A Boat Made of Bone (The Chthonic Saga)

by Grotepas, Nicole

  Then they began to map out how to host bands and shows. The competition would be Salt and Sugar Coffee, but there was no reason they couldn’t utilize their proximity to Suga’s benefit. They decided there should be several little mini-festivals with local bands where Suga’s hosted a band and Salt and Sugar hosted a band, and anyone else along the block that made up their little collection of stores would be invited to join in too, sponsoring a band or a little stage if they wanted to.

  They felt pretty good about their plan, but wouldn’t know anything for certain until Ferg talked to Darryl. Until then, they’d keep planning and maintain hope. Not that Kate wanted to work for the rest of her life at Suga’s, but it was best to plan ahead.

  ***

  “What are you going to do now?” Ferg asked as he and Kate left the store at three. He shoved his fists into the pockets of his skinny jeans, waiting expectantly beside his Civic, rocking back on the heels of his Vans.

  “Probably go see Audra at work,” she answered. “Why?”

  He removed a hand and leaned it casually on the roof of his Civic, but jerked it back immediately. “Damn, hot, hot, hot,” he hissed. He looked at Kate, flexing and relaxing his hands like they both smarted from getting burned. “Stupid summer sun. Man, OK, well I was just wondering if you’d want to run to get some food with me at Lucy’s diner. We could go over our plans for the store. You know, and some other . . . uh, other stuff.”

  Kate cocked her head to one side. “Other stuff, like maybe Emily might be there?”

  He sighed, rubbing his hands together. “All right, all right. I heard through the old grapevine that she might be there with her friends when she finished her shift.”

  “So you were eavesdropping?”

  “Look, I was getting a coffee, OK? It’s not my fault those baristas have to talk so loud to be heard over their machinery.”

  “You should just talk to her, Ferg. She’d probably like to work things out with you. But I can’t today. Sorry. I need to go talk to Audra.” Kate began moving in the general direction of her home.

  Ferg nodded, frowning. “Fine. No big deal, then, go hang out with the friend you see all the time.”

  “I see you all the time too,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah, but we never just hang out anymore. It’s always work these days.”

  “We’ll go this weekend or something,” she reassured him, smiling.

  “We better,” he answered and got in his car. As he backed out of his space, Kate turned and increased her stride. She lived just up the street, so often she walked to work rather than driving. As she headed up the street on foot, Ferg followed alongside her slowly through the parking area pull-out that ran parallel to the street. Finally he rolled down the window and shouted out, “Want a ride?”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  He waved and drove off.

  At home, she went inside and freshened up—changed into a clean T-shirt and put on her Rainbow flip-flops. On her way out, Kate filled the dog’s water bowl which was dry as a bone—he belonged to Kate’s roommate but the day was too hot to ignore—then jumped into her Jetta and headed to the Home Warehouse where Audra worked.

  When she got there, Kate found her friend at the returns desk, wearing a mauve apron and gabbing with customers and the other cashier.

  “Hi,” Kate said, walking up to the desk. “How’s work? Loving all the returns?” she asked, leaning her forearms on the counter.

  “Oh it’s been great. As long as I remember I don’t give a crap if people really do return things like toilet seats, literally speaking.”

  “Nice, nice. That’s pretty gross. I guess you can’t re-stock that, eh?” Kate said, pausing. “So, good news, I had another—” she covered her mouth with one hand and checked around to make sure no one else was listening, “sex dream the other night.”

  “Yeah, really?” Audra laughed, but furrowed her brow. “Is that normal? To have so many?”

  “No, it’s not. At least, I don’t think it is. And get this, it was with the same guy as the others have been.” Her stomach bunched up and doubled itself into several knots.

  “What? No way,” Audra said. “Have you figured out who he is?”

  “No, but it seems like I remember and know in my dreams literally, and biblically,” Kate said, grinning sarcastically. “Oh, and there’s something else,” she added absently, almost catching his name as it winged through her mind like a blackbird. She frowned. It got away.

