Juma

by Madhuri Pavamani

  I kissed him soft and slow and sad because I could not help myself, his mouth was made for my kisses.

  “But I cannot do this anymore.”

  My eyes filled and a sob escaped my lips.

  “Juma, come on.” He pushed my hair behind my ear and smiled but I saw the flash of fear.

  I pressed my finger to his lips and quieted him because all kinds of pretty words were going to tumble from his gorgeous mouth to try and convince me otherwise because he thought he knew what was next but I suspected he had no idea.

  “I cannot do us, Dutch.”

  My tears fell and his eyes filled and I hated that my words caused him pain but the truth was cutting and after a while, all those nicks to your heart and soul added up to some serious damage. Dutch and I were living proof.

  I leaned close and cupped his cheek and kissed his sadness.

  “I’m so sorry,” I continued, even though I could see him breaking into a million little pieces before my eyes and I wondered after all was said and done, would I be able to piece him back together, would he let me. “But this, me and you, it no longer works for me.”

  He sat up and his face was pure unadulterated despair and confusion and I wondered suddenly if I’d lost him before I even had a chance to save us. I grabbed his hand and he looked down on our tangled fingers and I watched him study us, the knotted mess we were, and I loved him harder than I had ever believed possible.

  I pulled him back down to me and even though he resisted he was Dutch and I was his Juma and he would do anything for me even if he thought anything would wind up the death of him. We were nose to nose, so close, and try as he might to place some distance between us and protect himself from my words his truths our realities, he could not because we were one, bound to the other forever ever.

  “I cannot do us,” I repeated and he closed his eyes and seemed to silently beg me to stop even though he would never dream of saying the words aloud. “Look at me, Dutch.” I waited for him to open his eyes so I could lose myself once more in their dangerous depths.

  “I am so tired, and I know you are, too,” and here he shook his head in disagreement, but I continued, “we are exhausted and that is why I can no longer do us. Because us is too much and not enough and I’m done with not enough.

  “These last few days I have not slept, I had no peace, I was nothing but anguish and fear because I had no idea where you were, what you were doing, if you were alive—and worse, I couldn’t contact you because I don’t know how.” I cried, my tears fast and fat. “We are so caught up in death and dying that we haven’t even taken a moment to ourselves, to revel in our magic, to wonder at our impossibility . . .”

  “ . . . to exchange cell phone numbers.”

  I buried my head in his chest and he wrapped me in his arms and the stress of not-knowing poured out of me.

  “I cannot do this separately any more.” I held his face in my hands. “I don’t need to be next to you twenty-four seven, but I need access to you, I need to be able to find you whenever I desire, no matter what. And I don’t know what it means to do this together, but whatever it is, please include me because I intend to include you.”

  The room fell into a hushed silence as my words mingled with our breath and lingered on our tongues and for the first time in a long time, we stilled and we stared and we reveled in the beautiful simplicity of us.

  “Please, Dutch.”

  I sought.

  “Always, Juma.”

  He swore.

  Then he kissed me and I kissed him and that soft promise of us remained with me through all of our forever evers.

  But first, the darkness.

  37: DUTCH

  I’ve heard it said death has a funny way of sneaking up on the least suspecting, felling the athlete on signing day, striking the golfer as he hits the hole-in-one, catching the cheater mid-ejaculation atop his lover.

  I know Death and trust me, her timing has nothing to do with being funny. It’s researched and purposeful and—more often than not—fueled by vengeance.

  Which was why I knew. Before a word uttered, a greeting exchanged, I fucking knew. I brought Juma home after finding her in the wreckage of whatever bloodbath had taken place in Frist’s building, and even though I didn’t expect a visit from Death, I still fucking knew.

  “Juma and Dutch.” She stood in the doorway. “How goddamned sweet. Get the fuck up.”

