THE HISTORIC CORE

by Becca De La Rosa

Based on an idea by Maybell Marten

Five minutes in and already Nora is bored of the party. It isn’t even a party, really, just industry people sitting around a handful of tables, drinking nineteen-dollar cocktails. No one’s brought presents, or offered her free food. Parties used to be better when they involved bouncy houses and cake. Now she’s just supposed to listen to coworkers talk about themselves, and respond politely but not too cleverly, offer soundbites that seem just rehearsed enough not to show anyone up, because the only thing worse than not making enough of an effort is trying too fucking hard.

At least the bar is pretty. They’re perched on the rooftop of some old Mills Act hotel downtown, close enough to the Financial District to clearly see the haunting, dazzling shimmer of the skyscrapers, but far enough away that all the nearby buildings are lovely historic constructions: red brick, art deco gold, plaster relief and ancient fire escapes and neon marquees. To the east the view cuts all the way across Skid Row to the Sixth Street Bridge, and somewhere, past the twinkle of headlights and taillights on the freeway, past the palm trees and the 5 and the spread of East LA, all the way to the San Gabriel mountains.

Nora has wandered away from the rest of the party. Pressed up against the rooftop wall, the sequins on her dress catching against the stone. At night the apartment buildings glitter and shine, and there’s something so enchanting about it, all this life in the darkness, as though each and every one of the units isn’t filled with unhappy, dissatisfied people. Same as anywhere.

“Having fun over here all by yourself?”

Nora grits her teeth around her smile. “Absolutely,” she says, still smiling. It feels like a tightening mechanism, something compressing her.

Simon lounges beside her against the wall. “Can I get you a drink?”

Sometimes, in the writers’ room, Simon lingers to walk to the elevator with her. Sometimes he presses the flat of his hand to her back, to guide her. “No,” she says, “I’m good.”

“Passing up a free cocktail?” He leans towards her. “You’re really not one of us, are you?”

Laughter echoes across the rooftop. Automatically, Nora glances towards it; not her party but one further from the bar, a table full of people whose features she can barely make out, but who, even from this distance, look like the most beautiful people in the world. Models, she thinks vaguely. Maybe actors. Probably talking about their Netflix shows, how big they are in Asia. Whoever they are, they seem to be having a much better time than she is. She drags her attention back to Simon. “Guess not,” she says, willing him to leave her alone.

He does not. “You know,” he says, tilting himself somehow even closer to her, so close she can smell his cologne, a scent that registers in her brain as Man Hipster: bourbon, pine tar, oak. “I think you’re wasted on the show. I said that to Mae. I swear to god, I said exactly that: Nora’s wasted on this show. You’ve got something real, you know? Whatever it is, you’ve really got it.”

The purpose of the compliment is to make her feel indebted to him. The purpose of the debt is leverage, and the purpose of leverage is – his hand on the small of her back, a twenty-dollar drink with her name on it. Nora feels her shoulders slump. She can extricate herself from Simon, but at the moment the prospect seems enormous, exhausting.

“Pardon me, is that leather jacket yours?”

A low, melodic voice. Nora and Simon both turn, simultaneously, and she sees a tall and beautiful woman, hanging sheets of copper-colored hair, a shapeless golden shift dress like something worn by a ’20s flapper, strong, lovely features. The woman is gazing at Simon expectantly.

He furrows his brow. “What?” he says. “Yeah?”

“I don’t mean to intrude. I just thought I should mention that I saw one of your friends, I presume, digging a wallet out of the jacket pocket. If you have some kind of arrangement with them, that’s – ”

“What the fuck,” Simon says blankly, his flat face expressionless, then he throws his hands up in the air. “What the fuck!” he shouts. “Who stole my fucking wallet?” He storms across the roof towards the party.

The woman gives Nora a speculative look. Suddenly, gracefully, like a magician’s elegant sleight-of-hand, she procures from some secret pocket a fat leather billfold. “If he’s your beau, I’ll put it back,” she says.

Nora stares. Laughter splits out of her. “How did you manage that?” she demands. “I’m genuinely impressed.”

Smiling, the woman slides the wallet away out of sight. “I,” she says, “am sneaky.”

“I appreciate it. I’m Nora,” she adds. “That was Simon.”

“Not a beau, then.”

“Considering it’s not 1839, no.”

The woman regards her. Her eyes are a curious gold-red. Her skin is oddly luminous, as though a soft spotlight follows her wherever she goes.  “Nora,” she says. “I’m Luc.”

Luc is tall, and slender, and smells like a thunderstorm, her hands long-fingered and deft, her posture ballerina-perfect. Nora angles herself unconsciously towards the woman, notices herself doing it, considers, stays where she is. “Are you here for an event?” she asks. 

“Oh, I am.”

“Am I interrupting?”

