My incredibly articulate thought of “what the hell” was brought up short as I swallowed, folding my hands in my lap. I was not going to let this strange woman get to me.
Dolly glanced up at me, but only for half a heartbeat, and surreptitiously, as if she didn’t want me noticing she’d glanced my way. She shuffled the cards expertly, her pink nails flashing as she snorted. “You’re such a bitch, Mags,” she said, flipping the cards almost in the air as she rearranged the cards to chance again and again. I watched her hands, my heartbeat racing, watched the cards flash like silver fish between us.
Kane took a long pull on the cigarette, like a movie star from the forties, savoring the inhalation as deeply as a woman from the forties would—before the knowledge that the smoke could do any harm whatsoever to you had been found out. She blew the smoke out slowly and stalked over to us—fully ignoring Mags. Kane moved with purpose, almost going slowly, each foot finding its perfect spot to step, so that she moved like a predator, too, I realized.
Once Kane was beside us, she leaned against the wall, taking another pull on the cigarette as she regarded me with those violently blue eyes of hers. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she asked me softly, her head to the side in that curious way, staring at me intently, waiting for me to answer. I realized I’d been staring at the cigarette.
“No…not at all,” I murmured as Dolly chuckled behind her hand, shuffling through the cards one last time before leaving the stack of them perfect and neat on the wooden table in front of her.
She dealt the ten cards not even looking at the slick pieces of paper in her fingers. I only noticed this out of the corner of my eye, because I was really watching Kane. Watching as smoke wreathed her head like a halo, almost obscuring those too-blue eyes as she pulled again and again on the cigarette.
But Kane was watching me. I took the cards as she flicked the cigarette, the ash on the ends sailing in the air as light as breath. My fingers were numb with cold as I touched the cards, hyper-aware of how cool the air was in the space between Kane’s body and mine, hyper-aware of her eyes on me.
Dolly’s smile was wide, as if we were sharing a joke as her fingers curled around her own cards.
We played the game.
I’m not very good at card games. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t paying attention to the game, and I wasn’t paying attention to Dolly. She made occasional jokes, but—for the most part—we played it in silence. And Kane watched. The air around the woman may have been cold, but the heat of her gaze seemed to burn a line into my skin, tracing my curves, my hands, my form and face. I shivered beneath that intense gaze, and occasionally, I would lift my eyes to her. She looked away each time, slowly, carefully, as if it was imperative that we not lock eyes or exchange glances. She smoked through several cigarettes, always expertly lighting the next one from the stub in her long fingers, and rich blue smoke continued to rise around her face like she was an angel, and the clouds of heaven had parted so she could look through them down to me.
What was happening? I flipped cards and looked at numbers and spades and clubs and diamonds…and hearts. And my own heart beat a little faster, and my own face was warmed and red, and as I played the game with Dolly, it was the strangest thing…it was familiar. Dolly was familiar, yes, with her lilting, high-pitched laugh and her soft blonde ringlets. But this, too, was all familiar. The snipes and occasional jabs from Mags, the laughter and low, murmured conversation from the other women. The room with its tall walls of stained, antique wood, the red and black checkerboard floor, the antique furniture that gave off that scent that antiques do: a little musty, and a little like memories.
But the most familiar thing of all was Kane’s presence, beside me. Watching me. Making me shiver beneath her gaze.
Somehow, impossibly, Dolly was gathering the cards from beneath our hands, and declaring “I won again!” The cards flashed in her palms as she shuffled, crossing her legs and leaning back in her chair as she regarded me with a bemused quirk of her lips. “We can stop, now, Rose. I’ve beaten you too many times. Thanks for playing with me.”
My head was heavy, my eyes heavy-lidded as if I’d gone days without sleep, the smoke swirling about my face mingling with the wood smoke from the fireplace. Though a fire roared in the wide grate, the warmth didn’t reach us here, and my skin crawled with goosebumps. I could feel gazes on me, watching me, as if curious, but just as many of the women hadn’t given me the time of day or seemed to notice me in any way.
