Mike and Harry laughed loudly, and Ara just screamed, trying to dodge the stream of water—not quite able to gather her wits and retaliate or even escape. Watching her run about the yard like a schoolgirl without any combat training made me worry for her. If she found herself in a dangerous or hostile situation, it was clear her body would go into flight mode—provided escape was even possible. It was the same thing that had happened when I attacked her; she just shut down that day, did nothing to help herself.
“Stop it!” she squealed, but Mike was enjoying himself too much to stop. It seemed his new lease on life—the one he’d found since he and Emily sorted out their shit—had allowed him to once again enjoy the simple things, and the simple things seemed to be a relationship with Ara. They hadn’t been close in decades; hadn’t mucked around or joked with each other. I hadn’t seen Mike smile at her that way in a very long time. But with Emily pregnant, I supposed Ara was less of a threat now, which allowed Mike the freedom to be the friend he’d missed being. Which also made me see why Emily had forbid it in the first place. There was too much love behind that smile, and what hurt Emily was that the love had no true bearing. It was the result of a curse and it felt incredibly unfair. Even to me.
I was about to step in and end this gleeful charade when Ara jerked around reflexively and, as she put her hand out to protect herself from another blast of cold water, the stream stopped mid-air before reversing itself and saturating Mike and Harry.
I stood in check while the others just laughed like it was the most normal thing in the world. But it wasn’t. Not to me. Ara hadn’t used her Cerulean Magic since she came back to life—not around me at least—and it just hit me as further evidence that my Ara was surfacing a little bit more every day. And then it sunk in—sunk through me—that I’d misinterpreted what Vicki had said to me that day: Ara was burying her old self until she felt safe to bring her out again. I didn’t need to beat it out of her—punish her until she obeyed me and became her old self. I needed to love it out. I’d heard Vicki when she said that, but I hadn’t truly understood it until now.
When Ara looked at me, I laughed as though I had been the whole time. Not even Mike seemed to notice that this was the first time she’d exposed her old self around any of us, or perhaps he did and just wasn’t making a big deal out of it. Which, I decided, was a capital idea. She didn’t need attention brought to it. She just needed to move on with her life.
“Oh my goodness!” Vicki shrieked, stepping outside. “Look at the state of you. Both of you!”
The very wet and orange Ara and Harry laughed, pinching the cold clothes off their bodies as they walked back to the porch.
“He started it.” Ara laughed, pointing at Mike.
“And you ended it,” he called, flapping his wet shirt.
Ara laughed again, which made Vicki smile. “Looks like you had fun.”
“We did.” Ara nodded.
“And Mom used telekinesis,” Harry informed, showing Vicki the bat.
“That’s great,” she said, not making too big a deal of it. “Now come on in, Harry. I’ll take you up to get cleaned.” She took his hand and looked at the both of us, shaking her head. “And you two better do the same before I have to wash the floors again.”
As the front door opened, I could smell pumpkin soup cooking, and my stomach turned. I’d had enough pumpkin for one day. I decided then that I’d be taking Ara and Harry out for lunch instead. My body, heart, and even my soul wanted more time with them—alone. That moment over there by the lake, with the wind moving the trees and our son engaged in supernatural activities, had felt, for the first time in so long, like it used to be. It felt like home. It felt good. And I needed to feel good with them again.
“You can use my shower,” I said to Ara, leading her inside. “And hurry up. We’re leaving in half an hour.”
“Leaving?”
I nodded, heading up the stairs. “We’re going out for lunch. Just the three of us.”
She smiled.
47
Ara
I came out of the shower a pumpkin-free woman and started across David’s room to the door. In the adjoining room, I could hear Harry talking to Vicki, and I thought I heard David in there too, until his form shifted near the fireplace and scared the living hell out of me.
“Sorry,” he said with a laugh. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m always a bit more vulnerable when I’m naked.”
His eyes shifted to my towel as if he only just realized I was naked under it.
“You’re clean,” I noted, taking in his loose-fitting jeans and cream urban-style t-shirt. He looked good. And fresh, and he smelled divine.
“I used Mike’s shower. He and Em are still hosing everything down out front.” He looked at the book in his hand then and set it down on the lamp table near the armchair. “You want a shirt to put on to go across the hall?”
I listened to the buzz in the house—to Harry and Vicki, the other door to that room opening out right onto the hallway where I would have to pass. “Um, yeah. Thanks.”
He moved over to his wardrobe and turned on the light, his shadow stretching out across the floorboards. I could’ve just walked across the hall in my towel—the woman who raised me in my teen years and my eight-year-old son wouldn’t care—but I wanted David’s shirt. On my naked body.
The light went out and David’s bare feet appeared in my line of sight, bony and long from under his jeans. My eyes followed the slender line of his legs to the slight curve of his waist, stopping on the shirt he held out to me.
“Thanks.” It was soft and smelled just like him as it slipped down my body, and when I pulled the towel away and the fabric touched my skin, a hot rush of desire made my limbs sort of weak. It made me think about his hands, his skin, his chest, how it would feel pressed to mine. I almost told him to cancel lunch out and take off his clothes. And when I looked up to meet his eyes, I knew for certain that I wanted him to cancel. I just didn’t know how to say it. What if he rejected me? What if he said he didn’t want me, or he wasn’t ready yet? I wasn’t sure I could handle that.