“I approached you,” Luc says, one eyebrow raised. “It would be absurd for me to say yes.”

Nora’s chest tingles, the same way it always does when she meets someone she finds truly, honestly interesting. “Far be it from me to propose something absurd.”

Luc laughs softly. Her laugh has a velvet edge to it, a quality that makes it sound very nearly predatory. “Why are you here?” she asks, gaze unblinking, relentless.

“A work thing. A party.”

“Where do you work?”

“In television.”

“Ah,” Luc says, angling her head so her hair slides briefly across her face. “How original.”

Beyond them, a police helicopter swoops over Little Tokyo. Luc turns to observe it, her expression almost hungry. Nora studies the swan-like curve of the woman’s neck. “This is LA,” she says. “Who’s original?”

“You’re not from Los Angeles, are you?”

Does she wear a fucking sign? Nora tucks her lower lip between her teeth. “No,” she admits. “I’m from the Northeast.”

“This is the greatest city in the world,” Luc says softly. “It is the height of culture and the abyss of the human condition. It is a snake and a sorcerer and a god and a man on the side of the road doing a card shuffle, and it wants the very best for you, and it will laugh when it sees you stabbed in the back. Some people understand it the moment they set foot on its soil. For some it takes years, and some never see it clearly.”

Anyone can write a clever speech. Anyone can sound good. Nora knows this, and still finds herself feeling oddly small, the same way she feels sometimes when she hears a fluent speaker of a language in which she’s struggling to state her own name. “Where are you from?” she asks. “You don’t sound – ”

To be fair, Luc doesn’t really sound like anything Nora can pin down. If she had to try, she might almost call Luc’s accent Transatlantic: cosmopolitan and androgynous and intentionally cultivated, reminiscent of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. Cary Grant in Arsenic and Old Lace. Nora watched black-and-white movies with her grandfather, on the old box TV. It’s one of the reasons she’s here.

Luc twists a long gold necklace around one finger. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m a native,” she says. “Born and bred.”

“Well.” Nora stares down at her own hands. “Thanks, like I said.”

Another burst of riotous laughter from the other side of the roof. Luc makes a humming sound. “My friends are having far too good of a time without me,” she remarks. And then, speculative again, almost calculating: “Why don’t you join us?”

Nora glances over her shoulder at the group. At the moment, a shockingly willowy creature is perched up on the table, their ink-black pageboy haircut bouncing as they gesticulate. Their friends laugh and catcall and throw tiny red straws. “Enough, Tandy!” one of them shouts. Martini glasses and highball glasses litter the table. Back at Nora’s own party, half the writers are bent over their phones, their faces blue-lit, absorbed in their feeds. Simon is vehemently interrogating one of the interns. “I should really get back,” she says, reluctant.

“Should you?”

A valid question. Nora clears her throat. “I – ”

“I won’t beg,” Luc says. “Make up your mind.”

So she does, swiftly. Why the fuck not? “All right,” she says.

Smiling again, Luc takes her hand, leads her gently over to the table full of beautiful people. They turn their faces towards her: shining, delighted. “Luc brought a present!” the creature called Tandy says brightly. “What a sweet present. What’s her name, Luc?”

Luc laughs. “Be polite. This is Nora.”

“Luc rescued me,” Nora adds, pushing past her discomfort at being the focus of so much attention.

The table cheers. There are six of them, all shockingly attractive. Luc introduces them one by one: Tandy, who blows Nora a kiss, and a plump girl named Svetlana, and Kiro, a man with a leonine mane of golden hair and a sunlit smile, and seemingly identical twins Ilta and Valo, and a small, pale boy whose name Nora doesn’t quite catch, dressed in the most glorious glittery jumpsuit she has ever seen. She sits where Luc pulls a chair out for her, at the head of the table. “What did Luc rescue you from?” Tandy asks, swirling a pomegranate-red drink in a champagne flute. Their eyes are a startling electric blue.

“A co-worker,” Nora says, accepting the glass Svetlana passes her. “And certain boredom.”

Tandy scoffs. “Boredom on a night like this is a crime.”

The glass is full of an effervescent golden liquid. “What kind of night is that?” Nora asks. “Sorry, what is this?”

Svetlana giggles. “It’s good,” she says. “Try it and see.”

A sense of growing unease permeates Nora’s curiosity. One of the first friends she made in LA, years ago, gave her a curated list of forbidden activities, the foremost of which was: never accept an unknown drink from a stranger, no matter how pretty the stranger, or how good the drink looks. Don’t want to get roofied, Nora had agreed, feeling worldly and unimpressed. Her friend had laughed. Girl, she’d said, no. Don’t want to wake up in Tujunga Canyon having gone missing for a week, left only with the memories of some spectacular orgy and a sweet tooth for Tujunga prickly pear whisky.

