by Molly White
“Are you sure about this?” Brendan asked.
Her expression turned to one of dismay. “Wait, have you done this before?”
“A few times,” he insisted. “But it has been a while.”
“I’m sure.”
“All right, well, we’re going to use these, no arguments.” He leaned over her, giving her the opportunity to nibble at his collarbone, down his chest, to his stomach. He reached into the drawer and pulled out a packet of condoms. The moment her eyes landed on the little foil squares, her expression melted, and he was overtaken with images from her mind. She was so grateful that he wasn’t going to make her argue for protection. She’d heard so many stories about that sort of thing.
He carefully pumped his fingers into her, rubbing his thumb where he hoped it might feel best. Her hips arched off of the bed, and he realized he’d found the right spot. He was picking up on her feelings again. He didn’t know how, but he wanted to wallow in it.
He peppered her chest with kisses, teasing at the pink peaks of her nipples, while he rolled on the rubber. Through her eyes, he saw himself naked, which he honestly could live without, but from her perspective, it wasn’t so bad. She thought maybe she would be frightened when this finally happened, but he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. He couldn’t. He felt her sinking into the sensation of trusting someone enough to touch them. All she felt was peace and his quiet affection. He could feel her joy and the warm wetness against his fingers as she fluttered around him.
He could feel her fascination at the newness of being pressed against another body, skin to skin, all the way down to her ankles wrapped around his calves. He felt the sheer indulgence of running her fingertips along his smooth skin, feeling his rough hands touching her in return. To her, he tasted of whiskey and warm vanilla. He didn’t know how that was possible—he’d indulged in neither today—but he was glad that’s how she felt.
She traced the curve of his jaw with her lips before biting down gently on his chin as he worked his fingers. She tightened around him, almost to the point of pain, her breathing wild and damp against his neck. He positioned himself between her legs, asking, “You sure?”
She nodded frantically and he pushed forward, so slow that he thought he might lose his mind. She was so warm and so very tight that he was seeing white spots. Surely, that wasn’t normal. He forced breath into his lungs, in and out, over and over, so he didn’t bloody embarrass himself like a schoolboy. She clung to him as he waited for her to adjust.
After a moment that felt like purgatory, she whispered in his ear to please move. He kissed her forehead and rolled his hips. She moaned, her hips stuttering, as she struggled to find the right rhythm. Meanwhile, he was so afraid of moving too quickly or too forcefully, he worried he wasn’t a very exciting first time.
Oh, all saints, he was her first. What if he was ruining this for her? What if she regretted this in the morning? What if she never wanted to see him again?
Suddenly, she found the right rhythm, rolling her hips like the sea tide and damn near making his eyes cross. She gasped, putting her hand on his forehead and nearly flooding his brain. The first time he touched her hand without making her see anything. The way she felt when she woke up in a hospital bed and knew that he’d watched over her as she slept. The first time he kissed her and the thrill she’d felt at the possibility of loving someone.
He moaned against her hand, trailing his lips against the skin of her wrist. “How are you doing that?”
“That’s how I feel about you,” she murmured against his lips, her hips quickening.
He could feel it coming, the threat of release building at the base of his spine. He picked up his pace, circling his thumb between her thighs. She showed him more, every sweet thought she’d ever had about him. How much she’d wanted him, walking through his door tonight with every intention of jumping him, the many filthy things she planned to do with him once she grasped sex a little better. And the moment she showed him the position she’d seen when she clicked on the wrong website, he lost the fight and spilled into her. She shrieked, wrapping her arms around his neck as she fell over the edge with him.
He collapsed on top of her, rolling to his side so he wouldn’t crush her. They simply lay there, breathing heavily, until she tried to raise her head and the dried sweat made her skin stick to his. She burst out laughing as he gently pulled his shoulder away from her face.
“Graceful as always,” she sighed.
He insisted, “There’s a certain charm to sex sweat.”
