enjoying it before her skin lit up in a stripe under his right palm, and then another under his left, and then, catastrophically, between her legs where his thumb had been.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Uff<\/em> \u2014 off, off, get off \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was off her instantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Your hands. What’s on your hands?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looked at his own palms in the lantern light with total incomprehension. Then Mikkel, from across the room, said one word, and Jinho said something short in Korean and put his head back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep Heat. He’d had it on his shoulder for four days. He’d reapplied it at half past ten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, by then, on her hips, her stomach, both thighs and a place where it had absolutely no business being, and it was building rather than fading, and she was up off the cushions and hopping on one foot with her hand between her legs and eight men were watching her with expressions ranging from horror to open delight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It burns \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“I’m sorry \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It burns, Jinho<\/em> \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Water,” said Adit, already moving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no water, because there was no power, because there was no pump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a bucket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every block in the city had one, in the corner of every washroom, next to a plastic dipper, for precisely this reason. Adit filled it from the tank on the roof, which fed by gravity and did not care about the grid, and Mikkel carried it because it was heavy and Mikkel could carry it, and they took her into the tiled washroom off the corridor and stood her on the drain and Nat poured a mug of cold tank water straight down her front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She swore in three languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They poured another. And another. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Chidi held the lantern up and Adit worked the cold water over her hips with the flat of his hand until the sting came off, and by the fourth mug she had stopped hopping, and by the sixth she was laughing again, standing naked and streaming on a drain in a dark tiled room with a Nigerian holding a lantern over her and a Dane holding a bucket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The water was cool and the room was hot and the air had weight to it, and every one of them was still shining with sweat that had nothing to do with the bucket at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody poured one more mug over her head, unnecessarily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Who did that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Nat,” said everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She pushed her hair back off her face and looked at the seven of them standing round a drain in the dark and thought: I would have missed this. I would have got on the first bus and gone back to a hotel and had a class in the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Again,” she said, and held her hair up off her neck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lantern was down to about an inch by the time they got back to the room, and nobody trimmed it, and the candles had gone an hour ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was left was headlights swinging up the ceiling from the road, and the fixed orange of a tower two blocks over that was on a different grid and had never lost power at all, and, once her eyes gave up and adjusted, the moon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lay back on the cushions in the dark and let them come to her, and discovered that she knew who was who by their hands.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She had four days of watching these men grip rackets and she had not understood, until now, what that did to a hand. There was a ridge of callus that ran across the base of the fingers of every right hand in that room, hard and slightly raised, and it dragged very faintly when it moved over her skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit’s fingers were taped, two of them, and the tape had gone soft with heat and had a grain to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel’s hand was cool. It was the only cool thing in the building and it covered half her ribcage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat’s hands were quick and never stayed still and were still, faintly, tacky from fresh grip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi ran hot, everywhere, always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei’s hands arrived and stopped and stayed exactly where they landed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren’s were the softest, because Ren was twenty-one and had four fewer years of this than anyone else in the room, and she could have picked him out of a hundred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jinho’s hands she could identify because they took hold rather than touched.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Vikram’s hands she had known for two years, from a thousand ordinary things, and she knew them in the dark immediately and did not say so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Nat who suggested it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had worked it out geometrically, apparently, and he presented it with some pride: Mikkel could hold her up. Just hold her, clear off the ground, her whole weight in his hands, and someone could \u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“He can do it. Look at him.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m sure he can.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We are on the fourth floor of a building in Jakarta,” she said, “in the middle of an earthquake, in the dark. Nothing doing. Not in earthquake country.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a pause while seven men weighed this and found it, on reflection, unarguable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s fair,” said Nat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s extremely fair,” said Adit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I could have done it,” said Mikkel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know you could have,” she said, and patted his enormous forearm, and that was the end of it. Nobody raised it again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What they did instead was everything at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had told them she would call the pairs and she had called every pair for an hour and a half, and now she lay back and said “all of you,” and there was a short silence while eight men worked out the logistics of that, and then the room reorganised itself around her and she was the centre of it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Jinho underneath. She lowered herself onto his cock and he took her hips and pulled her down the last inch himself, and one hand came up to her jaw and turned her face to him and held it there. “Look at me,” he said. She did. He didn’t let her stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit behind her. He had prepared her twice already that night and he did it again anyway, unhurried, thorough, because he was not capable of doing it any other way, and when he pushed into her arse she cried out and Jinho’s grip on her jaw tightened and the fullness of both of them at once was something she felt in her teeth.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Wei at her mouth, one hand cradling the back of her skull.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren’s cock in her right hand. Nat’s in her left, with Nat’s fingers over hers, showing her a grip and then leaving her to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel had one breast and Chidi had the other, and the contrast was ridiculous. Mikkel’s hand covered hers entirely, his mouth almost gentle at the nipple. Chidi used teeth and made noise about it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

