by Roxie Noir
“I think we should check the attic again,” Zach said. “We got all the files down from there, but there’s all these chests and suitcases and bags. It’s probably worth a shot.”
Seth just nodded, still trying to shake the dream off.
“Sure,” he said, then took a giant bite of his sandwich.
The attic was a mess. Seth had only been up there a few times as a kid, but he remembered being amazed by the sheer amount of stuff up there. Stuff that seemed like it hadn’t been touched for a hundred years at least, that probably still bore the fingerprints and perfume of whoever had owned them.
As an adult, he quickly realized that no one had visited the attic in generations except to shove more stuff up there, and looking around, his heart sank.
“Where do we start?” breathed Jules.
“Well, I think newer stuff is by the door,” Seth said. “So we start at the other end, by the far wall.”
It was as good a guess as any.
For hours, they plowed through boxes and drawers, going through bags, pulling out delicate old clothes that seemed like they might fall apart at any moment, thick boots with mud still caked on them, and everything imaginable in-between.
“Our ancestors were packrats,” Zach finally muttered. It was nearly one in the morning, and Seth could tell his brother was tired and starting to get irritable. “This is all just trash.”
“It’s cool trash,” Jules said, picking up a picture frame. Two kids stared into the camera, their serious faces a little blurry. “Who’s this?”
Both brothers shook their heads, and the silent work went on.
After another hour, Zach stood and stretched.
“I have to go to bed,” he said. “I’m going to fall over up here if I don’t.”
“Go ahead,” said Seth. “You’ve been up almost twenty-four hours, you deserve it.”
“Night,” said Zach.
“Night,” said Jules, watching Seth’s little brother descend the staircase.
“You should get some sleep too,” Seth told Jules. “You’re probably tired. You could stay here, if you want, there’s a guest bedroom.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie, and Seth was more than willing to move all the junk off of the bed in there and sleep in it himself. Jules could have his bed.
She shook her head, curls bouncing around.
“I’m actually not really tired,” she said. “And I’m having a great time going through all this old stuff.”
She pulled something out of a big chest-of-drawers.
“I mean, look at this box. I think it’s covered in fur,” Jules said, holding the box carefully with her fingertips, as though it might come alive and try to bite her at any moment.
Seth looked at the box, and a thrill passed through him, from his scalp to his toes. He reached one hand out and ran one finger along the top. Jules was right: it was some kind of fur, slightly brittle with age. As he touched it, he could feel a low hum start in his bones, and he snatched his hand back.
Jules frowned. “Is there something sharp?” she asked, touching it with the pads of her own fingers.
Seth shook his head, searching for the words to explain it to Jules: it enthralled and repulsed him, all at once. It had something that he shouldn’t want to see but very much did.
Then he took it from Jules, gently, and the hum returned. Jules looked at him strangely, but Seth still couldn’t explain what was happening.
The box was about a foot wide, two feet long, and shallow. He turned it in his hands and then held it up to the attic’s bare lightbulb, trying to figure out what kind of fur it was.
“The fur is from something small,” Jules said, her voice hushed. “Look, you can see where the seams are,” she told him, tracing one finger around a skin.
Seth looked closer.
“You’re right,” he said. “It looks like... mice, or chipmunks, or something.”
“Why’s there a box covered in mouse fur in your attic?” she asked.
Seth just shook his head. “Beats me,” he said.
The real question is, why does it make me feel so weird, like there’s a magnet inside, but I’m the only one drawn to it?
He and Jules looked at each other over the box, then Seth took a deep breath and opened it.
The box was filled with feathers. They were all a deep brown-gold, ranging from tiny to enormous, with a few almost as long as Seth’s forearm.
“Wow,” breathed Jules. Carefully, she reached in and took one of the long feathers, holding it up delicately and twirling it back and forth between her fingers.
The moment she touched it, a thrill ran down Seth’s back.
“This bird must be enormous,” she said. “Look at this thing.”
“I think it’s an eagle feather,” Seth said. “We’ve got golden eagles around here. They nest up in the sides of the mesa. Sometimes you can see them flying in there. It looks like they’re going to just crash into the side of the cliff, but then they hop onto a nest. It’s pretty cool.”
“That’s what Hiram could turn into, right? Allegedly, I mean.”
And my grandfather, and my great-grandfather...
The dream flashed through Seth’s mind again, the feeling of cold air rushing around him.
“Right,” he said.
Then he tilted the box a little, puzzled at the way that its weight shifted.
“There’s something else in here,” he said.
Jules put the feather back, then pushed her hand underneath the layer of feathers and dug around a little, carefully. Then she pulled out an ugly, oblong stone along the length of her hand. It was rough and pebbled, the same brownish-red of the sandstone everywhere. One end was slightly concave and shiny, almost burnt-looking.
It called to Seth with a voice he couldn’t understand, but one that growled at him.
“Is that a crystal or something?” Seth asked. He was starting to get a little shaken by all this weird stuff, but even more shaken by his physical reaction to it.