That was the strange thing. If I was an employee of this hotel, what was I doing hanging out with the owners?
And were there owners, or was it just Kane? And why did it feel like I’d done this before, known her before…as if these actions, this playing cards with Dolly while Kane smoked and watched, her eyes raking over my form, was as familiar as if I’d slipped on a well-worn glove?
I remember this line from a book my mother read me when I was a kid. I’m sure everyone’s read it: Alice in Wonderland. I didn’t particular like it—it was too confusing to me when I was eight, and I’ve never given it a chance since. But there was this one line that’s always stuck with me, that I’ve always remembered and thought about. And it was worth using now:
Curiouser and curiouser.
As if playing gin rummy before a roaring fire wasn’t strange enough, I then heard the plucked strings of a violin as a woman tuned it behind us. I felt as if I’d fallen backwards in time about a century as a woman with burnished brown hair, close-cropped to her skull, and wearing a suit just like Kane’s, drew a bow across the violin’s strings, eliciting an eerie, almost human sound of music.
And then she began to play.
She was very good. I didn’t recognize the melody, but I almost did, an old classical piece that Dolly began to tap her toe to as she placed the stacked and shuffled cards in front of her on the table, turning to listen to this music player. Is this what they did all day, I wondered, as I glanced around the room again. There was no television, no laptops, no smart phones that I could see, and that’s what I think was the strangest thing of all.
Cards and violin music and talking and laughter. It really was like a moment from the past as the cigarette smoke twirled in loops and swirls across the ceiling. As if we’d all stepped backward into a corridor of time, into an intimate hall somewhere in Europe where women dressed like men laughed and kissed each other, drawing velvet ladies onto their laps to wrap their arms around their soft forms.
Maybe it was wrong to assume that all of the women in this room were lesbians, but they very much seemed that way to me. Maybe the name “Sullivan” was code for something, because hadn’t Kane introduced everyone here to me as a Sullivan? I’d come across a lot of nicknames for “lesbian” in my long and illustrious career as one (hah! Far from illustrious), but I’d never heard “Sullivan.” But how could they all be related...?
My brain was twisting inward on itself, and I felt disoriented, discombobulated…weird. As the violin music rose into the air, wrapping itself around us as tightly as the smoke, Mags began to move toward me through the gray air, smile twisting on her face as she held out her sharp-nailed hand to me.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked, and I shuddered, because I thought she was making a joke at my expense, as I stared up at her. There was something dangerous in those eyes.
She looked hungry.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t dance,” is what I told her as the women quieted, turning to the both of us. Probably to see how Mags was going to slice me to pieces. But I held my gaze with the woman whose sardonic smile turned into a frown as she glanced from me to Kane again, one brow rising in a slash of black across her too-pale face.
“She doesn’t dance,” she all but cooed as she sashayed past Kane, shaking her head, her hands on her hips. Kane regarded her calmly, coolly, as Mags went past. “Funny,” hissed Mags, drawing out the word to imply that it was, actually, not funny at all. “But Kane doesn’t dance either. What stu
ff you both have in common! Two of a kind!”
“I’m…I’m sorry,” I managed, stumbling to my feet. I was light-headed, the floor swirling beneath my feet as quickly as it had by the Widowmaker staircase. “I have to go…” I said. The smoke, the coolness, the strangeness…it was too much. I moved past Dolly, past Mags, past all the other women, but as I passed Mags, her hand snaked out and she took my wrist. Her fingers were so cold, it seemed—for half a heartbeat—that they’d burned my skin.
“Don’t forget to watch your step,” she chuckled, low and throaty, in my ear before releasing my wrist from her grip. I moved past her, not looking back until I’d reached the door, my fingers curling around the silver scrollwork of the doorknob. Only then did I turn, look back into the room.
Everyone else had returned to their individual pastimes. Only Kane watched me, the brilliance of her blue eyes cutting through the smoke and the darkness. I breathed out, my breath catching in my lungs, and then the doorknob was turned, and I was out into the corridor, the room closed behind me.