“Ew. I hope you saw what I wanted you to see. I’ve never really tried that. Bonita just showed me how to do it,” Cordelia said.
“You’ve actually done that before, when Messina was threatening you,” he told her. “You grabbed my hand and I got the full Cordelia visual experience. Those images weren’t at all as friendly as they are for me. I particularly enjoyed the one where you bashed Messina’s face against his cursed table.”
“That’s strange,” she murmured.
“I’m sorry about staring at you in the hospital. That still feels a little weird,” Brendan said.
“I’m willing to overlook it,” she told him.
He rolled out of bed and disposed of the rubber. “I’ll be right back.”
After conscientiously washing his hands, he reheated the pasta and bread and brought two bowls back to the bed. She was propped up against his pillows, her hair all tumbled down her shoulders, and he wondered how he might talk her into staying that way for a considerable amount of time.
She grinned at him, making grabby hands at the pasta. “This smells great, thank you. And don’t think I didn’t notice that the sauce is homemade.”
Struck by a bit of romantic inspiration, he set his own bowl on the nightstand and said, “Hold on. I’ll be right back.”
He went back to his kitchen, where he’d tucked away a present for her and padded back into the bedroom. “I have a surprise for you.”
From behind his back, he presented her with a tiny Christmas tree. He clicked a button on the base and tiny LED lights on the branches lit up in patterns of green and red. She eyed the tree suspiciously.
“I don’t know what you have planned for that, but I feel the need to remind you that I am a beginner. That looks like an advanced technique,” Cordelia said.
He cackled, placing the tree on the nightstand and joining her under the covers with his pasta. “No, I’m not some sort of tree fetishist. I thought you might like it for your trailer. The grocer is in full Christmas mania. Decorations and special biscuits and gift wrap. It’s only November.”
“Americans have a tendency to plow right through holidays,” she told him. “We go right from Fourth of July decorations at the stores to Halloween. It’s like we think we can make that special holiday energy last longer, but it sort of makes everything feel worn out and sad.”
He asked, “Did you spend Christmases on the road with your ma?”
“No, thank goodness. Bernadette was never one for holidays,” she said, around a bite of pasta. “After I turned ten, I pretty much spent the last weeks of December in a scramble to put something together for the both of us. Throwing deeply discounted turkey in the oven or a scraggly tree covered in garage sale string lights, like it was some sort of Christmas miracle. She’d come to resent it too much to keep it up, and by the time I was eighteen, the house was dark and turkey-free…I swear, I don’t lay these conversational traps on purpose.”
“I think this one is on me,” he said. “But I’m glad you tell me about stuff like this. Probably safer than uploading the information straight into my brain.”
“You liked it,” she insisted.
“I did, just maybe limit it to sexy times.”
She scooped pasta into her mouth, leaning against his shoulder. “Thank you for making me dinner and taking my virginity.”
“For the record, I didn’t plan to seduce you with homemade pasta sauce,” Brendan said.
“
Well, it would have happened either way, because this stuff is freaking delicious. Any chance that you bake, too?” Cordelia asked.
He pursed his lips. “Not well, but if you’re willing to do that thing you saw on the website, I will go full Great British Baking Show for you.”
She laughed. “I like cookies, but not brownies. Have fun with that.”
“If we’re still here at Christmas, I will make you all the biscuits you want,” he promised. “I’ll make you a bloody castle made of gingerbread.”
“I think I would like it if we were still here at Christmas. I’d have people to spend it with. I haven’t had that in a long time,” Cordelia said.
“I think I would, too. So…you and Lancaster?”
She shook her head. “Yeah, we’re not going to talk about that now.”
“All right then,” Brendan said.
12
Cordelia
Before coming to the bayou, Cordelia had reached a certain level of comfort and complacency in her everyday life. She was not used to glancing over her shoulder every few steps, trying to see around corners. Because well, she hadn’t left her house that much in about ten years.
