I raised the photo across from me, trying to study it objectively. By the following spring the same picture would capture entirely different women. There would be Olivia’s determined innocence, a force so strong it would even outshine her brazen beauty. My physical power would be burgeoning, a strength born of total weakness.
And my mother? Zoe Archer wouldn’t be in the picture at all, I thought wryly. She had left before winter even swept its chill fingers over the valley.
“I have so many questions for you,” I murmured, running my finger along Zoe’s jawline. “Wherever you are.”
I considered that for a moment. My mother was alive, well, and someone knew her whereabouts. Yet she’d never bothered contacting Olivia or me, and that sat in my stomach like a ball of acid. I let the photo drop, let the memories drop away as well, and went into the bedroom to find Ben.
One object stood out more than any other in Ben’s bedroom: the bed itself, a king-sized monster with a padded leather headboard in deep mahogany, and a chocolate-colored duvet that made the whole thing appear layered in inky clouds. In it, during this, the deepest hour of night, was the man I loved. I stole up to his bedside and peered down at his face, wondering how best to wake him. After all, he was a cop, and by all evidence, used to sleeping alone. The last thing either one of us needed was for me to be looming over him when he awoke.
So I knelt by Ben’s side, breathing in the thick scent of a deeply sleeping man, and reached out to touch him. But I stopped as I caught sight of my fingers, pale in the thin light cast from the bedroom window, and I couldn’t help remembering what else they’d touched that night. A scimitar. A dead man’s body. Olivia.
I gasped at the last thought, jerked my hand away and stood in one swift motion. Ben didn’t even stir.
Like you don’t even exist.
I couldn’t wake him, not the way I was now. The last thing I wanted was to soil anything or anyone else with my touch, with what I’d become, and as I backed away, I wondered if I’d ever be clean again. My skin itched with the question. If I could have removed it, taken it from my body and bones in that moment, I would have. Instead, I settled for a shower.
For the longest time I stood under the spray, eyes closed, just letting the water scald and sting my skin. It pounded the thoughts from my head, drummed the echoes of Olivia’s screams from my ears, and washed away the filth that couldn’t be seen or scented but was seeping into my soul even now. I shook my head and refused to think about it. My muscles relaxed, my skin grew red, almost raw, and still I remained beneath the steady stream of wet heat, not wanting to move. Not ever again.
I thought I’d be too wired to relax completely, too aware of Ben’s presence in the next room, and of dawn’s steady approach, but I’d underestimated how exhausted I truly was. Somehow I managed to doze off still standing, leaning against the tiles like a beached bass waiting for another tide to come in.
I awoke to arms snaking carefully around my naked waist and a soft sigh catching in my ear. Goose bumps prickled down my neck and breasts and back, and I didn’t have to inhale to know it was Ben.
“Jo-Jo,” he said, feathering kisses along my earlobe, hands rising to cup my breasts as he moved in closer behind me. I tensed, realizing in some ultra-alert corner of my brain that I shouldn’t be doing this. I couldn’t. Not tonight, of all nights.
“Wait,” I said, half turning to him, hardly daring to meet his eyes. “We can’t.”
Ben smiled kindly, mistaking my reaction for plain-vanilla reticence, and why not? He had no idea what kind of night I’d had. He knew only that a handful of hours ago we were climbing into each other’s skin, and that now I had accepted the invitation into his home and then climbed into his shower.
“‘If we could decide who we loved, it would be much simpler, but much less magical.’”
That hit me. Not only had he just admitted he still loved me, but because he did it in the way we had when we were young, hiding behind the mask of a quotation, using someone else’s words to bolster our own softly blooming emotions.
“Who said that?” I asked, slicking my hair back with one hand as I looked up at him.
“The dudes who created South Park.”
A laugh burst out of me, strangled but strong, and I bent my head to his chest, shaking as my smile slipped into tears. For a long time Ben just held me, letting the water sluice along my shoulders and back, his hands still, chin resting on my head. He was giving me time, letting me know it’d kill him to back off now but he’d do it if that’s what I wanted.