Is this a week-long-orgy type of situation? Whoever these people are, they are all preternaturally beautiful. Nora studies them for telltale signs, monstrous curvatures of flesh, limbs of stone, of tree, feathers or scales. She doesn’t see anything, but how can she possibly be sure?

Warm breath in her ear. “It’s a gin fizz,” Luc whispers. “Svet likes to be mysterious, but it doesn’t suit her very well.”

Presumably, this is meant to reassure her. “Not much of a drinker,” Nora lies, setting the glass on the table. 

Luc sits back in her chair. “Darlings,” she says to her friends, “Nora is a little bit wary of us. Shall we tell her where we come from?”

Svetlana shakes out her curls. There are spangles pinned among them, catching the light. “Not from the canyons,” she says, sing-song.

“Not from the River,” Kiro says with an indulgent smile at Luc.

“Not from Santa Monica,” Itla proclaims. Her brother adds, “Not from Hollywood.”

“Not from the mountains,” says the glitter-decked boy, his voice soft and sweet.

Tandy downs the last of their drink. “Not from the high desert, or the low,” they say, with peculiar relish, their eyes fixed on Nora. 

Beside her, Luc lounges like a lion. Her hair falls in coppery folds. “Do you know,” she says, “that this was the first named street in downtown? A city surveyor named it for his sweetheart. The pet name he called her. Thomas Edison shot a movie just down there, in 1898.” She lifts her own glass, a shimmering martini. “This is where so much of it began,” she says. “All the chaos and all the glory. Why not celebrate it with us?”

Over at the writers’ tables, Simon is arguing loudly with a waiter. Her only semi-friend at work, Louisa, is taking selfie after selfie, smiling into the camera and then studying her phone, stony-faced, critical, mercenary with the representations of her own self. Nora may not be exactly certain what’s going on here, but it’s surely better than that. She grabs her gin fizz and drinks. 

It’s a good cocktail. That’s all, just sugar, liquor, lemon. Nora drinks, and decides that it might be wise to ignore the disappointment that drags through her, whatever its implications might be. “So you’re celebrating the city?” she asks, aiming herself in the direction of polite curiosity. “Or, what, the Historic Core?”

“You asked what kind of night it was,” Tandy says, rising in a single fluid movement. They gesture to the skyline. “A clear one.”

It certainly is clear. The smog is gone, blown away by winds or burnt away by heat, and the air is cool, attentive, full of city noises. Laughter from a club down the street. The coughing sputter of a modified car engine. Somewhere, an ambulance. Nora looks out, out at the pristine skyline, such an evocative thing. Promises, promises.

“That’s what you’re celebrating?” she asks Tandy.

“Do we need another reason?”

“Where are you from, Nora?” Svetlana asks. Under the table she’s barefoot; her toenails are painted bright gold, and they patter against the decking. 

Nora drinks again. If she’s not going to get absolutely railroaded by the most beautiful people she’s ever seen, she reflects, she might as well get wasted. “Maine,” she says. 

“Christ, Maine.” Tandy has succeeded in waving over a waiter, who obligingly brings another blood-red drink. “Not a worthwhile city in the whole state.”

“We have Portland,” Nora says, immediately defensive. “We have Bangor. Stephen King’s from Bangor.”

“Yes,” says Tandy, “that well-known urban sophisticate, Stephen King.”

“Tandy, there’s no need to be rude.” Luc purses her lips. “Tandy is a terrible snob,” she says to Nora. “Maine has beautiful stargazing. Do you miss it?”

Nora thinks of the house she grew up in, rotting shingles and half-toppled cattle barn, the wood stove always dragon-eyed all winter, her mother’s baked beans and maple-roasted delicata squash, the perfect silence of deep snowfall. She thinks of digging clams and ice-skating on a frozen lake and moose in the river and the endless spring whine of mosquitos and the blood-fat deer tick she found embedded in her soft thigh, red snapper hot dogs at church fundraisers, yard sales all summer long and in the autumn everyone in flannel, everyone in blaze orange. Then she thinks of taco trucks, heatwaves, graffiti tags, mountain lions, wildfires. Neon. Violence. Light. “Yes,” she says. “And no. You know how that can be?”

“Of course I do,” Luc says softly. “Home is a complicated thing.”

“Even for you? Born and bred?”

“If you think this city is any one thing, or can be pinned down in any one way, you don’t understand it yet.”

It’s petty to feel stung by this. Nora can’t help herself. “Fair enough,” she says, somewhat sullenly, and drinks.

Tandy crosses one whip-thin leg over the other. “You’re making the poor girl feel inadequate, Luc,” they say. Sly-smiled, dangerous. “No one likes to hear about what they don’t understand.”

“Whereas everyone loves to have their hometown insulted,” says Nora, giving her sweetest smile.