She told herself that maybe she should stop walking places, but the grocery store was just a few blocks away. And she wanted to bring something to the baby shower favor-building thing. She felt so guilty, with everybody bringing food to her house all the time and her never making a return gesture. It was uncomfortably close to her mother’s manner of friendship.
Cordelia wasn’t entirely comfortable cooking for people who were obviously very good at it, but she could pick out some nice cheeses and fancy crackers and wine. That was the sort of thing people ate at a baby shower favor-building party, right? Not that she’d ever been to a baby shower favor-building party.
Now that she’d thought about it, she’d never been to a baby shower.
Anyway, now that she was spending her days scanning the sidewalks for her mother, she’d come to recognize just how many people she’d come to know in this town, and how much she liked them. She had Zed and Clarissa. She had Jillian and Dani and Sonja. She had Bonita. And she was pretty sure Siobhan was cutting her bigger slices of pie than was necessary.
She still hadn’t convinced Bonita and Walt to date each other, but she couldn’t have everything.
And what about Brendan?
She stumbled a bit at the thought of Brendan and the things they’d done together. She’d thought she’d die without knowing that kind of pleasure, and she’d made her peace with it. But knowing what she’d been missing all of these years—in order to protect her brain, which seemed reasonable at the time—all she wanted to do was climb back in Brendan’s bed and explore those pleasures over and over again. In fact, she’d persuaded Brendan to explore them with her three times the previous night, but he insisted that they had to leave the house, otherwise they would be reported missing and Zed would kick their door down, and the embarrassment would have been life-changing.
Right, back to non-sexual thoughts. Brendan didn’t count as a local, but she certainly felt connected to him. Spending time with him was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mature adult relationship. And yes, it was sort of sad that something as simple as eating dinner, watching movies, and then having sex was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mature adult relationship, but she was basically on relationship training wheels.
For the first time in her adult life, she was part of a community and it wasn’t nearly as painful or scary as her mother made it out to be…or the way her mother actually made it. She had those neighbors and friends she’d always wanted, without the price of discomfort and displacement and other undesirable “dis” words.
What would life be like when it was time to leave? While things didn’t look great with her casket-related work, eventually, her assignment here would end. It was hard to imagine just going back to her apartment in DC and her old, quiet, boring life, without her friends, without Brendan. Would Brendan just go back to Dublin? Would she ever see him again or would they be reduced to that awkward sort of acquaintance who only emailed out of a sense of obligation?
And what about Alex? Eventually, he was going to return from his assignment in Mystic Bayou, too. Now that they were both aware that they worked in the same office, was he going to show up in the artifacts department, asking her to talk to him? Because that was getting old.
“Cordy?”
She paused on the sidewalk, closing her eyes. She shouldn’t have thought about him. It was like she summoned him.
She turned to find Alex standing behind her. He was as polished and handsome as always, dressed casually in a cable-knit sweater and very dark jeans, except he had shadows under his eyes and little lines were starting to appear around his mouth. Fancy moisturizers could only do so much when you spent most of your days frowning.
“Let me guess, you want to talk,” she said, throwing up her arms. “Despite the fact that I’ve made it clear I have no interest in talking to you. Multiple times. I’ve made that clear so many times.”
“Yes, and I don’t understand why,” he said. “Things were fine between us when I came into town. I had some hope that we might be able to reconnect or at least figure out what happened between us, but you just shut me down.”
“What do you mean, what happened to us?” she cried. “I told you—”
“Yeah, you let your mom take you away,” Alex said.
“I let her? You met Bernadette,” she argued. “Do you really think I had a choice in it? You know what my mother was like. And your father wasn’t exactly giving us his blessing.”
“I never stopped loving you. I never stopped looking for you. My wife knew it, that’s why we imploded. I married a perfectly nice girl from a nice normal family with a good job. Everything was just so nice and normal, and I couldn’t handle it. She didn’t know me. She couldn’t know the real me. She knew the image I’d created. I tried to be someone who wasn’t me and it didn’t work!”