My decision, at last, came out in a single smooth watery movement. I lifted my lips to Ben’s and released the weight of my own pain, just let it wash down the drain along with every other thought in my mind.
The soap had cleansed me, the water warmed me, but it was only with Ben’s touch that the nerve endings beneath my skin began to skirt back to life. He ran his hands down my arms, gripped my waist, then skimmed them gently along my hips. All the while he kissed me, a soft exploring pressure against my mouth that tasted like musky sunshine and was the most solid thing I’d ever known. Passion rolled through me, quaking through my core at first, then causing my limbs to curl tightly around him. The selfish and greedy part of me that still wanted to live, to thrive, even after all I’d seen and done that night, reached out to Ben, opening to him, and overrode the numbness threatening to encase my soul.
We switched places, nearly slipped, and used each other’s flesh to right ourselves again. Ben was as voracious as I was, and we laughed when we met with teeth instead of tongues, bit instead of kissed, and when we bruised instead of brushed the flesh we’d waited a decade to touch again.
He shifted, leaning back beneath the spray, and pulled me along with him. Water pounded our skin, filled our ears and our open mouths, creating trails for us to track, liquid maps laid out over our bodies. Ben followed one over my neck and down to the slope of my breast, where it paused, cresting at my nipple. There, his tongue turned lazy, lingering and teasing until I dipped my head back, moaning, and arched into his mouth and arms.
The water snapped off suddenly, Ben muttered some dark demand against my skin, and I lifted my head in time to see him blindly pushing open the shower curtain before I was lifted from the tub, wrapped in a towel, and dried in short order. He never stopped kissing me. I never stopped kissing back.
“Now you,” I finally said, pulling back to offer him the towel.
His eyes lit on my face, as dark as a banked coal. “I’m not cold.”
I dropped my gaze, inspecting his body. No, he wasn’t.
He picked up a bottle and moved toward me. I let the towel drop.
He started from the top, kissing every place he touched both before and after slicking it with lotion. He grew distracted again when he reached my breasts and, I confess, so did I. His palms were wide and warm over the sensitive skin, his thumbs and tongue earnest in their circuitous exploration. I reached for him, but he moved away, poured more lotion, then lifted one of my legs as he leaned against the counter.
“How you doing over there, Jo-Jo?” he asked as his fingers worked my instep. I dropped back against the opposite wall of the tiny bathroom and stretched my leg toward him in reply. He chuckled, his hands moving higher.
“You going to slick my whole body?” I asked as he massaged my calf in broad strokes.
“That’s the plan.” His fingers slid past my knee. Our eyes locked, and I ran my instep along his hip, then his inner thigh, opening wider to him. He inhaled sharply, his eyes flicking down my body, narrowing when they returned to my face. Then my leg was thrown over his shoulder so fast I was gasping before his knees hit the ground. His hands moved over the inside of my thighs, flared over my stomach, and dropped to cup me from behind. I strained toward him, and he moaned, the echo sliding through my body, humming in my thighs. I bowed back, reaching for new sensations, and this time earned twin moans from us both. The silence in the room was punctuated only by our breaths
, catching and quickening, the breathy music of lovers improvising a duet.
He was feasting. More, he was watching me as he did it, eyes so dark and filled with such desperation, it was almost fierce. He licked slowly, savoring, and touched me deeper with his tongue. I moved my body into his, offering myself to him, and came a moment later with a cry that sounded distant, like it was coming from someone else entirely.
Ben dropped his head to my belly, weight pinning me while his heart thudded between my thighs. “I didn’t expect it,” he finally said, the words whispering against my stomach.
“Expect what?”
He lifted his gaze up to mine. “The sight of you. In my arms again.” He looked confused for a moment. “It’s devastating.”
I could only swallow hard at that. That, and watch him rise, our stare never breaking as he picked me up and carried me to his bed.
“I knew it,” Ben said, his voice scarcely more than a whisper. “I knew you’d come to me.”
