Ever Lasting

by Odessa Gillespie Black

  Allie

  I finished my dinner.

  The girls were splayed back in their booth.

  “I think I’m pregnant.” Lacee held her stomach as if she’d pop. “With a food baby.”

  “Cole and I are going out,” I said.

  “So he finally got off the fence?” Nicki said.

  “If by that you mean, he finally decided he wanted to be with me, we’re talking. Is that good enough for you guys?” I folded my napkin and placed it in my plate.

  “I’m too full to argue.” Lacee lay her head back on the booth.

  “I’ll see you in a little while. I won’t be too late.”

  In a pair of black trousers and a white shirt that was untucked and unbuttoned a few buttons down, Cole stood and placed cash on the table. The dark skin of his chest under the white was breathtaking. I wanted to rip all the buttons—.

  Stop that Allie. You have to control yourself, I thought.

  Cole winked then worked his jaw. He must’ve heard me.

  Stop that! I wanted to scream. But he couldn’t help his effect on me.

  Cole held the door open for me, of course with him in the doorway, I’d have to slide by him. Possibly touch him.

  “Where are you taking me?” I slipped past him.

  “To your future,” he said mysteriously.

  Outside, in the darkness, the wind blew lightly, but it was chilly enough that it cut through me.

  Cole tugged me to him before I could shove him away. How he was so warm with it so cold out?

  “It’s you. I may not have blood, but you heat me up when you’re close.” Cole put his lips to my hair as we walked. His breath was hot on my ear.

  “Isn’t this cheating? You’re a little too close.” I slipped out of his arms. If he hadn’t been in one of those semi-odd moods, I would have been a little more at ease.

  “I could never be too close to you,” he said. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable though. You do know that your comfort, your needs, everything that matters to you is of my utmost priority, don’t you?”

  “If that were so, you would put even more distance between us. You have no idea what it does to me when you are so close. There is so little that keeps me from dashing through the boundaries placed around us. My resolve is tissue-paper thin most times.” I walked fast as we neared the car door.

  With a green sparkle in Cole’s gaze, he gave me an abrupt little tug around and pressed me against the car.

  Cole’s lips grazed my neck. His hot breath on the curve of my neck sent chill bumps over my arms. “And my resolve is even thinner.”

  I was paralyzed, needing to feel his lips, but knowing how dangerous that would be. His breath slid behind my ear. “I promised I wouldn’t touch you, but I never said I wouldn’t fantasize about it.”

  I rested my weight on the car. My thoughts soared.

  There was no one around and it would be so easy to…I had to stop myself.

  The thoughts of what we could do in the dark with no one around in that private space would lead Cole into an even more heated stage.

  “Close your eyes,” he whispered.

  I was terrified because with Cole in this state, I needed to see what was coming, but I listened to his demand. My eyes drifted shut.

  “Now, I want you to think of what you want. What you want right now. Where you want me to touch you, kiss you.”

  My knees turned to a gelatin consistency and the pit of my stomach ached.

  “I found a way to cheat.” His low velvety voice enticed little goose bumps to erupt over me.

  A startlingly vivid image of his body cold and gray in a grave bolted through my mind like lightning. Suddenly, I was jarred from the heated state of euphoria that his voice and nearness put me in. “No. You said you wanted to do things right.”

  Cole stiffened.

  I pushed him back, going against all the instincts that screamed to let him have his way. “Don’t you want me for eternity?”

  Animation flooded back into his face, but he dipped his head and rested his forehead on my shoulder. “I want you right now.”

  Did he always want me?

  “Always,” he agreed with my silent thoughts. “It only gets worse by the day.”

  “Then I should go.” I slipped around him.

  “I’ll stop.” Cole spun around and grabbed me. “Please don’t leave me. I just can’t help myself sometimes.”

  I faced away from him not able to flee from him as much as he wasn’t able to resist me.

  His voice was filled with determination. “As long as you are saying no, aren’t we safe?”

  “I don’t know how long I can keep that up.”

  Cole leaned back and allowed some space between us. “I won’t attempt to touch you again. Unless you ask me to. Promise.”

  I contemplated it. Staying with him this evening was like walking into a hurricane. Nothing to hold onto when the wind of his desire carried her away.

  He walked around to my door. “Get in, please.”

  I turned back to the car, unable once again to leave him. I was afraid for his mental status if I attempted it. It hadn’t been that long ago that Cole had been teetering on the edge of insanity. He still seemed right on the edge of a cliff.

  I yanked the door open. “As long as you know I do not want you to touch me.”

  Cole nodded and crossed his heart.

  I got in.

  Cole shut the door for me, it sounding like a gunshot going off. A warning.

  I sank into the leather seat and hoped I could do this. Being strong and pretending to be strong were two totally different things.

  Pretending to be strong was taking its toll by the day. As I belted myself in, I realized something. “This isn’t your car.”

  “I liked it so I bought it.” He stared at the windshield as the wipers swiped away sparkles of misty rain.

  The low hum of the car’s engine, the tires gripping asphalt, and the new car smell did nothing to distract me from him.

