CHAPTER THREE
MOST HONORABLE CITIZEN
Tanya Sato burst the cap of a champagne bottle so foam exploded, slipped down its neck, and drooled over her fingers. The drink slicked her hands, down her wrists, and drip-drip-dripped to the dance floor. She squealed with joy as she shook the bottle up and down. Splashes, sparkling alcohol, and foam sprayed all about her in spurts that flecked her face and hair and front.
A dozen girls and boyfriends surrounded her who roared in unison. They bounced up and down to the bass of an electric song. Chromatic disco lights lit their forms with alternating colors. All the colors streamed from a disco ball that dangled from the ceiling.
It started with blue and shifted to green. Green faded into red. Red brightened with yellow. The cycle repeated when yellow shifted to blue. Spots of white laced back and forth like spirits who frolicked across the floor, walls, and ceiling. Theater lights also angled beams that tilted up and down, panned side to side, in constant motion.
Vivid bass thudded from music speakers into the air with volumes of unseen energy that traveled through their ears, into their bloodstreams, and made goosebumps on their skin.
They danced to it with their hands in the air, sweat on their skin, and pulsing ecstasy. Their outfits, whether it was a sister's party gown and jewelry or a boyfriend's unbuttoned shirt and necktie, were wet with a mixture of their bodies. They packed together tight enough to grind hips against hips, rears against groins, backs against chests. Hairdos had come undone down their necks and shoulders.
Tanya dunked her bottle over herself. It streamed down her umber-brown hair, seeped into her scalp, and drooled over her face. She whipped her hair sending flecks this way and that. Champagne slipped down her cheeks and she tasted its sparkles as it went past her mouth.
She screamed into her personal paradise at top volume.
She spent this way forever as drink flushed through her, on her, all around her from an endless fountain.
Her outfit glued to her finer curves with alcohol stains that absorbed deep. The dress bunched in tight places: her sides, over her cleavage, and around her thighs. It clamped in places that left little to the imagination, where her underwear showed its outlines around her breasts and her rear end. She had removed her heels long ago.
The thumping floor slicked with spills through which she pranced, wetting her toes and heels. Her pearl necklace and beaded earrings glinted at the right angles with all the four colors.
Ronda Jiggy stood in her way. "Where were you?" She had to shout through the din to be heard. Her eyebrows slanted and her nostrils flared.
Tanya slipped her arm behind Ronda. Their sides pressed flat together. "Hey, look at that!" She took the Iroh Award and showed it to the closest boyfriend half a foot taller than her. "I don't have six of those lying around at home." She plopped a kiss on it and handed it away. "Take that, daddy."
"I waited for you," said Ronda in a softer tone.
"And you're here, now. Let's go." She smacked Ronda's closest ass cheek, not that anybody heard in the tumult. Her tight glute had just enough thicc fat to squish.
"I'm not dancing," said Ronda. She adjusted her shoulders, twisted out of Tanya's embrace, and faced her front to front.
Tanya caught her hands in hers. "Come on."
"I'm not."
She tugged so their fronts tightened together, breast to breast, hip to hip, thighs to thighs. Only their clothes stopped them from being any closer. She whined. "Come on!"
"I'm not doing it. I'm disappointed in you."
Tanya blew a raspberry against Ronda's mouth.
A chorus of raspberries and joyful cackles erupted.
"Take your mind off it. Forget about it. One-two stomp. Cha cha, real smooth."
Ronda jerked back into someone's awaiting grasp, catching her by her upper arms to hold her steady.
Tanya pedaled her hands round and round, dance-stepped, swayed her hips, cooed through her puckered lips.
"You're a hoe, Tanya. Seriously." Ronda snatched her friend's wrist and led her away. She parted the dancers midway, swatting them to the left and right to shoo from the path she made.
Tanya blew kisses behind her to one boyfriend's surfboard abs, one of the girls' rounded love handles, to the new trophy boy, with mwah! After mwah! After mwah!
They strode together out of the dance hall and away, around a couple corners and across carpet floors, down marble stairs and beneath vanilla-white lights. The glow was translucent and soft. The air itself seemed to distill them to blurry orbs, or perhaps that was Tanya's drunken filter. They passed smells of shopping mall cologne mixed with brass polish.
The whole way, they talked, but she remembered nothing that was said. She laughed from the pit of her bellows. She shouted loud enough to turn heads in her wake. She remembered later how the words made her feel no matter what they meant.