He was propped up on one elbow beside me, his other hand exploring, taking his time. I nestled my head deeper into his pillow. “How? I didn’t even know.”
“I know things about you, Jo-Jo.” He smiled, and touched a finger to his breastbone. “In here. Probably things you don’t even know about yourself.”
I could have laughed at that. I could have said, “You have no clue who I really am,” and told him stories of first signs and conduits, and magic that allowed a person to walk the earth like a ghost. But I didn’t. He was too sincere, and so sure of his quiet belief in me—and in us—that I couldn’t shatter it. I wanted to believe it too.
“Like what?” I said instead. “Tell me something you know about me.”
“I’ll do better. I’ll show you.”
He leaned over, tenting his body above mine, and the hand that had been propping him up climbed into my hair. He pushed my thighs open with one of his, taking up residence in my most personal space…exactly, I thought, where he belonged. The sheets rustled around us, conforming to the new shape of our two bodies forming one, and I shut my eyes and inhaled deeply.
Ben’s scent was everywhere; on the pillowcases, in the air, clean and warm and dizzying as he bent over me. I lifted my head, pressing my lips to his, trying to coax some of that scent into myself. He kissed me back freely, unable to know what I was really seeking, but responding to the way I dug my fingers into his back, letting me set the pace. I sighed into his mouth, lifting one leg up his hip as my palms flattened and pressed over his back, and his skin was so hot it felt like I was raking burned silk.
I squeezed his bare hip with my right hand, then ran my nails along his outer thigh, my knuckles along the inner. As hard as he was, he stiffened further, and ground himself against me with a moan, trapping that hand. He moved his own fingers along my left side, half spanning my rib cage with his palm, dropping farther to my hip before settling beneath me, lifting me to him as he pressed from above.
He closed his eyes and whispered, “I want to go back a decade. I want to go back, and never let you go.”
I stilled, wondering how he could so clearly read the thoughts of my heart.
Go back. God, that sounded good. Back to being that girl who feared nothing, who was on the cusp of becoming the woman she was born to be, before God or fate or whatever personal dogma you hung your hat on intervened. I would do it too, in a nanosecond. I would go all the way back, and this time I’d protect her better. I’d never cross that midnight desert.
And that, I realized, was what I was really searching for night after night, as I snapped photos of the disenfranchised on the litter-strewn concrete streets and urinestained walls. Ben thought I was looking for the monster who’d taken a bite out of my young life. But I was really looking for her. For me.
“Okay,” I finally said, lifting my head, and freeing my hand to caress his flushed cheek as his eyes clouded. “Let’s go back now.”
“Yes,” he agreed, and began to lead me, slowly, kissing me lightly as his chest brushed my nipples, then harder as he opened me with one gliding caress, still cupping me from below. “Yes.”
He entered me smoothly, a key settling in its lock, a corner piece clicking home in a puzzle to make sense out of things not previously understood. I cried out with the rightness of it, and he dropped his forehead against mine, gasped into my mouth. And rocked.
I clasped my thighs around his waist and squeezed, then kissed him hard, and the shock I’d been in for the past few hours snapped so instantaneously that my life came flooding back to me—my life as it was meant to be, before I’d been touched by violence, or fate, or anyone and anything who wasn’t Ben Traina. That was when I knew I could face the dawn. With this to come back to, I thought, I could face anything at all.
Buried in me, Ben murmured against my cheek, infusing me with his scent and life and love…and his hope. Starved, I shifted, rolled and straddled him in one swift motion, lifting our hands so we were linked both above and below. He gazed up at me silently, his eyes twin brands regarding me brightly in the dark. The glow of the streetlight outside sent silver light skittering into the room, and our bodies were bathed with it as we set to a gliding rhythm. I could hear him, whispering to me in the silvery light, telling me things he’d bottled up for years, and in doing so, causing those years to melt into nothingness behind us.
Then, without warning, I began to shudder, the climax overcoming me in long arching waves—claiming us both—and driving us to a place that was neither in the present nor the past, but one reserved for the possible, the inevitable. The new.