And Vikram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She felt his mouth at her toes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She couldn’t see him. She was full in three places and both her hands were occupied and her eyes were shut, and somewhere below all of it she felt him take her foot in both hands and press his mouth to the arch of it, and then her ankle, and then the inside of her calf, and start working slowly upward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone else had taken the obvious places. He had taken the last thing left and made it the most deliberate act in the room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It went on longer than she had any way of measuring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a point at which she stopped being able to locate her own edges. She knew where Jinho was because he wouldn’t let her look away and she knew where Adit was because Adit never let her forget he was asking, but everything else came apart into a single condition. The fan was off and the air was hot and wet and there were nine people breathing in it. Somebody’s palm slid on her hip and had to be repositioned. Sweat ran off Chidi’s forehead onto her collarbone. Her hair was stuck to her neck in a rope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She could taste Wei. She could smell Deep Heat and tank water and beer and eight men who had played a championship final nine hours earlier and not one of whom had had a proper shower since.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Somewhere below all of it Vikram’s mouth had got as far as the back of her knee and had stopped there, deliberately, and stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pressure of it kept climbing and did not release, and she went past the point where she had words in English, and what came out of her was not a decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Bas<\/em> \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The room stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of it. Instantly and completely. Jinho’s hand came off her jaw. Adit was out of her and back on his heels with both palms up before she’d finished the syllable. Wei was gone from her mouth. Every hand on her body lifted at once and the absence of all of it was so abrupt that she came up onto her elbows in the sudden dark with her heart going and no idea, for one full second, what had happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eight men, absolutely motionless, waiting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was Ren who said it. The youngest man in the room, who had not volunteered a single sentence all night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“She said stop.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And she started to laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not the good laugh. A wrecked, breathless, useless one, because she was looking at a room full of naked men holding completely still at half past one in the morning on the strength of a word they had learned four hours earlier as a joke about a bus.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“No,” she said. “No, no. Bas<\/em> means \u2014 I meant \u2014 that isn’t what I \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You said stop,” said Adit, not moving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know what I said.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“So we stopped.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I know.” She put her hand over her eyes. “I know you did.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lay there for a moment in the hot dark with eight men waiting for her to be able to speak, and something went through her that had absolutely nothing to do with sex and that she was going to be unpacking for a considerable length of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she took her hand off her eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Aur<\/em>,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody moved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s the other one,” she said. “The opposite one. Aur.<\/em> It means more.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi, very carefully: “Are you sure.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Chidi. I will get the pen and write it down for you.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The room came back onto her all at once and she stopped trying to hold any of it together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The orgasm that arrived went through her like something structural failing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long and loud and total, her back coming up off the cushions, every muscle in her body clenching at once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She cried out round Wei’s cock and the sound was muffled and it made no difference, because everyone in that room felt it happen.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Jinho came inside her with his eyes locked on hers to the last second. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit came in her arse and held himself there with his forehead against her spine, breathing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wei came in her mouth, silent to the end, his hand briefly cradling her jaw the way it had at dinner. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ren across her stomach, Nat across her hip, both of them pulling out at the last moment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chidi across her chest, obviously, and with visible satisfaction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel finished in her hand and put his forehead against her shoulder afterwards and stayed there a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram pressed his mouth to the inside of her knee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And waited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They slept in pieces after that. Somebody dragged two mattresses in off the beds in the next room and pushed them together, and men went down where they were and stayed there, and by half past two the room had gone quiet in the way rooms do at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Jakarta made its half-past-two noises through the open window. A motorbike. Somebody’s radio on a balcony. The generator two blocks over that had been running all night and would still be running at dawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The heat had not gone anywhere at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Right,” she said, into the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram, from a metre away: “Right?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Contest,” she said. “Result.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several men who had been asleep were suddenly not asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can’t call it,” said Chidi, sitting up on an elbow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m the umpire.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can’t call it, because the tie isn’t finished.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She turned her head. She could just make him out. “Go on.”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“He hasn’t played.” Chidi pointed into the dark at the mattress where Vikram was lying. “Your captain. He hasn’t played a single rally. You can’t award a tie when one man hasn’t been on court.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a general noise of agreement, and it was, she noted, genuine. Not one of them said it to be funny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He’s right,” said Adit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He’s right,” said Nat, with regret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika lay in the dark for a moment and let that sit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then she said, “Everybody out.