Laughing, Tandy raises their glass. “I’m sorry I’m an asshole,” they say. “To the night sky, the Beaux Art movement, and the Pine Tree State.”

They drink. And they drink. And they drink. Svetlana hears a song she likes playing on the speakers, and she squeals, drags Ilta and Valo up to dance with her. The boy in the glittering jumpsuit pours himself into Tandy’s lap and perches there, languid. Kiro and Tandy start a complicated game involving pennies and shots. Nora ends up standing by the edge of the roof again, listening to Luc talk quietly about the buildings all around them. Secret, esoteric stories. At one point Luc glances at Nora and gives her a half-smile. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Am I boring you to tears?”

“Honestly, not even a bit,” Nora tells her. “I didn’t know downtown was so interesting.”

“Everywhere is.”

Below them a man walks down the street, accompanied by a pulsing thrum from his boombox. Nora watches his weaving path. “How do you all know each other?” she asks.

Luc waves one decorous hand. “We’ve been around for years. Family, in a way.”

“You seem – ” Nora watches Svetlana grind between Ilta and Valo. Her ass to Valo’s crotch, her tits rubbing against Ilta’s. “Close,” she says dryly.

For a moment Luc doesn’t respond. The expression on her face is illegible, elbows on the roof wall, one hand tracing the shape of the illuminated bridge in the distance. “The clear nights have grown fewer,” she says at last. “We’ve always preferred to take our pleasure where we can.” She stirs. “Bar’s closing,” she adds.

Feeling strangely empty, Nora digs her fingers into her wrists. “Oh.”

“Would you like to come to the after party?” Luc asks.

“Where is it?”

She spreads her hands. “Right here.”

As it turns out, Luc must know the owner of the bar; the other remaining patrons are shuffled out, but Luc and her friends are resupplied with cocktails, and then, to Nora’s genuine surprise, they are left alone. The bartender packs up and heads downstairs. The waiters kiss Tandy goodbye. The market lights wink out, and then the track lighting over the bar, and finally even the emergency exit light switches off, so the roof shudders into darkness. It makes the skyline prickle into sharper relief. Nora turns to Luc, sees the woman’s angular face enunciated in curious relief, too. Lines, curves. A flush of pink neon illuminating her cheekbones. Dazed, Nora glances around to find the neon in the streets below, finds nothing. “What kind of after party is it?” she asks, all at once wary again.

“I told you,” Luc says, “this is an event. Look up.”

With slightly drunken obedience, Nora does.

“Do you see the moon?”

No moon. Only stars, dimmed by the city lights but still visible, slow-tracking planes, and Nora gets the sudden feeling that what she’s looking up into isn’t an atmosphere at all but a river: not stars, not distant planets, but rather sodium lights, street lamps, high rises, marquees, all reflected from below in a sweep of fathomless black water. “No,” she whispers. 

“No moon. It’s new tonight. Can you feel the wind?”

It plays in Nora’s hair. She nods.

“If you could get up high enough,” Luc says, “you might see all the way to Santa Monica Bay. That doesn’t happen very often.”

Desperate curiosity overwhelms her. “Who are you?” Nora asks. “All of you. What do you do?”

“Well,” Luc says, only the slightest edge to her voice, “we don’t work in television.”

Nora doesn’t need this. Curiosity isn’t worth this. She rolls her eyes, turns to go, but Luc laughs and catches at her arm. “Stay a while and I’ll show you who we are,” she says, playful, teasing, oddly intent.

But Nora is stubborn. “Show me now,” she insists.

Luc gazes her. Then she smiles, though only slightly, her face shadowed. “See that building?” she says, pointing at an apartment block further down the street, its square facade softened by confections of plaster relief over its windows and along the length of its rooftop. “It used to be a hotel. Charlie Chaplin had rooms there, once upon a time. Do you see the lights?”

The windows of the entire top floor are illuminated. “Yes,” Nora says, uneasily. 

“Watch them, please.”

She does as she’s told. She’s had enough to drink that the lights blur together, separate and reform, blur again. Into a line, electric and vivid. Nora squints. The line remains. Like a diffraction spike, though solid, hazed but somehow definite.  Is it growing larger? Could it possibly be moving towards her? Across the negative space between building and building, over the stretch of the sleeping street? Nora blinks and blinks again. The line of light stops, grows, and now she thinks she can hear it, the soft crackle of electricity, hum and whisper like an old neon sign, back before everything was LED, when glass tubes caught fractionated air of the same kind released by the movement of stars. Nora is too astonished to do anything clever, like scream, or run. Instead she just stares. The light reaches the roof of the bar. Hesitates for a brief moment at the wall, then trickles over it. Nora watches, unable to breathe, as the line of light pours like a snake, internally muscled. She does move when it brushes against her wristbone. She jumps, and squeaks, and bounces on the tips of her toes, but Luc presses her palm to Nora’s arm. “Be still,” she says.