  I don’t know what made me do it, why I felt the need to piss her off, but after everything Juma and I had suffered at her hands, at the hands of The Gate, after all of it started to feel like one big clusterfuck, some part of me must have said to hell with all of the bullshit and tossed my fate into the hands of the universe.

  Also, I knew Juma needed a second, she wasn’t fully right yet.

  I was stalling.

  “Mistress, excuse me for asking, but what the fuck is your problem?” I asked as I slipped my arm from underneath Juma’s head and she shot me a stricken look.

  “You, Dutch,” Death replied and turned on her heel, no doubt expecting us to follow. “You are my problem.”

  Juma and I locked eyes and for the first time ever, she looked scared.

  “I can’t move yet,” she whispered, and reached for my hand. “Please, don’t go out there with her. She’s going to kill you.”

  “She won’t kill me, she likes fucking me too much.” I laughed low and tried to sound confident, tried to make her feel less panicked, but Juma wasn’t buying one second of my false bravado. She pulled me close and smiled, and nothing about her looked happy.

  “This is for real,” she said. “There is only one reason she is here: death. Mine and yours.”

  A crash and clatter in the kitchen halted our conversation and we both looked at each other like what the fuck, was she in there making coffee? As if we were all about to brunch together?

  “Sorry about that,” Death called out. “My bad.”

  My bad, I mouthed to Juma and she shrugged her shoulders and if our lives hadn’t felt fucked-up and bizarre and full of all kinds of twisted shit already, they sure as fuck did now. Death nosing around Juma’s kitchen at 7:47 in the morning was goddamned weird. I pushed away from the bed, but Juma grabbed me again and pulled me close.

  “You promised me, Dutch. You swore you would always be there when I revived,” she whispered in a voice full of desperation and fear. “If you go out there, you will not be able to keep that promise.”

  I kissed her because she needed to be kissed and because I wanted to swallow some of her panic.

  “I will always be there, Juma. Always,” I promised, “but if I don’t go and deal with her now, she’s going to come back in here and then you’re right, this room is small enough for her to kill me with ease. Out there, I have a fighting chance. I’m a Keeper of The Gate, and if that’s good for anything in this fucked-up cursed existence of mine, it’s that she cannot kill me without doing some serious damage to herself. It’s all part of the universal balance of things. So breathe easy, gorgeous, I got this.”

  But she wouldn’t let go.

  “I cannot help you,” she almost-cried, “and you cannot make me listen to your death. Please, Dutch.”

  “I don’t have all day,” Death barked from the kitchen, interrupting our frantic back-and-forth.

  I pulled away from Juma, this time determined to escape her tear-stained face and urgent grip.

  “You will not be listening to anyone’s death,” I insisted and left her side.

  Juma sat up on her elbows, her eyes wild with fury and panic and all kinds of fuckery and I wondered how often since meeting each other I had done this to her, made her feel all kinds of anger and helplessness.

  “Dutch!” she called out, but I didn’t turn around because I knew if I did, she would draw me back to her to kiss away her tears or hold her hand for an extra second or touch her in some way to ease her mind and I would get trapped in her magic, ensnared by her tortured beauty, and we would be finish
ed. Instead, I walked into the hall and closed the bedroom door behind me, hoping it was thick enough to shield Juma’s ears from whatever was about to go down.

  For two beats I watched Death from the other side of the room and wondered what she was up to, sitting down at Juma’s oversized, unused table, eating a meal fit for a queen.

  “Had no idea you ate food.” I approached the table, rather hypnotized by the spectacle.

  “I don’t.” She looked up at me and smiled. “But I can cook up a storm.”

  “You and I both know you did not cook any of this,” I replied.

  “Just as you and I both know I have no use for you and want to speak to Juma.”She spat the words, each striking me like a tiny knife. “Get her the fuck out here now.”

  “Ease up, Mistress,” I laughed. “She’s coming. She just jumped in the shower.”

  One lie was all I got to utter.

