THE LADY IN THE CROW MASK…

The invitation came without a name on it, just an address and a time and a line in gold ink: Come as someone else.
The building was an old warehouse by the river, all rust and brick and light spilling out of a fourth-floor window like the place was on fire from the inside. Inside, the party was a beautiful disaster, smoke machines, a string quartet playing something sinister and slow, bodies packed shoulder to shoulder in vinyl and silk and fake blood. A man in a goat skull drank champagne through a straw. Somebody's Marie Antoinette was already carrying her own head under her arm.
I was in a black suit, black shirt, no tie. A crow mask hung around my neck, waiting.
She found me before I found her.
I felt her first, a cool hand on my forearm, the soft drag of feathers. When I turned, she was close enough that the scent of her hit me: orange blossom and something darker underneath, like burnt sugar.
The mask was a crow's skull, lacquered black, curved beak jutting over her nose, and beneath it her mouth. Just her mouth. Painted a deep, wet red. She wore a velvet dress the color of a bruise, cut low, cut high, and her shoulders were bare and pale in the smoke.
"You're not wearing yours," she said. Her voice was low, a little hoarse, like she'd been laughing too much or talking all night.
"Neither are you. Not properly."
Her head tilted. "I'm wearing exactly what I want to wear."
I lifted the crow mask from around my neck and fitted it over my face. The world narrowed to two eyeholes. She watched me do it and something in her posture changed, settled, pleased.
"Better," she said.
We didn't talk about work, or where we were from, or what we did. She asked what scared me. I asked what she'd do if she weren't afraid. She told me a thing so filthy and so casually that I nearly spilled my drink, and then she laughed at my face and took the drink out of my hand and set it on a passing tray.
"Come on," she said. "The music's terrible in here."
She led me by two fingers through the crowd, up a narrow iron staircase, past a landing where a couple was already pressed against the brick and not being quiet about it. She didn't stop. Third floor. A corridor. A door that opened onto a room that smelled like cold plaster and old books, somebody's half finished renovation, a single bare bulb, a drop cloth, a window full of city light.
She turned the lock behind us.
I reached for her and she stepped back, one heel, then the other, backing away until her shoulders met the wall. She lifted her chin.
"Take it off me," she said. "The mask. Slowly."
I did. The ribbon at the back of her head was thin and the knot tight, and my fingers weren't steady. When it came loose, she was a stranger in a good way, sharp jaw, high cheekbones, a small scar through one eyebrow, eyes the color of weak tea. Pretty in a way that had nothing to do with being pretty.
"There you are," I said.
She pulled my mask off too, dropped both of them on the drop cloth like a pair of shed skins.
Then she kissed me.
It wasn't gentle. She kissed like she'd been thinking about it for an hour and was done waiting, one hand fisted in the front of my shirt, the other flat against the wall, her mouth hot and open and tasting faintly of champagne. I got a hand in her hair, dark, pinned up, coming loose and she made a low sound against my teeth that went straight down my spine.
"Careful," she murmured. "It took me an hour to do that."
I pulled the pins out anyway, one by one, and let the hair fall. She laughed, breathless, and shoved me back a step, and then she was working the buttons of my shirt with quick, efficient fingers, and the wall was at my back now, and her mouth was on my throat, my collarbone, the flat of my chest.
"You're good at this," I said.
"I know."
She sank down onto her knees on the drop cloth.
The dress had a slit up the thigh and it fell open as she went. Her mouth was red and ruined and she looked up at me once, deliberate, before she took me in her hand. Then her lips closed around me and my head went back against the plaster and stayed there.
She was unhurried and thorough and she watched me the whole time, that small scar creased with concentration, humming a little at the sounds she pulled out of me. When my hand tightened in her hair she only took more, eased off, took it again, a slow, teasing rhythm designed to keep me right at the edge and no further. Twice I thought I was finished. Twice she pulled back and smiled against my skin.
"Not yet," she said.
I got her up. The zipper of the dress gave way down her back and the velvet slid to the floor in a heap. Underneath, black lace, and beneath that, skin still cool from the night air and the smoke. She stepped out of the heels. I ran my palms up her ribs, over the lace, and she arched into it, eyes fluttering.
"Bed," she said. "The drop cloth. Anywhere. Now."
I laid her down on the canvas in the middle of that cold, bare room with the city burning outside the window, and I took my time with the lace because she'd taken her time with me. She got impatient and said so. I ignored her. By the time the lace was gone her thighs were trembling and her hands had found the edges of the cloth and gripped it white knuckled.
Then I put my mouth on her and she stopped being clever.
She came the first time with her heel dug into my back and a sound like a sob, and the second time quieter, longer, one hand over her own mouth. The third time she pushed my head away and gasped, "Enough, enough," and dragged me up by the shoulders, and reached down between us to guide me.
"Look at me," she said.
I did. Her eyes were blown wide and wild and her hair was everywhere and she hooked one leg high around my hip and pulled me in.
The first push made her breath catch and her nails bite into my shoulders. Then we found the rhythm together, rough, deep, her hips meeting mine, the canvas bunching under her back. The bare bulb swung. The window fogged. She said my name, the one I'd given her, the only one she had and then a string of things that weren't words, and then, "Don't stop, don't you dare stop."
I didn't.