“Jo-Jo?” Ben said after a bit.
“Hmm?”
“There’s one more thing I know about you.”
I cracked open one eye. “Already?”
“Not that,” he chuckled, and pressed a kiss to my forehead. “No…I know you still love me.”
I looked at him fully, then just watched him watching me before nodding my mute reply.
“You always have,” he said, with full confidence. “You always will.”
I stared past him and outside the window, where dawn waited impatiently. “I guess that’s how you knew to leave the door open for me.”
“Oh, Jo-Jo,” he said, sighing sleepily as he gathered me tight to his body. “It was never closed.”
I stayed still for as long as I could. I had no desire to break Ben’s embrace because I knew these final moments for what they were. Stolen. I felt it with every second marked by the bedside clock, I marked it myself with every steady exhale Ben released beside me, and I counted the moments until dawn using the pulse that beat under my fingers at his wrist.
Ben didn’t stir when I swung my legs over the bed. Of course, he wasn’t dreading dawn the way I was. He didn’t have any heavy decisions to make about joining a supernatural underworld. I watched his eyes move beneath his lids as he battled some sort of wafting image, and then they stilled and he fell deeper into his dreams. I envied him his peace, and wished it for us both.
After dressing, I went back into the living room and called for a cab. As I gave directions to the house, my eyes strayed to the photo I’d tossed onto the coffee table. I didn’t think Ben would mind if I borrowed it for a while. I could make a copy, give him back the original, and have at least one photo of my mother, my sister, and me all together. I’d long ago torn up the rest.
I found a pad of yellow Post-its, wrote down my intentions, and pressed the note onto the empty photo sleeve. There was a bookshelf along one wall, and the lowest level was lined with albums identical to the one I held. I longed to look at them all, to savor every picture and wonder at every moment captured while I’d been somewhere else. Perhaps someday. Right now, lacking the time, I simply slipped the album I was holding back into its place and turned to leave.
That’s when I saw the camera. It wasn’t a fancy one, not like the Nikon I used for my professional work; in fact, it wasn’t even what I would consider a real camera. It was one of the throwaway kinds p
eople bought when they forgot to bring their own on vacation with them. But it was all I had, all that was there, and I picked it up, suddenly wanting to capture this moment—the deep silence, the unsure light—everything that would change the moment I walked out of the house.
So I took the camera back to the bedroom, back where Ben had shifted to his side, his hip rising like a wave beneath the dark covers, his long legs running the length of the bed. Not wanting to risk the flash, I used the lightening sky to bring his features into relief, and when I snapped the picture, the click reported like a shot throughout the silent room. I lowered the camera to watch him sleep with my naked eye, and jumped when a horn honked outside. I should leave, I thought, before he could wake. I didn’t, though. Instead, I bit my lip and paused to consider him just a moment longer.
Just one more.
Holding my breath, I moved in closer, careful not to make a sound…not that it was necessary. I still possessed the aureole, and for a while longer, at least, I was still just another shadow layering the night.
When I was in place, Ben’s face framed by the primitive square of the cardboard lens, I stilled. Then softly, almost inaudibly, I whispered, “Ben?”
A pause, another deep inhalation, then the corner of Ben’s lips lifted ever so slightly. It was a lopsided smile, like his thoughts were only half formed, but it made me want to smile too. I clicked. I tucked the camera in my pocket. Then I left.
A sliver of sun peered over the eastern ridge of the valley, illuminating the peaks of the Black Mountains like jagged bruises against the face of the sky. The air lightened, spreading pastel swaths across the wide canvas, and I sucked in the first bright breath of dawn. After a moment’s more hesitation, I turned and strode into Room 8 of the Smoking Gun Inn, slamming the door behind me.
Warren was seated where I’d left him. I’d have wondered if he’d even moved, except there was another man with him, slouched on the edge of the bed. I ignored the newcomer and wordlessly tossed the photo I was carrying on the table in front of Warren. Only his eyes moved.
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