I leaned against the door for a long moment, taking in deep breaths of fresh air. Kane’s scent seemed to cling to my hair that was curling around my neck and over my shoulders, now. Warm spice and vanilla.
I stayed for a long moment with my hand on the doorknob, as if I was compelled to return, as if I’d do anything to be within Kane’s gaze again. I wrenched my hand from the knob and took two steps away from the door.
Out of the floor-length windows, the sun touched against the earth, a bright explosion of reds, oranges and golds.
Sunset?
How was that possible? How long had I been in that room?
Behind the oaken door, laughter as brittle as breaking glass echoed.
And then the low tones of Kane’s voice. The laughter was silenced as I turned and walked back along the hallway, shivering.
---
Somehow, impossibly, I found the way back to my rooms and my bathrobe and the boxed food in the freezer that went into the microwave and then my stomach. I don’t remember what I ate or how I made it or how I found the utensils to eat it with. I was in a haze. I wanted to talk to Gwen, needed to talk to her, but she wasn’t in her rooms.
I fell asleep with my feet on the little antique ottoman, and my body curled up on the bright blue chair, the handkerchief she’d given me clutched in one hand.
And I dreamed.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Kane, which is how I explained the dream, afterward. She was the last thought that I’d had before falling asleep, so of course she would be the thing I dreamed of. Of course. But that calm explanation didn’t exactly reach me in that moment as I realized I was dreaming, as I opened my dreaming eyes, and she was standing in front of me.
Kane Sullivan.
Her white-blonde hair almost glowed beneath the moonlight, luminous and bright. We were out standing on a broken sidewalk, bits of concrete pressing through the thin bottom of my flats against the skin of my feet as I shifted, leaning toward her. Maybe we were in my old town, maybe we were in Eternal Cove, though it was hard for me to say, since I’d not seen Eternal Cove hardly at all, just that first time that Gwen drove me through it on the way to the Sullivan Hotel.
Either way, no matter where we were exactly, we now stood on a sidewalk in front of an old, gothic church. The steeple loomed overhead, long and thin and sharp, like a needle. I was wearing my favorite red jacket, the one with the soft pockets and the satin lining. She was wearing her mens’ suit, a single white rose at a hole in the lapel, its petals soft and almost glowing, too, in the darkness of the night. The wind was soft and cool as it played with her hair, moving it this way and that as she stood in front of me, her hands deep in her suit jacket pockets. Her eyes were that same violent blue, the blue so dark and deep and bright, all at the same time, that when she stared into me, it seemed—as cheesy as it sounds—that she was seeing to the depth of my soul and back.
Something stirred in my belly as our gazes locked, as we stood about a foot apart, the coolness of her skin washing over mine, even though there were those twelve short inches between us, and she was not, in fact, actually touching me. Everything about her was a gravity, I realized, as she held her hand out to me. I couldn’t not place my fingers within her palm, I couldn’t not step forward as she pulled me gently, tugging my arm so that I glided forward effortlessly, my curves resting along hers, our bodies against one another like they were made to be this way, complementing and whole.
She stared down into my eyes, tilting back my chin with one long finger, the coolness of her skin making me shiver, but this shiver, I now knew, was one of delight. As she stared down at me, the depth of her eyes growing deeper, bluer, truer, I inhaled that scent of her, the coolness of her that was so opposite to the spice of her, inhaling deeply as her lips hovered above mine, and I wanted—more than anything else that I’ve ever wanted—to stretch up on my tiptoes and kiss her.
But I did not kiss her, and she did not kiss me. She paused in her downward descent toward me, she paused as her exquisite, graceful neck had angled her face gently down toward mine, the light from the moon dangling overhead like a lantern painting her face with sharp angles and lovely valleys of light.
She paused and she stopped, and she did not kiss me, and though I wanted—desperately—more than anything to kiss her, I did not. I don’t know why I stopped myself. I suppose I knew that this wasn’t the right time and place, this dream, this fantasy.
I wanted the real thing.
I woke up.