  “What, tell me.” Audra leaned over the other side of the counter, her face close to Kate’s in rapt attention. Before they could discuss it, a man in white stained, dirty jeans and steel-toed work boots came walking up with a huge return on one of the big item carts. A bunch of PVC pipe and lumber and plumbing supplies. Kate watched in slight irritation until he was done. Audra swung back toward Kate.

  “Tell me, quick, before someone else comes in.”

  “We can just go hang out after work. You get done in fifteen minutes, don’t you?”

  “But I want to know now,” she said.

  “Last night,” Kate began as Audra leaned forward, hanging on every word. Kate told her about the dragonfly ring and the chase through the marketplace. Audra’s eyes widened as she absorbed it, immediately obsessed with the mystery and possibility.

  “So, let me get this straight, you’re having recurring dreams about some hot guy who says he’s dead, and now you’ve had a dream where he puts a dragonfly ring on your finger?” She checked over her shoulder, but the other cashier was busy ringing someone up. “Kate, we need to find out what a dragonfly symbolizes in a dream!”

  Kate laughed. “What, you don’t know? Tsk, tsk. Some dream interpreter you are.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Don’t insult the Madame or else she’ll stop helping you. Anyway, don’t you have a climbing date with Ty?” Audra asked, fiddling with the scan gun.

  “So?”

  “Well, sounds like things are going well. Maybe if you, you know, got it on with him, the dreams would stop? Sealed the deal, that kind of thing.” She shrugged, put the scan gun down and picked up the big black marker she’d been using to make sale posters for the store.

  “Ty’s out of my league,” Kate muttered. “I mean, he’s gorgeous, yes and I want to go out with him. I’m going to, I should say. But it’s hard to imagine it turning into anything long-term.”

  Audra popped the lid off the marker and began writing out a price and sale information in big blocky letters on the mauve colored poster paper. “Someday you’ll realize I’m right and the only guy who’s out of your league is a guy you dismiss as being out of your league. When you think beautiful and confident, others sense it and want to be around you. Trust me.”

  “That works for men, Audra, not women. Men are too superficial. Women can look past a guy being too short or bald or overweight, but men never do that.”

  She stopped writing and studied Kate, her green eyes running up and down Kate’s body. “I see none of those problems with you. You’re blonde. Men love that. You have full lips, men love that. You have a contagious smile. Again, love. You’ve got a nice figure and an ample chest. All lovely feminine traits. All you need now is to think like you’re a million bucks and it will radiate from you.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Kate mumbled, straightening, feeling suddenly self-conscious from Audra’s scrutiny. She walked over to the candy endcap and grabbed a Snickers. “Can I buy this?”

  “No, it’s not good for you,” Audra said, avoiding eye contact. She didn’t even look up to see what was in Kate’s hand.

  “It’s fine. I’m starving.”

  “Sorry babe, nope.” She put the lid on the marker and set the poster aside just as a customer with a return came striding up to the counter. Soon a line formed, and Kate realized she’d be busy until her shift was over.

  Kate put a dollar-fifty on the counter and as she turned away with the Snickers in her hand, Audra grabbed Kate’s arm, leaned over the
counter, and whispered in her ear, “I’ll be out in a minute and we’ll go get dinner or something, but I just wanted to reiterate what you need—you need to get laid. By Ty. That’ll fix your dream problem.”

  Kate chuckled nervously as fire spread through her cheeks. “Right.”

  Audra began ringing up another contractor’s return—this one better dressed than the last—chatting flirtatiously and amiably with the guy as Kate headed out to her car.

  Taking a bite of the Snickers as she walked through the parking lot, a beady-eyed gull landed in front of her and stared at the candy bar menacingly. “What are you, the godfather seagull?” Kate muttered at it. She kept walking and it flew away. With a sigh, she broke off a bit and threw it in the space next to a cart return where the bird wouldn’t get crushed by a vehicle.

