by Kat Turner
Bemusement brought a knitted element to Brian’s gentle face. “I appreciate the gesture, but how? You’re in exquisite shape, but you don’t strike me as the bodyguard sort.”
Helen lifted her bottom off of the couch, leaned up, and pressed her mouth to Brian’s. She massaged and nibbled his top and bottom lips, treating each to equal attention.
Lavishing, she willed magic into the union of their flesh, pretending she could bless a kiss with the power to cure his pain.
A moan left his throat, and he kissed her back. He deepened their contact, moving a hand to rub the back of her head, his skilled lips sucking hers. His taste, minty fresh, its uniqueness woody-sweet, spun her into a cloud of arousal.
She slid her tongue in to take his inviting, warm and wet cave. At her invasion, a startled little growl, a sound male and animal and so damn raw, leapt from Brian.
Tongues nudged, stroked, savored. She licked his teeth, diving deeper, and allowed her hand to rove to his trim abdomen. Helen sent her wandering and shameless hand to his waistband.
Brian’s tongue stiffened against hers. His probes grew faster and deeper, became sublimated fucking. Oral thrusts claimed her. The grip in her hair tightened. She matched him plunge for plunge, her tongue as bold and curious as his. Her hand, equally so, ventured down and touched his full erection over his jeans. The hard length of him, so long and wide, pushed stiffness into cloth. She stroked his bulge and landed at a wide crown close to his waistband.
He groaned into her mouth, a pained sound of need, crushing their lips into urgent congress.
Helen rubbed Brian’s swollen tip, the pads of her index and middle fingers gathering hot friction against denim. His heart sounds merged with hers. The musky scent of his excitement drifted up. She fumbled with the snap on his jeans, ready to kneel before him and make him feel incredible. Because this man deserved a great blowjob, and so much more. More than she could give, but she’d damn sure offer whatever she could.
Brian broke the kiss. Lips swollen and wet, he looked at her like she was a scrumptious meal he wanted to devour. “Not the best idea.”
“Right. Need to stay on track. Research.”
“Research mode requires cold shower. Be right back.” Brian brushed a kiss to her cheek, rose, and walked down the hallway. Water ran.
Helen lost her grip to a bizarre, uncanny relative of déjà vu. She blinked, spacey. A misty whirlpool coiled below her navel, whipping in frantic circles, gathering steam. This sensation marked the onset of curse activity, a type of clarion call.
While she awaited the energy’s rushing from her body and darting in the direction of the crystal, Helen reached for her bag. From now on, she’d track nefarious behavior in her journal and search for patterns.
A whoosh, as deafening as a howling gust in a wind tunnel, blew into Helen’s skull. She fell to her side, equilibrium gone and mind empty. But the hurricane inside kept churning when the force should have zipped out of her by now.
“Lift your right arm.” The slick male voice from Nerissa’s house and the fair paralyzed her with fright.
Though she’d all but forgotten about him, he hadn’t disappeared. He’d been dormant, lying in wait. Plotting.
“No,” she whispered, clamping a hand over the arm in question for good measure.
A string of words in an unknown language followed. Helen’s fingers and toes numbed, becoming as dead and heavy as rubber. A rumble quaked inside of her, and black horror bobbed to her surface.
“Lift your right arm.”
“No.”
A flash of movement and the outline of a person attracted Helen’s attention to the window overlooking the city. Fear zipped around her system, making her surroundings crystal clear and sharp as sizzling tingles piqued her nerves.
The petals of the lilies, tips as pointed as forked tongues, popped into ominous relief.
Rain beaded glass, slashing diagonal splatters. Watery streaks painted an apparition in the window. The double of Helen stood there, smiling like a maniac.
This was no simple reflection. Though she wore an identical outfit of jeans and a T-shirt, she stood while Helen sat.
The male voice grunted more of the spooky language. “Raise your right arm.”
The double in the window complied, bringing her limb to hover at hip’s length in a creepy, zombielike pose.