She came apart under me with her head thrown back and her throat bared, and I followed her over a moment later with my face buried in her neck, and for a while the only sound in the room was both of us trying to remember how breathing worked.
Afterward she lay with her cheek on my chest and one finger tracing the slope of my ribs, and the bulb swung slowly, and neither of us said anything for a long time.
"What's your name?" I finally asked.
She lifted her head. The scar through her eyebrow caught the light. "You'll find out," she said.
Then she sat up, reached for the dress, and started getting ready to disappear.
She left the crow mask behind.
I found it on the drop cloth when I got up, lacquered black, one ribbon snapped. I didn't realize until the next morning how much that meant, a woman who'd been careful enough to take her hairpins and her lace and her shoes, and who'd left the one thing that had been covering her face.
Or maybe she just forgot it. Either way, I took it home.
The invitation had no name, but the gold ink had a watermark. I held it up to the lamp and read the name of a design studio in tiny letters, and the studio's website had a blog, and the blog had a post about the "come as someone else" party, and the post had a photo gallery, and in the fourth photo, at the edge of the frame, half-turned, was a woman in a bruise coloured dress with her hand on a stranger's forearm.
Not me. Some other night. Some other party.
I spent a week finding out who she was. Not in a stalker way, I told myself, in a she left her mask and I'm being polite way. I asked the host, a wiry man named Dorian who ran the design studio and wore too many rings. He grinned at me over his glasses.
"Which one?"
"Black crow skull. Velvet dress. Scar through the left eyebrow."
"Ah." His grin got wider. "Her. She'll be delighted you're looking."
"Is she"
"She's not with anyone, if that's what you're asking. She's not with anything. She doesn't do this." He waved a hand at the party, at all of it. "She does that." A nod at the mask in my hand. "Once. Then she's gone. You're not the first to come asking and you probably won't be the last."
"Give me something."
He looked at me for a moment, then pulled a card out of his jacket and wrote a name on the back and tore it in half. "She's at the bookshop on Kestrel Street Thursdays. Don't tell her I told you."
Her name was Neve.
Kestrel Street was a narrow lane behind the old market, all cobbles and propped-open doors and a smell of wet cardboard. The bookshop was called Vellum, and it was exactly what you'd expect, deep shelves, a cat asleep in the window, a brass bell over the door that announced me before I'd taken two steps.
She was at the counter with a stack of returns. Hair down. Glasses. A cardigan the color of oatmeal. No velvet, no red mouth, nothing that said crow. She looked up and her face did a fast, complicated thing, surprise, then pleasure, then a smooth mask over both.
"You found me."
"You left your mask."
"I left it on purpose."
"I know."
She put the books down. The cat lifted its head and decided we weren't worth it.
"Who told you?"
"Dorian. Under duress."
"Duress." She snorted. "He's a gossip."
"Neve," I said. Just to say it. It felt good in my mouth.
She took her glasses off and folded them and looked at me properly, and there it was, the same steady, appraising thing from the party, the thing that had been under the mask all along. "So you found me. Now what?"
"Now you tell me your last name and let me buy you a coffee."
"Fenwick. And I don't drink coffee."
"Tea, then."
She didn't say yes. She said, "Thursdays I close up at six," and went back to her returns, and I took the hint and left before the bell could embarrass me twice.
The next Thursday I was there at ten past six with two teas in a paper tray.
She locked the door behind me, flipped the sign, and took the tea. "You're early."
"You said six."
"I said I close at six. I didn't say come at six."
"Should I come back at eight?"
"Don't be stupid." She took a sip. "Milk. No sugar. Good guess."
We sat on the floor between the shelves because there was one chair and she'd claimed it by putting her cardigan on it. She told me about the shop, her aunt's, hers now, barely breaking even, the roof a disaster. I told her about my job, which was boring, and about my brother, who wasn't, and she listened with her chin on her knee and didn't do the polite nod once.
At some point she said, "You know this is a terrible idea."
"Which part?"
"All of it. The party was one thing, she gestured at the shop, at herself, at the tea ", this is Thursday."
"Thursday's a good day."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she set the tea down and crawled the three feet between us and kissed me, and it was a different kiss than the one in the renovation room, much slower, less performance, her hands framing my jaw like she was trying to memorize the shape.
I got her cardigan off. I got her up against the shelf of poetry, which rocked once, hard, and she laughed into my mouth and steadied it with one hand. Her skirt went up around her waist and my hand went down the front of her underwear and she was already wet, already rocking into it, already saying my name in that low, half hoarse voice with a finally buried in it.
"Bedroom," she said. "There's a flat upstairs. Go."
The stairs were narrow and she went up them sideways with my hand on her back. The flat was small and warm and smelled like her. There was a window with a bad sash and a bed with too many blankets. I got the last of her clothes off and she got the last of mine and she pulled me down on top of her and hooked her ankle over the back of my knee.
"You're going to stay this time," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm going to stay."
She came twice before I did, and after, she lay with her head on my chest and one hand over my heart like she was checking the meter, as the bad sash rattled in the wind, and the cat scratched at the bedroom door to be let in.
"You should know," she said into my skin, "that I'm very bad at this."
"At what?"
"After. The next day. The part where you're still here."
"Then we'll be bad at it together," I said. "I'll come back next Thursday."
She lifted her head. The scar through her eyebrow was very close. "Eight o'clock," she said. "Not six."