Nora is still. The line of light curves softly around her wrist. The skin beneath it prickles; the hair on her arm stands up. Nora remembers scrubbing a balloon over her head to illustrate static electricity in some kindergarten science class. Very carefully, she flexes her hand, and then she looks up, questioningly, at Luc.

“What does it feel like?” Luc asks, her gaze golden and intent.

Breathless, Nora shakes her head. “Like. The lemon and the penny.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That didn’t – that wasn’t sense, I didn’t make sense. They have you do an experiment sometimes in school. Making a battery out of a lemon and a penny. You can test it – ” she motions with her free hand. “On your tongue. You can taste the electricity. It’s citric, you know? It’s – ” she struggles for the right words. “Springy,” she says at last, and laughs. “Volts taste like sour lemon popping candy. I used to think if I ate a lightning bolt it would taste like that.”

“If you ate,” Luc repeats, “a lightning bolt.”

The electric hum around her wrist increases. It travels through her body, carried by the artery beating under her thumb. Nora gasps. “I used to think about it all the time,” she says, no longer exactly sure what she’s saying, aware only of a growing thrum in her pulse points, between her legs. “Like what it would feel like. To have – in my mouth.” The snake of light feeds itself from her wrist up her arm, across her shoulder to her throat, where it laces like a collar, scintillates against her breastbone, and she shivers, wavers on her feet. “It was the weirdest fantasy I had,” she says, and why is she saying this? To a beautiful stranger who currently has a voltage of electricity wrapped around Nora’s neck? “Maybe everyone daydreams about deepthroating a lightning bolt, but I don’t know.”

Luc has crept closer. There are points of light on her cheekbones, now, and the tips of her ears, the corners of her eyes, like cities seen from outer space. “Is that what you daydreamed about?” she asks, sounding genuinely fascinated. “Deepthroating a lightning bolt?”

Nora nods. The movement jostles the line of light around her, and that sends a wave of electric pleasure throughout her body, biting and torturous, as though the night itself is a vibrator she’s pressing her entire self against. “It was a whole thing,” she says breathlessly, unashamed, not quite certain why she is unashamed. “It was what I thought about when I – ”

“When you pleasured yourself.”

Nora huffs. “You talk so old.”

“I am relatively old,” Luc says mildly. “As old as the street we’re standing above.”

Even being “from away”, as they’d say back in her hometown, Nora knows a little bit about the history of Los Angeles. The oldest residential building in the county is technically within the bounds of DTLA, up by Olvera Street. It dates from 1818, and the surrounding buildings, even some of the highrises, date from as far back as the late 1800s. If this was the first named street in downtown –

She pulls herself away from the rope of light. It shocks her, like a car door on a particularly dry day. “Excuse me,” she says, and stumbles blindly across the dark rooftop towards the stairwell.

Her phone rings as she’s feeling her way down the stairs, wide-eyed and dumb with shock. It’s her friend, the first friend she made in LA. “How’s it going?” her friend asks lazily when Nora answers.

Nora slams down on the stairwell exit bar and shoves herself out onto the street. A group of young men are crowded around a streetlight, smoking joints; they turn and peer at her. “I’m having a weird night,” Nora says. “Can you tell me I’m not insane?”

On the other end of the line, Sky rattles something that might be a bag of chips. “I don’t know, can I?”

“I was at a work thing, and I met these – people. They said they weren’t – ” she flaps one hand. “From the canyon, from Santa Monica, from WeHo, anything. But one of them – she knew a lot about downtown, she’s, like. Crazy beautiful. She wanted me to drink with her – ”

“Ooh,” Sky interrupts, perking up.

“But there’s something. Weird about them. All of them. She told me she’s as old as this street is. And I’m pretty sure that’s – really, really old. Not in street terms, but in – in people terms – ”

“Wait wait wait,” Sky says. “Are you talking about Luc and her friends?”

Nora hugs her arms around herself. “You know them?”

“Everybody knows Luc. She wanted you to drink with her?”

“Yes?”

“Was Tandy there?”

“Yes.”

“I slapped Tandy in the face one time. It was amazing. And you left?”

“Yes,” Nora says cautiously.

“Why?” Sky asks her.

“Aren’t they the kind of people you warned me against?”

Sky laughs. “For one, I didn’t warn you against anyone. I gave you some tips about your own behavior. Two, Luc is like – one of those birds that birdwatchers are obsessed with, right? Like super rare birds? Like they go crazy if they see one, call all their birdwatching buddies, everyone grabs their binoculars and heads down to the park, maybe they write about it in their birdwatching newsletter – ”

“Rare bird,” Nora cuts in. “Got it.”

“I mean, Luc’s not around much anymore. But she’s famous. She used to throw these parties up on the roof of old hotel buildings downtown.”