  She got in her Jetta, turned on the radio and sat there, listening to music as she ate her snack and thought about the guy in her dreams and the guy in real-life, who wanted to get to know her. Audra was most likely right, not that Kate would ever tell her friend as much—the dark haired vixen already thought the advice she handed out was prime material and she was constantly talking about starting an advice blog like some sort of Dear Abby thing.

  The chunk of candy bar Kate had tossed down for the birds had become the object of a tug of war between two gulls. Kate watched as a third bird appeared and tried to snag it from the beak of another bird.

  Kate needed to hear what Audra said—she knew that, if she was being honest with herself. It was stupid to long for some figment—some ultimately intangible hallucination—from a dream. How dumb would it be to pass up real life love (and sex!) for what happened in her dreams? So. Dumb. She’d deserve no real life relationships if she rejected Ty for a dude she only remembered when she fell asleep.

  She briefly considered what it would be like to sleep with Ty. She blushed and looked around. It would probably be pretty nice. He had an extremely luscious body. And it might make the dreams go away.

  Audra was, as usual, probably right, she mentally admitted again with a sigh.

  6: Deserts

  She opened her eyes and found herself in darkness. A fire whipped and crackled a few feet in front of her, giving off a sparse amount of light. The fragrant smell of whatever was burning bit at her nose. A light breeze brought the odor of disturbed sand and incense rippling by. She sat on a large cold rock, watching the fire. Through the flames, the bluest eyes she’d ever seen caught her gaze, staring at her. A slight smile tugged at the corners of their owner’s mouth from his seat on a large stone. A dimple formed in his right cheek.

  There were others around. Kate glanced at them. Their olive-complected faces were illuminated by the firelight. The flames flickered in the prisms of their eyes and cast shadows in the folds of their brightly colored robes. Strangers. Maybe Bedouins or some sort of desert dwellers. There were large tents surrounding the fire, but her eyes kept coming back to the set of sapphire eyes straight across from her. Who was he?

  His gaze warmed her. He wore no headdress or flourish, just a dark cap of short hair and a clean, shaven face, which was unusual amongst the other men. A tingle danced up her spine, hot like the touch of a summer breeze, though her back was cold. Overhead, the Milky Way was a white gash across the night sky—a sky so dusted with stars she felt like she may be one of them, fallen into darkness and lost in a desert.

  She lowered her eyes and he was still staring at her. He winked. She glanced around to see if she was confused about whom he was looking at. When their eyes met again, he tilted his head at her and grinned. Her heart thudded at the sight of that smile. There was something familiar about it.

  He stood and moved around the fire. He was wearing a white linen shirt and black linen pants. His bare feet brushed against the edge of the soft red coals of the fire, but he paid them no attention. Cinders shot up around him at being disturbed, dancing around him in the jetties of air his passing created. He seemed to glow in the firelight as though he too were made of stardust. He was in front of her, taking her hand and lifting her to stand beside him.

  He pulled her past the fire, through the ring of people around it, and to the opening of one of the tents. He pulled the flap back and guided her inside. A lantern glowed in one corner, shedding muted light on a lush, Persian rug and piles of red and golden pillows. He moved close to her and kissed her. Kate’s heart drummed a thunderous, galloping beat that seemed to echo across the desert plain outside their tent.

  He paused long enough to whisper, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  He has? Who is he? she wondered, distracted by how her body responded to his proximity. She wanted to hold him, even though he was a stranger. He pushed her gently into the bed of pillows, one hand supporting her back as he lowered her into a reclining position. His lips sent shivers through her. He kissed her cheeks, her neck. The fingers of his free hand interlaced with hers and he raised their joined hands above her head as his body came to rest atop hers. He pressed her arm back into the cushions above her head. Kate surrendered. His fingers beneath her back parted her clothing and found her skin. In the soft golden glow of the lantern light, his blue eyes glimmered when he opened them. They stared directly into Kate, into her soul, which was crying out for him.