Clicks, snorts, and harsh syllables lacking the harmonious curvature of vowels bombarded Helen’s ears. “Lift. Your. Right. Arm.”
Unable to look away from the clone, Helen lost a battle to hold on to her faculties. Zoned out, she watched in shock as her arm shot up into the air.
“Excellent, excellent, excellent. Now we find something sharp to put in our hand.”
Hysterical laughter followed the male voice’s declaration. The clone joined in, adding to a cackling frenzy, and dematerialized.
Helen snapped back to clarity. Her arm flopped to her side.
“You alright?” Brian walked into the living room.
Nope, but no point in alarming him. She’d spoken too soon when allowing herself to slide into fantasies about beating this thing with her wits and moxie. No, an opponent of this magnitude called for heavy-duty witchcraft. Big-ass spells.
As soon as she got back to Minneapolis, she’d get to work on levelling up her skills, but for now she’d have to wing it. In the meantime, she could team up with Brian on the hunt for clues—anything they could dredge up that could lead her to a stopgap.
“Fine. Let’s find some ammo to help us beat this thing.”
Ten
Brian thumbed through a few pages of Helen’s arcane book, pausing on a fascinating yet foreign illustrated portion before moving on. The research session reached a lull, the sort of comfortable silence he hadn’t enjoyed with another person in ages.
Typing on her laptop with soft clacks, she lay on her stomach, stretched across the floor of his penthouse suite with her legs bent in the air and crossed at the ankles. Her posture of comfort and ease mellowed him.
His back resting against the couch as he sat on the floor, he watched with respect as she worked. Outside, rain tapped a calming drumbeat. A realization hit. In this moment, he didn’t need to move or hustle or plan. Didn’t need to order anyone around. Didn’t need to worry. He could unplug from the fame circus and be, if only until they spoke of their problem again.
His thoughts drifted to his past, before everything went sideways and barking mad with the soon-to-be-fired Joe. His mind open, the sensation serene and thoughtful, he considered new possibilities. Not everyone who was into esoteric things was like Joe and his goons. His mum certainly wasn’t.
And now, cozied up with the mysterious woman who’d taken control of his emotions with her passionate kiss, Brian craved understanding about what made her tick as much, if not more than, he wanted a solution to his predicament.
Helen rolled to her side and stretched. The mermaid pose highlighted her voluptuous curves, and craving stirred below his belt. Where was his restraint? On most days he possessed sexual continence in droves, but on this one his hormones wrestled control out of his erstwhile iron grip.
When they’d kissed, he’d felt more than lust, though he’d felt plenty of that. But their kiss left an impression on him, one that transcended the ranks of sex.
He’d escaped with her to someplace he’d never been. Not with any other woman, even his wives. With her, he escaped from himself, from a certain cold inaccessibility he projected to keep other people at a safe distance. When Helen melted his defenses with her kiss, his heart grew.
And for that, despite whatever she’d done or thought she’d done, he would remain in her debt. Whether they—or, rather, she—needed to talk about the kiss or forget, he couldn’t say. For now, the pleasure of her company sufficed.
“How long have known you were different? In possession of these abilities?” he asked.
“Since I was a teenager. But back then I didn’t have a name for it. I thought
I was a mess, broken in some fundamental way, and so did the families. Therapists said I had episodes of disassociation and depersonalization related to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but that never felt like a complete explanation. I’m sure trauma was a factor, but I suspected more.”
Interest in her history took the place of an urge to get her naked. “Families?”
Her posture stiffened. She flipped back to her belly-down position.
“Foster families,” she muttered, fingers clacking over keys like she wanted the sound to muffle her words. Her shoulders cranked up to her ears.
“Sore subject? I don’t mean to pry.” And he didn’t. She’d open up when, and if, she felt ready. The woman didn’t owe him her life story.
“Ugh, it’s fine. Yeah, it’s sore, but that’s on me. I really need to let that wound heal.” She typed, poking a key a bit too hard.