“That’s basically what they’re doing now.”

“Notorious,” Sky says, enunciating the word with obnoxious glee. “Those parties were no-tor-i-ous. And so what if she’s old? How old are you?”

“You were literally at my thirty-third birthday party a month ago.”

Sky makes a scoffing sound. “You’re grown,” she says. “Luc’s a little more grown. So what?”

Nora watches the young men on the street corner finish their joints, slap each other’s backs, amble away. A peal of laughter echoes down from the roof above her. “Can you tell me what they are?” she asks quietly, too quietly, she hopes, to be overheard. 

Sky’s silent a minute. “Better ask Luc yourself,” she says. “But they’re all special. Like if you found the big book of Los Angeles, Luc’s name would be written in it. That’s not true of everyone.”

“It’s not?”

“Nah,” says Sky. “Have to have that something. It’s a snake eating its own tail out there.”

While Nora is wondering at the fact that two separate people referred to LA as a snake in one night, the stairwell door opens. Luc steps out, leans back against the brick wall, her arms crossed over her chest. The streetlight makes her mythic, written in luminous colors. Unconsciously, Nora flexes her wrist. She can still feel the path of light lie crackling across it. “Got to go,” she tells Sky. “Talk to you later.”

“Say hi to Tandy for me,” Sky sings, and the line goes dead.

Luc says nothing, does nothing, barely moves at all except to blink, her lashes the same copper as her hair, so it’s up to Nora to edge closer. “That was my friend Sky,” she says. “I think you might know her.”

“Everybody knows Sky.”

“I shouldn’t have run off. I just got – freaked out.”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Still Luc doesn’t move a muscle. “Oh, that’s all right. Not everyone’s made to understand this city.”

“So you keep saying,” Nora says, frowning slightly. “But maybe you just need to give me a minute to process when you tell me crazy things.”

“I don’t need,” Luc says, “to do anything.”

Nora looks up at her. Light reflected in her eyes, glittering, neverending. The aristocratic line of her cheekbone. “You’re the one who followed me,” she points out.

Luc blinks, then laughs, a husky laugh. “A fair point,” she admits. “Shows my hand somewhat, doesn’t it? Are you coming back up, or do we say our farewells here?”

“No,” says Nora, smiling, “I’m coming back up.”

They go up together, in the dark. Only it isn’t really dark, because every stair and every footfall is illuminated by glimmers and whispers of light, light Nora thinks, maybe, possibly, is coming from Luc. Not the blue-white of bioluminescence but the glowing gold-white of a skyline against night. She leans into Luc, experimentally. Luc drapes one arm around Nora’s shoulder.

And out on the rooftop, the party has evolved. Svetlana and the twins are all naked and clustered around a girl who looks to be one of the bartenders, the girl’s own shirt gone, her hair spilling from its braid, her neck arched in exquisite agony. Her hands and ankles are bound to her chair with the same ropes of light that Luc wrapped around Nora’s throat, each rope tracing across the roof and back to some twinkling pinprick in the DTLA sky. Tandy is standing on the table, regarding the foursome like a conductor pleased with their orchestra. The boy has stripped half-out of his spangled jumpsuit and is kissing Kiro up against the wall, his sleeves dangling behind him like a shed skin. “I did tell Tandy to make everyone wait,” Luc says dryly. “They can be impatient.” 

“So this is what you guys do?” Nora asks, feeling slightly haunted. “Fuck on rooftops when the night is clear?”

“I can show you what we do,” Luc says lazily, eyes heavy-lidded, languid. “If you like.”

Nora believes that she very much would like, but is currently unable to speak. She nods instead, and Luc laughs again, reaches for her shoulder.

Luc kisses her once, softly. She tastes like electricity held in the mouth, like the pulse and beat of electricity, like the first glimpse of fireflies over the back of the ramshackle cow barn in early summer. Then Luc straightens. “Come here,” she says.

Filled with trepidation, filled with delight, Nora follows Luc to the table. Carefully Luc plucks at the light strings around the bartender, pulling them up the way a museum curator would pull at a velvet rope to let Nora in to get an intimate look at a famous, controversial work of art. “Sit,” she says, smiling.

Nora sits. Opposite her and across the table, Svetlana is lovingly kissing her way down the bartender’s neck. The twins are peeling off her jeans. The bartender catches Nora’s eye, and Nora thinks, for just a moment, they understand one another perfectly: bewildered, wondering, aroused, appalled.

“You are very sweet,” Luc says softly, moving to stand in front of Nora’s chair, blocking her view. “I thought that as soon as I saw you beset by that ridiculous little man. You look like an apple, like you’d be crisp and sharp and fresh and delicious if I bit into you.” Luc grazes one finger down the curve of Nora’s shoulder. Nora shivers. “Do you write with a committee?”