  Recognition flashed through her as his gaze pierced her eyes and seared the back of her skull.

  “Will!” Her voice was a hungry rasp. “Will, I remember you.”

  “I thought you never would,” he said with a smile, his mouth sinking into hers. He flowed through her; he moved like a desert wind across her body and into it. Kate was suddenly alive, suddenly remade, suddenly completed. Outside the tent, she heard the beating of drums—strange drum beats, and the soft chanting of an old song that awakened some dormant part of her soul.

  ***

  “Where are we?”

  “Does it matter?” Will asked, sitting up where he lay beside Kate. The soft orange glow from the lantern dressed the contours of his body in shadow and light. He smiled and his dimple appeared as he put on his shirt.

  “Don’t,” she said, touching his arm to stop him.

  “Oh, you little . . . you’d just love it if I simply paraded around nude all the time, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head, unable to maintain a straight expression as he tried to frown at her for being so indulgent in him.

  “Well,” Kate said, shrugging. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. That’s my motto. But I’m not very good at following it myself, so I let other people keep it for me.”

  “Sorry Kate, now that I’ve had a chance to soak up the afterlife, I really have a sense of modesty that I didn’t have when I was alive,” he explained as his head popped out of the top of his white linen shirt. Kate smiled—he looked so good in it, all she wanted to do was pull it off him.

  “OK fine, but at the very least, leave your pants off,” she pled in a joking tone. She continued to recline in the mountain of soft pillows.

  “Ha, you wish. I’m not too keen on that idea, actually. If you’d caught me fifty years ago, maybe then. Maybe. But we’ve been over that . . . that name . . . whatever you called me once, man-whore? Man-whore phase.” He shook his head. “I still can’t get over it. Anyway, I was old-fashioned and kind of modest, even then.” He stepped into his pants, stood and pulled them up, tying the drawstrings quickly and then plopping back down beside Kate. “So, what about you?”

  “Modest? Ha. A man calling himself modest. Sounds so, so odd. As for me, I thought I’d just lay here for the rest of the dream.”

  “Naked?”

  “You don’t love the idea?”

  “No—I—uh, do, I love it. Just, well—” he scratched the back of his head, looking perplexed. Kate frowned and suppressed the cold chill of worry at the thought that she was ugly or undesirable. There must have been some other reason for his hesitation.

  “Wow, ouch,” she whispered, sitting up and retrieving her clothing. She paused, wondering momentarily if she needed to ph
ysically dress herself, or if her mind could take care of that. She moved to a part of the bed away from Will and sat down, getting ready to pull her dress on. Maybe she could just imagine herself in clothes and it would work. She still hadn’t figured out all the intricacies of the dream-law.

  “Kate, Kate, it’s not that,” Will said, crawling toward her. He flopped over on his back like a cat and wormed his way closer to her till he was looking at her upside down. “You’re beautiful, you know that, right? Which is why,” he paused. Kate was covering her mouth slightly with one hand, trying to suppress a laugh. He frowned. “What? What’s so funny?”

  “You. You make me chuckle,” she said, leaning over him to give him a kiss. When she pulled away, his eyes had gone all glassy with primal desire.

  “Come back,” he mumbled.

  “I thought we were getting dressed,” Kate said.

  “We were.”

  “But don’t you want to explore?”

  “I did.” He flipped over and tackled her. She laughed and returned his passionate kisses. His chest heaved with deep breaths as he devoured her face and neck with his mouth. He stopped suddenly.

  “This is why I wanted to get dressed, Kate. See? I can’t resist you. I don’t want to resist you. You make me an animal.”

  “Oh? Oh. I get it now. Sorry for being so sexy and amazing. You should have said something,” she apologized. He rolled off her and crawled to the edge of the bed of pillows and stood up.

  “I was trying, and then you kissed me, and your breasts were in my face, and what sort of man can resist that temptation?” He laughed, blushing.