  There was no warning, no tease, and I suppose that made sense as she and I had moved past that sort of relationship the second I crossed paths with Juma. And although we’d put on quite a show that day in this same apartment—Don’t touch me, Juma—we knew even then we were full of shit. There was no love lost between us, there was just Juma.

  It was always just Juma.

  She was on me before I had a chance to contemplate her attack. She moved so quickly I didn’t even realize it happened until I found myself pinned to the wall and her knee jammed into my balls.

  “Fuck!” I moaned, and she kneed me harder.

  “I should have killed you after the whole Kajal episode,” she whispered as if she knew Juma might be listening and she, too, wanted to keep whatever was going to happen between us quiet. “But I got caught up in the gorgeous face and tortured soul and magic dick and like a goddamned fool, I let you live.”

  “You know as well as I, you cannot wantonly kill me.”

  She laughed and it sounded as if we shared a private joke but I knew it held all kinds of sinister, fucked-up shit.

  “I can kill you any goddamned time I want to kill you.” She leaned away from me and smiled as she blew on her blood-red fingernails. “It just might fuck up my new gel manicure, is all. Which would really suck, because I love this shade of red.”

  She held up her nails for me to see, then quickly slashed right left right left across my face and throat, shredding my skin as if her nails contained razors. I recalled Juma telling me a story about Death’s nails and how she used them to open veins on dying drug addicts or death row prisoners all the time, how she’d even used them on Juma here and there, and how painful they were, as if not only sharp but full of poison. I now had firsthand knowledge and could attest to the fact that those nails were anything but normal and were probably infused with the blackest of magic possible.

  “Don’t you even think of uttering one sound.” She held my chin in her viselike grip while her hand trailed down the front of my T-shirt, leaving an ever-growing trail of red in its wake. Then another and another until my chest was nothing but shredded meat and my blood pooled at our feet and fuck if I made a goddamned sound.

  Juma was right.

  Juma was always right.

  She was going to kill me, she didn’t give a fuck about any sort of balance between herself and The Gate, not when it came to me. She would deal with the brutal consequences of killing a Keeper—the eternal boiling of her insides—so long as that Keeper was named Dutch Mathew, the love of one Juma Landry’s life.

  “I had no idea you Keepers bled out so goddamned fast,” she observed casually as she looked down at the pool of my blood. “I always thought you’d have some special magic to keep you all in one piece, but evidently I was wrong.”

  Then, with a smile curving her full lips, she sliced along my waistline and cut so deep I wondered whether the hole would ever close. I leaned against the wall, weak from the blood loss and the effort of internalizing my agony.

  “God, you love her,” Death said as she studied me with a look resembling muted awe—she was impressed but also quite bored with the dramatics of whatever existed between Juma and me. “You haven’t made a single sound this whole time I’ve been killing you slowly.”

  “I do love her,” I agreed, my voice almost inaudible, my breath full of blood.

  Death studied me for a second, her eyes cold and clinical, her fingernails tapping out some sick beat on her thigh, and I wondered to myself how I’d ever fucked her. But such ponderings were silly and pointless—had I not fucked her, I would have wound up like this much sooner.

  “The problem is, Dutch, she belongs to me,” Death explained, and she sounded almost childish both in her voice and her logic. “Juma Landry is mine, and I hate sharing.”

  That moment should have been my last. Through the haze of my suffering, I could tell she was making her final charge, my black kiss was right there on the pillow of her lips. Until it wasn’t.

  “Mistress.”

  Before Death could turn around, Juma sliced into her back with a weapon I had never seen her wield, a weapon I had never before seen at all. It looked like a nasty circular saw blade, jagged and rough, fastened to the end of an elegant handle. It was small, demanding its wielder remain close, and Juma seemed to know exactly what she was doing with it as her arms flew across Death’s back, ripping her open, adding to the gruesome scene already being played out. And even though I knew Juma had a darkness to her, something deadly about her in its developing stages, the fact she was able to inflict such grievous harm to Death boggled what little was left of my functioning brain.