Am I entering some sort of sleep-deprivation psychosis? he wondered. I didn’t sleep great last night, but it seems early for that.
“It’s fulgurite,” Jules said, turning it over in her hand. “This is what happens when lightning strikes rock. It superheats it really fast and then cools. This stuff in the middle is more or less impure glass.”
She held it up for Seth to look at, still examining it herself. He felt like he was looking down a deep hole, or like he was on a great height, looking down, and he closed his eyes.
“This one looks like sandstone,” she said. “Which makes sense, this part of Utah is all sandstone.”
“It’s from the mesa,” he said suddenly. He didn’t know how, but he was completely positive.
“Probably,” agreed Jules. “I’m sure it gets struck by lightning plenty.”
Seth just nodded, and Jules put it back in the box, then took the box from Seth and put it back in the drawer.
Right away, he felt like the world stopped buzzing, and he exhaled hard, shaking his hands out a little.
“You okay?” Jules asked.
Seth nodded. “I’m fine,” he said. “I just need to take a quick break.”
He found a saddle blanket, spread it on the floor, and sat on it, leaning against a big, heavy wooden trunk.
“C’mon,” he said to Jules, patting the blanket next to him.
She looked over, from his hand to his eyes, and suddenly seemed to stiffen again.
“Are you still worried that I’m trying to seduce you into doing something about the mine?” he asked.
Jules blushed a little in the dim light and looked at the floor.
“I mean, I am in your attic and it’s almost two in the morning,” she said. “If you are, it worked.”
Seth couldn’t argue with that.
Then she sighed, blowing a stray strand of red hair from her face, and walked over to sit next to Seth on the saddle blanket. She picked at it with one hand, looking pensive.
Jules took a deep breath, then started talking.
“When I was in high school, I had this huge crush on this jock named Taylor Kimball,” she said in a rush. “And one day, he asked me out.”
The whole story spilled out of her: the homework, the studying, the ridiculous love notes. The discovery that he’d just been using her, that he’d told half the school all about how pathetic she was, how she got him good grades while he was banging his real girlfriend. His friends waving her love letters and shouting at her and how she’d run out of the school, crying.
“Holy shit,” Seth said, looking at the floor. “God, teenagers can be cruel.”
Then he looked over at her, at her hazel eyes that seemed far away.
“I swear I just thought you were cute,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said.
They were silent for a moment.
“This thing smells like horses,” she said, wrinkling her nose, scrunching all the freckles together.
“I like horses,” said Seth.
Jules pulled her legs under her, then leaned her head back against the trunk.
“I can’t get the mine stopped,” she said. “Believe me, I tried. In twenty years, it’s going to be in books and documentaries as a famous environmental disaster, but the people in charge of Quarcom don’t care. I think they’d drown a boatful of orphans if they thought they could make money from it.”
She paused and picked at the blanket a little.
“It’s going to fuck things up pretty bad,” she said. “The kind of mining they’re doing is going to be illegal within four, maybe five years, but this is the first time it’s been tried in the U.S., so there’s no laws against it yet.”
“And we’re the unlucky bastards who lived in the right spot,” Seth said.
Jules leaned her head against his shoulder and nodded, a stray hair tickling his cheek.
Without thinking, he turned and kissed the top of her head, inhaling her earthy, spicy scent, and then she looked up at him, her lips slightly parted in the light of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Her green-brown eyes nearly glowed in the low light, and once again he felt weightless, soaring, as he looked into them.
Then he kissed her on the lips. For a moment she didn’t respond, but then she pressed herself against him, and Seth felt something deep down inside him tighten, a deep hunger he’d never felt before. Jules parted her lips against his, and Seth ran his tongue along her lower lip only to feel her tongue seek his out and tangle together with it.
Her hand crept onto the side of his face, made its way into his hair, and before Seth knew it, he had tangled his fingers in her wild mane, pulling her against him, aching to feel her touch. Jules hesitantly put a hand on Seth’s waist, sending sparks through his whole body, and then they broke apart, gasping.
Seth stroked her cheek with one thumb, feeling like he was falling. Any thought of the mine or the mesa or the coming disaster had been completely wiped out of his mind, and Jules filled it, completely.
She bit her lip, like she wasn’t quite sure how to proceed.
“Should we be looking for the deed?” she whispered, her hand tightening on his waist, sending ripples through his whole body.
“Probably,” he said.
Then he kissed her again. This time he couldn’t help himself, and he moved one hand from her hair, down her neck, to her shoulder, and onto her back, feeling her soft, warm body beneath his fingers. He could sense that something dangerous was about to happen, that he was on some precipice that he’d never be able to back away from, but he didn’t care.
If you stay here with her, his brain whispered, this is it for women for you. You know she’s leaving Obsidian, don’t you?
Seth didn’t care, and Jules moved from her sitting position, scooting toward him, pressing the length of her torso against his.
8. Jules
This is not a good idea, Jules thought.
Not that it mattered, because she wasn’t about to stop what she was doing.
You’re leaving town in two, maybe three days, and then you’ll be miserable, she thought. Better to not do this.