He slid along the front of the couch, bringing himself within touching distance. “Why is it sore, if you don’t mind me asking? If you do mind, feel free to respond with ‘piss off, Brian’ or similar.”
She humored him with a quick chuckle. “No, I’m not that volatile or reactionary anymore, thank goodness. But I suppose there’s a part of me that blames myself for the fact that I never got adopted. Before that, my life was one intense thing after another. My father’s suicide, my mom’s psychotic break, Child Protective Services getting involved. There’s this part of me that’s always wondered if I was some kind of cursed person from the get-go, flawed to the core, attracting bad things.”
“You aren’t flawed to the core. I think you’re wonderful. You endured a bout of bad luck and walked away from it with poise and strength. I admire your tenacity. You’re a fighter.”
“Yeah, well, it gets hard to believe you have worth when your mother is tying you up in the basement, shaving your head and doing exorcisms on you. And then you go to school with rope burns and no hair, and all of the teachers assume you’re a stupid girl acting out for attention. And then it gets worse. Yay you.” A shaky undercurrent jostled her hardened words.
Her hands shook as if her body was mirroring the cracking of fault lines beneath her rocky surface.
Brian sure could relate to such an aggressive effort to block pain, the act one enacts due to lack of trust, a skittish fear of others. He squeezed the arch of her foot and massaged the sole with his thumb. “I’m sorry that happened to you. Sounds awful, like something I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. You deserved a stable life and a proper head start.”
With a definitive jerk, Helen pulled her foot out of his grip. His heart sank. What had he done?
“It’s fine. Ignore my self-pitying bullshit. The past is gone. Over. You find anything useful in that book?”
“I apologize. Did I hurt you? Touch you wrong?”
“No. I said it’s fine. Anything of value turn up in the big book of weird?”
Though Brian reeled from her retreat, he heeded her call to switch subjects and returned to reading pages full of various languages and eerie drawings. Avoiding difficult emotions by way of productivity was his forte, so he could respect Helen’s move.
Her apparent tendency to repress via labor also evidenced traits in common, albeit a sad alignment of broken pieces. Maybe he’d found the right woman at long last, someone whose cluster of pathologies mirrored his own.
A bizarre, unintended noise, steeped in a muddle of ironic amusement and childlike delight, sneaked out of Brian’s mouth.
She flipped her hair, shooting him a side-eye that betrayed the faintest flutter of vulnerability. “What the fuck was that, you swallow a whoopee cushion?”
He flinched, but not at the sound of her curse. She’d called him out, something he never experienced from the disingenuous flunkies who hung around the perimeter of his world.
“You remind me of myself sometimes is all.”
“Um, huh? I’m neither rich, nor famous, nor talented.”
“I meant your defense mechanisms. And of course you’re talented. I don’t see why you downplay your many positive traits with self-deprecation.”
“I feel so seen.” She fixed him in the crosshairs of her askance look. But now the corner of her mouth curved and a twinkle shone in her eye.
Moving a piece on his mental chessboard, Brian allowed a pause to linger. Just a few seconds, enough time for her to process the fact that he was thinking of her. “I do see you.”
The look passing between them drew intrigue, trepidation, and a hell of a lot of attraction into a strong field. Brian ran a single finger over the bottom of Helen’s foot, watching with delight as her sole curled like a caterpillar. He sucked his bottom lip. He’d love to make her toes curl from a different kind of stimulation.
“You’re a total player.” In one swift, fluid motion suited to a person gifted with superior balance and equilibrium, she scooped up her laptop and vaulted her body to sit beside him.
The teasing way she’d called him a player, combined with how she moved to get closer to him, betrayed the inviting nature of her retort.
Helen’s fragrance, smoky and floral, drifted from the lazy coils of her brown hair.
“Why would you call me that?” Though he tried to mask the sultry ache in his inflection with a cloak of neutrality, his speech insisted on coming out all low and rumbling.