  How the fuck was Juma able to do all of that—the cutting and ripping and hacking—to Death?

  “Dutch!” Juma yelled at me. “Do not close your eyes. Stay focused on me, Dutch.”

  And so I did.

  Even though it was horrific.

  Because I needed to stay alive.

  Because she needed me to stay alive.

  “JUMA!” Death roared and turned and her back was open and exposed and she almost looked like me from the inside out even though I knew better and whatever that was inside her, all red and bloody, full of tissue and organs, was also full of motherfucking magic, so she would surely survive this perverse knife fight. Whether I would was a whole other story.

  My knees buckled and I fell to the floor and Death charged at Juma, knocking her off her feet and into the opposite wall, because when she should have been focused on what was quickly turning into a death match, Juma was watching me seemingly succumb to my own match with Death.

  “Dutch!” she yelled from the floor. “Every move, Dutch. You’ve gotta watch every move. Do not close your eyes.”

  I knew I did.

  Every goddamned move.

  No matter how sick and twisted and dark she was, no matter that all of her lovely light was hidden under a cape made up of blood and entrails and gore, no matter that she was more angel of death than giver of life.

  None of that mattered.

  I just needed to watch. Make an accounting. Bear witness to her dark magic. And stay alive—because both of us knew I would succumb the second I closed my eyes.

  “Every move, Dutch!” Juma shouted as she and Death struggled over that weapon and again I wondered why it was Death had even allowed shit to get this far? Since when did she fight her Poocha, and crazier still, when did she fucking lose? Because from my near-dead position against the wall, it looked like Death and I were headed to the same place pretty fucking soon.

  Perhaps all of this—the blood and guts and viscera, the screams and rage and horror—perhaps it was the universe letting everyone know that none of us mattered, none of us held too much control, and ultimately, we all came out losers in this game of lives.

  These philosophical questions crossed my dying brain as I watched Juma wrestle the weapon from Death and launch a most gruesome attack upon her Mistress as I sat in a pool of my own blood, stunned, unable to fathom the underlying animosity and ill will. She sheared off Death’s arms, one after the oth
er, fell sweeps of the jagged blade across the limbs at the shoulder and the elbow, and when Death lay on her back and laughed and cried, Juma returned with Simone.

  As if the blade weighed nothing, Juma ripped it across Death’s upper thigh, getting caught on bone or tissue or maybe just some goddamned magic, then came back again

  once

  twice

  thrice

  until she cut through completely and left Death a mere torso.

  And still, Death never really fought back. She couldn’t. But even when she could, she sure as fuck didn’t do any of the fancy shit she’d enjoyed doing to me against that wall. Not once did she lash out with those deadly nails of hers.

  “Dutch, goddammit! Pay attention,” Juma yelled at me as she stood over Death’s body and I realized my eyes had closed as I got lost in my thoughts. Juma was covered in blood, her freckles and brown hidden under streams and splatters of red and gore. She was both lovely and terrifying and I wondered how much of this she enjoyed and how much was survival instinct, an understanding that once she started this shit show, she couldn’t stop.

  These thoughts bounced around my brain as I felt someone grasp my chin and give me a shake and had the rational side of my brain still been functioning, I would have known it was Juma because for real, she was the only one standing. But I was pretty fucking past any sort of rational function; brain synapses and waves had stopped moving at normal speed a while back. This version of myself was here by sheer force of will only.

  And that shake of my chin.

  “Dutch!” Juma squatted in front of me, looking like my personal angel of death, and I smiled, or I think I did. The act of smiling played somewhere in my consciousness, I just don’t know whether a smile actually curved my lips. “Open your fucking eyes, do not die on me.”

  I nodded, my eyes open though just slightly focused. Regardless, Juma seemed satisfied with my effort and returned to Death’s side, looming over her Mistress with vengeance in her eyes and I wondered what more she could possibly do to the already mutilated body lying on the floor.