  Going down the road, I trained my eyes on whatever happened to be outside my window. It helped to not have Cole’s sinewy, muscular frame in my peripheral vision.

  Cole pulled us up to the side of a large brick building that had an antique look to it. The architecture, I was unfamiliar with but the building itself was so beautiful.

  “What is this?” I released my seatbelt.

  “You’ll see.” Cole’s red lips curled into a mischievous smirk.

  I followed Cole up a landing. The door required a key card for entrance. A few feet down the hall, an antique elevator waited with open doors for its next passengers.

  Cole nodded toward it. “It’s small, but if you stay on one side and I stay on the other, I’m pretty sure you’ll be safe. From me, I mean. The elevator is in perfect operational order.”

  “It looks older than the one at home.” I was wary of its capacity to haul two bodies much less itself up to any floor.

  “It’s sturdier than it looks.” Cole stepped in and started to reach back to take my hand. It was second nature, but he fought it. He waved me in. “Come on. The project is up here, and you’ve already come all this way, even chancing a brush with death to see it.”

  I grunted at his poor joke.

  Cole smiled. “This elevator is by far the least of your worries.”

  The deadliest thing that existed to me was standing right in front of me, and it was a human.

  “If we get stuck in this thing…” I let the threat linger, stepping forward.

  We made it successfully to the top floor of the old building. Cole’s loft was a different world with an antique backdrop. As we stepped out of the elevator car, light music triggered by a motion detector filled the room. The beautiful soft music was mainly piano with some violin in the background.

  A canvas spanned a good portion of the wall. The face of the girl in the picture was young in appearance, but
her eyes were haunted and sad.

  “Do you like it?” Cole stepped a little too near, but I didn’t budge from my stance in front of the painting.

  The painting had been lightly brush stroked in black, white, and gray. It was of long flowing hair, in shades of black and gray that billowed behind a young girl of whom the artist was obviously in love with. Her serene face was turned slightly toward the onlooker, and her eyes, accented with highly arched brows, were trained on something to the right. The only color on the entire canvas was the beautiful curves of red on her lips.

  It was me. Only overly glorified.

  “Who painted this?” I said.

  “I closed my eyes and when I opened them, this is what the brush gave me.” Cole’s voice was thick, velvety.

  The walls around us were backdrop to more paintings of what Cole considered beauty. Each one depicted something different that he decided to bring to life on canvas.

  One was of hands intertwined, one masculine and one feminine and, though most hands resemble each other so much that oil paint wouldn’t succeed in making them distinct, these were unmistakably ours.

  The next was also in black and white, a theme that was prevalent in the room. It was two profiles with their foreheads together, noses almost touching. The two profiles were ours also, though Cole obviously saw me much different than I saw myself.

  “I had no idea you were so talented.” I walked past the masterpieces.

  I could feel Cole’s stare on my back. He was silent.

  “I meant artistically.” I corrected myself before he got any ideas to use some word play on me.

  “In living so many years, my talents have grown by the bounds.”

  I knew what he meant and still ignored the statement with a smile. I turned on Cole and stared at him from across the room. “What else can you do? Strictly artistically speaking, I mean.”

  “Follow me to my bedroom and find out.” He held out his hand with a flirty flick of his brow.

  “Watch it.” I glanced to the elevator making sure of a quick escape.

  “No, seriously. Come look.” He innocently waved me toward the concrete steps that landed on a balcony overlooking the whole apartment.

  “How long have you been living here?” I followed him up the steps a safe distance behind him.

  “I just moved everything here today. Do you like it?” Cole was almost at the top.

  The whole room was geometrically spaced. Not one piece of furniture out of place.

  His furniture was oddly fashionable and very neatly tied together. Black, white, and red.

  The black leather sofas faced each other in the center of the floor. They were lined with red and black throw pillows and a black coffee table with gargoyle legs separated them.

  The white rug on the black marble floor was expansive, spreading from the edge of one wall to the other in odd-shaped designs.

  An odd black and gray stone sculpture stood alone in one of the corners of the room staring out the window into the night. From one angle, in the gray stone, it looked to be a man, but from the other side it appeared to be shifting or pulsating into a large black cat-like monster.

  “It’s different.” Cole stared at the room with a triumphant swell in his chest.

  “It’s a shapeshifter,” I said in awe. It was beautiful.

  “The artist obviously wanted to glamourize the process. Maybe to hide the sheer ugliness of it, to possibly change how one might look at the curse if he or she found out, keeping some of the details secret.” Was he giving away the identity of the artist in his evaluation of the sculpture? He smiled and nodded for me to follow him further up the stairs.

  I was almost mad at myself for not knowing Cole better than I did.

  “We’ll have all the time in the world for you to get to know me.” Cole stepped onto the landing of his balcony room.

  One glance in, and I fell silent.

  The king-size bed was mahogany. Intricate carvings wrapped around the four posters that supported a canopy lined with white sheers. Gargoyle feet, masculine and dark, supported the bed. Matching nightstands sat on either sides of the bed with matching feet. An oversized dresser with a mirror adorned with the same carvings as the bed lined the dark brick wall.

