She sat on a barstool, promised herself it wouldn’t be her perch for the night, and asked Fulki for a Sex on the Beach, “And double the Peach Schnapps.”

“What happened to that top you left with last night?” Fulki asked, grabbing a vodka bottle by the neck. “Moved on already, huh? You’re a devil, Yaya.”

“So says my mother,” Yaya said.

“Try not to break too many hearts tonight, okay? You’re a lot to clean up after.”

Yaya nodded to Fulki and sipped her drink. Sitting at the bar soaked her in a familiar ocean. Women who eyed her, women she eyed, their flirtation a dance of glances and doubt. Such looks had landed her naked in Doc’s apartment in the first place.

Someone slowed in passing and then turned to orbit Yaya. “You smell sweet,”

they said, their fluffy hair bobbing when they spoke. “What perfume you wearing?”

“That’s just me,” Yaya said, grinning. Her jaw was sticking out, she could feel it, and hoped Fluffy Hair liked it as much as she did. “I’m not wearing anything though. Sometimes I smell like peanut butter.”

Fluffy Hair smirked. “Sounds like a bad evolutionary trait.”

“Yeah, if the world goes to shit, I’ll definitely be eaten by starving dogs.”

Yaya waited for Fluffy Hair to finish giggling. “But who’d let that happen?”

“Exes of mine say that’s the natural state of things. Dog-eat-dog world.”

Fluffy Hair stared with brilliant brown eyes. They had russet skin and a gigantic smile that Yaya would’ve loved to kiss.

“Multiple, huh?” she asked. “Sounds like a committee.”

Fluffy Hair shrugged hard, their shoulders weighed by bad experience.

“You know what they say. Date three Ayn Rand fanboys and you’ve dated them all.”

Yaya chuckled, wondering if any of them might be named Bryant Peters, and then an uncomfortable twitch hit her gut. Skin crackled, and hair stood on end, both painful and electric. She’d been hornier on her period before, but never this vast chasm opening inside herself, her abdomen giving way to a valley of restless lightning. Its novelty made no sense. The drink might have been getting to her; she’d doubled the Schnapps after all.

She wondered if she’d felt this unhinged when Doc took her home last night. They had used protection concerning Doc’s fingers and Yaya’s tongue, but all safety was fallible. Yaya had been too perturbed with her morning discovery to ask about contagion, be it some unknown tooth herpes or otherwise.

Worse, she was a special case. The double-zero virus had made a lot of special cases, thousands of chimeras. Maybe her fucked-up DNA, mixed with the wrong bacteria, could sprout teeth within hours, an unexpected down-there problem. She wished she hadn’t gotten that damned reminder call. ABP was a soul-sucking void, and she had hoped a drink might fill it for a few hours.

Teeth, teeth, teeth overpowered the bar’s music.

~

Sex wasn’t worth exposing Fluffy Hair or anyone else to Yaya’s problem.

When her front door creaked open sometime after ten, stairwell smelling of cleaning product, someone shouting in Urdu upstairs, Yaya was alone.