She quirked her lips like she knew where treasure was hidden. He longed to see the riches inside her guarded, compelling mind as much as he craved the sight of her sexy body naked.
“You’re disarming. I’m sure you have quite the effect on women.”
“Do I have an effect on you?”
“Casting aspersions on you asking a question you already know the answer to, ego man.”
Helen pretended to read a webpage, scrolling down a wall of text though the waxy gloss over her eyes unveiled disinterest in the content. But her body heat, and the instinctual way she angled herself toward him, radiated sexual chemistry.
Brian neglected his sexual and emotional needs, sure, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t read women. “Is that why you kissed me? To cast your aspersions?”
One of her shoulders bent, the gesture an overblown attempt to convey nonchalance. “I kissed you because I’m attracted to you.”
The harder he worked to assemble her behaviors into some semblance of a coherent whole, the more insecurity emerged in the big picture of Helen. And he didn’t blame her, after surviving severe neglect and navigating the emotional wasteland.
She slackened beside him but still pretended to read.
The woman dared him to get close to her, offering tiny concessions. It struck Brian that, perhaps, she lacked the lexicon of social skills or vocabulary required to approach him with authentic assertiveness. Yet she’d been so assertive at the fair.
Which factors pushed her in one direction or the other, swung her pendulum to the brash or meek extremes? Did an in-between exist, a resting state of balance?
Instead of delving into her psyche more than he already had, he chose to open a bit of his own malfunctioning prototype of a heart. “My mum saw a palm reader—or psychic, I can’t remember which—a couple of months ago. She called me up in tears, ecstatic, saying how the woman delivered information about my sister who died. How she was at peace. Happy. In a good place. Mum’s been doing a lot better since then. So I’m not opposed to the idea that there’s more out there. And that whatever that more is, that it can be good. In some sense I welcome the idea. Adds mystery to life. Comfort. Meaning.”
Helen closed her laptop. Matching his stare with a searching look, she rubbed a circle on the closed notebook. “I’m sorry about your sister. What happened?”
“She was a baby. Got sick with the croup. We lived on a farm, middle of nowhere near the Scottish border, and health care wasn’t great. My mum always blamed herself, no matter how much we reassured her. But now she’s stopped.”
Brian couldn’t quite list all of the reasons he chose to tell Helen this. But
seated beside her in an anonymous hotel room, listening to the rain, he took pleasure in talking with her.
He liked her. She was prickly yet compassionate, genuine but aloof in a way that heightened his interest. A beautiful knot of harmonious contradictions, she interested him on mental and physical levels. Her layers stirred him to song.
Human connection, even if an illusion of the connection he was loathe to admit he yearned for, provided solace.
As a younger and more reckless man with endless access to women, he’d found false bonding in fleeting road relationships, temporary partners held close for a couple of nights. He now understood that confusing love with sex was a mistake, but he could enjoy emotional intimacy with Helen if they steered clear of physical coupling and its tendency to create attachment. His tendency to form attachments. Brian knew himself by now and avoided casual sex for distinct, clear reasons.
“Are you close with your family? I love hearing stories about happy families. They give me hope,” she said.
Noted. He’d have to censor the uglier parts of his filial saga, which suited him fine. He could talk about Mum and Dad and Alan without having to fib. “I call my parents every couple of weeks, my brother a few times a year. Visit yearly. Our lives are as different as can be, but we take comfort in each other. I enjoy hearing about day-to-day life on the farm, how the animals are faring. Keeps me grounded.”
“When did you move to London? Didn’t the band meet in London and break into the music scene fairly young? I thought I remembered hearing that in an interview.”
Empty pain unspooled beneath his ribs. He rubbed his knuckles, easing a bit of the ever-present soreness out of his joints and bidding adieu to the concept of self-censoring. “I moved there when I was thirteen, to live with my grandmother. My parents thought I needed more opportunities to hone and pursue my musical talent.”
“It paid off in spades. I want to say ‘good call, Mum and Dad,’ but I sense from your tone that the whole thing was a mixed bag at best?”