“You didn’t tell her about the carnival, did you?” Cordelia asked.
“How could I!” he exclaimed. “No one is going to understand growing up like that!”
“You might be surprised,” she said. “There are plenty of people around here who just accept weird baggage.”
“What? Like your creepy banshee friend?” Alex asked.
“He’s not creepy, and yes, we’re seeing each other, and he understands. He gets it,” she told him. “He doesn’t treat my gift like it’s an inconvenient teenage phase I can just get over.”
“I never said that!” he cried.
“No, but you made it clear that’s how you feel!” she yelled back.
At this point, people were starting to stare. Two of the pie shop regulars, Jeb Cho and Earl Webster, were standing near Ice Cream Depot, their expressions concerned.
“You all right, Miss Cordelia?” Jeb asked, frowning at Alex.
“I’m fine,” she called back.
Earl Webster’s glare towards Alex was equally harsh. “You just let us know if you’re not fine, all right, cher?”
“I will, thank you,” she assured them. She turned to Alex and gestured toward the gazebo. “Let’s just calm down OK?”
They walked to the town square in awkward silence. Cordelia was aware that if Alex had told her any of this just a few months ago, she would have told him that she had only ever loved him. But to be fair, at the time, she’d had rare opportunities to love. And now that she’d had more opportunities to know people and love them, she knew that she was capable of much more, that she wanted more. And she still hadn’t settled just how loyal Alex was to Messina, if Messina was an evil mastermind and how much Alex had to do with those evil mastermind plans.
How was dating a person who foresaw death easier than this?
They sat on the swing, letting it sway underneath them as she tried to find the words that would at once explain her feelings and maybe trick Alex into giving information away
about Darwin Messina.
This was why it was easier to date someone who foresaw death.
“We were children, Alex,” she said, trying to sound calmer. “We were caught up in the moment without thinking anything through. If we’d stayed together, we probably would have broken up within a year. Us against the world is a lot less appealing when you’re broke and living in some flophouse, unable to pay for groceries and utilities, much less college tuition. You would have ended up resenting me.”
“I wouldn’t—” Alex said.
“Did you resent your wife for not knowing what it was like to grow up like we did?” Cordelia asked.
“Yeah, I did,” he admitted. “Maybe I didn’t mean to, but I did. I know it’s stupid, but I guess I miss how easy things were with you. When I look at you, I’m that sixteen-year-old kid again, the whole future ahead of me.”
“Not so dented and damaged by the world?” Cordelia suggested.
“Exactly.”
“You think maybe it’s possible that we both spent the last decade idealizing our relationship?” She reached for his hands, wrapping her palm around his watch and opening her mind like a barn door. She gritted her teeth against the flood of images…perfectly nice, normal images. She saw Alex calling his former mother-in-law and wishing her a happy birthday, then feeling guilty because he had to rely on his smartphone to remind him of the date. She saw him sitting in the pie shop, alone, watching Zed, Bael, Will, and Brendan talking with a wistful loneliness. He had plenty of friends back in DC, but he hadn’t cracked the social code around the bayou. And it wasn’t like he could make friends with Messina’s security guys. They kept to themselves mostly. And Messina was a one-man fortress. Alex wasn’t even sure what the guy got up to at night.
Other than checking out Jillian’s pregnancy-padded bustline, for which he immediately looked away and chastised himself as an asshole, his thoughts were nearly above reproach. Except now that she was touching him, he was thinking about her, and in his mind, she was cast in a sort of warm, pinkish-golden light that was far more flattering than she probably deserved. He didn’t even feel that hostile towards Brendan, just grief over the second loss of Cordelia and attempts not to feel jealous when he saw her with Brendan. She could feel how desperately he wanted to be happy for her when he saw her smile like that.