When my eyes went absently to the book he’d been reading, he took a reflexive step into my line of sight, which piqued my curiosity.
“What were you reading?” I asked, walking past him.
“Nothing.” He reached in quickly and snatched the book when I picked it up. I only got to see a date on the side and a bit of handwriting inside before it was gone. But it was enough to tell me the book was, in fact, a journal I had written sometime after I met David.
I turned around, smiling competitively. “Why can’t I look at it? I wrote it.”
“It’s…” He walked toward the bookshelf framing Harry’s door. “You don’t need to see this stuff. Read a more recent one.”
“Why?” I followed him. “Is there horrible stuff in there about you?”
“No.”
“Is it bad stuff that happened to me?”
He stopped walking, keeping his back turned. “Some.”
“Why would you read it then?”
A heavy second of thought passed over him, his hand smoothing the cover. “I guess I need to see that…”
“That?”
“That she did recover—in the end.”
“Recover?” I slowly walked up behind him.
“From all she suffered. I suppose I was looking for some evidence, or maybe reminding myself, that we can come out of this.”
“Out of what?”
He turned to me, his face soft with sadness. I knew what he meant then. It never occurred to me that we were ‘in’ anything, but I guess we were. Here I was just trying to live my life, and he was standing right there waiting for it to end. Waiting for me to disappear and for his wife to come back. I nodded, but I couldn’t look at him. It hurt too deeply.
“Hey.” He tilted my face up. “What’s wrong?”
“I used to wonder if you would h
appily accept my death if it meant your wife would come back.”
“Ara—”
“No. It’s okay. I do get it. Really. I just…” I took a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t wonder anymore. I know now, for certain.”
“It’s not like that, sweetheart.” He wrapped one arm around me, pressing my face and my wet hair into his nice chest. “Don’t you get it? If Ara ever surfaces, you won’t vanish. I don’t want you to. I love you. And you’d still be you. You’d just have all your old memories as well.”
I rolled my face up to look at him. His vibrant green eyes smiled back down, so full of love and compassion that I smiled too, taking a small step away. Then, with a quick flip of my hand, snatched the book from his.
“Hey!” He tried to grab it, but I turned quickly and opened it. I read only two lines—something about my father being evil, but I’d referred to him as King Drake—before David snatched it back.
“I wasn’t done reading!” I jumped up in the air and tried to grab it, but he was so much taller than me. He only needed to hold it above his head so I couldn’t reach.
“I’m not letting you read this yet.” He switched hands a few times as I kept trying to grab it, laughing.
“Not fair!” I jumped again and my fingers almost touched it. “You’re taller than me.”
“And quicker,” he said. But we both knew that wasn’t true.
“Yeah, well, you’re also human.”
“And?” he challenged, daring me to try something.
I looked at the patch of skin where his briefs showed above his jeans and where his shirt came up with his arms extended, and rushed for it. “You’re also ticklish!”
The book hit the floor hard as he folded over, but when my hands connected with his skin, my mission was no longer to get that book. I wanted him. Naked and on top of me. I wanted his breath across my face and the wetness of his lips cooling mine.
I kept digging my fingertips into his waist until he landed on the floor, then I jumped on top of him, weaving my hands through his chicken-wing arms to get to his ribs. But as I lifted his shirt, his eyes went wide and, though he laughed it off, I saw panic there right before he flipped me over and threw me down softly onto the rug near the foot of his bed.
The air was filled with breathy laughs and a kind of energy that was so vibrant and tingly I had to admit that he was right; Ara would have loved the human version of him. He was lovely and sweet and playful. I liked how his face went red when he laughed and how he sometimes couldn’t catch his breath. I liked the sound of his thumping heart—how it gave me signals about his desires, no matter what they were. And as he laid there half on top of me, my legs parted around his hips, my naked skin touching his warm denim jeans, I knew he wanted the same thing as me.
He leaned down into his hands and kissed my mouth, his nose pressing my cheek, his stubbly chin grazing mine. I parted my lips to let his tongue in, tasting him like he was a flavor I’d always wondered about. I wanted to commit all of him to memory. Even the slightly stale taste of coffee on his breath. But as things heated up and I put my hands up his shirt to push it off, he drew a very sudden breath and jerked back. “We have to stop.”
“Why?”
“I just…” He leaned forward and picked up the book off the floor. “We’re supposed to be going out to lunch.”
“Screw lunch.” I wrapped my bare legs around his hips to make my point, feeling my patch of hair go flat against his jeans.
And he just laughed, reaching to place the book on his bed. But as he extended his long body past my face, his shirt fell loose, and I got a very good look at why he was so defensive. My heart slipped into his nightmare in a singular cold flush, my mouth filling with saliva, making it hard to swallow. What on earth had he been through?
Without his consent, I shoved my hands up his shirt and lifted it so fast it was above his nipples before he felt its absence.
“Ara!”