  Cole walked over to the bed and thoughtfully ran his fingers over the carvings of the footboard. He turned back with a wide smile. “This took hours. Weeks possibly. Days sort of run together when you’re trying to get something off your mind.”

  “You…you made these?” I had no idea he had that much art in him waiting to explode on whatever artistic medium he touched.

  “They started out large pieces of wood.” He inspected one of the carvings. “I guess I went a little overboard.”

  I stepped closer to the bed. The detail in the creatures was absolutely astonishing. The bird’s feathers had lines and their feet were perched on trees that looked real. A unicorn’s long mane looked 3-D.

  We were way too close to a bed. And one he’d made for me. “I should probably go.”

  Cole looked confused. “Did I do something wrong?”

  I backed away from the bed. I needed space between him and me. I needed him to not be so damned beautiful and artistic and….

  He was everything that a woman should jump on if she found him and here I had to walk away, because if I didn’t I would end up killing him off. “I’ll find my own way home.”

  “Are you serious?” He followed me down the stairs.

  “Yes, very.” My chest felt heavy. I was unable to control the quiver of nervousness in my voice. “I’ll come back. One day. When things are right.”

  “You just got here.” Cole stopped on the bottom step.

  Our reflections shined back at us from the wall of windows on the far side of the room. I turned back to him but avoided his pleading gaze. “And if I don’t leave, then I won’t.”

  He looked out the window to a car’s headlights that had just pulled up across the street at the light. “I miss you when you aren’t with me.”

  “I know, but we can’t be together. Not alone. Not yet,” I said hating myself for leaving, hating myself for giving in to him by coming here.

  “I dream about that day.” Cole’s gaze was glued to the street outside. His eyes clouded over as if he were distracted with some mental exercise.

  “I do too. That’s why I have to leave. Right now.”

  “But I didn’t touch you.” His voice was frantic.

  “Yes, you did. You don’t just appeal to me physically, you know.”

  “Would it be so wrong to ask exactly how I appeal to you? I want to hear it. I hear your thoughts, but I want to hear it from your lips.” His eyes darkened as he stepped closer, but he didn’t dare touch.

  “Intellectually, artistically, emotionally, and probably the most dangerous of all physically. I’ve never been so attracted to anyone as I am to you. On so many levels. You do things to me that I really don’t think anyone else on this whole planet has experienced.”

  A smile spread across his face. And I thought he might have been holding his breath until I reached the last word. Had he won something in my admission? The look on his face seemed so triumphant that it confused me.

  That wasn’t a strange occurrence though. Cole constantly confused me. He was naturally good at it.

  On the street, in front of the loft apartment, tires screamed in anguish, as the driver abused them to either show off or exercise the horses under the hood.

  Cole looked down to the car’s rear lights as it fishtailed and took off in the other direction. He had a solemn look on his face as the car disappeared into the night.

  I walked to the elevator as Cole gazed at me as if it might be the last time he would ever see me. “I’ll take you home. You’re not riding in a cab.”

  * * * *

  Cole was quiet on the drive home. He waved his hand over the radio and it came on, asking him, “Hello, what
is your preference this evening, Mr. Kinsley?”

  “Anything with the word guilt in the theme or song itself,” he said.

  What a strange request.

  “I have 5,286 results.”

  “Surprise me.” He sounded indifferent.

  “Yes sir,” the automated voice replied and a rock song with a slow beat and a sad performer filled the car with lyrics about the girl he was in love with belonging to someone else.

  “Perfect.” Cole settled back into the seat and thrummed the steering wheel.

  I couldn’t understand why that song was perfect for his mood, but I guessed he had a good reason. Maybe, I’d spent enough time with him this evening that I would witness the flirtatious Cole sliding into the depressed one.

  “Any amount of time without you is beyond excruciating. I try to find ways to occupy myself, hence the painting, carving, piano playing and the other various talents I have acquired.” He glanced in his rearview mirror.

  “We don’t have much longer.” I kept my gaze on the spaceship-looking dashboard of his new car.

  “Let me ask you something.” Cole paused, dead serious now. “If you had to choose to exist with me forever and you only saw this side of me, the side that is always, for the most part, happy, impulsive and pretty much unfiltered would you miss the other side?”

  “The other side?” Were the tethers of his mind coming unraveled?

  “The other side of me is more meticulous and responsible. More grounded. I guess what I am asking is, which side do you like better?”

  I shifted nervously in the seat.

  His change of mood had been alarming, but this question topped it off. “If there was one of us, which side would you choose?”

  “Is this one of those hypothetical questions to fill up the silence on the long drive home?” I gave him unsure smile.

  “Something like that.” His tone was odd. Hollow.

  “I don’t know. I like the thoughtful side a lot, not that you aren’t thoughtful all the time, but I see you at times as sort of not thinking about the consequences of your actions, but that comes with the impulsiveness I think you’ve always had to keep under tight reins. I can’t say that I don’t feel a certain thrill with that side. It’s very hard to say which way I might go.” The scope of my answer was too small to cover the size of that question. It would take forever to separate the two distinctly different personalities that I saw inside him that seemed to somehow fit perfectly together.