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Harper is very small. Not that Yasmin is tall, she’s average, but she lives in heels. Maybe her artificial height is why she is always noting Harper’s natural diminutiveness. Being short doesn't seem to bother Harper, in fact, she seems unaware of it. She looks up at people with such authority it’s like she’s looking down.
Yasmin has spent a lot of time thinking about her body, and what it means, and by extension other people’s bodies and what they mean. Your body signals something to other people. Sure that may be vain, but it’s also highly practical, a means of understanding and negotiating your place in the world. Maybe Harper’s petite adorableness is a form of predator camouflage, like a leopard’s spots.
Yasmin doesn’t have camouflage, she has armor. She isn't a predator, she’s prey. How very on the nose.
Yasmin’s armor is failing her. Her looks, her careful grooming, her artfully coordinated wardrobe, her ostensible charm, the seven fucking languages she speaks, all that amounts to a shit load of nothing. And her family's money and name would never protect her again.
“Are you okay?” Harper asks, but Yasmin doesn’t really hear her. She’s once again lost in a haze of anger. She’d been reaming out Rob for giving her number to Henry Muck, which isn’t okay, but she can feel herself being more of a cunt than she needs to be, and she can’t stop.
Then Harper grasps her head gently and forces Yasmin to meet her eyes.
“The press are animals,” she says voice soft, firm, “Ignore them.”
Harper would handle the paparazzi better than Yasmin is. Harper wouldn’t get angry and lash out. She’d just walk coolly past, eyes disguised by sunglasses, not speaking, not even glancing their way.
“You move ahead right?” Harper says.
Yasmin nods, even though just the phrase exhausts her, even though that day flashes through her mind in a dull horrifying pulse—her father’s hands on her wrist, her father’s dick, her father drifting away—because Harper knows what she’s dealing with, and Harper believes Yas can move ahead. Maybe she’s right. She usually is.
Harper goes upstairs to fuck a guy who’s name isn’t worth remembering. Yasmin goes to handhold Henry Muck, whose call is not innocent, no matter what Rob says.
In a strange turn of events, strange turns now being standard in Yasmin’s life, she ends up spending the night doing blow with Eric. That is until he tells her he wants to fuck her friend so can she get lost, please? And Yas does get lost, relieved that Eric wants Denise and not her.
Did Eric and Harper ever fuck? Yasmin has never asked Harper. She could’ve asked Eric, they were high, and he probably would’ve answered. But they’d just been talking about Yasmin’s father, which made her think of the way Eric treated Harper like his daughter, so to ask if the two of them had ever fucked would’ve seemed perverse. Amazing that Yasmin could perform such mental gymnastics while high. Her defenses around the subject of fathers and daughters never lower it seems.
Yasmin hopes Eric never fucked Harper. She hopes he never even tried. She hopes Harper never had to be faced with that situation.
Yas doesn’t get home that night. It doesn’t matter, she hasn’t been sleeping much anyway. She sleeps better when she gets in with Harper or Rob, but Venetia has been in Rob’s bed lately, and what’s his name has been in Harper’s.
The last time she’d truly slept well was at Nikki Beach. Harper had slept with Yasmin the few days they were there. Yasmin hadn’t had to ask. Harper hadn’t even bothered to check into her own room.
Only in hindsight could Yasmin appreciate how perfectly Harper had orchestrated everything. Their entire party was thoroughly fooled. After they arrived she made Yasmin go down to the restaurant for dinner and pretend all was well. She’d responded to a remark about Charles’s absence with mild curiosity and nudged Yasmin to do the same. Then Harper insisted they go dancing, leading Yasmin onto the dance floor, hands clasped as they moved to the pulsating beat. And at the precise moment Yasmin felt she couldn’t take it anymore, that she needed to run and be as far away from people as she could possibly be, Harper led them out of the club and to their room.
“I’ll shower first,” Harper said. So Yasmin sat on the bed and waited for Harper to finish showering.
“Your turn,” Harper said. So Yasmin went in the bathroom and showered, and when she came out, Harper was sprawled out on her side of the bed, tiny amid the snowdrifts of white sheets, flicking idly through the channels.
Yasmin crawled into bed. They watched an action movie from the middle to the end, Yasmin couldn’t remember which one. When it was over, Harper turned the TV off and rolled over to face Yasmin.
“I’m fucking exhausted,” she’d said, reaching out with one hand, patting the bed, “The sun always zaps my energy. That’s why I like London.”
Harper’s hand landed on top of Yasmin’s, and Harper folded Yasmin’s hand in hers. Then she yawned, snuggled down into her pillow, and closed her eyes like it was just another night. Like everything was fine.
“I can’t believe I slept so well,” Yasmin said to Harper the next morning over breakfast, “That’s just further confirmation I’m a horrible person.”
Harper had waved her hand dismissively. “It was an adrenaline crash. And I already told you, you did nothing wrong.”
“But still,” Yasmin said, poking at her fruit with a knife, “I should’ve at least had a nightmare or something.”
“You shouldn’t suffer anymore over that man,” Harper said definitively.
She’d looked so calm, sitting there on the sun-soaked deck of the resort, sunglasses perched on her nose, wrap thrown carelessly over her swimsuit. She didn't look at all out of place. She never had. Yasmin hates that she notices things like that, but her eye was trained to notice class. And though Harper had grown up poor, and was covered in tattoos, and not overly concerned with wearing the right clothes, she fit. She didn’t blend, she was too much of an individual for that, but neither did she stick out. She had that all too crucial sense of her own superiority. The only difference was that in Harper’s case, she deserved to feel superior. She usually was.
“How are you so calm?” Yasmin asked, laughing a little, “Have you done this before?”
Harper smiled, “I plead the fifth.”
Yasmin laughed again, shaking her head.
“No, but seriously, I can freak out with the best of them,” Harper said, picking up her drink, “But there’s nothing to freak out about.”
Harper never panicked for a moment the whole trip, not even when the crew finally realized Charles was missing. She’d hovered over Yas’s shoulder, flawlessly playing the concerned friend.
Yasmin watched Harper lie for her, watched her trick a whole boat full of people into believing that Yas was nothing more than a concerned daughter, and felt whatever ties there were between them loop around her heart again and again, tightening into something she could feel as a physical thing in her chest. It wasn’t painful.
Harper told her that she had the right to be relieved her father was dead, that Yas didn’t have to feel guilty.
But what if Yasmin told Harper she had never felt more cared for than when Harper had kneeled at her feet and said we’re going to take care of it, okay? Never felt more protected than when Harper put her in the shower and held her face. You need to come back to me now.
Would Harper think that was worth feeling guilty over? Wasn’t it horrible that for a few minutes after she’d told Harper she’d killed her father, all Yasmin felt was an alien and radiating warmth that might have been love? A thing she’d never felt for the father she’d just let die. Would Harper think it was perverse? Pathetic? Sad?
Sometimes, when they’re out partying, Harper sways over to Yasmin, looks up, and smiles. An evil little grin, like they’re getting away with something just by being together. She seems especially small then, a mischievous fey creature in the flickering club lights, sharp-toothed and bright-eyed.
Maybe she isn’t a leopard, maybe she’s a trickster fairy, only appearing tiny and pretty to better fool mortals. But she doesn’t fool Yasmin. Yasmin she protects.
If Yas said any of this to Harper she’d look at her like she was a lovely idiot, tell her she should’ve taken more maths classes and less mythology. But that’s only because she’s unaware of how strange and singular she seems to people, just like she’s unaware she’s small.