I sighed and rubbed at my face in the darkness, my heart beating too quickly in me to want to try and fall back asleep, to even attempt such a thing. The handkerchief pressed the scarlet “S” against my palm, and I turned it over in my hand with a frown.
I got up and checked my wristwatch that I’d placed on the little oaken bedside table. I peered down at the tiny face in the half-light coming in through the window of the streetlamps above the little parking lot outside and sighed. Four o’clock in the morning. Great. I was supposed to get up at seven, and that meant that if I didn’t fall back asleep now, I…wouldn’t. And tomorrow would be an extremely over-tired hell, the very first day of my actual employment here at the Sullivan Hotel.
But it couldn’t be helped. I knew with utter surety that I wasn’t getting back to sleep anytime soon.
I got up out of bed again, threw on my favorite red jacket over my pajama top and bottom (the very embarrassing fleece set of ‘jammies, covered with gigantic cartoonish lips. Gwen had gotten it for me a few years ago as a joke, when absurd fleece pajamas were pretty popular. But her joke had misfired: I’d actually enjoyed them because they were crazily soft and warm. Who cared about gigantic cartoonish lips in the face of extreme softness and warmth?). I pulled on my old floppy brown hat with the earflaps and tugged on my worn gloves, and I slipped out of my room, the heavy metal key resting in my coat pocket against my thigh like a trusted, familiar weight.
Everything was quiet, softly quiet, the perfect silent time of night that makes me…well. Happy. I don’t know why. When I was a kid, I’d often wake up in the three o’clock hour, and I’d read until I fell back asleep, then often have dreams about whatever I’d been reading about (usually vampires, if you’d believe it). But when I was a teenager and I woke up in that strange three o’clock hour I’d grown to know, and almost love, I began a tradition that exists until this very day. I’d get up, get dressed…and I’d go for a walk.
I used to walk down the streets of my old town at three o’clock in the morning without a care in the world. I know a lot of people think that walking at such an ungodly hour is pretty unsafe, but nothing had ever happened to me, and I had a little can of pepper spray in my other coat pocket, just in case. And, true, tonight was very different from those long-ago walks. For one thing, I didn’t know my way around this place that well yet, but I’d found my way back to my rooms from the second floor, and if I avoided the Widowmaker staircase (because prett
y much forever I’d be avoiding the Widowmaker staircase), I’d be able to make it to the first floor and out into the cool night. It wasn’t a very good plan, admittedly, but my head was still muddled from the amount of hours I’d spent in that room with those women.
It felt strange, muzzy, the memory of today. I wondered if it had even happened.
The only evidence I had that I did not, in fact, dream up Dolly and Mags and Kane staring at me deeply through the shadows, was the fact that my hair smelled lightly of cigarette smoke. Normally, the scent of smoke tickles my nose—it’s dirty and dark, and I don’t like it. But this smoke was different. Spicy, almost. Still cancer-causing, obviously, but also almost sweet and edgy. I liked it, despite everything in me telling me that I absolutely should not.
So it had really happened. I’d spent all day with these women, and I’d not needed to eat or drink, and time had seemed to speed up or…I don’t know. I didn’t have any other explanation other than that, that time—in fact—had actually moved faster than normal within that dark, mysterious room. It had seemed that only an hour or two had passed while I sat at the table with Dolly, playing cards, Kane’s eyes warm and cool against me at the same time. But then the sunset had burnished the sky with gold, and I’d woken up from something that had felt so much like a dream…and my entire day had seemingly been stolen from me.
Honestly, “stolen” isn’t the right word. “Stolen” implies that something was taken away from you that you valued, and you’re unhappy with the experience. My day hadn’t been stolen. I didn’t mind any bit of it, because I’d spent the entire day within Kane’s gaze.
Yes, I suppose you could say I was beginning to have it very, very bad for that woman. Which was crazy, I know. I didn’t even have evidence that she was a lesbian, though it seemed pretty obvious that she was. There was just a feeling…a knowing that she very much might be.
And also a feeling that I knew her, her gaze, her form a familiar thing to me. From where or when or how…I didn’t know.
Meeting Eternity (The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1 Page 5