“What happened?”
He scooted away from me and covered his scars. But they were etched into my eyes. I could map out every single one of them now and I just wanted to cry.
“Tell me what happened!” I demanded, getting onto my knees. He shuffled back as I moved closer, and when he was finally cornered against the armchair, I reached across and touched his shirt.
“Don’t. Please,” he said, pinning it down in tight fists.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t talk about it. I…”
“Then I won’t ask,” I said. “I promise.”
He shook his head, closing off from me like a scared, rigid child.
“David, please.” I shuffled a knee-space closer and let my breast fall against his upper arm, my lips a breath away from his jaw. “I need to see.”
“Why?”
“Because I care about you. And you clearly hide these from me—from everyone—”
“Of course I do, Ara.”
“Don’t.” I stopped him as he turned away, curling my fingertips around the hem of his shirt. “Not from me, okay?”
He tensed, staring with a hard face at the floor as I lifted the shirt up. The inch of skin above his jeans was perfect, as it should be, but beyond that, starting at the base of his ribs and devastating his chest, it was clear he’d been cut deeply many times. There were two thick and still-red scars in squares on each side of his ribs, and a very jagged circular one around his left nipple, as if it had been cut off and sewn back on.
He tightened up a little more as I motioned for him to raise his arms, and when he did, I saw why. Everything outside of his chest area was perfect—untouched—as though these injuries were done deliberately there to hide them. The squared scars on his ribs were nothing on the other cuts, which were very obviously stab wounds, and as I accidentally touched the thick skin of a wound, it became apparent that I’d felt a scar before. I just hadn’t realized it was a scar, nor had I realized it wasn’t normal to have a scar on his penis. My mind went back to the closet, where I’d had it in my mouth, deriving images from the touch that I couldn’t possibly have fathomed back then.
His shoulders were the worst, though—criss-crosses of angry red ridges, some white in places—and when I shuffled around to look at his back, his shoulders curled in obvious shame, my breath leaving my lungs in a barely restrained sob. Whoever did this had fun doing it—made a joke of it. His back had been carved out like a chessboard, skin left in places and taken in chunks in others. It was smooth skin versus scars, and the creator had a masterful hand with a scalpel.
“I was once regarded as the most skilled torturer in the Drakarian monarchy,” he said quietly. “Second only to Morgana.”
“This is strategic pain-causing,” I whispered, gently touching the tip of my fingers to the scars. He flinched a little but didn’t pull away. “Does it hurt still?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I was healed at Loslilian General by some first-class surgeons and some advanced vampire medicine, but this is the best result they could get. It’s just sensitive because no one’s ever touched it before.”
“Has anyone seen it?”
His head moved in another no. “There were the few that rescued me from the tombs, but…”
“But?”
“There was a lot of blood. No one really knows the true extent of the damage.”
I slid my hand around to his stomach and pressed my cheek to his shoulder. “I’m sorry this happened to you, David.”
“It was far less than…” He stopped, and I got the sense that he wasn’t sure whether to say ‘than you suffered’ or ‘than my wife suffered’.
I gave him a firm squeeze with loving arms, afraid to move in case he closed off again and refused to talk to me. A door had been opened, and I wanted him to finally tell me what had happened to them in those tombs.
“What are you doing?” He turned at the waist to look back at me when I slipped his phone from his pocket.
“I’m calling Mike.”
“Wh
y?”
“Mike,” I said when he picked up, ignoring David. “We’re not coming down for lunch.”
“Oh. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I… uh… we just need to talk, is all.”
“Got it. Say no more,” he said. “We’ll take care of Harry.”
“Thanks, Mike.”
“Anytime.”
When I hung up the phone, David had a worried look. “Why did you do that?”
“Because…” I shuffled around on my knees to the front of him, relaxing down onto my legs after. “You’re going to tell me why she chose to etch a chessboard into your back, and then you’re going to tell me what happened here.” I pointed to the jagged nipple scar. “And here”—I aimed my finger to the squares on his ribs—“and then you’re going to tell me why you look so haunted when you mention what she did to me.”
“To Ara.” He sat down on his butt, head in hands, elbows propped on his knees.
“No.” I knelt up and pulled his hand down. “To me. I don’t remember what happened, but it did happen, and one day, it might just come back and hit me. I need to know so it won’t be such a shock when it does.”
He considered me for a moment, one eye slightly narrowing before he shut them both and sighed. “Morgana placed a hex on me once—made me hate you. We almost broke up over it. When I found out, I beat the flesh off her face with my bare hands.”
“Literally?”
“Literally.” He held my gaze with firm resolve, regretting nothing. “I did things that I’m not proud of that night—things I felt were justified at the time, but that I later felt like a monster for.”
“What kinds of things?”
“I…” He cleared his throat.
“David, just say it.”
“I cut off her breasts with a scythe.” He shuddered then as he broke down for a moment, burying his head again. When he finally found a voice to speak, he kept his face hidden between his knees. “I forced her to play a round of chess to decide which parts of her I’d cut next. Pawns were limbs—every time she lost one, I’d cut a limb. Knights were… orifices—”
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