They united in a glass-and-gold lobby over marble floors with Mako, plus a gathering who belonged to tonight's event. They formed a circle to barricade the three people. The entourage struggled against a sudden crowd.
News reporters spied them between the guards and threw questions, until they were shuffled out of view for the next wave.
Celebrities waved, cat-called, and wolf-whistled from disparate sections of the lobby.
Their humor roused Tanya's wild tiger, if only Ronda let her off the chain. Her insides spiked out of her control. Her hunger ached in a few key places so fiercely, her body made goosebumps and shivered. Her chi starved. She needed something tonight.
They passed through a set of doors that exited the building's front. The outside world breathed of a steel jungle, the all-around odor of cars running empty on gasoline and drinks tickling the air with spicy alcohol. Vehicles roved pavement in a constant sound from distant streets. Unseen railways sent busses and subways speeding along iron tracks.
Light beams extended skyward at dozens of different angles, because everybody had the brightest energy and nobody could outdo one another. The factions of the city fought for the attention of the stars. They fought so hard and so brightly, they muted the night sky of any stars to speak of, just a waxing moon nearly full.
Ronda pulled Tanya and one of the guards from their entourage to the street-side where a Future Industries vehicle awaited them. The luxury sports car gleamed with polish under the closest lamp-posts. Its headlights streamed out cones of light onto the pavement, the engine was running, and the guard opened the passenger-side door for Tanya to get in.
"I'm seeing you tomorrow, yeah?" Ronda waved them good-bye before she led the rest like groupies who trailed after a pop band. "Don't be late!"
Before she got in the car, a man's voice called her by the name Sato. He said, "I'm doing an article for Republic City. I just want to ask a few questions." He ended it with an uncertain jilt in his tone.
The guard muttered close by Tanya's ear, "He's big," which persuaded her to face the reporter.
He wore black and white over his muscled chest and arms, a tuxedo that swelled to bursting with stretch marks over his bod. The tux's sleeves ended midway down his upper arms, such that his biceps and well-developed arms showed bare to the world. Hair covered his forearms. A tattoo done in tribal scar style peeked out in cool detail. Grizzly hair covered his chin, jaw, and upper lip that matched his ebon hair.
He smirked. He was cooler than smiles. He presented a notepad with ink pen and closed the distance between them with some sort of panache in his strut.
"What do you think of the media's nickname for you, La Winci of our time?" The cleft in his chin, his dimples, and the muscle in his bearing belied the keen glint suddenly filling his stare. He toned the question as unbelievable as it made her feel.
"Ridiculous. I don't paint."
"What about your other nickname – the Avatar of Death?"
"That one's not bad."
"Some members of the media are concerned your Industry's sales to all four nations escalates jealousy and a desire to use their deadly tools for war – placing you in a position to profit no matter who goes into battle."
"My Mom developed a philosophy in her older years. Peace means having a bigger dick than the other guy. I promise you, the moment our nations let go their weapons and put their pants on, I will spend the rest of my days designing dildos and condoms and building fertility clinics."
"You rehearse that much?"
"Every night in front of the mirror before bed-time. I'd like to show you first-hand with my collection of sex protection."
"Mrs. Sato and Hiroshi before her struggled for years to advance mankind with on-hand technology. It's only after she engaged with Avatar Korra did she revolutionize the weapons department. Some have accused her, and now you, of war profiteering."
"Tell me, do you also plan to report on Future Industries' new assembly lines that reduced factory casualties by two-hundred percent? Submarines that can study aquatic life in Water Tribe oceans? Earth Kingdom pesticides that protect harvests from roach-rocs? All of those inventions, Future Industries, daddy."
"You ever lose sleep over the millions of people your weapons might kill one day?"
"Come to my place." She fingered the loop of his necktie and tugged him closer. They leveled each other nose to nose, feeling breath after breath and heat that steamed between them. Her sparks flew. Inner bolts rattled. Her unseen screws stripped in their holes. "I'll show you how much sleep I lose." She showed clenched teeth through her grin.
She fixed him in place with a stare that drove home her point, a stare that pierced through his eyes and plunged into the deepest place where his id dwelled. She awoke it on the spot with her own. Their hypnotism transformed from interrogation into a contest of urges. He mouthed one noise of astonishment.
Before they knew it, time and a car drive and a struggle of arms brought them to Tanya's home with one tell-tale thwump on her guest bed.
