“Kindalana? Don’t tell me you didn’t want to fuck her. Everyone goes for important Oriati women. They’re so unattainable.”

A tremble of passion across his broad face. It took a moment for him to master himself. “You seem quite attainable,” he said. His eyes had gone casually dead, neither eager nor fearful, simply resigned. Aminata realized, with a soiled thrill, that he must be a whore of some kind. He’d said he was a womanizer, yes. Was he ashamed? Was he debased that she’d recognized him as wanton? She liked that a little. Men had strange reasons to proposition her, racialized and fraught. Whores did it for sex and money, which were much safer.

She undid two buttons on her jacket and lingered on the third. “Yes or no?”

He took several measured breaths. His eyes liked the shadows beneath her unbuttoned coat, the strict womanly confinement peeling away. But he was still thinking too much: “You’re an officer. You can’t marry. You can’t touch the men under your command. So you proposition strangers. I know how that is. You need an outlet.”

“King’s balls, man, I don’t care. Yes or no?”

“Well…” He quibbled a moment. “Do you have a cap?”

Of course she had a cap.

She left her jacket on, but unbuttoned. He shrugged out of his, and the undershirt, naked to the waist, spectacular in the evening chill. She could trace every cell of his abdomen, the hard curve of his pectorals, the thrilling breadth of his shoulders. They didn’t kiss but very assuredly went about provoking each other. She unbuttoned him, tested his heft and hardness, and tied the cap on. To keep him occupied through this fairly technical process she took his wrist and showed him, efficiently, how she liked to be touched, with the flesh of the hood as a buffer. He knew. His broad sure-fingered hands had the violent thrilling precision of surgery. She leaned back against the wall and wrapped her legs around his waist, daring him to hold her up, and he was not a disappointment: he pressed her against the alley wall and came into her and they fucked standing there with Aminata’s open mouth pressed against the cabled curve of his shoulder and throat.

“Too gentle,” she whispered, when the first thrill had passed.

“I don’t want to hurt you—”

“Pretend I’m Kindalana,” she teased, which made him tremble all over, and sent him into a frenzy whose emotional components Aminata had neither the interest nor the concentration to analyze. For a long exultant time she arched against him and savored his desperation. He must be twenty years older, and she’d had him on their first meeting, a man of good status and carnal delight. What a catch. She might have a new story to impress sailors on the first night drinking.