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no privacy in a dormitory block during a power cut, so what she got instead was seven men taking their mattresses and their beer into the corridor without a single complaint, and the door being pulled to, and Chidi’s voice through it saying something in Igbo that Vikram apparently understood, because he laughed.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Then it was quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moon had come round far enough to lie in a bar across the floor. Vikram sat on the edge of the mattress and she came and sat next to him and neither of them said anything for a while, which was not new. They had been not saying anything to each other for two years. It had always been the good part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You waited all night,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You told me to.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Before that. You waited all night before I told you anything.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looked at his hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Two years,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“About that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Why didn’t you \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Because you’d have said yes,” he said, “in your first term, when you’d have said yes to anybody who was kind to you, and you’d have worked out in about three months that you didn’t actually want it, and then I’d have lost you.” He turned his head. “I’d rather have had two years.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She didn’t have anything to say to that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So she put her hand on the side of his face and kissed him instead, and this time there was nothing underneath it and nothing held anywhere, and he made a sound into her mouth that she had never heard him make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He put her on her back and went down to her feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He started where he had started before, at the arch, both hands round her ankle, and worked upward with his mouth on every inch of her, slow, unhurried, taking the kind of time that in a room full of people would have been provocation and alone was something else entirely. Her calf. The back of her knee. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inside of her thigh, and then the other one, all the way from the ankle up, so that by the time he got anywhere near where she wanted him she was shaking and had a fistful of the mattress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Vikram.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Mm.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Aur.<\/em>“<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He knew that one. Of course he knew that one. He’d learned his Hindi off a hundred films in which people said it in doorways in the rain, and he had never once been able to order a coffee in it, and he lifted his head and said, in an accent that had made her laugh in three different years, “Say please.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She laughed and then she stopped laughing, because he put his mouth on her.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vikram ate her out like a man who had thought about it for two years and had a list. He was not the best in the building. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat was probably the best in the building and had been extremely open about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Nat had been playing a shot and Vikram was doing something else, working her steadily and paying attention to every single thing she did, and about four minutes in something started building in her that she did not recognise.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It came from lower than orgasms came from. It felt structural rather than local. She had a moment of thinking she should say something and then it was too late to say anything, and her hips came up off the mattress and she made a noise that was not a noise she made, and she squirted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hard. All of it. Across his mouth, his chin, his chest, the mattress, running down the inside of her own thigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She had never done that in her life.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

She sat bolt upright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Oh my God \u2014 Vikram \u2014 oh my God, I’m so sorry \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was scrabbling backwards on the mattress with both hands trying to cover herself, her face on fire, twenty-three years old and absolutely certain, in that instant, that she had wet herself in front of a man she had known for two years, with seven more of them in the corridor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t \u2014 I’ve never \u2014 Maa<\/em>, I’m so sorry, let me \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Avantika.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“There’s a bucket, there’s the bucket in the \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Avantika.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was sitting back on his heels with his face and his chest soaked and he was looking at her like she had just handed him something.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Look at me,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She couldn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Look at me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That,” he said, “is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then he took hold of her ankles and pulled her back down the mattress towards him, and put his mouth back on her pussy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went straight back into it eating her out hungrily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

she said “no, wait, I can’t, I’ll \u2014” and he made a sound against her that meant yes, do that<\/em>, and she did it again, and this time he took it directly and did not move his face away at all.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He drank it. He held her thighs open with both hands and stayed exactly where he was and did not flinch, and when she finally came down off it he wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked at her with an expression she had never once seen on him in two years of ordinary Tuesdays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Again,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Vikram, I can’t \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You can.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She could. He kept eating her, she kept coming, kept squirting, and he kept drinking her out from the source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Afterwards he pushed into her slowly, both of them soaked to the elbows, and it was the least athletic thing that had happened in that building all night. He held her face. She held on to his forearms. The moon had moved off the floor and onto the wall and neither of them was looking at it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He came inside her and stayed where he was for a long moment and then lay down beside her and pulled her into him, and neither of them said anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They had known each other for two years. Some things had never needed words. What was different tonight was that the quiet had changed shape and they both knew it and neither of them was going to pretend otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Kabir told me I was carrying too much,” she said, into his shoulder. “Through the middle. He said it like it was coaching.