### In the Village

The hut smelled like old wood and cold soup.

Jacob pushed the door open with his shoulder — the familiar resistance of the warped frame, the familiar creak of the hinge, the familiar smell of his grandmother’s cooking that was usually already warm by the time he returned from wherever he had been.

The soup was cold.

That was the first thing.

The second thing was the women.

Five of them.

Standing, sitting, moving around the interior of the hut with the comfortable ease of people who have been in a space long enough to stop navigating it carefully — using the bowls, the firewood, the water basin, the small table by the window — all of them in states of dress that the word ’dress’ was being generous about.

Torn fabric. Makeshift arrangements of cloth that had once been clothing and had since been renegotiated into something that covered the necessary surfaces and committed to nothing beyond that. Hair still damp. Skin still carrying the particular flush of people who had been through something physical recently and had not yet fully returned from it.

All of them beautiful.

The kind of beautiful that stops a nineteen-year-old man in a doorway with his hand still on the frame and his mouth doing something he has not authorized.

His heart thumped.

Not metaphorically.

He felt it.

He felt it the way you feel a bell inside your chest when something unexpected has just rung it without permission, the single, enormous, completely involuntary ’thump’ of a young man’s heart encountering five women in his grandmother’s hut at night.

He stood in the doorway.

They looked at him.

All five of them. The looks varied by the woman producing them — Nara’s was mild, the assessment of someone categorizing a new piece of information and filing it. Celia’s carried a trace of something that might have been amusement. Gia’s was neutral. Fatima’s was politely disinterested.

Marla’s was a click of tongue.

The sound of it — sharp, deliberate, the clicking dismissal of a woman who has looked at something and found it insufficient — arrived in the room before any words did.

Jacob closed his mouth.

He opened it again.

"Have you— " His voice came out wrong. He cleared his throat. He tried again. "Have any of you seen my grandmother?"

He was looking at Celia when he said this.

Then at Nara.

Then, briefly and immediately corrected, at the neckline of Gia’s makeshift wrap.

Then at the floor.

Marla looked at him.

She looked at him the way a surgeon looks at a patient — clinically, completely, without personal investment in the result. She looked at his face. She looked at his neck. She looked at the angle of his shoulders and the position of his hands and the particular posture of a young man standing in a doorway trying to look at five women without looking at five women.

Her eyes tracked downward.

She stopped.

Her jaw tightened.

She looked at the wall.

The centipede feeling moved through her — the full-body recoil of a woman who has spent her entire life finding men physically repellent discovering that the young man in the doorway is visibly, undeniably, nineteen-years-old-and-cannot-help-it ’reacting’ to the five women in the room.

Her skin crawled.

Her pussy clenched — involuntary, the reflex of a woman whose body had been thoroughly recalibrated in the last several hours by something that was not this young man and was not remotely comparable to this young man and the comparison was doing things to her composure.

She breathed through her nose.

She said: "She went to the waterfall."

Her voice came out flat and controlled. The voice of a woman using professionalism as a firewall.

Jacob’s head came up.

"The waterfall? At night?"

"She told me," Marla continued, each word precise, "to send you there when you came. Young master." The title landed with the particular weight of a word being used as a tool rather than a courtesy. "She wanted to give you a gift. She said she has someone to introduce you to."

Jacob blinked.

He ruffled his hair.

The motion was the motion of a boy who has just been given information he is not sure how to hold — his fingers pressing against his scalp, his face doing the arithmetic of ’grandmother’ plus ’waterfall’ plus ’night’ plus ’gift’ and not arriving at an answer that made sense.

"Really," he said.

His eyes drifted.

To Celia’s collarbone.

Celia coughed.

He looked at the ceiling.

He thought, with the involuntary, irreversible, completely automatic memory-association of the body, about the last time he had looked at a woman’s collarbone in front of his grandmother and what had followed. His hand moved to the back of his neck.

"I see," he said, to the ceiling.

He stretched.

Both arms above his head, his back popping, the gesture of a young man buying time while his nervous system finished doing what nervous systems do when five beautiful women are in the room.

"Though," he said, to the air approximately two feet above everyone’s head, "it is late. And dark. I do not know where she has— would any of you— I mean, if it is not too much trouble—"

He looked at them.

They looked at him.

The five looks arriving with slightly different flavors but converging on the same basic conclusion, which was: ’this boy.’

Nara looked at Celia.

Celia looked at Gia.

Gia looked at Fatima.

Fatima looked at Marla.

Marla looked at Jacob with the expression of a woman who has made a decision and is implementing it with the efficiency of a person who has been making efficient decisions her entire life.

"We will accompany you," she said.

Jacob blinked.

"You will?"

"Eat something first," Nara said. Her voice was warmer than Marla’s — the particular warmth of a woman who has spent the evening being comprehensively dismantled and has come out the other side in a mood that is more generous than her baseline. "There is food."

There was food.

Jacob ate.

He ate with his elbows on the table and his eyes on his bowl because keeping his eyes on his bowl was the safest available option and he had learned this lesson once already today and intended to apply it.

The women moved around him.

The hut was full of them — their sounds, their presence, the warmth of five bodies in a small space, the occasional brush of fabric or the soft sound of someone moving past someone else.

Marla stood against the far wall with her arms crossed.

She watched him eat.

She watched him eat with the particular attention of a woman cataloguing evidence — the way he kept his eyes down, the occasional failure of the keeping-eyes-down, the recovery after the failure, the set of his jaw when he recovered.

’He is young,’ she thought.

’He is nothing like the master,’ she thought.

’Why is he in this hut,’ she thought.

She looked at his hands.

He had his grandmother’s hands. The same wide knuckles. The same density. Dragon slayer hands, scaled down by a generation, still in the process of becoming what they would be.

She looked at the wall.

The food was finished.

Jacob pushed back from the table and stood up and stretched again — the full-body stretch of a young man done eating, his arms out, his back straightening.

"Right," he said. "Waterfall."

He looked at the door.

He looked at the women.

He held the door.

"Ladies first," he said.

Marla’s eye twitched.

’This stupid idiot...’