Already, she was moving onto her knees, Seth’s hand warm and strong on her back, pressing herself against his hard body in a way that made her whole body feel like it had just come alive.
His brother’s downstairs, she thought.
Seth’s hands hovered on her shirt, right above the waist of her jeans, and for a moment, Jules moved her lips away from his, their foreheads leaning together, both of them panting. Jules kept her eyes closed, like that would make this less real.
“This might be a bad idea,” she said. As she spoke, she traced the hard outlines of his stomach through his t-shirt, each muscular bump raising her heartbeat a few notches.
“It might be,” he said, his voice low and teasing, with a hungry note she’d never heard before. “After all, I barely know you.”
“Hey, that’s supposed to be my line,” Jules said.
One of Seth’s fingers found the place where her shirt rode up by a centimeter, the skin on her back exposed, and he ran his fingertip against it. Warmth flooded Jules’s body, and she could feel her rational thought processes shutting down, one by one.
She was pretty sure that if Seth were doing this purely for his own profit, he wouldn’t look at her quite like that.
Besides, there was no way she was going back to the horrible RV when this was here.
“As long as it’s established that we’re not being smart right now,” she said, leaning her hips into him, inviting his hand to move along the skin of her back, under her shirt.
“Not even a little,” he agreed.
Jules kissed him and reached for the top button of her own shirt, moving quickly down the line of buttons until the whole front was open, and almost immediately, Seth had pushed it off of her shoulders, tossing it somewhere in the attic with a growl.
“Hey, I have to find that later,” she gasped as he kissed her jawline, then nibbled the delicate skin down her neck and to her collarbone, making her eyes slide shut in pleasure.
Seth just shrugged, one hand tight around her ribcage, the other still on her back, his mouth at the hollow of her throat. Jules heard someone heave a deep sigh of pleasure, only to realize that it was her.
Moments later, her bra was off, and she yanked it off of her arms, throwing it behind her as Seth moved his mouth to her rosy, pebbled nipples, swiping his tongue along one as Jules gasped.
“You should be quiet,” Seth said, his voice low and gravelly. “My little brother’s asleep downstairs.”
“Shut up,” she gasped, and Seth chuckled for a moment before closing his teeth around her nipple and biting, just barely.
Jules’s back arched. By now she was on the attic’s cool wooden floor, Seth on top of her as he licked and sucked at her nipples. She wrapped her legs around his waist and hips. The feel of his bulk between her legs, even if she was still clothed, made her a little dizzy with anticipation.
What the hell is happening? She thought. This is so fast.
Is it? Part of her whispered back. I’m pretty sure you wanted to do this yesterday, the first time he kissed you.
She tugged his shirt over his head and Seth got up on his knees, tossing it to the side, and hesitated for a moment.
Jules thought he might have the most perfect body she’d ever seen, and for a moment she was totally speechless. The only thought in her mind was I want.
Then he reached for the waistband of her jeans and pulled her even closer to him, and Jules squealed, just a little.
“Shh,” Seth said with a grin.
Then he unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, tugging them down to her hiking boots along with her underwear.
“Shit,” Jules said, laughing at her pants stuck against her boots, the rest of her totally naked.
“I was almost so smooth, too,”
said Seth, as he yanked at the laces of her boots. Moments later, they were off, thumping against the floor as he tossed them, her pants following in a heap, and before Jules could blink his lips were on her belly, then her belly button, then the inside of her upper thigh, his hands pushing her legs apart, her knees over his shoulders.
“You don’t have to—” she started to say, and then Seth’s tongue slid along her with an intensity that made her gasp and shudder, her back arching again.
She could swear she felt him grin, but then his tongue began making slow circles around her, teasing at her lips and channel, then flattening against her nub.
It took all of Jules’s self control not to grab Seth’s hair as he licked at her, each stroke of his tongue driving her higher and higher, her body responding to him like she’d never felt it respond to anything before.
“Seth,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. She could feel herself getting closer and closer, about to pass that point of no return.
He didn’t respond, but circled her clit with his tongue, making Jules claw her hands along the wooden floorboards.
“I’m close,” she gasped. “I’m gonna finish if you don’t stop.”
He flattened his tongue again and then swiped it across her, pressing hard against the small, sensitive nub, then did it again and again until Jules finally felt like she’d reached the edge and she was falling over it, no longer in control of her own body as the pleasure swelled throughout her, exploding as her fingers and toes curled against Seth.
Jules lay on the floor, gasping for air, waiting for the world to feel like it wasn’t tilting anymore, and then she looked down to see Seth resting his head on her belly, grinning.
“What?” she asked.
“That was so sexy,” he said.
Then he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her upright, so she was sitting on the horse blanket again. Without pausing, she kissed him again, hard, tasting herself on his lips just a little, and then reached for the button and zipper on his pants, yanking them open ferociously and reaching inside, bringing out his long, thick erection and sliding her hand from root to tip.
Seth sucked in his breath, closing his eyes. He put his hand on hers, and Jules bit her lip, feeling the fire inside herself rekindle.