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Vikram didn’t say anything for a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then: “Do you want me to have an opinion about Kabir, or do you want me to say nothing?”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“Nothing.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Fine.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She closed her eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He also said,” she said, “that he only ever partnered me because he wanted to sleep with me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram was quiet for long enough that she opened her eyes again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Then he’s a worse player than I thought,” he said, “because that’s a perfectly good reason and he still lost.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She laughed so hard she had to put her face in his chest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Point,” she called, into the dark, some time later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The corridor door opened about four seconds afterwards, which told her a great deal about how much sleeping had been happening out there.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“To who?” said Chidi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Vikram.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Uproar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On what basis!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Umpire’s decision.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“On what basis<\/em>, Avantika \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“He won a point I didn’t know I had,” she said. “That’s the whole basis. That’s it. You can lodge it with the federation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That’s not a criterion!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s my criterion.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You said win by two!”<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

“He won by more than two.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nat, sitting down heavily on the end of the mattress: “Can I ask what the point was<\/em>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“No.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mikkel, from the doorway, ducking under the frame: “I think we should let it go.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“You would say that. You came second.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I came second,” Mikkel agreed, “to my captain, in his country, in a room he booked. I’m at peace.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s not his country, he’s Malaysian \u2014”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“It’s closer to his country than it is to Denmark.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They argued about it for forty minutes. She fell asleep somewhere in the middle of it with her head on Vikram’s arm and the argument still going on above her, which was, on balance, the nicest way she had ever gone to sleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call to prayer went up somewhere south of the campus at about twenty to five, and then a second one from further off answered it, and Avantika surfaced just far enough to register that the city had started without her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The power came back at ten past five.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It announced itself the way it always did, with every fan in the building starting at once and the corridor lights coming on and somebody’s phone charger chiming in the next room, and eight men made eight different noises of complaint and none of them got up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fan over the mattresses turned slowly and then faster and the moving air hit her bare skin and it was, after seven hours, the single best thing she had ever felt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grey came up the wall. Just after six, and Jakarta sounded different, quieter, or more honest about what it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lay there and took stock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bodies across two mattresses and most of the floor. Somebody’s kit shirt draped over her hip. Chidi asleep on his back with one arm across Ren. Wei sitting up against the wall, awake, reading something on his phone, unbothered. The room held the full evidence of the night and the fan moved warm air over all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dried on her skin: Chidi across her chest, Ren and Nat lower down, Mikkel’s on her hand where she hadn’t washed it off. She looked down at herself in the grey light and felt a satisfaction so complete it had no edges anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Adit was fucking her from behind, slowly, one arm round her waist and his mouth at the back of her neck, because Adit had apparently woken up and made a decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She’d surfaced into it some minutes ago and had no objections at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The knock came heavy at ten past six.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Kapten? Bus is here. Whenever you’re ready.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit didn’t stop. She didn’t ask him to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She looked at Vikram, who was awake, watching her with the expression she was still learning to read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Let him in,” she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vikram looked at her for a moment. Then he got up and opened the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pak Hendra was fifties, compact, moustache, glasses, and he had the bearing of a man who had driven a great many buses and had every expectation that this Friday would resemble other Fridays.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

He looked at Vikram. Then past Vikram at the room. At the bodies, at the kit on the floor, at the two mattresses dragged in from the next room, at the bucket that had never made it back to the washroom, at the general and unambiguous state of things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then his gaze reached the mattress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Avantika, the shirt covering almost nothing, Adit’s arm visible at her waist, the slow movement of the two of them under it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stood very still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His glasses fogged, faintly, at the edges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Kapten,” he said, with enormous care. “We are going to be \u2014 late getting home.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adit, to his considerable credit, had still not stopped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avantika pushed herself up onto one elbow. The shirt slid. She held the driver’s eye across the room and put her hand out towards him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pak Hendra looked at her hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then at her face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then at the room one more time, doing some kind of internal accounting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he stepped inside, and pushed the door shut behind him with his heel, and walked to the foot of the mattress, and stopped. He reached up and took off his glasses. He folded them, one arm and then the other, precisely, the way a man folds his glasses at the end of a working day, and he set them down on the desk beside him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Ya,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She reached for his belt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THE END<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

I always look forward to your feedback.
Please comment on the story to let me know what you liked about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEE HER GALLERY<\/a><\/h6>\n
<\/div>
<\/span><\/div>
<\/div><\/div>