“There’s a – a team.”

Luc lifts one hand. Regal, demanding. The skyline in Nora’s peripheral vision wavers. “Is that how they tell stories these days?”

“It’s – it’s collaborative, we all give our input – ”

Rivers of light swim from the city to pool at Luc’s feet until she’s illuminated like a monument. For just an instant Nora thinks she sees her clearly: ritualized, archetypal, enormous. Statuesque and queenly. Something undeniably old-fashioned about the way she carries herself, debonaire creature, devil-may-care. “How inspiring,” Luc says, one golden eyebrow arched.

Nora bites back a grin. “It’s a living.”

“It’s a con.”

“Isn’t everything?”

Luc easily loops light around Nora’s neck, as though she’s draping her with a feather boa or a fox-fur stole. “Are you really so cynical? Or is that just what you tell yourself, so you don’t have to hate what you do?”

Electricity sizzles into her, a flood of it, warm and liquid and undeniably pleasurable, in the most inexplicable way. “Oh,” Nora says on a gasp, and then, “you’re really that earnest?”

“Darling,” Luc says, pressing the warm palm of her hand first to Nora’s cheek and then to her breastbone, just beneath the line of light, “there’s nothing more powerful than a little bit of earnestness. Don’t you know that?”

“I always thought it made you weak.”

“That’s the problem with your generation,” Luc says up to the starlit sky. “All posture. No sincerity.”

“You sound about a million years old when you say shit like that.”

Gracefully, Luc slips the straps of Nora’s dress from her shoulders and tugs it down, down. More gracefully still, she traces the tips of her fingers down Nora’s throat, down over the cups of her lacy bra, down her stomach, a shuddering, sparking trail. She plucks a second line of electricity from the air and wraps it neatly around Nora’s left wrist, then her right. “I think it’s quite tragic,” Luc says, stepping slightly back to observe her work. “You live in a world of shadows. Not even your light is real anymore. But from where I stand – ” She smiles, briefly. “The view is truly dazzling,” she says, her voice soft. “It’s something to be seen. Something real.”

Nora has lost track of exactly what they’re talking about. The electricity jolts and shimmers through her. This is what it’s like to be one of those glass tubes over on Broadway, she thinks, lit up from within, endlessly effervescent. “You,” she says, and “god – ”

“Flattering, but inaccurate. I don’t have delusions of grandeur. I know exactly who and what I am.” Luc tugs on something, and Nora’s arms are drawn seamlessly up, up over her head, into a web of golden light. When she pulls at her wrists, nothing happens. Her heartbeat jolts into triple time. “Do you like this?” Luc asks, more curious than concessionary. “Some people don’t.”

Again Nora fights against the electric lines. Rather than cutting into her flesh, the thrum from them seems to trickle more deeply inside her. Into her spine, her throat, her cunt. “Yeah,” she says, almost panting. “This is. This is good. But – ”

“But what, pretty Nora?”

“Will you touch me?”

Luc tips her shining head in apparent surprise. “I am,” she says. “This is all me.”

All this light. All this electricity. Nora twists her head to look at the city from within its net of brightness, the way she is inside the net of Luc’s spider-gossamer voltage. So that’s what they are. Her thoughts stutter and spark. “You said LA was a man doing a card shuffle,” she says. “But you say what I do is a con?”

Luc laughs, her head tipped back. “A card shuffle isn’t a con,” she says. “It’s the most honest thing in the world. And so is Los Angeles.”

“That’s – a statement.”

“It’s the truth.”

Nora struggles a little, for show. Her hair has fallen loose from her bun, but there’s nothing she can do about that. “I like you looking a little bit wild,” Luc says, as though tracing the outskirts of her thoughts. “It suits you. Do you want to see what it’s like?”

Nora’s entire consciousness seems to have descended into her skin, her stomach, her cunt. She’s so wet she can hardly think. “What what’s like?” she says, positive she sounds incredibly stupid. Nothing to be done about that, either. 

Luc gazes down at her from her glorious, streetlit height, and smiles, as though she sees something unbearably sweet. “Deepthroating a lightning bolt,” she says softly.

As Nora watches, Luc clenches her fists together. Light coalesces and coalesces, coursing from the city skyline to her hands, building upon itself in a lacework of lattice, into a shape not dissimilar to a cock. The light wraps itself around her waist. The most beautiful, most ethereal strap-on Nora has ever seen. It’s all she can do not to drop her jaw in ecstatic anticipation. “Oh,” she says. “I. Yes. Please.”

Luc laughs again, though tenderly. “Look at you,” she murmurs. “You’re so real it hurts. Such a shining thing. Come here and taste me, then.”

And Nora does, first with just the tip of her tongue, and Luc’s cock tastes like everything, more than she could have ever imagined, thunderstorm, Ferris wheel, wildfire, champagne, and she opens her mouth, and Luc hums in pleasure. She grips the back of Nora’s head, not like a man, but as though she can’t bear not to. Exhilaration floods Nora. Veins and arteries. Her head an electric rush. Her hands, pinned above her, twist and twine through the lines of light. Luc moves closer, slides her hand up Nora’s dress. To her underwear, soaked. Inside them, to her bare wet flesh, and when Luc’s fingers press into her Nora makes a sound she can’t describe. Luc moans, quietly. Her fingers twist inside Nora’s cunt. Nora lurches against her bonds, desperate, blinded, everything brightness. She wants so much. She feels so much. Luc cups her free hand at Nora’s neck, pinpricks of molten stars, everywhere alive. Nothing’s so alive as a city, not anywhere.

Beyond them, the bartender screams. The night captures the sound. Hip-hop from a car bathes the street in bass.

Inside the web of city lights, Nora is beautifully pinned. Her mouthful of lightning. Luc fucks her, fucks her, and if she could she’d thrash, she’d twist and gasp, but she’s held in place, and somehow this stasis only serves to heighten her arousal and desperation, compresses it like a diamond into the brightest point, as though she, too, is a speck of light in the city’s glittering smile. When Luc comes she does so gracefully and with great abandon, tugging at Nora’s hair, still, somehow, entirely clothed. She pulls her cock from Nora’s mouth. “Well?” she asks, breathless.

“Please don’t stop,” Nora begs, near tears.

Luc kisses her. Lemon popping candy. “Darling,” she whispers, her luminous cheek presses to Nora’s, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

And then: lines of light snake over Nora’s entire body. Up her legs. Across her stomach. Into her cunt, into her mouth, like being fucked by an atom of pure energy, and she comes gasping, split into fragments, burst into color. The night cracks and scatters and reforms into the city, the greatest city in the world.

-

After that everything blurs. The twins and Svetlana turning from the bartender to each other and back, and back, and back. The boy with his spangled suit shed like a skin lying on the tabletop while Kiro and Tandy take turns sipping what looks like pure moonlight from the curve of his knee, the hollow of his clavicle. Tandy pressed against the brick wall, masturbating with their head tipped back, one of the most beautiful sights Nora has ever seen, and poignant in a way she can’t hope to understand. And Luc, and Luc, and Luc. Luc’s fingers and her tongue and her flickers of shimmering light inside Nora, everywhere. The sensation she wrings from Nora’s body. Until Nora is damp with sweat and her own come, exhausted.

At the first pale flush of dawn, Luc kisses Nora gently. “Better get home,” she says, one possessive hand on Nora’s hip. “The show winds down from here.”

“Where.” Nora can feel her legs shaking, trying to keep her upright. “Where are you going to go?”

“Oh,” says Luc, her voice light, “I’ll be around.”

And that seems to be that. Nora gathers up her scattered clothing, her bag, her phone, and, with one last look around her at the chaos and the glory of the night, pushes her way into the stairwell.

She meets the bartender down on the street. The bartender looks haunted, feverish, in a way Nora can’t help sympathizing with. They glance at each other and burst out laughing. Then they go their separate ways.

Later, Sky meets Nora for lunch at the Grand Central Market. Nora hasn’t showered; she feels deliciously, visibly filthy, and at the moment she doesn’t want that to change. Sky takes one look at her and shakes her head. “You need pad siu,” she pronounces. “Like, immediately. Like, more than probably anyone has ever needed it.”

They get pad siu from Sticky Rice and sit outside, next to the noise and movement of Broadway. “So,” Sky says, twisting her chopsticks through rice noodles. “Are you going to give me details, or do I have to beg?”

“It was,” Nora says, and stops.

“Good? Better? Mind-blowing?”

“Do you think this is the greatest city in the world?” Nora asks abruptly.

Sky chews. She tucks a puff of red hair behind her ear with the end of one chopstick. Today Sky is dressed like a skater boy from the early two thousands, tattered Vans and baggy jeans and wifebeater and beanie cap and all. “Well, yeah,” she says, staring at Nora. “Is that even a question?”

“Do you think I belong here?”

“Who gave you that identity crisis? It was Tandy, right?” Sky shakes the ice in her Thai tea. “You belong here,” she says. “Everyone does. That’s the whole thing. What you do with it. You know what I mean?”

“It was transcendent,” Nora says, and she is entirely, appallingly earnest.

“Sure,” says Sky, easily. “I get that.”

“I think I need a new job.”

“Okay.”

“And I need one of those. Those things.”

“Things?”

Nora is already tapping at her phone. “Apps,” she says, absently. “With the moon phases, and the weather. So you can tell when the sky is going to be clear.”

“Okay,” Sky agrees. They finish their noodles. The city moves around them, in them.